How many of us find ourselves wishing daily that things around us would just stand still long enough for us to catch our breaths or just plain catch up? We are all in such perpetual fluster, and vying for the impossible.
But what if we stood still instead? When it all feels like too much, can we sit or stand quietly in heavy deluge, and plant in ourselves--without turning to remedies, herbs, essences or others--moments of stillness, right in the center of our personal storms?
On the days when I am hectic, over-stretched, and stressed from nursing my three-month-old, tending to my older son, meeting writing deadlines, helping friends, seeing clients, and dealing with countless other demands, I choose to stay upright.
Here’s what it looks like: I stop, sit down, and lift my spine. I picture myself in a torrent of swirling branches, bees, and hail. I sit, breathe, and lift up some more. I realize that these buzzing pressures that I perceive as attacks on my time and drags on my ability to be calm, are not attacking me at all. They are just being themselves. And if I stay upright amidst them all, I no longer encourage stings or collisions, and they in effect have very little hold on me. They are all just motion, energy, light.
In Zen Buddhist practice, there is tremendous attention paid to posture in sitting zazen. There are also countless stories of old Zen masters walking amongst their students in their temples carrying sticks, and thwacking slouching practitioners on the shoulders to get them to sit properly, to draw them up into the moment, and to, in essence, wake up.
When we are awake, both lyrically and literally, we grow clear on what we can actually manage, and we accept our own limitations. The things that require our attention don’t go away, but they do become decipherable. Suddenly the mountains of work don’t seem so haywire, intangible, huge or blinding. In learning to forge ahead in uprightness, we understand there is no striving required; simply our own lifting spines, and breath. We become ambassadors of tranquility while the chaotic swirl of the day plays itself out and inevitably draws to a close.
Can we in our own sensitive ways thwack ourselves upright and awake? When we commit to uprightness, unflappability and calm arrive more reliably, again and again. There is nothing extreme or over arching about this practice. It becomes our own still shelter in the eye of the tornado. From here, we can radiate out into the world in a balanced and proportional way. We can give of ourselves in majesty and excellence, be of better service, and touch people from a nobler place.
See for yourselves how wonderfully uprightness informs your offerings to the world. These conscious contributions are what, in every moment of the day, truly matter most.
