Everywhere I go the world offers me its busyness. It does not believe I do not want it.
Mary Oliver
Summary: Many metaphors carry significance and meaning all by themselves, without elaboration. The name of practice 8 is one of them. Numerous positive associations come from this water metaphor—non-resistance, going with the flow, being easy-going and letting go of demands from the smaller thinking, non-aware, self. Here is our homage to the Tao, effortlessness, westernized of course—since it is coming out of my mind– so we can approach important implications. This practice takes the tact that while being large and in charge has its place in life—and we get endless encouragement on this front—the foundation of the 10 practices is the opposite compensatory balance, going with the stream of life that emerges within.
Water images teach us
Mary Oliver, in one of her many stop-you-in-your-tracks poems, Some Things, Say the Wise Ones, refers to water as “gleaming generosity.” Many have contemplated water, from its molecular properties, to its multiple states, its destructive and life-giving powers. Water is the standard for cold, above and below freezing, and much more. Here we use it for its amazing properties of flow, of inviting and sensing our inner energy states so that we can move with them and not against them.
Whether we encounter choppy waves, or a silent subtle current of resistance, life and work and happiness are a struggle when we take a wrong inner direction. Going with the flow of what positive is emerging from within ourselves is so much easier than going against it. Outer social resistance is not the kind we are addressing here. Outer resistance is another matter, and how we deal with it comprises the essence of many a great story. Take prejudice. When Martin Luther King found his inner flow, his true north, he could deal with the outer resistance of centuries of institutional prejudice. Once inner flow is found, and we attend to it regularly, we have our foundation for expressing our lives, living our purposes and making positive impact.
It is the inner resistance, against our own convictions and inner nature, that is our fundamental work in practice 8. Jack Kornfeld contributes this: “In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of the things not meant for you.”
One of my own examples of not flowing and clinging to what was not mine to hold was in my mid-career. We, myself with my co-preneur and wife Patricia, enjoyed our leadership development work with our number one client for many years, but we held on somewhat too long to the work even as it got boring. When we let the client go, with a bit of sadness and fear, new doors opened and work better suited to us showed up. We got watery and it worked.
There are indeed times in life to step up and grab the reins, to exercise our active will, even to cling with all we have. (You have noticed by now that I remind us of this regularly.) And there are equally times to engage our passive will. Just do it and Let it be both have their place. Just do it has fire built into it and gets plenty of play in this culture of muscling, achievement, and willing through. Practice 8 is about the wetter elements of our minds and awareness that allow and foster—Lets it be— moment by moment flow.
Water out of time
Practice 8 is going watery internally. This does not mean passivity. It means resisting nothing on the inside. By becoming more like water we limit the encrusted edges of the getting and gaining habit/stance discussed in practice 7. We let go of the space-in-time only view, objects acting on objects, solid and specific—a view that has dominated our attention and is the only one encouraged in our culture of doing and accomplishing. We can still assume the specific view whenever we need it. It is always there for the using. But here we use a new lens. Many a master teacher on alternative views to Newtonian day-to-day practicality, and my experience also tells me it is true, that we need to balance this approach to life with a stance of non-utilitarian fluidity .
If we can be like water, allow the moment and the evoking the potential resting underneath the surface world of the things and people around us, if we become a vessel for what emerges, we can get back in touch with vast aspects of our thinking and awareness. We activate the potent energies of being present. Our intuitive knowingness integrates our thoughts towards more meaning and harmony.
Look for the underplay, a hidden underground river
Underneath this daily world of flux and fluctuation in our outer world, and the waning and waxing of our inner energy states and thoughts and emotions, there is a steady stream of underground energy. It springs out of the all-encompassing generative present that we have been working toward in all the practices. It is a boundless stream of fluid frequencies that we can tap with our mindful mind, and that our thinking mind can helps us name and use, if we go fluid first. It is easier to go from awareness to thinking versus the other way around.
