Ease and Flow in the Presence of Magic
I feel deep movements in the world around me, waves washing up on the shoreline of our collective experience, their ripples showing up at multiple levels of my own life. Over the last few weeks, the climate in Aotearoa New Zealand has graced us with it’s imaginative power, revealing to us it’s ideas for how the world we inhabit should be. The ways that its imagination conflicts with our collective ideas and identity, and my own personal ideas and identity, is offering an invitation to reflect on my presence and role in this swirling mass of change.
This article is the product of that reflection, and an invitation to you, dear reader, to dwell with the ways these challenges might act as muse in your own life.
A Catalyst for Magic
Late last year, I left a role contributing to a significant piece of work co-designing a regional development straegy for Te Awa Kairangi, the Hutt Valley just outside of Pōneke, Wellington. Over the course of 18-months, the team I was part of explored ways of co-creating a vision for the future growth of one of the largest flood plains in the country, and ways we might stimulate a collaborative response from the human participants in that broader ecological system that supports organic health and regenerative potential.
It was a challenging 18-months, navigating the whims and will of a governance system designed for a different kind of change in a different kind of time, and ruptures in the fabric of human systems of collaboration, governance and decision making in the face of increasingly unpredictable ecological movements.
More recently, the flooding in Auckland highlighted the sheer unpredictability of the ecological waters we swim in. The impending cyclone due to hit Auckland and the rest of the North Island in 2 days continues to highlight that unpredictability. Amidst this change, my body feels the call to reflect and express as a way to process and discover valuable steps to take as we increasingly bear witness to the limitations of our current practices, beliefs and responses.
I’ve spent much of the last 7 years or so working with people to explore ways of being and acting that support sustainable outcomes. The usefulness of that work is being called into question at a deep, fundamental level.
In a world engulfed in so much change, what does sustainability look like? What does a reasonable and useful response look like?
On a regional and global scale, I have directly experienced the ways that our ideas and thoughts of what a sustainable response looks like predisposes us to problems in future. On recent projects, it’s clear to me that the solutions being explored are at best highly temporary in the face of a climate that promises vastly increased rainfall, flooding events, soil erosion and more. Yet the responses that might genuinely help us genuinely co-evolve with these environments in a way that is sustainable long-term are often deemed irrational, illogical or too disruptive when filtered through our historic beliefs and ideas.
However we are to move forward, the only place I can start is with a curious exploration of the ways my own body and mind are challenged by the cognitive dissonance between what my history and conditioning tells me is reasonable, and what I sense on a deeper, intuitive level to be right action (whether my conscious mind agrees or not).
Where Ideas and Reality Meet
This weekend I was due to head to Shipwrecked, as festival north of Auckland. For a variety of reasons - some personal, some collective - I made the decision to sell my ticket. As I sit here, I’m racked with FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), even though I know not going is absolutely the right thing for me. A third festival in a row, sharing fun, light, playful connection is simply not what my body craves right now (I’ve had my fill after two festivals in the last two weeks!), and the prospect of staying up in Auckland as the worst storm in 150 years batters the city isn’t overly appealing. Yet the old pattern of wanting to belong and not miss out persists. It’s a useful invitation to sit with an old response in the face of a new, ever-emerging reality for which those responses may not be well suited.
Others I know have taken the opposite approach. If the end of times is coming and the city is to be ruined, why not dance and party our way into oblivion?
I could justify both options to myself. Underneath it all, it highlights a core dialectic (an interplay between seemingly opposing points of view or ideas) that sits at the heart of how magic seems to occur in my life:
Is it better that the flame of our lives burns brightly and fiercely for a brief time? Or that we flicker gently long into the night?
This feels like a tension worth paying close attention to in the day to day of my life. In a practical sense, it invites some useful inquiries.
Should I stay home and rest, avoiding areas and spaces in my life that might invite too much intensity?
Or do I walk willingly into the flames of intensity and make the most of the visceral experience I’ve been afforded the chance to have in this body?
My experience and practice over the years gives me a useful foundation to be with the tensions that arise in ways that support magic.
Discovering Magic
I love magic, and I believe in it’s existence. Not in the Harry Potter sense of the word - though I do love a bit of fantasy - but in the way that Dr. Jason Fox considers it:
“Magic being phenomena that exists at an order of complexity beyond our reckoning.”
Whether viewed through the lens of complexity theory, living systems science, yoga, or some other system of knowledge, I consider magic to be the emergence of new experience in our world that cannot be explained in a simplistic, rationalist way. In one expression, it is the ways in which unexplainable new growth and life emerges from circumstances that our experience in body and mind tell us is untenable, uncomfortable or destructive.
Considering what I’ve learned over the years about the way that life reveals over time, this gives me a useful framework to consider the steps that might nourish me in an immediate, practical way.
Life’s Interplay
Life exists - and ideally evolves - in the presence of multiple forces that often seem irreconcilable.
On one hand, we have the forces of expansion that invite the sprouted seed to reach up through the soil, seeking the nourishment of sunlight that invites the possibility of photosynthesis and sugars to sustain new growth and facilitate the exchange of delicious sugars and micronutrients with the world it inhabits.
On the other, we have the forces of contraction that constrain this seeds expansion and maintain its evolving identity as it continually becomes something new. These same forces invite the downward reaching of a root structure capable of maintaining the structural stability of this emerging organism as it gains weight and form, keeping its structure stable enough for it to engage in useful exchange with the world it inhabits.
My life is no different.
Forces of expansion call me to reach out to a festival that promises uplift, buoyancy and levity. Forces of contraction call me to heed signals that my body is tired, and that there is an intricate weaving ahead - facilitated by the forces of nature and the impending storm - that will require a paticularly strong and stable root structure from which I might receive sunlight, process rays into sugar, and offer new nutrients to strengthen my bonds with the world around me.
