The Bliss of Letting Go
The center of the labyrinth moment is a pivotal one as I’ve come to experience it. All the switchbacks and roots to trip over, rocks and bumpy terrain on the way in sort of irritate me. The sight of the marker at the center, a physical destination so easily attainable if I just skipped over all the nonsense on the path and walked straight in, taunts me to leave the longer path behind.
I don’t really know how it works or why but I do know that it works—that by walking the whole path in, there is a turn that happens, some impatient and rushed thing drops away. I can’t even say what it is I’m left with exactly but it’s a slower presence for sure, and in that turning, the way out is different. My pace on the way in and the way out are not the same. My breath is not the same. My mind is not the same. On the way out, everything is slower. I’ve let go, but not into nothing. I’ve let go into a kind of timeless awareness that feels as if I’ve dropped into being held, as if I’m being led out beyond my own doing and controlling into something both less and, at the same time, more.
The image of letting go takes me out into the ocean, one of my favorite places to experience letting go and being held at the same time. It’s here that I’ve learned to lay back into the water all around me and allow it to hold me up. The movement of it all is so big, so incredibly powerful, and can surely overwhelm. Indeed, the way into the water is often characterized by a stumbling, tentative entrance. My mind is usually still working its own story about what’s been before and what’s to come. Depending on the temperature of the water and what ends up underfoot, I might brace myself, holding my arms above the water, trip and sway as I walk in.
Yet, this is a place I’ve learned to trust. Laying back, my body, my breath, my mind all become slower. Sometimes I stand with a boogie board facing the horizon, watching for the next wave that might take me. When it comes, I have no idea where or how it will take me, but I let it take me all the same. Standing and watching for that wave, every part of me is in the middle, receptive place of awareness, where all of me slows and prepares to move me forward without the distracted, racing mind of before.
When I first got to know my body on my yoga mat it wasn’t like this at all. I didn’t trust it, had lived outside of it for a long time. How could I possibly know how to stand inside of it, a strange and foreign land, while I listened and attemped to move accompanied by a strange and foreign land of postures? It is hard to begin and harder still when beginning is with something like a body you’ve already been living with for your whole life.
Eventually, I understood this space of my yoga mat, my body and breath moving on it, as another kind of ocean. I was moving in the vast space of air, trusting the wave to carry me into a kind of freedom I could name but couldn’t really explain. I could allow my body and breath to carry me into something unplanned.
These moments became rare, nearly impossible really, when I thought for a time that my body had forgotten how to move, when I thought my body was failing me. One day, though, standing in my bathroom with the counter for support, I let myself feel into what was possible. It was a little like walking hesitantly forward with all that cold ocean water around me, an invisible path under foot. Little by little, I felt my limbs, my joints, my muscles, respond in their own particular way. Suddenly, I was listening and receiving feedback from this body that I could hear and respond to. The moment lasted all of five minutes in the bathroom that day but it reminded me of what it felt like to receive and return to myself with a sweet awareness of trust that I thought was gone.
I would name the feeling that erupts from these times as joy. Joy for the movement itself but also joy for the getting out of my head and into an awareness that is both simpler and bigger than the thoughts that so often confuse and consume. For a time, the script my mind is writing is lost and my experience is about the earth supporting me, about breath and bones, flesh that is beautiful and holy feeling into some divine wisdom.
What if you could support this awareness by deciding upon it and then trust it to take you? What if you stopped your rushing mind wherever you are by experiencing your breath and its blessed movement, then paused to listen in the space around you as if in a middle moment of receptivity. Maybe you imagine yourself staring out over the horizon of the ocean, watching for the next wave. Or perhaps you listen more closely for your own intuition to tell you how to move and which direction to go. Maybe its a gentle roll of your joints or stretching of limbs. Perhaps its a dance of movement that takes over or a walk without the constant drone of your thoughts taking you away from this special, holy window of time.
Barbara Brown Taylor writes in An Altar In the World, “The beauty of physical practices like this one is that you do not have to know what you are doing in order to begin. You just begin, and the doing teaches you what you need to know. What do you need to know? How would I know…with so many variables available to me all by myself I cannot imagine the possibilities available to those who walk the path wearing their own skin.” The “path” as it may be doesn’t offer a set experience. “Instead,” Taylor writes, “it offers a door that anyone may go through, to discover realities that meet each person where each most needs to be met.”
Take a little time today—maybe even right now—and see where the door of movement leads you. Perhaps it will be exactly where you need to go.
I miss being near a labyrinth and the experience of walking into and out of it! Do you know if there is one near us? This was another great reflection! Thank you.