Dancing on the edge of certainty

I chanced upon this beautiful poem by Mary Oliver called ‘Angels’; it was appropriate timing as I question edges and margins and lack of certainty, all the places that my practice currently takes me. Here it is:

You might see an angel anytime
and anywhere. Of course you have
to open your eyes to a kind of 
second level, but it’s not really
hard. The whole business of 
what’s reality and what isn’t has
never been solved and probably
never will be. So I don’t care to
be too definite about anything. 
I have a lot of edges called Perhaps
and almost nothing you can call
Certainty. For myself, but not 
for other people. That’s a place
you just can’t get into, not 
entirely anyway, other people’s 
heads. 

I’ll just leave you with this. 
I don’t care how many angels can 
dance on the head of a pin. It’s
enough to know that for some people
they exist, and that they dance. 

Life is a dance, and never more so than when you invite the angels into it. They are such a part of my life, that I forget that for other people this might seem rather strange. I love sharing angel cards with people especially for the first time and seeing their eyes open wide with the surprise at the angel card that has presented itself to them - always with an appropriate message, something that means something to them, and often fits in witty the context of a treatment or healing session.

Life is uncertain, and never have we been more aware of this than recently, with Covid. Yet still we try and find something concrete, something to hold on to, something to make us feel safe, be that our jobs or a relationship or possessions, even if we have outgrown them. We will hold on to the certainty of a yoga practice too, the familiarity of a sequence that we have practiced many times previously, and a style that we can almost do in our sleep, because it is so familiar to us and to our bodies.

Yet I have become increasingly aware, through the paradox and contradiction of the Scaravelli-inspired approach to yoga, that certainty in our practice can lead us down the superficial path of least resistance, the path well trodden, and not necessarily in our lives, but in our minds. It is easy to zone out of the body during a fast-paced asana practice, trying to keep up with the flow, trying to move the body and breathe, and put our bodies into the positions asked of it, always trying to further our practice, make our bodies bendier come what may.

I’ve noticed that we can stuck in movement patterns, feeding into the superficial muscles, allowing them to take over, and in the process denying the wisdom of the deeper muscles. So too in our life, we can lead very superficial lives, only allowing ourselves to delve so far into what may offer greater depth, but often this lacks certainty, it’s on an edge, a margin, a path not yet travelled, not yet lived, there’s resistance, and this send us straight back to where we were previously, to somewhere safe.

It takes courage to explore the backwater, to go deeper, to delve into the shadows, to let go of that which inhibits our growth, on the surface, to explore the edge of the inner landscape, to consider a life lived on the margins, neither here nor there, beyond definition, for it is a life lived with a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, not quite sure how it might unfold, not striving to be anywhere in particular, allowing the body to breathe rather than imposing the breath on it, and not trying to control an outcome, come what may, deeper truth and wisdom, compassion, forgiveness and the self, greater connection to the heart.

Our fears will keep showing up, reminding us of the reason we were searching for certainty in the first place, to conform, to feel secure, because everyone does that, and sometimes it’s difficult to live a life that goes against the flow, that tries to find a different path, a new way. Yet once touched, we know that we have to keep going, that we cannot stop, that we cannot go back, that we can no longer compromise that part of ourselves that craves a different life, that wants to go deeper than that life lived superficially, however much we may try and convince ourselves that that is OK and adopt anyone of our usual numbing strategies, so that we might forget that life could be lived differently.

I’m enjoying finding different ways of moving my body that is less harmful than the patterns I have adopted over the years, the patterns that I kept reinforcing on my mat, that allowed my body to maintain its armour, and it’s yang tendencies - albeit the tendencies are not so much of the body, but of the mind, which has dictated my practice for me. Now I get to sculpt the body, to do things differently, to chip away the armour and change the cellular memory, let go of the past which is still held in the body, informing my present.

The weight of responsibility will often weigh down the shoulders and impact on our ability to breath, tightening our upper spine, clipping our wings. We will struggle to truly find the comfort and ease of breath and body encouraged by the Yoga Sutras, forcing the breath, forcing the body. So too the hips, holding all those years of repressed emotions, the anger and hatred, sitting on them, impacting on the mobility and freedom of our spine, or our mind, we keep doing what e have always done and yet hope for a better outcome.

It is not enough to continue along the path of least resistance, the linear path, the safe one, certain, holding on to what we have always known and putting our heads deeper into the sand, even in ur yoga practice, even on our mat, even following prompts and instructions we can avoid being truly in the body, noticing it, but not noticing it, not knowing it, not knowing ourself, how can we know ourself if we are not truly present to the muscles, the bones, the ligaments, the flesh, our very nature, our nature.

So much of our physical tension of the result of mental tension, of lack of inner harmony and wholeness, fragmented, the good voice and the bad voice, the us before a yoga practice and the us at the end. How can we bring greater harmony to our whole being? I believe that this is the paradox. We might feel that life needs to be certain before we can find greater harmony and peace, and yet really, it is in the uncertainty, that this will reveal itself to us. A glimmer, a smidgen, a robin, a feather, a sign that this is the dimension where life might be lived, with the angels, a possibility, a potential.

Once we begin the journey to greater depth, once we step away from the superficial, once we notice more of the mind, with its comfortable and yet restricting and sometimes unhealthy patterns, then we can begin to notice more of the breath, and the certainty of this, and yet know that this is the breath between life and death, that the spine is the joint between life and death, that the exploration of the ancient sites is the space between life and death, that all of life is a dance between life and death and it is full of uncertainty that provides the joy that we seek, the possibility for inner harmony and peace. It is on the edges and the margins that life, the depth of life will reveal itself to us.