I continue to be a slow learner. Slow to digest, assimilate, integrate. So it is. When I was younger I mistook this for a lack of intelligence, reinforced in many ways by dominant structures in family and education. But now I see it as something much more spacious. Something in which change and growth unfold at their own right pace and where the time in between one form and another is the real space of becoming.
I think about this quite a bit and again as of late have had it reinforced in my own experience of waiting for some clarity around what the next right form is, as well as in the musings of some of my mentors and dear hearts. A longer and more intimate exploration of the liminal space of not yet knowing. Where the revelation is there but the light of awareness hasn’t lit it fully just yet.
The paradox of course is to already have enough time spent in process and in practice to know that the knowing will eventually arrive, that the waiting in wonder and unknowing is in many ways the juiciest place of pure possibility that we could linger in. Hard to know that without knowing that. It is hard to know that trusting something is worth it before you’ve ever lived into the outcome. And so.
Recently Christina has been instructing, when overwhelm or confusion or just too many instructions start to take over: breathe, and trust the shape. I think maybe I heard her say it a dozen times before I heard her say it. Ya know. Slow to learn. Sometimes slow to even hear. But I love that. I have been taken by the relational nature of practice in general and the postures in particular for a long time, but I love the metaphor of that in the larger uncertainty of life.
Can I trust the shape of things, when parts of my understanding are still hanging out in the dark corners of the unknown or unresolved? Can I trust the form of my life to support the space between one being and the next becoming? That I live in this house on this land with these people and this is the particular form of it all and on like that. Trust the shape of my life, made by many things, and mostly by design. Mine, and ours. And again, this does not seem so much like the appropriate task to set out before the young and eager first-timer. But to get from there to here, it seems it must be possible, right? That at some point we just choose to trust the inherent wisdom in the process without yet having any experience of the proof? I think so. It kinda has to be so.
And yes 100% this is where mentors and guides and community seem to me so essential in the support system of this spacious, yet often tenuous, unfolding. I know I couldn’t have learned to trust the shape (of anything) if I hadn’t watched others before me. I am curious now if I am making it sound too easy… Simple, yes. Easy, no. It is hard to learn new things, especially new things with no seeming answer other than the suggestion that perhaps the next thing will eventually arrive. In time. After a while.
I did this practice today with no plan and just a timer and some longing to visit some shapes that make me feel good, with whom my relationships tend toward the positive. Mostly. Like a greatest hits but not at all. I listened to a podcast about sleep research the entire time and the whole thing was so average and just right. Just me. Just a basic daily tending. And then Wilfred woke up and I went on with my day. Unfinished and okay. Unresolved and okay. With more questions than answers and a whole lot left to learn. But I like leaving that way. It might be the very thing that brings me back. So, to more waiting in the space in between. But not so much waiting, and very much more being. Like that.