I’ve just returned from a wonderful, achingly hot week in Ibiza with 2 of my dearest friends and it reflected a lot about my current musings.
Before I left, I was doing my usual Breathe and Brew morning practice and had chosen to listen to the meditation journey our colleague Jane Alexander had created to encourage connection to the energy of the green tea (link below). It offers a visualisation to help release fear from your body and builds to the gentle seeking of your deepest fears, ones that may well not be in your awareness. It asks nothing of you intellectually as it is a somatic releasing practice, not a cerebral one, but what popped into my head was this question… Is my greatest fear that I might be missing the point of living?
I constantly recognise in myself a kind of tick-boxing of time. Even doing the meditation, my inner critic was saying ‘blimey, 16 minutes, have you got the time for this?’ which in a nutshell is what is wrong with the current paradigm. Having time IS what life is, the precious snapshots of your physical existence in this moment and space, in this human body…. It is all about time, the currency of life.
I know intellectually that being present is what connects you to your lived experiences and yet in reality, I'm always trying to move it on, seeing each chapter as a stepping stone to the next, the constant 'when I finish this...', without really acknowledging the path is inevitably just leading to a non-physical existence. So in answer to my initial question, yes I think i am missing the point.
Doing counselling training and finally realising the training isn’t just going to spit me out as a qualified therapist once I’ve completed all the assignments, has been very confronting. For it is instead a brutal and taxing initiation process (in the days of us being hunter gatherers, I might have been sent off into the mountains to survive on my own for a month) designed to challenge me and develop my ability to trust myself, my instincts and become congruent enough to ask someone else to be that vulnerable with me, because I too have touched those places within myself.
This also mirrored something to me about the Breathe and Brew practice I encourage in others. How can I ask people to truly make the time to be brave enough to hold space for themselves each morning, when half the time I’m uncomfortable finding that time for myself?
So back to my super hot holiday. For a whole week, all our well-laid plans to do things dissolved into ‘pool or sea?’, for any further exploration of anything without a cooling body of water was futile in such blistering sunshine. So we did a week of pool or sea (sea winning on almost all occasions because why wouldn’t it!)
Basically the ‘doing’ part of our existence for the week was demolished, we had to ‘be’. Feet in the sand, beer in the hand, lovely, nourishing being. We just drifted around in an ocean that was so deliciously temperate our bodies and the water had no separation, they were as one. I finally understood. Here was a snapshot of my physical existence where all of me felt whole. My brain quietened, my body finally got to take the wheel and determine any action -warm skin, hot flashes, sweat, head for cold water- our unspoken somatic mantra and we all felt it.
It wasn’t the holiday I’d planned, planning and doing being a very intertwined and seductive duo for our modern, 'tick-box time' brains. But I was forced into being, with little energy available for considering much else and I have arrived back much more rested which ironically means I now have the capacity to be productive and focused once more, something I was sensing I was losing a grip of as I headed towards a more frazzled version of myself. I finally understood the many people who go on holiday for two weeks and just lie by the pool but also it highlighted the modern-life holiday conundrum. Is it healthy that we have built a society where we work to the point of burnout and then need a forced lie-down to recover and reset?
Our 'time' here has to include a more balanced amount of ‘being’ if it is to offer a good life currency, if we are seeking a good exchange rate. It made me honour practices like Breathe and Brew with its offering of that precious ‘being’ time, the tea holding the space open should you choose to step into it. I will try not to squander the opportunity ever again and ask my inner critic to step down for those precious moments each morning as I now know that it is offering me the path to living a good life. It is my regular mini holiday within the chaos.
Wishing you a wonderful summer, enjoy the gorgeous weather and we look forward to speaking to you again in August.
Anne and Ric x