Grounding, Organization, Focus

As I enter into my third year of intentional focus on ayurveda practices, I am starting to find clarity in my work for each season.  The resonance of what I need to keep working on as autumn continues has strengthened over the past week.  

Grounding, Organization, Focus

Challenging practices for me in this season.  

What became clear over the past week was that my coping strategies for stress deteriorated.  I could feel myself fall into a vortex of self-critique and numbing.  Older residual habits that I've managed to avoid over these years.  And that is the issue.  I have out run some of those old habits, all the time fearing the moment they come back to dominate my life.  That means those habits are far from gone; they leave me reactive and at times responding in ways that are not always true to who I am now.

When I sat in that revelation for a few days, I could almost feel another layer of my older self peeling off of my body.  And what I realized was that I had to admit that those deeper fears of myself still had a pretty firm hold on me.  Bringing those fears out of my unconsciousness and into my conscious, intentioned self, I knew I needed to develop ways to handle that process with awareness and clarity, so I do go into reactive mode.

Grounding, Organization, Focus

Muscles I need to locate and strengthen.  

Grounding: To place on a foundation; to fix firmly; to settle or establish.  This is probably one of the hardest practices for me.  It is easy for me to loose touch with all that is beneath me. I forget to feel the earth. Attempts at settling down often produce greater unsettling. I can remember to ground in my yoga practice, but off the mat, it easily slips out of grasp. Yet, I know that in order to pay attention to my reactivity, I must stop and actually feel the ground.  Feel the world around me.  Feel the hardness of the ground. Feel the soft carpet tickling the bottoms of my feet. Feel the pointed tips of the grass between my toes. Feel my feet shuffling through leaves as I walk through my backyard.  But how do I remind myself of grounding in the moment? That will be my challenge.  


Organization: The state of being organized.  But what does it mean to be organized? I found an interesting definition: "to give organic structure or character to."  I like the idea that organization emerges organically, responsively to what is happening.  But not reactively. It means, for me, that the practice of organizing has to be done intentionally and with awareness. And even in the past few days, even the tiniest task to organize with intention has provided me calmness and relief.  Clearing out my dead and dried annuals and putting the planters under the deck provided the space for me to observe the way nature prepares for and responds to the changing seasons. Organizing my deck helped me embrace the end of a season of outward growth and welcome autumn's preparations for pulling inward. 

Focus: An act of concentrating interest or activity on something. To have focus on something, for me, means finding flow. Finding the zone.  Finding total absorption in something always puts me in a euphoric space.  I want to get in that zone with my research and writing.  Not simply to do the work in order to soothe some arbitrary ego requirement, but to feel the joy in the work.  I want to keep myself attuned to those spaces that bring me joy.





This is my work for the season. I have to stay awake and intentioned.  Focus, organization, and grounding. They all work together. They reinforce one another.  They feed and work on one another. 

Synchronicity: Where Kali Dances

There is a quote from Cixous that has stood out for me in my reading of her book, Rootprints. 

"What ties me to my elective relatives,
what holds me in the lure of my
spiritual guides, is not the question of
style, or of metaphors, it is what they
think about incessantly, the idea of
fire, over which we maintain a stealthy
silence, so as not to stop thinking about 
it. No complacency. Only the admit-
ting of the fear of fire. And the
compulsion to confront the fire. We
need fire." (p. 26)

I think of Cixous as an elective relative.  She is poetic, metaphorical, elusive, academic, but not an academic, and a woman who writes with her whole being.  Everything I strive to be.  

No complacency.

There is something in her language that aligns with the work I have been doing over the past year.  Interestingly, I have not picked up anything from Cixous since I taught "Laugh of the Medusa" about a year ago. I have not read Rootprints in quite a few years. She and I grew distant, but I see how her words settled into my unconscious, like a footprint, a rhizomatic set of memories of her words and metaphors.  Root. Print.

What blew me away in the quote were the lines: No complacency. Only the admitting of the fear of fire. And the compulsion to confront the fire. We need fire. This sums up the complex work I have been doing over the past year with ayurveda.  Facing fire. Facing fear.  

