the spiral of release
There is a line between awareness and action. Since my mind is pitta-dominant at least half of the time, I tend to be very action-oriented. Throughout the course of a day, I’ll become aware of something I’m doing that doesn’t strike me as a good idea. I am so naturally geared towards movement that my inclination is to JUMP on anything in my field of awareness that doesn’t feel in alignment with how I want to live. This tendency can be a beautiful thing. And unaided, it can be exhausting. It’s so easy for me to over-do things - to try hard to the point of depleting myself. Even when the things I’m working to adjust are being adjusted to help free up my vitality and keep me from depletion. The irony is ridiculous. It makes me laugh. And it makes me crazy. And then it makes me laugh again because once I recognize it, I get to move forward in my practice of what the yogis called Vairagya and what I’ve deemed the Spiral of Release.
Discovering myself white-knuckling in big ways and small, many times throughout the day has become a fun realization because the payoff is so huge. Is there anything sweeter than the sensation of release? Hah! The realization that slips me into the release phase usually goes something like, Ohhh, you mean if I decrease my intentional effort by about 85%, and simply put forth a willingness to pay attention and make some adjustments, the universe will guide me along to right where I need to be? And then I wonder why it’s so hard to get this through my head, and then I laugh at myself: just because it’s the work I’m here to do in this lifetime doesn’t mean that I’ve done something wrong. Part of why it’s so hard to get the hang of surrendering is because we’re steeped in a culture that laughs behind its hand at ideas like what I just laid out. Sure, there are increasing numbers of people in the West who subscribe to this approach. I have been in circles where people talk about this kind of thing for some time, so I’m comfortable with them. But those circles aren’t mainstream. We live in a broader dominant culture that glorifies self-sacrifice on the wheel of work. We’ve been unwittingly indoctrinated into a pattern of living and thinking that prioritizes PUSHING. PUSH for it. Bust your ass to get wherever you’re going. Work hard to be successful. Make sacrifices, be a hard worker, get ahead, and hustle. You get it. You’re probably as steeped in it as I am. And in my experience, this is a tremendous samskara to address. It comes up all over the place - for me, engaging with the compulsion to push is like playing Whack-a-Mole. But like any samskara, this approach to living isn’t bad in and of itself. The trouble is that it’s utterly pervasive, and the world I grew up in offered very little in the way of counter-weighting the hyper-masculine values that this way of living espouses. Our society is changing in many ways, but we’re still dragging along the considerable weight of, to quote bell hooks, a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Working hard can be a wonderful thing, and hustle is a quality I’m grateful to have, but they offer life in a limited color pallette. Too neutral; too many grays. These values have been exalted to the point of excluding feminine ones.¹ We human beings, especially womxn, need flow in our lives. We need space. We need time for surrender. We are so hungry for these things. I am so hungry for these things. Though they can feel unattainable when we seek them outside of ourselves, there’s good news: we begin to win at this game by starting from within. Over and over, we learn to trust ourselves and lean back, freefalling into the divine/goddess/God/Universe/creative intelligence/_______. I find that sometimes it is possible to do this with gentle engagement, rather than a tornado of effort. And my goodness, what a treat it is to arrive again and again at this conclusion. And how it amazes me that I forget so quickly! So we keep making our way around the spiral that helps us remember. And it’s okay to simply trust that the spiral will continue, provided we persist in witnessing ourselves and being willing to keep a flexible spine in the face of the ever-changing circumstances in this game called life.
- Here, I’m not talking about people’s gender, but about polarities in how our values are constituted.
Image credit: Spiral Vectors by Vecteezy