I’ve learned that the key to working with this process in useful ways lies in finding what my teacher Richard Freeman describes as the middle path, that third option that exists beyond the expansion of “go to the festival” and the contraction of “don’t go to the festival”. In yogic terms, this is the interplay (and ideally the meeting point) between the prana vayus of prana and apana - and, when harmonised, the emergence of samana vayu - a constant dance that folks familiar with Ashtanga or Hatha Yoga will be intimately familiar with.
Finding Growth Beyond the Mind
It is not in the hard expression of one or another of these experiences that life will reach out to greet me, but in the meeting place between apparent oppositions.
The places that I find rest in action - where the will to act purposefully, whatever that means at that moment, even when low energy meet us - are the same places that I discover deeper, sustainable flow. While the rational mind may struggle to grasp this, it make perfect sense in the context of the deeper aliveness that I am.
All life requires the presence of both expansive and contractive forces. Often, the mind quickly gets involved and I attempt to artificially seek the boundaries I think we need using a rational, cognitive lens. I assess my options, rationalise the situation, believing that in doing so I might come to some logical conclusion about the right path to follow to find safety.
The flaw in this approach is that my ideas about what I need - the boundaries I need put in place, the things I should avoid or move towards - are borne of my historic bias, fears, experiences and more. My ideas about how to act can come from no other place, for the nature of my body-mind unfolding ensures that by the time conscious thought reached me it has already been filtered through layer upon layer of conditioning, theory and idea about what is good for me, bad for me, what worked in the past and what didn’t.
In the face of circumstances that have never arisen before - something with which we are each being increasingly confronted - this approach can only take us so far.
At its heart, it limits the possibility of true magic: truly unimaginable, emergent phenomena and possibility arising from the complexity of our present experience that can lead to new growth in us and our world.
Seeking Meeting Places
The word boundary is thrown around a lot these days, paticularly when it comes to interpersonal dynamics. I thoroughly believe that the practice of exporing and putting in place boundaries - and ultimately realising their limitations - is a necessary part of our maturation as a living being in this world. Sooner or later in any circumstance, when considering and navigating any tension in my life, I must come to realise the ways that my pursuit and implementation of boundaries is borne from historic experience of fear, pain and hurt.
As a forest evolves, there is no artificial imposing of boundaries borne of rational assessment through sensory input via a nervous system transmitting signals to a brain capable of analysis based on historic experience. Rather, the forest and its performers engage in a dynamic dance, discovering the places where nourishment occurs, continually taking steps towards nourishment.
Psychologist Carl Rogers describes this as the actualising tendency:
“Have you ever left a potato in your pantry only to discover later that it has grown sprouts? The sprouts are little white nubs taking advantage of the small amount of light available beneath and around the door frame.
Every time you open the door, some light enters, encouraging the seedling to fight for survival. If you were to plant that potato in the soil in the spring, you would soon find green sprouts fighting through the surface, followed by bushy green leaves.
We can see this desire to lean toward growth in everyone, and Rogers believed it true of every organism (Goodreads, n.d.). Organisms have an innate motivation to live in accordance with their true nature. When the organism cannot do this, it experiences incongruence but continues to push toward actualizing (the white nubs) even though the environment is more complicated.”
It is this tendency that motivates us to move and act in our lives in ways that bring nourishment. While I am in no way advocating for ignoring signals that arise through the mind in the form of thoughts or emotions, if they are the sole source of information directing my actions, I can become trapped in a repititious cycle responding to new circumstances using old habits. Inadvertently, I’m likely to recreate the very conditions in my life that I’m trying to escape.
As I’ve set boundaries in my life - boundaries borne of my historic experiences of pain, hurt, joy, love and more - I’ve increasingly come to see that ultimately I must let go of my need to control, and learn to curiously notice the innate contractive forces that exist in my relational life, and that naturally predispose me to sit at distance from one person or circumstance and closer to another. Rather than artificially imposing new boundaries in my life borne of what I think will keep me safe, things seem to flow more easily when I notice the places where our desire for nourishment overlaps and creates tension, so that I can position myself at a place in relation to you where we can both increase our capacity to receive nourishment.
This isn’t a rational, logical thought process. It lives at a much deeper level of our experience, somatically integrated into our nervous system and the complex ways that our body as a physical organism interacts with the context surrounding it.
That isn’t to say that conscious thought is to be avoided, but there is a deeper magic at play that we can blind ourselves to when we become too attached to the simplified meaning we apply to new information that has a vague flavour of something we experienced in the past.
The Growth of Our Shared Forest
As I sink into this process - noticing but not reacting impulsively to the thoughts that emerge, taking small, gentle steps towards the places that my body signals to me contains nourishment - the forest that we are comes to know itself more fully.
Collectively, we find patterns of exchange borne not from my ideas or your ideas, but from the places where we naturally meet and find ease in exchange.
Thoughts are compelling, and intimately wrapped up in my nervous systems experience of safety. This isn’t always an easy process to stay with, and it requires a tender hand and gentleness in the face of old stories and their respective somatic patterns. But over time it is teaching me to move towards areas of the forest that contain the right combination of nutrients, sunlight and exchange to best support my growth as a healthy contributor to the forest we share.
As I do so, I’m learning that rather than putting artifical boundaries borne of my ideas in place with those around me, I can simply let the differences in our needs educate me, an invitation to movement towards or away from you with a sense of genuine understanding that this process serves us both, moving us ever-closer to that part of the forest that who’s shape is a perfect match for our own.