Lance Kinseth, 2011
LISTENING, NOT KNOWING: Everything that we “know for sure”
is subject to be radically overturned.
The very nature of the universe(s?) will remain beyond our capacity to
ever sense.
And in everyday life, everything that we might experience as
constant, wondrous or even static and boring, is a stream of change. Even
across the time span of a few months, personal, societal and environmental
consequences will occur that we cannot foresee. Commonality is a measure of our limits rather than life at
it is.
How to live in such uncertainty?
Listening, remaining alert to the changing conditions of
existence, is the core of a wild state that optimizes the sustainability of
each species.
With senses pulled in many directions at once, coming to a listening
point may optimize alertness. Overall, this action offers to reduce
the sensory overload so that we might not overlook resources and actions that
are optimal.
This listening point centers us just enough to come inside
our experience rather than just look at it or, most of the time, overlook
it. We then stand to not
finally know, but rather, to invite and to listen to that which appears, we
optimize in our general capacity to connect, and we just might improve our capacity
to come into harmony, integrate and adapt and transform.
Body-mind practices often arise to essentially create a
listening point. Rather than being
just a borrowing or an age-old way from modern “exercise” or “stress
reduction,” such practices can provide a listening point that steps out of the
everyday for at least moments if not more. Many moments of body-mind practice or “repetition” may
flower into awareness of increasing integration with events that had,
heretofore, seemed separate and unimportant. Then, subtlety and grace become visible in the movements and
poses of practices such as tai chi, qigong, meditation, and very gentle
yoga. And if they are authentically
subtle and graced, there is much more going on with everyday activities such as
work and cooking and cleaning and relationships to others and to landscape.
Perhaps the crucial element of body-mind practice involves
cutting through the chatter of the continual rain of sensory stimuli and
thought. Slowing to stillness and
calmness optimizes this process.
And, paradoxically, doing less, a switch is flipped, and a profound
acuity and physiological action might be triggered that optimizes a listening
point.
Body-mind practices tend to cut through routine and place
each of us at a center point of sorts,
an “in-between.” On a very basic
level, each inhale might
penetrate inside us, and each exhale
connects or integrates and expands into our experience. In the body-mind
practice of gentle yoga, when we cross a threshold from the everyday to the
mat, to the place of practice—our initial stilling of the body-mind, perhaps
followed by breath work, takes us out of the chatter of discriminating self
into being-ness. Rather than self
and other, we might shift to Being-ness & Cosmos. Then, each breath is more that “air.” It extends into the infinity of
cosmos. We might go both inward
and outward. There is a listening
point, a center point and this point is a prayer of sorts, a call inviting
something deep that we literally need and should not be ashamed to seek, rather
than exercise or stress release.
