The Dance

I have meant to reach out to all of you sooner than this, perhaps many of you are also feeling inertia and torpor in the same way I have of late, given how things are moving in the world these days. Just yesterday when I tried to manifest something to say I found I couldn’t. Perhaps this speaks to what I was talking about in my last letter, about allowing the stillness and stuckness that life forces us into sometimes, and looking for a way to find the beauty in the stillness. 

Yesterday was just such a day, a feeling of unease spread throughout my abdomen that was hard to place and hard to find a meaning for. So as is often my practice these days, I didn’t look to displace the feeling but stayed with it until it dissipated. As it turns out, the dissipation took the form of being with a few of you in my clinic, with story and laughter and remembering why I do what I do and how important it is for both my patients’ and my own well being. 

This morning I received another gift in the form of an email from Pema Chödrön. She said, “We can dance with life when its a wild party completely out of control, and we can dance with life when it’s as tender as a lover. We work with whatever we have, with whoever we are, right now.”

So simple, and yet so difficult to achieve when the song, the people on the dance floor with us, or the moves are not the ones we want or prefer. I have often been asked by my students what’s the thing I hope to share most with my patients. And after years of practice what it comes down to most for me is grace. I can help with pain, and I can ease the suffering of illness, but these things inevitably return. I hope what I also offer is a way returning home to the body: its feelings, thoughts, aches, jitters and emotions just as they are, that I make it easier give everything our body is going through awareness and attention. This to me is a fundamental aspect of being alive, it also becomes the root of connectivity that brings us not only closer to ourselves but closer to everyone in our lives. If we can sit with our own discomfort without needing to fix it, then we can also sit with others when they are uncomfortable without needing to fix anything in them. This hopefully makes the dance we all are doing a little easier and more joyful. Of course, I will always do my best to ease whatever suffering someone brings through the door, but for me, this connection to self is a big part of that ease. I hope to see you soon. 

Be kind and gentle with yourselves,

Teo