These months were very disorienting as to what is real, what is possible, and what responsibilities I had within this world. At times the possibilities felt exhilarating, but over the long haul, they became exhausting. This intense period of “what is possible?” drew to a close when I got hired at Navajo National Monument in northeastern Arizona, and Cindy’s boyfriend came back from the Peace Corps. It was a relief in many ways to let rangering return me to “normal.” But those months created many profound changes within me that have influenced me ever since in ways that underlie many of the stories to come. So before my book veers off onto a very different path at Navajo National Monument, I want to reflect on some of those changes.
Body awareness
All my life, I had been, in hindsight, remarkably oblivious to the feedback my body is constantly giving. But thanks to the dance company, walking, standing, and breathing have been elevated into active generators of feedback guiding me in how to better align myself within this world.
For example, I became aware of each foot as a tripod resting on three main contact points with the ground. One point is my heel. The second is the ball of my foot behind my big toe. The third is the outer ball of my foot behind the fourth toe. I can shift my weight around between these three points. Almost every time I check in with my body, I am leaning slightly forward on the two forward points. This makes sense because they are further away from my ankles and so have greater leverage, giving them more precise control. The heel point is close to the ankle and so has less leverage.
I shift my center of gravity backwards until my balance tips back onto my heels. My toes lift slightly off the ground. My heels, almost reflexively, push strongly against the ground, pushing my balance back toward my toes. I try it again with more sensitivity. I try to shift across that balance point between leaning forward and leaning back as gently as possible so that there is no startle reflex, just a smooth, controlled shifting of responsibility between the muscles running up the front of my legs and the muscles in the back.
That’s what makes this shift so interesting. It is more than just a shift in balance. It is a shifting from muscles contracting to muscles relaxing (and vice versa) throughout my body. When I’m always leaning slightly forward onto my toes, those muscles with which my toes push against the earth, which push against the gravity that is trying to pull me, face first, down to the ground, are all being used.
When I shift my weight back on my heel point, all those muscles suddenly don’t have to push. They can relax and stretch. At the same time, another set of muscles throughout my body have to contract to push my heel against the ground to maintain my balance. Often times with this shift in muscles, a spontaneous deeper inhalation of breath arises.
Walking is a shifting of my body’s weight onto alternating feet as they step forward. The planted foot pushes back against the ground as the other foot swings forward to accept the weight of the next step. But where in the step does the weight actually shift from the back foot towards the other? Usually my body weight is already falling forward before my front foot has touched the ground. Therefore, when my front foot does contact the ground, it absorbs not only the full weight of my body but also the impact of its momentum falling forward. Bracing for the impact can lead to my front foot clomping against the ground.
Sometimes I become aware of this clomping and I consciously shift my weight backwards so I am not falling forwards onto the next step. I try being more upright so that, rather than bracing and clomping, my front foot is actually stretching forward to touch the ground at the same time the weight shift happens. When I do this, I’m always struck by how quiet my mind goes for a few seconds.
Chatter before.
Suddenly, quiet crunching underfoot.
My shoulders drop. My head rises. My next inhalation is full. Why do I keep forgetting to walk like this?
I try to bring this awareness to my first rule of pace: Start off ceremonially slower than I think I should. I had a hard time doing this with the very first step until I realized that the very first step is with the foot that stays and pushes against the ground. The foot stepping forward is the second step. When climbing at a steep angle, I can feel the body-lifting power pushing up through that planted foot. I strive to push my weight forward over my toes and onto the next step. Strive for that line of balance in my first slow, mindfully ceremonial steps and then my pace begins to quicken.
A very similar shift can happen while I am chewing food. Sometimes my eating is a rapid, mechanical chomping of the teeth, chewing and swallowing. But teeth don’t have to touch. If I slow down, my chewing turns into a squeezing of food between not quite touching teeth. My tongue moves the food around within my mouth. My mouth fills with more saliva and flavor suddenly enhances. Everything slows down and deepens. Why don’t I eat like this all the time?
A Responsive Universe
During those disorienting months, a belief formed that has stayed with me ever since. It emerged during those hours of lying on the floor, sensitively moving different parts of my body back and forth, releasing knots of tension. Over and over again, I would have the experience of moving some part of me in a way that caused an unexpected muscle wince elsewhere, a little bit of specific pain somewhere that caused my body to “bounce back” from that move. So I would circle back, repeat the originating movement – there was the muscle wince again – circle back, start the movement again but this time more slowly and this time with part of my consciousness attending to that part of my body where the wince will emerge. Gradually my movement and thought would hone in on whatever movement created this “wince” and I would take it slower. When I felt the wince starting to arise, I reversed, letting it subside, and then gently moving back again, letting it rise, playing with it before the sensation became painful, getting to know it, playing with it at a safe pace so that my mind could relax more fully into the experience. As it did, there would come a point where the incipient wince softened, released pleasurably, and was gone. My breathing expanded.
I began thinking of these unexpected winces and pains as a web of accumulated feedback about what my body needed to take care of that had not been attended to. The winces were guides that, if approached slowly with mindfulness, led to release, expanded breathing and deeper calm. Pain was not something to avoid. It should be attended to because, with the right attention, it led my awareness to where it needed to go. These experiences, repeated over and over again, developed a faith that the world can be trusted to give accurate feedback. Just as the surface of glacial rivers guides me to safe crossings, so feedback from the world can guide us towards a better future.
The way I thought about it at the time was that if I was a loving god and I wanted to create a universe that was the most loving possible for the creatures within, it would be one that gave accurate feedback so that each living thing could experience the adventure of responding to feedback in a way that led them to new possibilities, just as a toddler uses the feedback of every fall to master walking. The universe can be trusted.
This does not mean that the world is a perfect place. We are born into a world in which past mistakes have accumulated. This is because there are some challenges that arise with feedback (to be discussed in the third section). Nevertheless, all these problems are giving accurate feedback that tells us how to change course before the problem grows even more painful. If we pay attention, move carefully back and forth to find where the pain begins to arise, the trustworthy nature of the world can lead us in a better direction. We can have the delight of doing this work, of working with painful problems until they release and a spontaneous intake of spiritual breath fills us for the next stretch.
This sense of feedback resolved for me the dichotomy between determinism and free will. We have the free will to steer our energy but the world will respond in a deterministic way – that is what is so beautiful about it. If the universe was not deterministic in the events emerging from its physical laws, feedback would fracture into unrelated, disparate pieces of existence like ice floes swept along on a cold, dark Arctic night. Free will would have no basis for choice or chance to improve. On the other hand, if free will was triumphant, then the world would be just the way I wanted it . . . and it’s not. The world is somewhere in between and I have grown comfortable with this, embracing life as a roaming interplay between myself and the world.
The Power of Trance
In my primal scream depression, I was constantly aware of a patter of phrases coming from the watcher behind my left shoulder that I associated with the real me. That patter was a constant verbal shaping of my ongoing experience into the explanation I had internalized from Janov’s book. I was very aware of this relentless repetition of thought, but I did not recognize it as trance because I thought of the words as a sophisticated, incisive commentary on what was happening rather than as a spell that was redefining everything into the narrative of the trance. In just three months following Denali, my awareness shrunk down to the size of that cell of logic.
Trance has an alluring aura about it that makes us think it will be exotically fun. But it’s not really. Trance offers the solace of forgetfulness when one’s load is heavy. But trance is the gradual diminishing of consciousness, the surrender of attention, like falling asleep at the wheel as the yellow lines repeat themselves over and over and over and over and…. Trance is the beyond-conscious shrinking of the world down to a simplified world where the same things will always happen so I don’t have to pay attention. This lulls my awareness so that others can lead me where I would not choose to go. With their low lighting, sound of payouts, and lack of clocks, casinos are designed to put one in a timeless trance sustained by the flow of money from one’s pocket until the money runs out. Then one awakes from the trance to a now sadder world. Advertisers fill our eyes and ears with a constant chant of “you won’t be happy until you buy this.” Fox News amazes me with the pervasiveness of its underlying trance: “Be afraid. Feel persecuted. Be upset.”
But with the rolling across the floor of a dancer, “It is possible” woke me from the trance. Like the koan implies, the only way to escape the trance is to emerge outside of it. And when I did, the world was different. Where, for example, did my eyeshine come from? After 29 years of seeing, my eyes suddenly became something new with the power to ignite a similar shine in others.
Moving deeply into the power of trance and then coming out on the other side into a world that is the same and yet fundamentally different is a profound experience. What is Real? How much of what I am “experiencing” is the way the world really is and how much is defined by a mind that can change the world into something else? What is fixed? What is malleable? We live within a responsive world. This responsiveness creates new questions and invitations.
Depression, for example. I’ve described two of my depressions; a third one is still coming up. In all three, I saw something that popped me out of my depression. Today, lots of people are depressed, addicted, suicidal. I don’t know whether any of my experience is applicable to others, but I can imagine that many depressions are underlain by a trance about the nature of depression that helps hold one within it. When I look back on my life path, I see my depressions occurring at places where I lost direction. My early years had been defined by “get a college degree” and on the eve of that fulfillment, I realized I didn’t have any sense of where this should lead. Depression. Then the rosy finch led me to explore a new direction from which arose my life goal of becoming a seasonal naturalist in Denali. When I had achieved that, now what? An impossible koan? Depression. A dancer rolls across the floor and I’m moving again. Perhaps so many people are currently depressed because our culture is losing its capacity to engender the vitality that comes from a motivating sense of direction. Or perhaps our culture teaches people to move in a wrong direction. If so, the depressions are not the problem; they are accurate feedback pointing out a problem within our culture. I will return to this idea later in the book.
Connections
Many years later, my wife and I always tucked our daughters in at night. As they grew older, there were occasional times when one of them would go to bed angry. If I rubbed her shoulders, her shoulders would tense, holding onto the anger. I would handle this the same way I had learned from my own body. I would gently move her shoulder a certain direction until I could feel it tensing up. If I tried pushing harder, it would resist harder. So I would reverse the direction, moving the shoulder the other way. After a couple of times being moved back and forth, the tension melts, the shoulder drops, the breathing deepens, and I can feel peace releasing her anger.
One night I was trying this but it wasn’t working. Her shoulder remained stiff and tense. As I kept working on it, I became aware of a tension growing in my neck. I tried to ignore it but it grew more noticeable. Finally I had to deal with the uncomfortableness of my neck, so, not removing my hands from her shoulder, I shifted my focus onto my own neck and moved it until the tension melted. And the moment it melted, the tension in my daughter’s shoulder also melted.
This has happened enough times with various people that I’ve drawn the following conclusion. The anger that created the tension in this situation lay between the two of us. We both had to change. Maintaining my rigid position was part of the dynamic creating her tension. Therefore just trying to change her could not release the tension. But what fascinates me is how, when my tension released, her tension released. There was no exchange of words. No obvious changes in hand pressure. And yet, our inner states were connected through my hand on her shoulder and my awareness of her muscle state and mine. What is the nature of that connection through my fingers between her knot and a kinesthetic knot somewhere in my mind/body? That is a mystery. I release a muscle within me and her shoulder relaxes. A bird hops off a ledge and my life changes.
There is a connection between us all that can be ignored if we are unaware of it but which can become palpable, opening us to all sorts of fascinating connecting experiences if we learn to dance with them.
Next Chapter . . . . . Table of Contents
Leave a Reply