If you are in the European part of the world, you can't help but notice the season change. It’s both a beautiful and disturbing transition: the trees are changing color and gradually losing their leaves, the air is transparent and cold, and the days become shorter and shorter… Autumn is offering its discoveries. I became aware that there are gingko trees on our street when I started walking on the very special yellow leaves covering the gray asphalt under my morning steps to yoga…
One moment I want to share with you that was coming up for me in the last weeks was the theme of.. well, doing too much. We are always doing. In rope bottoming, in relationships, in teaching and learning. We are trying too hard. We feel we need to force, to make things happen.
Even when asked to relax, we come into forceful movement. Our bodies know power, effort, and labour. Ease and lightness are sometimes less accessible.
Ease and lightness however bring more feeling.
One of the big learnings I made in Hanna somatics was initiating the movement by letting go instead of forcing. I can hear my teacher's voice in my ears “What can you let go of, instead of activate?” A couple of years into the practice, I can recognize it myself. Trying too hard.
“It’s dark because you are trying too hard…”
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
Aldous Huxley
There is a conviction we carry in our muscles that we must make things happen. It’s another form of control. We do not trust it will unfold on its own… So we keep doing, pushing, producing. We can hardly tolerate the pause, the stillness.
Part of it is also that we are missing the somatic experience of ease. To bend to the left, you don’t need to force the left. Often, it is asking us to soften on the right, and you will be there with less effort. We can learn it in ropes and take it further into life…
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos,
no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.