photo by Arnaud Mariat

The body is a microcosm of the universe. The universe expands and contracts and so, too, does the body. In spring and summer we feel the expansion of the season opening us up as the world itself opens with leaves and flowers. In fall and winter the life force of trees contract back into their trunks, the animals hibernate, and we humans find rest and self-reflection. Every breath contains an expansion and a contraction. On the inhale our lungs fill, expanding our muscle fibers, compressing our organs with air. On the exhale our lungs contract, like a pump moving qi and blood through the body.

From the tiniest microorganisms to the ocean that holds them, we are all interconnected and the matter that makes up our bodies is responsive to the same rhythms. Heat expands us and cold contracts us. Joy expands us and fear contracts us.

During dark times, expansion and joy may be hard to feel. How do we find joy when violence is so present in the lives of people we care about? How do we find joy when the planet is hotter and less hospitable each year, when our leaders and temperaments drive us further from each other, and when desperation, poverty, trauma, addiction, violence and pain all feel so tangibly close to us? When I ask these questions, I try to remember that we are a microcosm of the universe. That we cannot just contract, we must expand. I know this but often do not feel it. And yet time spent in nature, with loved ones, engaged in community building and creative expression can remind my animal body how to feel joy and interconnection.

“I don’t use joy to bypass or to cover up, I use joy to hold everything. That way you stay connected. I can experience joy and also still understand that there are real struggles happening right now for a lot of folks, including us. It doesn’t bypass anything but it gives me the space not to be overwhelmed by suffering.”
- Lama Rod Owens

Contraction can look like a lot of things in the human system: fear, hoarding, self-protection, an inability to see beyond one’s own life experience and reality. It can make people do unkind things and behave aggressively. It is also a natural energetic response of the body.

The goal is not to deny ourselves these natural responses, but to identify them and work with them.

Autumn is the beginning of the contraction of the natural world, and it continues to contract into the winter months. We find ourselves seeking more rest and quiet. As a society we assign judgement to these natural rhythms. We tend to prefer expansion and expansive emotions like love, joy and contentment. We like spring and summer, youth and beauty, the building up but not the breaking down. We like order, not entropy. But that is just simply not how the universe works. We need grief, fear and rage. We need aging, death and destruction in order to have balance and to foster new beginnings. All these energetics are equally accepted by the natural world. Animals don’t resist aging, in fact aging is the privilege of those who have survived.

If my body is a microcosm of the universe, then tending to my body and those in my immediate sphere is tending to the universe. Loving those close to me, loving myself is sending love into the universe.

photo by Dingzeyu Li

If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.
― Lao Tzu

Working on the attachment patterns, traumas and defenses that inform our actions helps ease the trauma of the world. It sets an example of how the world could be. It interrupts the inheritance of those patterns. When I care for myself, I am kinder to those around me. When I tend to my needs, I can show up for the needs of others. When I am intentional with my choices, I live by my values and therefore deepen them and strengthen the impact and example I offer the world in a ripple effect. We all have that power.

As Prentis Hemphill talks about in their new book, What It Takes to Heal (highly recommended), not tending to our own relational wounds can negatively impact our community work. But when we do the hard work to heal our own insecurities and past traumas we can create reparative experiences for ourselves and others, building community that is much closer and more reliable.

Have you ever had the experience of feeling afraid to bring up an issue with a close friend, partner or colleague (contraction), but when you do it is received with love and gratitude (expansion)? When we work on our deepest insecurities and pains, we can say, “Thank you for bringing this to my attention, I’m going to think about it and figure out how I can show up better next time,” instead of getting defensive or reactive. Being on the receiving end of kind openness allows deeper connection and safety in relationships, however close or casual. This is one example of how tending to ourselves really does have a larger impact.

As I age, I accept contradiction as more of a given than an exception. When we make peace with contradiction, we can accept, love and appreciate the patterns of the universe, the expansion and contraction and the great unknown of our reality just as it is. Simultaneously we can want it to be better, safer, kinder, more generous, more enlightened and more peaceful. I’m not saying give up your activism, your effort, your hopes and dreams and accept the world as it is. Quite the opposite. Think of every moment as your activism. Every moment is an opportunity to be kinder, more generous, more joyful and more expansive. But we have to care for ourselves to be able to achieve that kind of openness. And it won’t happen all the time. The weight of the world will pin us to the floor with sadness sometimes. That’s okay, too.

“Over time, I have come to understand that social transformation (the push for more just systems and policies) and personal transformation (healing our own trauma and reshaping our relationships) have to happen together. Not one or the other, but both. We neglect ourselves or our growth in our rush to change what is external. When we do, we fracture, and succumb to what we are unwilling to face.”
– Prentis HemphillWhat it Takes to Heal

Relative and Absolute

In the timeline of the universe, I am a small being alive for such a little blip of time and I can’t really understand the direction in which everything is moving or the “point” of it all. Yet in my own lived experience, I have so many thoughts and feelings and such grief for the way humans treat each other and the planet.

Our human minds desperately want to understand the nature of the universe, but it is so vast that understanding simply isn’t possible. It is one of the many contradictions we live with. Our only choice is to make a narrative around ourselves and our reality, because that is how our brains work. We need an ego, an identity and a life story to survive the day-to-day, but it also limits and isolates us from the truth of our interconnectedness. Can we accept that this is only a simplified, story-book version of reality? That in fact we don’t really understand how it all works?

What might be helpful is to share with you the theory of relative and absolute. In the absolute, everything is just as it should be and the ways of the universe are a mystery I can accept. The universe expands, the universe contracts and every piece of matter in the universe responds to that rhythm.

