flow Archives - Souldew

Being the foolhardy, “that-looks-hard-so-I’ll-try-it” type, I’ve had a good bash at surfing in my time – and my fair share of wiping out. Which is when the world becomes a churn of whitewater, and I’ve no clue which way is up. The harder I struggle for the surface, the more difficult it is to find.

So, too, I’ve leapt valiantly into life’s rapids, tumbling and gasping for breath, buttocks exposed and bikini-slipped boobs askew. That’s when every part of me tries to grab onto something – anything – to slow the inner roil and find solid ground.

It feels disorientating. It feels unknown. Most terrifying of all, there’s no map to show where this rude, unapologetic current goes.

And yet, I know I can’t survive the rapids by resisting. As long as I fear life’s powerful flow, I’m trapped against my self-created boulders, taking the full force of the river. There’s nothing to do but surrender: let go of what I’ve been clinging to in my barnacle-strong terror.

Because the river’s current IS life: pulsing with change and direction and urging me gloriously on! I’m here to explore and experience the whole messy marvel of it; to whoop, cheer and holler. I can paddle furiously upstream all I want, convinced that salvation lies at the steep end of struggle, but it won’t change the truth: nothing I came for is back there anyway. That’s just where I travelled from.

Fighting the flow is just going backwards, towards the source. No matter how beautifully clear that water might be, I came to travel downstream: to cascade into waterfalls, spill through crevices and branch into a thousand pools; to sculpt and soften the way for others as I go, carving new dreams, paths and possibilities.

Good lord, EVERYTHING I seek is downstream! What if I stopped resisting – put down the mighty oars of my fears and conditioning and let my daft dinghy turn with the flow? Perhaps I’d discover what life has been doing all along: taking me where I need to go.

I’m here for the adventure, for the thrill of the ride – not to dam life’s flow with the bricks and mortar of my mind! So, when I feel trapped and buffeted in the whitewater, it’s not because life is hammering mercilessly at me: it’s because I’m still clinging to the same old boulder, bikini round my ears, while life dares me to let go.

Time to give up my thrashing, soften into stillness and trust the flow.

The whitewater was real; I just didn’t know I had gills.

A week and a half ago, between the opening and closing curtains of a wedding and a funeral, I did my very first podcast; another leap into trusting the flow.

And I notice, as I begin to let go of the old, the new and unseen doors that start to shimmer and glow, subtly lifting out of two-dimensionality like magic-eye art. By softening our gaze on the very same page, reality shifts and coalesces into a new and breathtakingly multidimensional stage.

Magic, and yet nothing of the sort… just possibilities and pathways that were there all along, obscured by the shutters of mind and its fearful fastenings and locks. And so it was with this, as Julia Chi Taylor – the extraordinary soul I’ve been voyaging with through my internal seas – invited me to take part in her new Podcast series, ‘Conversations with a Bodhisattva’.

But how fascinating to watch the inner protesters rally so fast – a surging horde of banners and shouts, all chaining themselves to the shutters with unequivocal handcuffs of doubt!

‘Danger!’ they shriek, ‘Don’t do it! Don’t risk! You’ll be vulnerable before strangers, self-manacled in the village stocks!’

If the only way I can speak now is from the epicentre of my truth – from the tenderest spots still healing from their loosening thorns – then to trust to the free-flow of an interview feels like launching my leaky vessel into the torrents of Niagara falls.

I’ve already leapt with my blog, so why does this dive feel even higher? Because speech is such an instant and irretrievable creature, so different to the small woodland mammal of the written word that forages so quietly beneath life’s delicate leaf-litter. While writing can curl up and hibernate for as long as it needs, nesting unseen in the roots and thickets of daily success and strife, the spoken word shrieks with immediacy – a discharged bullet whose trajectory can’t be changed.

Am I ready to fledge, to learn on the wing, without the time to perfect and to tweak? To be a mayfly of expression, a momentary flutter in life’s skies, preserved in amber though so briefly conceived?

Of course the cinema of my mind screens me bumbling haphazardly, a clumsily-blundering daddy-long-legs of orality! Prattling hither-and-thither, shedding legs along the way, tangled in endless webs of ghastly ‘what if’s’…

What if I can’t express what I mean? What if my fluency startles and falters? What if it dries-up like roadkill under the truck-lights of immediacy?

What if I say it all wrong?

There is, of course, no such thing. Nothing to be done but release the comfort-blanket of ‘right’, and surrender instead to the simplicity of is. To turn up as I am, as raw and unadorned as a Christmas tree in February; no baubles, no lights. And trust, as Jonny once wrote, ‘Ah… but you’re decked with fairy lights all year round lady, don’t you see? How lucky I am that you let your needles drop for me’.

Something that applies to us all if we can only trust our inner lights to guide the way, instead of grasping at those B&Q aisles of decoration and display. To be who we are, bare branches and all, and trust the anchor of our roots as the winds shift and sway.

And so I watched those inner protesters march the streets of my psyche, and thanked them politely for their loudspeakers of doubt. Then took the inner projectionist aside to suggest we change the music, brighten the lights…

Time to banish this dis-empowering delusion that to be worthy of being heard we must be finished and complete, reclining in our armchair of success and basking in achievement’s firelight;

To tie a bandana on my true-self, don the 80’s crop-top of spirituality, and thrill at the speedball while shouting ‘bring it on!’ to the Rocky theme-tune!

Sylvester Stallone knew what’s what, all those years ago.

It’s not about ‘winning’; it’s the art of showing up.

And so I did.

The beginning…

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Tag: flow

Finding my Inner Gills

Trusting the Flow: The Art of Turning Up