On Slowing Down to Find Balance

The opening stanza of Wild Geese by Mary Oliver equally thrills and haunts me:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

That last line has two bits that stir me:  “let” and “soft animal of your body.”

“To let” is “to allow.”  I have to allow the soft animal body to love what it loves?  Meaning, I’m negating her what she loves?  If this is so…what am I doing?  These questions allow a moment of honest reflection.  I realize that I sit all day.  I numb myself by binge-watching a series on Netflix.  I stay indoors and piddle around with this or that.

None of these activities equates to living.

“Soft animal body.”  I’ve been taught to forget that in a culture that prides itself on productivity.  Our work collects metrics that show how much we can do so the machine can grow and earn the mechanists at the top more money.  I sit in a chair for longer than my hips and back want to, so I can do this work.  It’s only when I move, and breathe, and sweat, and feel my muscles with strength and power that I remember what I am—a human animal.

It’s in this knowing that I work to find comfort in discomfort—longer meditation practices to quiet a chaotic mind, eight more laps in the pool when my shoulders feel they’ve reached their limit, or sitting in humidity as I talk with an interesting stranger.

Yesterday, I swam in a cold lake with my triathlon club.  The sun blasted my eyes as I turned my head to breathe.  The water was cold enough that my bare arms craved a warm cardigan. I could have called for the lifeguard to drag me back to shore as I held onto the side of his kayak. Instead, I chose to keep swimming with the discomfort and focus on the beauty of being outside surrounded by full trees.  I celebrated each breath in a body that felt strong. It made me question why we seek the same temperature on our skin—turning on the air conditioning at the slightest moment of thick air in the house, or the heat when we feel the tiniest bit of chill.

The night before yesterday, I taught my yoga class in a studio with a poor HVAC system.  The air was thick with sweat from the Zumba class that had just left. I led my class through a restorative practice in service of the full moon, where we left yoga blocks to support our bodies in poses.  Our only job was to succumb to the block and breathe so our tissues could release tension.  As I lead 20 people through this practice, I felt small beads of sweat gather under my clothing.  I moved with it.  I breathed with it.  It felt like magic.  I celebrated my “soft animal body” and let her be. 

A woman in my class told me afterward how much she needed the practice.  She could not close her eyes in the first pose—lying with a yoga block between her shoulder blades and another block under her head for support.  She said her eyes felt charged with nervous energy from a racing mind still spinning with the day’s to-do list.  Over time, pose by pose, she allowed her mind to follow the body's slower pace.  She found her way to her soft animal self and realized how important it was to return to this safe place.

We tend to need these reminders.

I felt such gratitude for my years of service to myself through countless meditation practices, yoga poses, and embodied voice hummings—all geared for recalibrating my nervous system to her true self, my soft animal self. These are what I love.

Sometimes I feel the world is too much to bear.

In today’s hyper-fast pace, I tend to get swept away easily out of true care for human nature and the planet.  The horrific impact of data centers on Earth’s water systems, community welfare (or lack thereof), and the deleterious effects on the brains of those who use AI shocks me to the very core.  My nervous system is overwrought. I want to run into a field to the edge of a forest and into the thickness of a woody mass covered with moss, roots, and ferns. I want to breathe moist air that smells like the color green.  I want to hug thick trees, and let caterpillars tickle my legs as I sit, and breathe, and cry. 

The beauty of the natural world is too much to bear, and I welcome my heart’s swell to hold it. This feeling is what I love. And, I allow myself to love it.

I feel such gratitude that I can re-capture this essence when I move with my breath, my resonant voice, and my heartbeat.

And it’s a true honor to guide others in finding this beauty for themselves.