If life resides in the present moment, life might have felt like too much for many of us last week. I’m not even sure we needed to live in or near Boston to feel rattled by the bombing that radically effected so many people. It’s still too raw, still too early, too many unknowns.
Too much.
What does that mean anyway? I’ve been saying to people how the event was too much for me to take in. Not five days prior a mother of two children died in a car accident. The loss sent many of us reeling. So when the bomb went off in Boston, I thought: I just can’t take this in, not right now.
But if life is present moment, and the present moment starts layering on losses, how can life be too much? If it just is?
Too much, for me, right now. This mantra lead me to consider a few questions:
- Am I in shape to take on being the change in the world in a way I say I want to take it on?
- How could I take in the news, allow my “bubble of denial” (as my Seven Stones’ colleague Jen Cohen puts it) to be burst, and still carry on, do the next right thing?
- What does it mean – look like, feel like – to take in the news, do the next right thing, and not drown in it, not get lost in those arising and strong emotions?
- How would I know I was in shape and was relating to the happenings of our world – local, regional and global – from a place of enough? What would those indicators be?
In other words, what is my enough line when I am not in charge of what’s happening, when life just does feel too much? In my commitment to be in right relationship with life, regardless of its presenting scarcity or excess, the best way I know how to begin answering these questions is to return home, to my center, through the body. We are teaching a Somatic Practice Day on Friday, and I am grateful to be heading towards that immersion, of discovering my very own center in a world that continues to astonish in its beauty and in its suffering.