David Brooks, the columnist and author cited in practice 5, writes about this stream of energy that he found under the daily activities of his life and work. He uses the images of a play.
…(It’s) like there’s a play you’ve been watching all your life, and suddenly you realize that the play you are seeing onstage is not the only play that’s going on. There’s an underplay, with the same characters, but at a different level, with different logic and forces at work, and greater stakes. There’s a worldly story to follow, as people move closer or further from their worldly ambitions. But there’s also a sacred story…
And then Brooks warns us, once we see this underground river and energy, unseeing it is not really possible—”It’s easy to not be aware of the underplay, but once you see it, it’s hard to see the other play about worldly ambitions as the ultimate reality. The main story is the soul story.”
Brooks has a sense for where the more fundamental, all-encompassing, energy is. What we call the mindful mind, the emergent stream of self, he refers to as the soul story. Let’s explore the practices that help us congeal this metaphor, more actionable steps for achieving the positive watery state we are describing as practice 8.
Practice for Being the Water
–Gear down the constant mental distinctions. We all derive benefit and often enjoy our stunning capability to distinguish one thing from another, like the 2017 chardonnay from the 2018 at the same vineyard. We can do this for everything. Bully for us, but enough already. There is a time to do the opposite, to be less sophisticated, less discerning, less precisely sensing and analyzing. Being the water and about flow means we can be more indiscriminate, more general, and zoom out instead of zoom in on differentiating details.
—Flow into the river of relax and release. Fall behind the emotion ripples and thought surges. Fall behind as the opposite to pushing ahead. Fall backward versus drive forward as we seek that underground river in the understory Brooks elucidates. Nobody says how to deal with tightness and anxiety better than Michael Singer. “The moment you feel a (bothersome) change (in your mental/emotional self), relax your shoulders and relax the area around your heart. The moment the energy moves, you simply relax and release. Play with letting go and falling behind this sense of being bothered. P 65 in The Untethered Soul.
—Step away from constant concrete observations and categories. We can think concretely, categorically, and specifically all day. We have the capability to also think more generally with the widespread “gleaming generosity” of water that comes with gratitude and other states of awareness. Brian Andreas nails this awareness state:
He told me that once he forgot himself & his heart opened up like a door with a loose latch & everything fell out & he tried for days to put it all back in the proper order, but finally he gave up & left it there in a pile & decided to love everything equally.
–Find the soft peripheries. As we look around and take in the world, we can use the wide-angle lens we are equipped with in our powers of comprehension. Apply the soft brush effect of the photo-shop finish. Comprehending is seeing the “far side” of the objects in the world we are taking in. Apprehending these objects is to seize them, to “focus on the near side” and the details so we can use them. Practice 8 is the comprehending mode counterbalance in a world of apprehension. When we are done reading the small print for instructions and details, we dial back that tight focus and look at a cloud, or take in the wholeness of your houseplants, or if we must, when looking at a screen, turn on the images of the ocean on YouTube.
—Liquidize and contextualize your past. I am a fan of revisiting our personal histories, to reclaim and amplify all the good that happened there and to recast, recontextualize and re-imagine beyond the original damage and limits we absorbed. Your past and your memories can be water too. (The same book I mentioned in the previous practice—The Power of Your Past: the art of recalling, reclaiming and recasting.)The more we free up from the past, dissolving the stories that were once useful, perhaps, but we now use to confine us, the more we can update it with new empowering interpretations. Water can and does dissolve the crusty edges of our histories and allow us to live and appreciate the present and its possibilities.
Being more liquid than solid is the way of non-resistance. Leave things in a pile. Look for the understory.
Look at things and events and discriminate less. Comprehend, look with, not at, more often. Let’s move onto the next practice.
If you missed the introduction to this series and the earlier practices here is the link that started the series. http://www.evocateurblog.com/2023/09/14/ten-practices-helpful-habits-of-mind-and-heart/