Out beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing there is a field. I will meet you there. Rumi
Summary: We extend beyond ourselves often, going under, over and past our normal thought pattern boundaries. Practice 3 is about going beyond regularly, on purpose, and staying there longer when we do. There are many avenues to the expanded space and time of the peace-engendering dimensions beyond our normal crowded thought streams. We will touch upon four of them—the arts, nature, love, mindful meditation (include prayer in this mediation part) —and build on them in the later practices. This beyond place is what many of us call spiritual as it feels larger than normal I-based thought states. Practice 1 and 2 covered enough on mindful meditation that we will consider it addressed enough for now. Let’s look at the other three.
The Portals to a Bigger Us
It is good news, from so many sources, that more of us accept as a normal fact that we are responsible for our bodies, and importantly, that we emanate energy fields beyond them. In the daily duties of work and life—from brushing our teeth to delivering a sizeable work output—we forget the energy fields we are and think of ourselves as task masters, or busy parents, who are, in the main, short on time. Fun-seeking activities, most assuredly a shift away from work energy, can also move us away from sensing the energy fields that hold us.
Often as we are moving through our days, however something happens: just as our regular thoughts are going along, this shift occurs—we go bigger, and we feel an expanded, less bounded energy. Something causes our attention to morph: a loving zoom conversation with a sister; a glance at a Van Gogh we have seen 100 times; a beautiful bouquet that jumps out at us. Or we may do it for ourselves: we stop, take a breath like in practice 1, go to mindful mind in a conscious moment, and feel the energy of that more timeless dimension. We shift to a more fundamental plane that is always so close and yet over looked for long, long periods.
There are four common portals to extending beyond ourselves: a love connection, nature, art, and mindful/meditation. Brief moments with these portals are not normally transformative. But they are always expansive and while brief, we mostly welcome the shift in energy, relaxing away from our normal more congested and less elevated thinking. Mary Oliver describes this shift in our energy in many poems, and here is one in the beautiful Snow Geese:
…my look shot upward, it was
A flock of snow geese, winging it faster than the ones we usually see, and
Being the color of snow, catching the sun so they were, in part at least, golden,
I held my breath as we do sometimes
To stop time when something wonderful
Has touched us.
We hold our breath and are touched as we enter some portal of extension and expansion. How can we cultivate the capacity to find and use the four portals?
Nature and Art as Extensions
Let me continue to use Mary Oliver’s work, her nature-steeped poetry, as the example of how both art and nature take us beyond ourselves. In her many years of poetic composing, she contemplated nature and extended beyond herself, and she wrote poetry that took us with her, as good poetry will do. In her words.
“I would therefore write a kind of elemental poetry that doesn’t just avoid indoors but doesn’t even see the doors that lead inward – to laboratories, to textbooks, to knowledge. I would not talk about the wind, and the oak tree, and the leaf on the oak tree, but on their behalf. I would talk about the owl and the thunderworm and the daffodil and the red-spotted newt as a company of spirits, as well as bodies. I would say that the fox stepping out over the snow has nerves as fine as mine, and a better courage. I would write praise poems that might serve as comforts, reminders, or even cautions if needed, to wayward minds and un-awakened hearts…I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”
Art and nature as extending beyond yourself
Most of us have cultivated our own practices with nature and art, from tending the tomatoes and hiking the fields, to visiting museums and playing the clarinet. The questions to ask here go like the following:
–what can we do now to expand and improve our habits with nature and art so we can take ourselves, or be taken, to the fields of energy we share with nature, and go beyond to our deeper origins?
–What barriers might we want to reduce or eliminate so the boundaries of the regular thought patterns dissolve a while, letting us eclipse the regular thinking of day-to-day specifics and move into more essential space?
Love as extending beyond yourself: dropping into the heart
To this point in the practices we have concentrated largely on mental moves to stay less in the confines of our head. Another tact is just as useful and powerful—spending more time in our heart. Many years back a good friend of mine, Cathy Robinson Walker, passed on a little phrase that is a great label for going to the heart space–the “2 foot drop”. This was the name for leaving our head-centered thought energy and its idea-centered mentations/thinking, and going into another major center of our knowingness—the spacious, accepting, courageous energy in our chests. This drop from one major center or chakra of energy to another major chakra, this 24-inches or less between head and heart, is inevitably an extension. Sometimes we leave a thought pattern entirely and we arrive in a love space. At other times we weave the pattern into the love zone and the energies intermingle.
This happens naturally when we are listened to well by a friend or loved one who is taking us in “whole-heartedly.” They have already dropped into their heart and we feel the empathy and caring they extend. The advice to stay around positive people, the practice of seeing good friends and being with loved ones, is practical as a means for staying whole, for reaping the benefits of extending.
Practice for Going Beyond Yourself
—Use fewer I based thoughts, words. Go to aware mind and stop running conversations in your head, the ones you have already had and are repeating to sound more articulate, and the ones we are rehearsing so we look smarter, better. In our speech, notice how often we self-reference—what do I think, what I did, what I am up to. Some of this is natural, too much is a bad habit. Don’t claim as many thoughts as your own. They often are borrowed. “It has been said” is a good way to start more conversations. Less use of I is a good place to start extending beyond yourself. (This is a great idea from David Hawkins, and more on this in the next practice).
— Bring your heart into your energy field in a conscious way. Love starts as a feeling often, but in practice 3 we are talking about love as a state of awareness. In practice 2 we suggested stepping back and observing from your mind level, where you are and what you are doing. Practice 3 adds to that: step back, witness, then drop from your mind into your heart and observe your energy soften, spread, glow, and do what it does. See what it does to your tendency to think, to judge, and unconsciously start a thought stream of opinions in your monkey mind (or worse, get fearful about something). More on this as well in practice 7.
— Put your hand over your heart for a few moments, feeling the energy. This physical act can be done even in some public places if you are discreet. Bring heart energy into the mix of your consciousness as often as you can. The little “2 foot drop” keeps the energy hanging around. Practice it all day, every day, a few seconds, a few minutes at a time. Feel the shift.
—Find a Mary Oliver poem, or Rumi, or some writer/poet who expands your thoughts into wonder, awe, contemplation, a more profound place than our favorite talk show, columnist, or sport event. Go past even thoughtful well considered information. All have their place. This practice says, simply, think and feel beyond the everyday cognition and especially surface thinking. Stay in this beyond place longer, more often, until it becomes a regular habit, a go to space.
If you missed the introduction to these 10 practices, here is the link for that http://www.evocateurblog.com/2023/09/14/ten-practices-helpful-habits-of-mind-and-heart/
And poetically speaking from an extended place, take in the following: art and nature together again.
In these three haiku – one image, one reflection, so few words–by Fred Andrle, he finds everyday nature a portal.
What he sees deeply in his backyard helps him extend beyond himself.
tree top cardinals transcontinental astounding leaps
call and response monarch branch to branch
crimson liturgy garden-training squirrel Olympiad
All haiku from the compilation Rocking in the Cradle of the Moment