August 15, 2023
Returning to Being
Written for the Moving Sanctuary class in the park on August 21, 2023
Being to me is like a river, a flow from an inner garden that is one with the bigger garden the universe is. When connected to this place inside the heart, I feel softness, openness, gladness. Living from a place of being has a quality of ease. It is my practice to keep coming back to this inner nature of being.
There are many times when I am not living from being, following patterns formed a while ago that were very useful then but that often no longer serve me. One of the patterns for me is striving. Striving to create a "great" blog that is close to how the mind tells me it wants it to be is an example. A sense of struggle and tension felt in the body tell me the pattern is here. Coming from a perceived sense of separation from the whole or oneness or love, parts of me (the ego) have learned to strive and behave in other ways a long time ago to be safe and to have my needs met back then. These habits were essential at a time they were formed, and now many of them are no longer serving. “What is extra effort?”, my sensory awareness teacher Lee Lesser would ask me.
For me dance has been a luscious way to return to my body and to my embodied Being. In this place of being we can tap into our essential nature more easily: Presence, Peace, Joy, Love, Abundance, Connection to and being an inseparable part of the whole/of Source, among other qualities. We plug back into the inner sparkle and that is healing and wholing. Returning our awareness to being helps us get a little bit more unstuck from a pattern that is no longer helpful, meeting it with a friendly smile, giving thanks to it and letting it go. Returning attention to being gives us space and access to innate wholeness and wisdom to see the situation we are in differently. Perhaps coming more from a place of peace, love, trust, acceptance, mystery and less from fear and separation, allowing us to feel more ease and joy, less stress and tension. Coming from a place of being, the blog writing becomes a more easygoing, enjoyable, doable and even fun process, rooted in the interest to share and less so in needing it to be a certain way, more ok for it to be imperfect, leaving room for the mystery of its unfolding.
In our world filled with much stress, it is vital I find to be cultivating this connection with Being, an antidote to stress and key to our innate capacity for health and healing.
Nature is already in the place of Being. Join me for a time in nature in High Park, Toronto, to connect with our Being with dance.
"Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again, come, come."
Jelaluddin Rumi