The Great Pause

Practice is more vital than ever in this time, my friend dubbed"The Great Pause." It’s been a valuable and rich opportunity to reflect on our patterns, individually and collectively. To that end, I recommend Charles Eisenstein’s provocative essay, The Coronation. He is just the combination of realist and visionary we need right now. And he is not offering answers- it is too soon for that- we need to marinate longer in the wonder-space important questions open.

This is an incredible opportunity to change the unconscious, destructive course we have been on, and ask ourselves: What do we most value? Where are we going? What are the externalities- the costs- of our fevered consumption? How can we remake the economy and our way of life to reflect universal care for all beings and the planet? There is a better world we all know is possible and we feel it calling us. It feels like a remembering sometimes, to feel part of a village again, part of a greater human family that needs each other, and supports each other.

We can forget, in this culture that prizes autonomy and individuality and specialness, that everything exists in relationship. My Embodiment Teacher, Philip Shepherd says “the quality of independence simply does not exist in our universe. No example of it can be found anywhere. Everything effects and depends upon everything else. Everything leans on everything…What is needed from us is a return to the body’s deepest understanding: that it indissolubly belongs to the world.”

For me, this experience of connectedness has come most often through the body- the senses, direct knowing of the unfolding moment, as opposed to understanding abstract concepts. It has come through gentleness and listening, rather than force and figuring out. That is why the practice of qigong has been so nourishing. To move with ease, to under-do, to let go and continue to let go in the body, even as aliveness flows ever stronger.