Dancing the tension between Being & Doing

Last autumn I found myself deeply encouraged by the words of Chris Heuertz, who I’d done some work with on the Enneagram. He wrote,

“These past few years have been the heaviest and hardest of my life, they have tested the limits of my endurance and resilience. There have been a few patches when I honestly wondered if I’d ever get through the pain, the loneliness, and the fog of confusion. In the moments when I allowed fragments of myself, as well as fragments of my experience, to lay claim to the whole of who I thought I was, I wondered if I’d ever rediscover my pathway home—the way back to my heart.

I wrote and thanked Chris for his courageous honesty because I too had had the same experience in the few years following the start of COVID. I too had my moments when the intensely, painful inner work left me wondering if I would make it through.

The gift of the inner work of that period was to make friends with myself in a way that I hadn’t done in 65 years. To live from a place of being, more than doing, of self-love than self-driveness. The process that is like a breaking down, which at times feels like it hugs the cliff-top of break down. At the height of dealing with unattended past trauma, where the pain felt at its worst, another mentor Marion Gilbert, wrote these words to me:

“You are more than your fear or terror;

You are whole and full of life force;

You are guided by love;

Breathe into the places inside you that know this truth”

As I surfaced through this dark night a dilemma faced me. Doing, driving hard, making things happen, being proactive, had served me well for decades, whilst at the same time storing up a world of unattended pain. I had been able to deftly hide from myself. Now I was making friends with self-love and with being, and I found myself wary of my natural tendency for action because I had seen the dangers of it.

But Marion’s words also rang true:

You are full of life force.

I still felt that deep, deep sense of mission that I’d felt since teenage. I felt the energy to ‘go again’, to not settle, to not just retire (literal meaning - to retreat, to draw back, to withdraw), to play it safe. I felt the pressure of the life force still within myself. I saw people around me who would not stop their ‘doing’, in order to try and outrun their inner demons and I saw people retire and settle for the unlived life. I saw they still had a strong, or fading, life-force and it was becoming a destructive pressure inside of them. The force was no longer propelling them into the world as a contributor, it was pressurising their very bodies from the inside. It was in some cases, not to be too dramatic, like watching a fruit rot from the inside.

I didn’t want either.

But how do you then live?

The wisdom, I think, that emerged for me was, like many things, isn’t an either-or. Both are true at the same time. The question is how to live with the doing and the being. How to live with the life force without being destroyed by it – either the destruction of denial, or the destruction of withdrawal. The poet Dylan Thomas caught the tension perfectly in the words,

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.

The life force drives the creativity of our becoming and yet can also be ‘my destroyer’. We need to constantly renegotiate our ego identity around our humble fragility, as well as honour our life-force.

It is taking time each day, every day, even at different points in the day, to contemplate. The root of ‘contemplate’ is to make a space for your personal ‘temple’; a space to reconnect to a higher and a deeper version of yourself that doesn’t need to do anything in order to be loved, valued or belong.

It is taking time to take just one step, as David Whyte encourages us in his poem Start Close In.

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

It is when we rush ahead, go beyond that first step into taking many, many other steps, that we are in danger of losing connection with our home-base, our being.

It’s knowing there’s a risk when we take a step. There is an ever-present risk of failure – of getting out of balance again. Of course, there is a risk in taking action, that we will lose connection with being and there’s a risk in doing nothing. The illusion is that if we do nothing, then we will be safe from the dangers of disconnection and burnout. As a dear lady said to me once, ‘Fear of failure? …that’s just your ego’

Contemplation manifests into action.

Action calls us back into contemplation.

And living the dance between the two realities – the being and the doing, the action and contemplation - is where the truth is.

Inexact, precarious, but alive.

Image by rick1611