I heard a talk recently by Richard Rudd, writer and teacher of the Gene Keys, where he began the talk inviting everyone in the room of the church and everyone tuning in online to empty themselves out. To become kenotic. Kenosis is a Greek term meaning to empty or be emptied. He invited us to imagine becoming like a white star that pushed everything out. In this way, we make space to receive the moment at hand.
I imagined it quite like the sun, though not really radiating, instead more like not allowing anything to be sucked in. I wasn't allowing my attention to be pulled away from where I was in that chair in that moment.
I've been contemplating this since I heard the talk some weeks ago. So often it feels like the outside world - jobs, people, media, relationships, bills, tasks, politics, news, the next environmental disaster or horrific story of unimaginable trauma, injustice, appointments crisis, fighting, commercials - is like a black hole. Either we are losing our footing, our integrity and being sucked into them from the inside out or we are overwhelmingly being drowned by it all from the outside in.
Either way, there's no space, pulled in by some overwhelming gravitational force that constricts and contracts and all we can hope to do is survive it.
Panic attacks, sleeplessnes, over-sleep, high blood pressure, low blood pressure, depression, flooding, despair. It's a measurable outcome of our state.
This keeps us spinning, anxious, frantic, fearful. We bring our past into the future or the future into the past and we create scenarios that narrow our window of tolerance for being able to manage anything. Well, we manage it in a way that we've learned, in a way that we've learned to survive it. We manage it through coping mechanisms, with hoping it'll go away soon, with distractions, with harshness and with pushing through on an empty battery. We manage it by surviving it.
The white star notion is one of creation. When we quiet the noise by emptying ourselves out, by synchronizing our energy to a neutral place, by arriving at the moment at hand, we allow room for creative insights to emerge. We can create our way out of a situation. We can ask ourselves one of my most favorite questions: "Given this situation, what do I want to create?" Hard to do from a constricted place. Much easier from the fertile ground of emptiness, spaciousness, the lightness of a blank slate.
I also like to think of it as the option of taking two boats.
One is a crew that is synchronized. They communicate well, they match each other, they are harmonious. Instead of four people on the boat rowing in unison, it almost looks as though they're one organism. They dissolve and merge into a oneness and it's mesmerizing to observe as you fall into trance captivated by their timing, their flow, their ease. They're efficient and moving towards shore.
The other crew is out of sync. They're splashing, they're not communicating, they're not matching each others' strokes. It looks chaotic and almost causes you to wince as you watch them. It's like a struggle. They're wasting so much energy, you want to do it for them because you can see the other way of the other boat. However, they, too, will eventually get to shore.
Both boats get "there" in the end. Now I can't exactly say these examples are like a white star or a black hole, but I hope you can see my point.
What do your days feel most like? Which aspect feels like it dominates the majority of your day to day lifestyle?
One of the greatest skills we can learn is how to manage our energy, how to regulate our attention, how to be more like a white star than a black hole, more like the first boat than the second.
At the end of every night for nearly the last two years, as I lie in bed I say to myself, "release the day” or “I now release the day."
It's a decision. That's all it is. It's a thought, an intention, an allowing. And without ever having heard of the term kenosis, or ever practicing it during the day, I have come to realize that that is what being present really means. Staying empty. In that emptiness we can sync back up with the moment at hand. With my kids, we sing the little song that says "that was fun and now it's done." Because transitions can be challenging! If we're not attentive, there can be a lot of splashing and wasted energy avoiding change.
If we don't empty ourselves, if we don't create a spaciousness inside with a decision of where we're focusing our attention, then we will be overwhelmed and overcome with stress, with constriction, with outside forces either pulling us away from our center with a force greater than we can handle or we will be taken over, like a tidal wave, by the magnitude of the stimulus of life, its challenges, its to-do lists, its influences.
It's not the job or the news or the US government that's stressing us out. It's our response to these nouns, these things. It's the depleting emotion we experience in response to the event or situation or thing that we call stress. We can manage our stress, our emotional response, but rarely can we manage or change the stressor, the thing, the event.
Become a victim to something we can't change/control?
Or free ourselves by shifting our attention to what we can change/control?
This is a practice.
Most of us never learned this. We can acknowledge that, get sad or mad about it, honor that, even appreciate it and then relax into the realization that we can learn new things. That’s why we’re here after all. To unlearn and to learn.
We can learn it now, the present is the gift - it's a present - and we can practice and we can get better at changing from the inside out to create a new baseline of response.
The upcoming virtual 6 week HeartMath class I'm presenting, beginning this week, helps us to understand our bodies as energy systems. It helps us to become self aware of our emotional responses to outside influence and, through the intelligence of the heart, begin to make a shift to plug energy leaks, recharge our battery and move through life a little bit more like first boat.
....You tell me it's the institution
Well, you know
You better free your mind instead..." The Beatles, Revolution
We are creators, and we create with our hearts.
I have always believed that decision is the ultimate power. But it takes courage to decide. Courage is a quality of the heart. You choose, you decide and then you move in that direction, with a flexibility to stay open, to adapt and adjust as you go, sometimes two steps forward, one step back. That's what resiliency is. It's your capacity to navigate the waves, the storms, the patterns of life from a place that most aligns with your essence.
I hope you'll consider joining my class beginning this week where we learn some techniques to increase this capacity, to build our resilience, to help us live in a more aligned and renewing way. If you've needed or wanted a fresh perspective or some extra support on your path, perhaps this could help ignite your creativity.
Like that first boat, those rowers had to understand that a right paddle makes them turn right and a left paddle makes them turn left. Learning about the mechanisms of our body, our nervous systems, our heart rhythms helps us understand how it's all interconnected and empowers us to take responsibility for our state of Being. Ultimately, we choose, we have agency over whether we live our life as a black hole or a white star and where we put our attention and the decisions we make.
This work has helped me to shift from living 90% like a black hole, being sucked into outside influences, drama and overwhelm with glimpses and rare moments of feeling like a white star to living like a white star 90% of the time with only glimpses and rare moments of overwhelm. Anytime we want to expand our Being, we come up against this pattern.
Learning HeartMath and how to sustain heart-brain coherence has dropped my anxiety and fear and increased my trust and ease by a number I don't even know. It has been invaluable.
So, dear readers, I invite you to practice a little Heart-Focused breathing by bringing your focus and your attention to the area of your heart. Imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area, breathing a little slower and deeper than usual. Just find an easy rhythm that's comfortable.
Then ask your heart if it has any messages for you. Can you commit to to those messages and move from that place? Coherence quiets the noise so we can hear the whispers and sometimes shouts of this deeper place.
The 6 Week HeartMath class begins:
Thursdays at 5:30 pm Mountain time | October 10 - November 14 - every week for 6 weeks
OR
Fridays at 9:00 am Mountain time | October 11 - November 15 - every week for 6 weeks.
you can learn more or register here.
Loving you, Be blessed,
Sarah
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