Preparing for What’s Coming

These are wild times—we are riding big waves in the texture of humanity’s earthly journey.  There is so much tension among and between us:  Topics of health, food, race, gender, climate, war, and perhaps most deeply purpose are aching with charge.  It’s easy to blame, shame, and judge, both ‘other’ and self.  I watch myself do it—my way of seeing makes sense to me.  I ‘know’ better, yet the experience of righteousness is by nature one sided.

Mysticism is a practice of holding the unknown with open hands.  My mind wishes to grasp—to determine what is and what’s coming.  My mind is a pessimist, so if I let myself hold on then I expect the worst.  If I try too hard to counter it then I paint the world with roses.  To immerse myself in mystery I simply sit in awe, holding my own heart with unconditional love in presence with the unknown.  It is a vulnerable, embodied state.  As I approach it I tend to shake, shiver, and start.  It’s an internal making of love–sometimes subtly orgasmic—and at times feels like a death through which I’ve thus far been reborn.

I have been leading events I call Somatic Mystery Journeys.  We drink cacao, work our breathing, move in awareness, and eventually turn up the music for ‘ecstatic’ dancing.  Through our bodies, and in the group field, we invoke the sacred space of mystery.  We let our bodies move in the permission and intention that we don’t know what’s coming.  I imagine that people have always done this, yet it seems particularly important right now.  The body has a way of knowing and being with others that’s very different from the mind.  Even thinking about it barely touches the power of the experience.

To prepare for what’s coming, especially as we don’t know what that is, we benefit from ways to hold and channel the intensity of emotion.  Anxiety is rampant, and when anxiety controls my actions I rarely make the best decisions.  We are communal beings, and the deepest anxieties often revolve around being isolated, shamed, and otherwise left unloved.  The power of journeying together in ceremonial movement is finding out who we are when we take off the masks (as many as we are aware of), dive under the anxiety, and perhaps let ourselves die.  As I read this it feels dramatic.  It may in fact be boring and banal—just a human being.  And yet, this is exactly the whole of it—humans consciously navigating our drama together.