In meditation this morning, I was working with Kali.  My mind immediately took me to the place I often go to in my meditation.  I would call it my internal fire source near/around my third chakra. It's a dark primal space. There was Kali--dancing around and grabbing me and pulling me into her circular vortex. She was dancing around the fire source, but I didn't realize it at first. It was as though the fire source was camouflaged.  It was covered with dark gauzy cloth.  Lately, I've been feeling stagnant... Not stagnant.  I have been feeling myself wanting to revert to a place that no longer exists within me.  And Kali refused to let that happen. She, rather violently, pulled me into the vortex, which made me look more closely at the black gauzy formation.  I pulled it off and realized that it was my power source.  And there were red hot coals pulsing and emanating heat.  She made me stay with it.  Kali made me dance around with her and stoke the coals until flames started to rise from the pit.  Then I sat there shedding layers of myself and throwing them into the fire. All the gauze, clothes, masks, skin, that was inhibiting me.  It's wondrous to think about how all this can happen in 10 minutes of meditation.  But my mind took me there immediately. 

No complacency. Only the admitting of the fear of fire. And the compulsion to confront the fire. We need fire. 

Could Kali and Cixous be any more direct with me?  I don't think so. 

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I've been struggling to understand the difference between synchronicity and serendipity.   I looked up each of the words in the dictionary.

Synchronicity: The simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.

Serendipity: Supposedly, the first use of the word in the English language was by Horace Walpole in a letter to Horace Mann. He said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of."

On the surface, these words seem very similar to me. But for some reason, I'm more comfortable using serendipity.  Happy accidents. Reading the definition and history of the word, I have become more fascinated with it.  "Accidents and sagacity." I love that these two words aligned.  Training yourself, focusing yourself, putting yourself into the right mind frame to find the thing we were not looking for, but what we, ultimately, needed to find.  Following the rootprints down into something more.

At the same time, I know I often bring divergent ideas together. Things that seem to have no apparent connection align to bring new knowledge, new ideas.  It seems to me, that it is the cornerstone of creativity.  Opening myself up to things that seem unrelated.  One could say our lives are constantly moving and tangling up in all kinds of synchronistic potential.  

These are two words to think about more. They deserve contemplation, because I know they have guided me through some difficult moments. When I trust in the things that my gut--that space where Kali dances--tells me, I know I'm doing the right work.  I just have to keep focused enough to remember when I feel most distant and remote from my elective relatives (and myself). 

And just when I feel most distant from everything, something tangible arrives that grounds me back to this earth.  A solar wheel to remind me of the energy and power of light. And the energy and power of each serendipitous, synchronistic moment. 

Juncture: Between Roots and Flight

“And I was afraid. She frightens me because she can knock me down with a word. Because she does not know that writing is walking on a dizzying silence setting one word after the other on emptiness. Writing is miraculous and terrifying like the flight of a bird who has no wings but flings itself out and only gets wings by flying.” -Cixous

We are in the middle of the juncture between early fall and autumn.  

Right now, I do feel afraid.  I do feel myself walking on a dizzying silence. I think it's because I've been struggling to find the perfect metaphor for what has been going on this past week or so.  Perhaps it's because  I am trying to build my words upon the emptiness of time. I just haven't had enough time to contemplate all that has been going on.  I need that open space.  I need the blank page. I need to face the blank page and sit with the silence. The discomfort. The fear of flying.

Flying.  My dreams keep filling up with air and space. So much vata.  I have recurring dreams of flying into space and taking plane rides to new places that terrify and excite in equal measure.

“Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time.
Write yourself. Your body must be heard.” 

With moving out of the time of remembering my ancestors, I decided to return to another  family. My intellectual and emotional family.  Hélène Cixous is one of my divine mothers.  Her book, Rootprints: Memory and Lifewriting is one of my favorite books. And it has occurred to me that for the remainder of this juncture, I need to read that book.  I know she will help me find the right metaphor.  She is my mother bird nudging me out of the nest.   She was that for me years ago when I embarked on my intellectual and academic career.  It is time to return to her for yet another push.

Between roots and flight. That is the juncture in which I sit. A cross section of contradiction. 

"Wouldn't the worst be, isn't the worst, in truth, that women aren't castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.” -Cixous

It's time to laugh.