Field Note #14 - When Truth Comes Through

There is a question that has been behind so much of my life, although I don't think I always knew how to name it. 

How do we allow what is true within us to meet the world?

How do we allow our true self to be expressed?

Perhaps this question began for me through dance. I spent so many years communicating through a body before I ever began doing the work I do now.

Through decades of working with people's bodies and movement, expression itself has underlined my fascination.

When someone stands in front of me, I don't only see anatomy.

I see a person.

I see the ways they have learned to move. The places they hold. The places they protect. The ideas they have been taught about posture, alignment, strength, weakness, flexibility, injury, aging and what their body should or shouldn't be able to do. I see emotion and history.

Our stories can become visible in the way we move.

A person may have been told years ago that something is wrong with their back, and that idea is still being expressed every time they move. It is expressed in posture but also emotion and energy.

Someone may have learned that they must constantly hold their abdomen in, pull their shoulders back, stretch a certain way, strengthen something, protect something.  Even their beliefs around the body and healing or gradual decline get woven into this.

These beliefs are no longer simply ideas.

They have become part of their expression.

And this reaches far beyond movement.

Throughout our lives, we pick up stories, beliefs, traumas and dramas. We have experiences and make meaning from them. We learn from our families, our cultures, our teachers, our injuries, our relationships and our spiritual traditions.

Some of these patterns are easy to recognize as things we would like to be free from.

The painful ones are obvious.

The trauma. The injury. The fear. The old story that says I can't. The experience we keep carrying long after the moment itself has passed.

We understand why we might want to unwind these.

But there are other patterns and beliefs that are trickier to see.

What about the stories we believe are good?

The Good Stories

There are identities and beliefs that can appear righteous, spiritual, helpful—even morally important.

I am the healer.

I am here to save.

I must sacrifice myself for others.

This is the right way to eat.

This is the correct way to practice yoga.

This is how we should move.

This is what healing looks like.

This is what it means to protect the Earth.

And then there are the stories we can gather through our spiritual lives—stories about our lineage, our past lives, our purpose, what happened to us, who we have been, what a particular experience means.

I am not saying these stories are wrong.

Some may have served us profoundly.

We can engage with something earnestly and honestly. It can teach us. It can help us heal. It can carry us through an important part of our lives.

But does that mean we need to become it?

Because something changes when a useful understanding becomes identity.

Now I am no longer simply experiencing what is here.

I am experiencing what is here through what I already believe it to be.

Can We Perceive What Is Here?

This is one of the reasons I return again and again to the senses.

They give us such a simple doorway.

Can I look at something and actually see?

Can I hear what is here before I decide what the sound means?

Can I smell something before immediately entering memory, preference or association?

Can I taste?

Can I feel my body sensorially—even sensually—without immediately deciding what the sensation is telling me?

This doesn't mean we somehow become people without history or understanding.

It is simply an exploration.

What happens when I loosen the filter?

What can reach me that perhaps couldn't reach me when I already knew what I was looking at?

Recognizing Something True

I notice this in another part of my work as well.

People sometimes share dreams, spiritual experiences or shamanic journeys with me.

And I can often hear when someone is speaking through a story they have learned.

Then there are other moments when something changes.

Their own voice comes through.

There is something about it that I recognize.

And I have wondered for years:

What am I recognizing?

I think it has something to do with resonance.

There are moments when another person's expression seems to resonate within us. We don't necessarily have to analyze it first. Something in us responds.

We feel when a dancer stops performing movement and begins to dance.

We feel when someone stops repeating what they have learned and something authentically their own enters the room.

Maybe truth isn't only something we understand.

Maybe truth is a resonance we can feel.

Rebirth

My work here looks at how much of our body is water, especially in our earliest development. I have been looking at what we receive from the field around us even before we have words for it, even before we are born. 

Then, last night I had a dream about rebirth.

In the morning, a friend mentioned the new moon to me.

There they were, meeting one another.

I love when life does this, when things line up.

I began thinking about the synchronicities of the waters—the waters within us, the waters we first developed within, the larger rhythms of Nature around us—and the possibility of releasing patterns we have accumulated.

Not replacing one story with another, nor deciding what everything means.

But allowing something to move.

To release.

And perhaps to emerge again with less of what we have gathered.

The Two Thorns

There is a story I once heard Mooji tell that has stayed with me for many years.

If you step on a thorn and it becomes lodged in your foot, you might pick up another thorn and use it to remove the first.

The second thorn has been incredibly useful.

It helped you become free of something that was hurting you.

But when the first thorn is out, you don't need to keep the second thorn either.

You throw them both away.

I think about how many second thorns we carry.

Practices that helped us.

Beliefs that gave us strength.

Ways of understanding ourselves that helped us through difficult periods.

Teachers. Techniques. Identities. Spiritual stories.

We don't have to deny what they gave us.

We don't have to make them wrong in order to become free of them.

We can honor the part they played.

And perhaps, when their work is complete, we can put them down.

Because underneath all these layers, I keep returning to that question that has followed me for so much of my life:

What would it be to allow what is truly ours to meet the world?

Not another identity.

Not another story about who we are supposed to be.

But something alive.

Something directly experienced.

Something that when it comes through, we somehow recognize.

Our own true note, sounding into the world.

— Kimba