So I have been reading this book.
It is called, The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible.
I love this title. Not least of all because the somewhat long and clunky way it is… is the perfect combination to call to something deep inside me.
When I first heard its author, Charles Eisenstein, say its name, it was like the perfect shaped slot for a key living inside me, that I did not previously know I had. But as the lock - that is this current, tangled and painful reality holding the more beautiful world at bay - appeared, so the key started to emerge from patterns previously indiscernible…
It was like I was remembering something I was sure I had already thought or written or said, or at least had definitely wanted to say, myself.
It also felt like the perfect combination of words to use. Unpretentious, a bit long-winded but necessarily so (I have tried to shorten, change, adjust the wording, to no avail!).
For me, this title calls to our imaginations, entrusting this imagining not to our minds, which seem to have a high rate of failure when it comes to our well-being, but to our hearts.
Also it is not my heart or your heart that gets the credit or the call here. It is our hearts, suggesting clearly that to bring about this more beautiful world requires collaboration, all of our collaboration.
The book itself is excellent, painting the clearest picture I have yet experienced of the context in which we find ourselves in this broken, broken world… and presenting the most coherent, overarching suggestions I have heard/read for how we might collectively, miraculously make our way to a more beautiful one.
However, perhaps what I have appreciated even more, or just as much as what I have found within those pages, is the deepening it has caused in my own system of the process of sensing and trusting into the/my/our way forward.
Indeed, the keys to this more beautiful world that lie inside my heart - as they do in yours - have been called into new action… by the only thing that could possibly do so… a vision, still emergent (perhaps always emergent?!) of a shared home of limitless beauty amongst all of us. Just imagine that.
*
There are a lot of meaningful philosophical weavings of thought throughout the pages. One of these is about how logic and argument will not solve the dilemma in which we find ourselves.
I appreciate this very much, and it reminds me of why I am so grateful to spend much time working with and through the body.
I love working with the body, because when we drop our attention from the typically subject-object oriented narratives of our minds, into this living flesh, we are forced to meet sensing. And sensing has but one logic, always. The logic of this, here, now.
There aren’t infinite options when it comes to sensing. You get what you get.
Confusion instantly extinguished.
(That’s a big deal by the way - nudge nudge - for anyone who might, from time to time, find themselves confused).
And for me, the practice is to, while sensing, also learn to inhabit the truth that whatever I meet there, it is always good enough. Or in other words, it is always valuable nourishment. Always.
There is only one thing going on… so how could it not be so?!
So one of the profound lessons that struck me as I read… As Eisenstein shares his thoughts on how true change is affected… Is that change must be LIVED.
And (thank the heavens!) living is always happening in these bodies of ours. And sensing brings us into contact with this. Always. Always. Always.
And for me, perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of sensing - in other words why I avoid it sometimes - is feeling. Because as sensing leads us to feeling; As we then inevitably meet what is alive, right now, in our bodies, as well as the pleasure and adventures of our appetites (which are our friends, not our foes, by the way) we will also find unaddressed pain there. Any and all of it. And not just mine, or yours, but generations, lifetime after lifetime, of unfelt pain.
So for me, in these calamitous and confusing times (hey wait, didn’t we talk about a remedy for confusion earlier somewhere? ;p), the ‘activism’ I am most interested in is in the practice of feeling and welcoming whatever is alive in me. Here, right now.
And often enough that is pain.
And I’m starting to learn, and accept and thankfully feel firsthand… that though this pain is almost never something I want at first, it is not after all such a bad thing… and perhaps most of all it is certainly a meaningful way forward.
How can I expect to make choices that are truly healthy for me and those around me if I am unwilling to feel the pain that is presenting? Wisdom requires us to feel pain.
(Surely a part of what has led us, as a species, on the fruitless-goosechases we have been on has been a profound misunderstanding of the value and resulting unwillingness to feel pain).
Imagine if, the next time you (or I!) are pulled into an argument, you (or I!) instead paused, breathed and truly felt what you were (I was) feeling in your (my) heart and your (my) belly. If you allowed your shoulders to settle downwards with gravity, giving your weight into the earth through the solid scaffolding of your bones. If you felt a layer deeper into all of that sensation and perhaps even shared out loud the truth of what was occurring…
“A fluttering through my belly, a throbbing through my chest, a tension in my heart.”
Would that not be a radical shift in the weaving reality? Would that not be inarguably worthy change unfolding, straight from nothing but a willingness to feel more deeply? Does a transformation like that not merit your (my!) time and attention as much - perhaps more? - then justifying loudly an already established position?
I now understand why for me (and it may, and likely will be different for you, and that is a good thing) I have struggled to find compelling ground in any particular political world view. I find them mostly repetitive, stuck, limited, formulaic, pastiched. Not so true to life, and frankly, not so useful to me.
What about the reality of the ever-changing human being alive in/as this world of sensing? How do we make more room for this in this world of ours?
In my opinion it starts right here, inside my very own belly, heart, chest. And so that’s what I want to invest my life energy into.
How about you?