In the relative, I see human suffering everywhere and I want things to be different. My own suffering is sometimes intolerable. But when I meditate, sit in nature, soak in a hot bath or take psilocybin, I have momentary reprieves from the relative and can blissfully suspend in the absolute; in connection and solidarity with everything. My time in the absolute offers perspective for when I come back to the relative, as painful as that return can be. I have accepted that the ways of the universe are far beyond my human comprehension. Even our own human nature defies understanding. We spend most of our time in the relative, in the reality we have created, and that reality brings with it a lot of suffering.

Let the absolute be a resource. Let it hold you when suffering feels too big for your one human body to hold. You are not alone, and it isn’t your singular job to undo the painful systems of the world. Put your feet on the earth, shout into the trees, watch the sun rise and set, and spend time around other humans you can confide in. To feel the enormity of the universe and to let our pain be held by it allows us to expand and let go of what holds us back.

Recently I asked a Buddhist teacher, “Is it human nature to cause suffering?” And he asked, “Do you care about deeply connecting with others?” And when I nodded, he said, “Then, yes.”

photo by Aiden Craver

Self-Care as Medicine for the World

Peter Levine, psychologist and daddy of the Somatic Experiencing method of somatic therapy, defines trauma as a loss of connection. Whether it’s a lack of safety in one’s own body, fears that interfere with close human relationships, or dissociation that keeps us out of the present moment, trauma shows up in our lives by emulating a past survival skill —probably acquired in infancy or early childhood — that got us through a hard time. That pattern may no longer be serving us, but it is what we know and have relied on. But as Gabor Maté reminds us in this beautiful podcast, trauma isn’t what happened to you. If it was, you’d be stuck with it forever because it’s in the past. Trauma is what your body did to survive what happened to you. That means it is a pattern in your body and can be worked with, changed and even released. Connection can be reestablished.

Questioning those survival patterns can be very uncomfortable because we have relied on them so deeply in the past, but it also leads to an expansion into new ways of being. These survival skills have leached into our political systems and institutions, prioritizing certain populations and their needs over others. It is a world-wide problem that shows up in ethnic cleansing and genocide, caste systems, slavery and hierarchies that still exist in every society. Changing established systems can feel daunting or even impossible. But as Resmaa Menakem points out in his book My Grandmother’s Hands,

Our bodies have a form of knowledge that is different from our cognitive brains. This knowledge is typically experienced as a felt sense of constriction or expansion, pain or ease, energy or numbness. Often this knowledge is stored in our bodies as wordless stories about what is safe and what is dangerous. The body is where we fear, hope, and react; where we constrict and release; and where we reflexively fight, flee, or freeze. If we are to upend the status quo of white-body supremacy, we must begin with our bodies.

Menakem is talking about expansion and contraction of the body. To consider our body a microcosm of the universe and to commit to undoing certain contractive survival mechanisms in our body that no longer serve us or our communities is a great undertaking. Our survival patterns have kept us alive, but they often keep us defensive and isolated, afraid to connect deeply with others or pursue our life’s work. Undoing this means facing what got us there in the first place, often the darkest parts of ourselves and our life story. It means being curious about what is underneath the patterning and asking for help from practitioners who hold space for that kind of transformation, but also from our communities and families as we commit to addressing our own personal human suffering.

When I identify and let go of my survival patterns, I get a little break from the relative and can fall back into the gentle, loving arms of the absolute. In this space I am connected to every human being, every blade of grass, every star and planet in the sky. I am with all the ancestors who have come before and those yet to be born. That space takes a lot of letting go to reach. I must detach from my long to-do list. I have to release the worry that I hurt someone’s feelings or they hurt mine. These are relative matters of my small human life. They also keep me from a sense of interconnectedness. When I return from my moment in the absolute, the survival patterns return, as do the to-do list and the worries, but they have less of a grip on me.

Life in the relative is complicated, distracting, overwhelming. It isn’t so easy to know how to prioritize our needs or even know what they are in the moment. And all of that keeps us from the absolute. Which keeps us from remembering that the body is a microcosm of the universe.

photo by Annie Sprat

The contraction of winter can be an ideal time to reflect on the patterns that don’t serve our minds or bodies anymore. With short days and long nights, there’s the invitation to stay home, and sit and observe memories of the day’s challenges. When a negative feeling comes up, give yourself permission to sit with it, instead of brushing it away. See if you can feel where it lives in your physical body. Amazingly, just paying attention to the feeling can allow it to dissolve, or perhaps help you gain insight into how and why an unwelcome moment happened. This is an active way to invite more kindness into your body, and subsequently, the universe.

From the Buddhist practice of Metta, or loving-kindness, I share the words said by thousands everyday: May you be happy. May you be well. May you be safe. May you be peaceful and at ease.

“My body is this expression of the natural world and just like the natural world, my body is also asking for balance. What does a natural balance mean for me? …It’s individual and collective. The collective reflects the individual and individual reflects the collective... Beginning as individual work, I have to figure out what my balance is and then I connect or expand into the collective… I can’t support and lift the collective if I’m not doing my work first.”
- Lama Rod Owens

Resources:

I recommend all these books, many of which have helpful exercises and a few of which can be listened to as audiobooks on Spotify. Fortunately for those with shorter attention spans, most of these authors also have deep and meaningful podcasts that I have also listed (some of) here. Happy reading, listening and practicing ☺

Prentis Hemphill:

Becoming the People Podcast

What it Takes to Heal; How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World

Resmaa Menakem:

My Grandmother’s Hands Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

Podcast: “Notice the Rage, Notice the Silence” On Being with Krista Tippett

Lama Rod Owens:

Love and Rage

Podcasts:

A Radical Anger

Fat Joy with Sophia Apostol

Gabor Maté: