Pssst
I have a secret to share with you.
Before I tell you the secret, I want to tell you a story. It’s not a typical story filled with action and drama. Quite the opposite. It is a quiet story. So quiet that I might have missed it had there been any action at all.
The setting
It was a warm, sunny afternoon and my husband and I had been travelling in India for two weeks. These two days in a lodge adjacent to a tiger preserve were planned as a “vacation” within a trip that had become a bit grueling because we’d both been sick for many days.
The driver had taken us around the perimeter of our assigned sector of the park once and it had become clear that this would mainly be a bird-watching drive. This was not remotely a bad thing! We were lucky to spot a nest of baby owls, we saw birds of prey circling, and many large and small exotic-to-us waterfowl.
We parked on the bank of a small lake so that a wildlife photographer who was part of our group could get some shots using his enormous lens that was all but useless in a moving (bouncing!) Jeep. My seat was in a sunbeam, and I happily closed my eyes, relishing the stillness and the quiet, and basking in warmth that had been in short supply during our time in the country.
The main event
As I sat with my eyes closed, I heard the quiet burble of the water along the banks. I heard the nearly silent sound of the leaves rustling in the soft breeze. Every once in a while, I heard a gentle clank from the Jeep’s cooling engine. As I listened, I realized that I could hear my own breathing – a gentle shushing sound in my nose and sinuses. And then I heard my heartbeat – quiet thuds from deep within my body.
In the stillness of my listening, quite gently, these sounds seemed to somehow synchronize. The water, the wind, my breath, and my heartbeat fell into an easy rhythm with each other. Even the Jeep’s quietly cooling engine played a part. I no longer felt like I was listening. I was part of the “music” of this moment.
I don’t know how long this moment was. If I had to guess, I’d say maybe five minutes, which, as any of you who have ever held a yoga pose or sat in meditation know, is a long time! In that moment, I felt the edges of myself dissolve. I felt myself soften into everything. I felt all resistance and tension in my body, my mind, and my heart disappear.
I don’t know what ended the moment. Whatever it was, it was subtle enough that I “came back” as softly and as gently as I’d dropped into the state. As I blinked back into myself, I realized that this was how I was meant to feel – connected to everything, a part of an unimaginably huge whole. I’d somehow touched on a deep human truth.
In that unforgettable moment, nothing “happened.” There was no “action.” Yet I will never forget it. It was tangible enough that its echoes lingered for almost two days. A year later, I know that it changed me for good. I’m not alone. Sages and philosophers and mystics have been guiding us toward moments like this for millennia.
A poet and a mystic share and explain moments similar to mine
The poet, Mary Oliver, described a similar experience that she had when walking out of the woods one morning and suddenly knew beyond a doubt that she belonged to the world and that she “felt comfortably [her] containment in the totality.” She writes, “it was the most casual of moments. … And yet it was a moment I have never forgotten, and upon which I have based many decisions in the years since.” (Long Life: Essys and Other Writings, p. 34)
Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk and author, shared a similar experience in his book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. He was standing on a busy Louisville street corner (the corner of Fourth and Walnut, to be precise), when he was overwhelmed by the realization that he loved every person he could see. They were his and he was theirs. He writes, “It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world.”
Mary Oliver described her “moment” as a “seizure of happiness.” Merton described his as a relief and a joy – “such a joy that [he] nearly laughed out loud.” Mine felt like a softening. A melting away of barriers. A relief that I am not at all “on my own.” A waking up to a truth I’d read about but never felt myself – that I am an integral part of a whole.
Here’s the secret
You are, too.
You are also part of this unimaginably marvelous whole
Yet you and I get so busy, we are still so rarely, and we create so much action and drama that we are almost always distracted from this beautiful, freeing, joyful truth. If we’re lucky (and GOOD LORD, do I feel lucky), we will have a moment of clarity, a “seizure of happiness,” (Oliver) a “sense of liberation” (Merton) from feeling different or “other” than everyone and everything around us.
This is the first part of the secret I want to share with you. Even though you are mostly not aware of it, you are part of something so much bigger than yourself. This is not only a relief from the burden of thinking you’re out here on your own but is also such a happy and joyful realization that it can leave you laughing and feeling as free as a young child running around the backyard on a warm summer day. Once you realize it, you will never forget it. The resulting freedom and joy are yours to treasure.
There is nothing you can do to ensure that you experience this one day
The other part of the secret may be harder to digest, if you, like I do, enjoy results. There is nothing you can do to make one of these moments happen. They are grace. What you can do is build a practice for yourself that helps you to slow down (maybe even to hold still) and to pay attention to the world around you as well as to what is going on within you. For Merton, this was sitting in contemplative prayer and meditation. For Mary Oliver, this was taking daily walks intended to allow her to marvel and wonder at the beauty of this world. For me, it is yoga.
You’ll notice that none of the moments I’ve described here happened during practice. Mary Oliver’s daily walk had just ended. Merton was well away from the quiet confines of his monastery. I was as far from home and yoga mat as I could be. The moment, for each of us, came out of the blue. However, I can tell you (and I believe from their writings that Thomas Merton and Mary Oliver would agree) that without my steady practice that has taught me not only to hold still, but to be curious and aware of what is happening in that stillness, I easily could have missed a moment that changed me forever.
So, choose your practice – the one that works for you. Stick with it. Show up even on days when you’re really too busy. (Perhaps especially on those days.) Don’t get caught up with whether or not your practice is “working.”[1] Do it because you love it. Trust that it is changing the way you are experiencing your life and the world around you. Trust that one day you will be graced with a moment of clarity of your own.[2] Until that day, you can allow the experiences of others to draw you onward.
[1] In The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, verses 1.14, 1.15, and 1.16, Patanjali teaches about the need for both steady, ardent practice (abhyasa) and the ability to let go of the need for a particular result of our practice (vairagya). Together, these create a balance between doing and allowing that gives us an awareness and openness to moments like the ones described above.
[2] Patanjali, in verse 1.17, describes the first stage of samadhi (samprajnatah) as a moment when we feel separated from the incessant thoughts and images that mostly consume our focus. In moments like this, we become aware of our true nature and this awareness is accompanied by an experience of bliss. I believe this bliss is what Mary Oliver, Thomas Merton, and I all experienced. I believe moments like this are possible for all of us.