Recently, I went from doing a job where I had a schedule that allowed me to put in place a whole structure of supportive, spacious commitments (such as taking a walk with the recorder and sitting for 20 minutes in the middle of the work day) to doing a job where that’s not so available.
In my new job, I was getting exhausted and defeated. Some guidance assisted me to see I was caught in an exhausting bamboozle that went something like this: “You’re so exhausted that you need a big intervention. Perhaps a weekend away in a remote country cottage. Go research that. But, by the way, you can’t take a weekend away right because you have all this work to do…” Then feeling trapped, despairing, hopeless, overwhelmed, failing.
After seeing that bamboozle, I am practicing shifting the focus to small, tiny, interventions: five-minute sits, two-minute dance and stretching breaks, walking between teaching classes with my earbuds in.
The energy is returning. Instead of affirming ego’s negative world of something wrong and not enough, the momentum is for Presence – the fun of listening for Life’s prompts about small interventions, tiny acts of love. It shifts the attention to relating to Life; I’m HERE to feel Life’s prompts drop in, that experience of being HERE to feel the prompt drop in where there’s a soft, warm energetic wave through the system, like being a pool of water and feeling a warm drop drop into you. In that relating to Life, I get to experience what’s so: I’m cared for, supported, not alone.
And of course the illusory big/small duality gets busted into the bargain. All that talk about needing a “big” (impossible) intervention is revealed for what it is: a distraction to keep attention out of the moment, away from HERE where All is.
It dropped in today: practicing with these acts of Love is getting to live life like the starfish story.
In the story of the starfish, a girl is walking along a beach where starfish have been washed ashore in large numbers. She stops to put the starfish one by one back into the sea. Someone comes up to her and says, “What’s the point? There are so many of them, what difference is it going to make?” The girl puts a starfish back into the sea and responds, “It’s making a difference for that one.”
An impulse arises to care for the human in a full work day. Life drops in: sit for 5 minutes. Ego’s negativity is the person coming up to the girl on the beach and asking, “What are you doing that for? What’s the point? It’s not going to make any difference. You’re still going to be overwhelmed. There’s still too much to do.”
This choice makes a difference for her for THIS moment. Sitting for five minutes makes a difference for THIS moment. Putting the earbuds in for a two-minute walk between meetings makes a difference for this moment.
And I get to experience the Authenticity that’s animating this form. I get to realize that this is the deep caring, innocence and determination of the girl returning the starfish to the sea.
Gasshō
Anna L