Intentional Society: The dance of doing and being
This Saturday, Feb 12: Orientation call 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC)
This Sunday's community gathering features: present-moment-expression practice
I have a wondering for you: What balance do you personally hold between "seeking" growth and "letting" growth happen?
In a "seeking" state, you might be trying, practicing, rehearsing, doing certain activities. Going to the gym to exercise your muscles. Practicing your scales to improve your piano playing. Concentration meditation to train your focus. This is the "doing" mode.
In a "letting" state, you might be observing, listening, being with yourself. Listening to the sensations that are alive in your body. Facing and feeling a fear without resisting it. Opening awareness meditation being with but not involved in arising thoughts. This is the "being" mode.
This wondering is inspired by an observation from our developmentally-themed Empathy Circling last Sunday. To roughly paraphrase, someone observed that having a direction to steer, a destination in mind, brought about a different kind of path-finding process experience compared to a pure "what feels alive in this moment" kind of prompt.
To which I say, yes. There is a polarity, a tension, a both/and, between push and pull. Many of us, among the crowd seeking self-transformation, became skilled in pushing ourselves, controlling our will, optimizing productivity and self-direction. The edge of learning for many of us, then, is to unlearn our effortful striving and learn to just be — to dance with the environment and with our underlying embodied wisdom. But it's not an "instead of" or full replacement. These poles of doing and being, pushing and being pulled, are themselves interdependent.
So, what balance are you holding? Have you found moments of integration between doing and non-doing frames? How do they nest within or nestle alongside each other?
Cheers,
James