Surprise, serendipity, embodied spontaneity and getting out of a rut
There are days when I feel alive and connected, and there are days when I don't.
In the latter, I often feel trapped in my own body and also within the habitual responses and gestures of my mind.
By trapped in the body, I mean habitually holding a certain shape in specific situations, and so habitual that on looking back, it's not hard to see that I, my beingness, is related to this shape I hold. I am tense and insecure. I deliberate too much. I have something important to say and yet I don't say it. And then I feel responsible and guilty for the loneliness I feel. Yada yada. By trapped in the habitual gestures of the mind, I am talking about the feeling of being constrained by the thought patterns I often fall back on, paradigms and starting points from which to consider a matter, or browsing the same things over and over again on the internet, reading the same things coming from the same voices.
The only reliable ways, I find, in which to circumvent these habitual patterns, self extricate, and reinstate vitality again, is to engage in 1) a medium/activity that affords surprise and serendipity, and better still, 2) activities which involve the body.
The first method is more convenient because it can be couch-based (; though it is especially tricky because it involves somehow, a particular form of mental gymnastics so that you might transcend your present state of viewing and orienting towards the world. When marinating in a world of bleakness where everything feels drained of taste or resonance, getting oneself inspired becomes less intuitive. Much like how it is difficult to muster gratitude at the end of a meh day. The trick is to take note of what has worked reliably for you in the past and then make a mental note of that β this can be done on a good day so that you have something to turn to on a not so good day.
1) Turn to encounters that offer surprise and serendipity
What has worked for me:
- Play games
- Pull a card from an oracle or tarot deck; this teases me out of the seriousness of my questions and invites me to lean into the large cosmological context which I sometimes lose sight of while tunnel-visioning
- Keep interesting people close by and visit their writings and books: Austin Kleon, Zeppellin Moon, Rob Breszny, Robin Sloan. I am drawn to these people as they seem to take on a certain lightness in their unique ways of regarding the world and its ongoing shenanigans
- Take an internet walk through are.na (one of my favourite places on the internet!); you will find me puttering about and tending to my garden there.
2) Engaging in activities that involve the body
What has worked for me:
- movement, somatic practice β this can work even if you only have a small space
- dancing
- bouldering
- learning and giving massages
- surfing
- freediving
These activities have given me the opportunity to get out of my habitual patterns β it is a joy and a pleasure to reconnect with myself again, to feel soothed, to no longer be frustrated or anxious; I can relate to where I am in (in the process) a new way. More importantly, these help me to cultivate greater intimacy with that-which-is-not-yet-known.
I've recently taken to the body has a fertile and potent site for inquiring into life. I'm interested in seeking out environments β sandboxesβ that invite the body to respond in different and creative ways. To follow an impulse. To bypass the thinking mind that wants to contemplate, ruminate, consider the problem. To be spontaneous! To allow the body to respond in the moment β to music, to the oncoming waves, to gravity, to the solidity of the ground, the tension or litheness of another warm body, to the buoyancy and resistance afforded by water. To be freed of the shackles that I've come to acquire unconsciously over the years. To allow the soft animal of this body to love what it loves. Sometimes, I feel very moved to be able to be in this body. It makes me want to consistently explore and play with the edges of what different activities may offer up this opportunity.
These activities that involve the body also taught me about commitment. Committing to a forward roll. Committing to a jump. One cannot half try for it would turn out to be painfully feeble and embarrassingly half-hearted. The nature of an introjecting mind is that in our lack of courage to make a move, we allow the thoughts to circle itself into perpetuity, wearing our spirits thin and burning ourselves out without anything done. Reflection, introspection, and awareness has its place but by "done", here I mean effecting change at the material/physical plane. When stuck in a thought loop that we cannot seem to circle out of. The body in motion is a useful plane for learning what it means to commit, make a move, and see the outcomes of our action in real time with our skin in the game.