Introducing... the present moment!
The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature
– Joseph Campbell
One of the most important skills to hone and develop as an herbalist is presence. It is a skill and ability that I overlooked in my early years in connecting with plants, which impeded my development and learning on so many fronts. Eventually, my primary mentor introduced and challenged me to nurture a daily presence practice, and after many years of struggle, boredom, 'am I doing this right?' and putting it off to do other things I considered 'more productive', I finally found a groove for myself, and discovered an entirely new dimension of practice (both as an herbalist and human) that would transform my work as an herbalist and enrich my relationship with plants to a profound degree.
I also discovered a political and social dimension to my discomfort around being still: The dominant culture wants us to move quickly and resist slowness at all costs. There is a reason for this. I included a few quotes from Tricia Hersey's book Rest is Resistance to provide some food for thought here:
"Our everyday behaviors and false beliefs about productivity drive us into behaving in a robotic, machine-like way. The way we hold ourselves and others to the lie of urgency is white supremacy culture and we will never be able to rest or be liberated from oppression while we are honoring and aligning with it. Liberation and oppression cannot occupy the same space. It's not possible. We must go slow and place intention at the forefront of this disruption. This work is not simply a reminder to rest, but a full interruption and turning toward a rested future. This is political work that is unafraid to step into the light of our dark shared history that is recreating itself through our individualistic and disconnected delusion of what is really happening to us when we don't rest deeply."
"Rest is somatic work–connecting your body and mind. Rest is anything that slows you down enough to connect with your body and mind. It is an ethos that holds firm to the body as a site of liberation. Active rest is also valuable rest. In active rest your body can move, swim, walk, dance, and tap into a portal. Since the beginning of my imaginings around what rest is and can be, I have repeated constantly, 'This is about more than naps.' This work is decolonizing and culture shifting. We are speaking about actual napping: laying your tired body down on a surface, closing your eyes, and sleeping for a shorter time than a full sleep cycle. But we are also speaking about the mystery of what is not seen by the naked eye and instead felt energetically and spiritually. You must experience rest. The praxis is rest. You will have to rest to believe in this message. You won't be able to skip steps and rush the dreaming that it will take to be liberated from grind culture. This is why I love rest as a liberation practice. It gets to the heart of the matter."
"When you are exhausted, you lack clarity and the ability to see deeply. Your intuition and imagination are stifled by a culture of overworking and disconnection. You must be open to go deep into the cracks to examine and to understand. It may take years to fully crack open and it will be a lifetime of practice, care, and creativity. It's your life, body, and community; therefore, it is yours to hold, protect, love, and care for. Exhaustion will not save us and will only lead us further into the clutches of grind culture. Rest is shape-shifting and wants to hold our hands as we usher in a well-rested world. It's about more than naps and is a full-on pushback and political statement against the systems that want to see us constantly moving, doing, and going in a frenzy. When we tap into the power of our bodies, we understand that our bodies are a miracle, a legacy and a place of extreme power. The foundation for love and reclamation."
While Tricia Hersey is speaking of 'rest' in a multitude of forms, I see meditation and stillness in a similar way: an unapologetic rejection of the imposed impulse to grind and be constantly productive. In this way, sitting in meditation is as much an act of resistance as it is a way of opening our awareness to the unconscious thought patterns that stand in the way of being fully present, alive, and in the only moment that exists: now.
Beyond the political dimension, the wisdom of nature, plants, and fungi, demand that we relate to them with presence in order to experience the more metaphysical and spiritual aspects of plants and their healing properties. Like a good friend, if you show up to see them with presence and openness, your relationship will deepen. If you arrive busy and disengaged, you will only maintain a shallow relationship.
Sitting still within our bodies is the most direct way of connecting with nature. We can be in the middle of the forest or on a crowded CTA bus and still have access to nature in this way. This is because we are nature. There is no separation, no division, no distinction between the basic 'stuff' of our bodies and the basic 'stuff' of the earth. Through the practice of meditation, we relearn how to be fully embodied. And as we move through our lives from this embodied way of being, we begin to see nature in places we previously didn't.
We also experience a sense of spaciousness, possibility, and openness to experience that we may not have had the capacity to open to before. When difficult things happen in our life, we tend to close and harden our shell. Meditation teaches us openness and spaciousness:
"The only thing that keeps us from being alive and delighted–or alive and interested with some sense of appetite for life–is that we have no encouragement to sit still. When we feel tense, when we feel pain, when we feel shaky, we have no encouragement to relax and soften our stomach and our shoulders and our mind and our heart. Anytime you want to make something out of your life, let go. Let go more. Soften. This is how your life becomes workable. This is how your life becomes wonderful. We have the seed of spaciousness and wonder in ourselves. We have the seed of warmth in ourselves. Meditation nourishes and waters these seeds.
There's the space that seems to be out there, like the sky and the ocean and the wind, and there's the space that seems to be inside. We could let the whole thing mix up. We could let the whole thing just dissolve into each other and into one big space. Practice is about allowing a lot of space. It's about learning how to connect with that spaciousness that's inside, and the spaciousness that's outside. It's about learning to relax ,soften, and open–to connect with the sense that there's actually a lot of room." - Pema Chödrön, How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with your Mind, p. 170
I want to invite you into this realm of spaciousness and stillness in your life, and offer my approach to some practices to support your ever deepening presence in the world.
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