Although our biodynamic classes are about making relationships and connections, I talk often in my classes about isolation, what creates it and why it is maintained both by individuals and cultures. In my opinion, our culture doesn’t teach us how to hold the whole of our experience, how to see beyond our own perception to something we have not seen or understood before. Isolation can be a brilliant way to manage and simplify our experience. But it can also maintain patterns or habits that while once necessary, may no longer be. When isolation becomes a habit or a default it can cause problems, both in the body and between peoples.
Since our last newsletter, a decision by one man has set our country on course to pull out of an agreement that was made by over 190 countries. The Paris Agreement, with all its flaws and inadequacies, was the most global agreement in history, intended to support the world to work together to address life-threatening challenges.
I bring up this current event because I think it is a fabulous reminder of the danger of isolation, and the actual impossibility of isolating from the whole. When we are isolated, we are not interacting with the whole, but that does not mean that we are separate. I can forget my connection to the natural world, but I am still connected to her. I can isolate the pain my body is managing into my shoulder, but my shoulder is still connected to my arm. I can abdicate my responsibility to the greater good, but it still needs attention.
I teach my students to notice where they are placing their attention and how to develop the muscles to choose where they place their attention. We can focus on isolation or we can focus on connection. We can focus on disease or we can focus on Health. We can remember that the Health is always present, even when she is not visible. As Andrew Taylor Still, the founder of Osteopathy out of which Craniosacral Therapy has grown, said years ago (paraphrased): “Anyone can find disease. It takes a skilled physician to recognize health.” I doubt Dr. Still knew how prescient and necessary his words would become. They have been guiding words in my life and work, and an ongoing challenge to live up to, a challenge we must rise to now more than ever. A challenge that is both difficult and simple. Health is always present. Know that. Turn your attention there. Pause there. Settle in. Don’t worry if you can only hold your attention there for 30 seconds. You are in a process. A process of carving out a space. A space you can recognize and return to. A sanctuary.
The current events in our world also remind me of something I wrote to my friend Osprey Orielle Lake, inspired by the work she is still doing on the front lines of the climate change movement powerfully and passionately through the organization she started, The Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (http://wecaninternational.org).
Here’s what I wrote to her several years ago and have expanded on today in our changed and rapidly changing world:
How do we not live in denial of the huge challenges our planet faces? How do we find the courage to act with love and alacrity? How do we find and take actions that are manageable and effective?
If we are not trying to fix, can we respond more thoroughly? If we are listening, can we hear what is being asked of us? Perhaps the world is not broken. Maybe it is simply in need of new support. There are millions of us – billions of us – each with our own unique tools and gifts – when I look at it that way, so much seems possible.
If the earth had a body, with capable hands and swift feet, she could go door-to-door like so many worthy causes do on her behalf.
What if when She knocked at your door you didn’t send her away? What if your first sight of the truth of Her, of her actual presence, didn’t send you scurrying to call 911 for security backup, but if instead you had the courage to invite Her in, then what? What if you began by asking what She needed, She who meets your every need. What if you asked her the question she is constantly answering: if She was thirsty and what She liked to eat? And what if you had what she loved to eat and drink in your fridge or garden and could give them to Her? What if you could give to Her a little bit what She gives to you? Well, you’d do that, wouldn’t you? And what if after Her belly was less empty and her lips more moist, She asked you to listen. Surely you could do that. And when she spoke she said many things that touched you deeply. What if Her words were like Her world – so amazing beautiful – that you found yourself weeping? What if as your tears reached your own lips you tasted a little bit of Her huge knowledge and your forgotten knowing? What then? What if you could remember what modern convenience has allowed you to forget? And what if once She was gone you couldn’t remember her words except for one request she made: “Do one thing every day for me.”
One thing. For me. Every day. Well, you could do that. I know you could. You with your amazing capacities and talents? You with your passions and dreams? Surely you can do one thing every day.
What one thing will you do for Her today?
When I ask myself this question, I can get easily overwhelmed. How can I do anything big enough for Her? Then I remind myself, She is in the small things too. She is in the subtleties. She is in the intricate design of a leaf or a dragonfly wing. She is present in the attempt to make a kind of human relationship that cultivates actual connection, presence and attention. I always say to my students that even the attempt to make relationship in this way is powerful. Even the attempt does something. Making a connection, and certainly maintaining one, is an ongoing process, an ongoing attempt to connect at the level where life continuously blossoms and unfolds, at the level where isolation is impossible.
What I am attempting to do here at the School Of Inner Health is teach skills of relationship and presence in ways that students can carry with them and use when needed wherever needed. I want people to be both effective practitioners of bodywork and effective people in the world. I hope to train people to connect with the places inside themselves where they maintain isolation, to build the capacity to sit with their discomfort and resistance until it changes form. To find their unique ways of connecting with themselves and the world.
