Do you know this feeling of dropping in? I hear it said by healer types. It’s this feeling of a deep breath. This feeling where the world slows down and a single leaf on a tree becomes the sole object of your gaze. Twenty feet above you and you notice the veins, the thin stem attached to the branch, and the flipping over and back in the wind, the front to the back of the leaf, a darker to a lighter green and back. Have you been there?
It’s dropping more of your soul into your body. Into your life on earth. It’s where everything goes into slow motion and nothing is more important than, for example, that leaf. It’s when you finish getting a massage and the only thing that matters is stepping your feet on the ground, hearing your footsteps in the soft night outside, as you walk to you car and the moon is floating, just above Henshaw Street.
It’s when you’ve just gone for a run and sit resting on a rock, and the blood pounds in your ears and chest, and you sip water and look out across the Charles. Slowly the thought of work and picking up the kids become solid in your head again. The pounding fades and the stream of hurried thoughts overtakes your being once again.
Life is simple in the body. It’s where love lives. It’s where consumerism dies and gratitude thrives. Gratitude for the cool drink of water, the pounding heart, a simple meal.
Close your eyes and take a simple breath. Put your bare feet on the ground. Walk around your block. Write on paper with a pen. Eat a sandwich without scrolling through Facebook.
I know. It’s too hard to do these simple things when there’s one more post to read, one more price to check on Amazon, one more fascinating fact that must be “researched.” Funny thing, though it’s the mind that makes us crazy, it’s that same mind that can get us back to the serenity of the body.
The mind might read a post like this and connect. It might remember the relief of wandering off down a quiet wooded path, glints of dragonflies and the high drone of heat bugs, as the body steps into the lead. It might remember finally letting go of the jabber as the body sweats softly, picking up speed. It might turn its attention to the rhythm of the lungs. It might wonder how it thought, just moments before, that the next Youtube video or Buzzfeed post was so much more interesting than those breathing lungs.
More likely, though, the mind won’t have made it this far through this post. It will have already clicked on to the next potential thing of interest. Hopefully it will eventually land on something that convinces it of the worth of the body. The body, pumping away unnoticed. The body, wriggling slightly and bearing as best it can the pain of sitting quietly for hours while the mind is in charge.
Yes, the mind may be jolted back to earth by an article or doctor who tells us to exercise and eat right, (which we hear as blah blah blah because everyone knows that.) Usually, though, the old body has to stand up for herself. She has to scream with some decent pain before we look up from our laptops.