Sometimes I feel I don’t need to live more lives. All there needs to be experienced has already been experienced. I don’t say this in a negative sense. What I mean is, what matters most is already there. It’s never gone. It might have been closer the moment we were born. Life, the societal life, only pulled us further away from it. But part of it is always there. We just need to practice to get back in touch with it.
That’s probably what it means to find one’s grounding. I often come back to this word lately, and I in fact told myself that a sense of groundedness is the quality I would most like to build in my life. Many things happen, one after another. Whether good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, they often pull me away from myself. I feel my sense of being floating in the air, being pulled in all directions, often in an urge to react to whatever is pulling it, with no real connection with itself.
I had a chat with a mindfulness instructor at the university today. There was nothing too different in what he said from what all other mindfulness instructors say. But his approach was a bit different. Instead of noticing what’s coming up in our mind and gently bringing our attention back, he simply told us to put our feet on the ground and feel them. As I was sitting across him, I noticed he had his legs apart, as men often do when they are sitting, whereas I, like most girls, had my legs together. Then I tried to bring my legs apart slightly. I immediately felt them more stable on the ground, in a way that was quite surprising.
This reminded me of the words of one of my college professors who taught us how to give oral speech. He was a theatre professor, so he knew how to present his body. He always looked confident when he stood there, and he always stressed the importance of physical qualities including body gestures and voice in oral presentations. Once after class, a Korean girl in our group approached him to ask a question. He noticed she was standing with her legs together, and suggested that she try separating her feet a little. That would give her speech, and her being, a different quality, he said.
In most of our life we are so detached from our bodies. We are mostly mind-workers. When we don’t do mind work, we throw ourselves into crazy dance moves at parties, or we mindlessly go through chores that require the labor of the body. We rarely feel that we are grounded in mother earth, that there is gravity pulling us. We are being pulled down, which is why we are alive, but our attention is constantly up there, floating and jumping from one to another. The body is rather ignored. It’s the tool we use to keep us alive. What’s valued is the brain.
But I wonder if mind and body are actually divided. I have no truth to provide, but I know that their division, or the notion of their division, is what has caused many problems in our being. In fact, that division between the mind and the body might be the source of every other kinds of division we see. The division between the self and the other, for example. I don’t know if reality is as divided as we think it is. I really don’t know. But I know that I wish it were not. There’s part of us that’s always yearning for unity, for connection. And that yearning tells me there’s some truth in that.
The fact that all of our life is about relationship is one of the only truths, only important truths that I’ve learned. Our relationship with ourselves, with others, with parts in ourselves. They are all the same thing. They mirror each other. All things are a reflection, a form onto which the essential quality of relationship is being projected. To find the right relationship, the relationship of health, love, wisdom, between me and every part of my being is the only thing I aspire. Again, it’s not a goal to reach, it’s a place to go back to. It’s not easy to go back to where you were. In fact much harder than reach anywhere new.