Going Inside
Even when the weather is beautiful
I’m slowing down and heading inside. Although in the northern hemisphere it’s the height of summer, and many of us are enjoying the elasticity of the long days…beach times, trips, summer cocktails, parties…I’ve headed indoors.
Sooner than I thought I would, and wanted you to know. I’m bringing another human into the world very soon. I have some treats and writing cued up while I’m on leave, but if you sense a shift that’s why. I may also keep writing all the way through - I don’t know yet and love to reserve that right (please always do too).
All I know is I’m here now, and I will be back too.
The yogic concept of Pratyahara has been sitting on my heart, giving me meaning and permission for this early phase of the portal. (Thank you Diana May for these beautiful little heart seeds that landed at the perfect time).
Pratyahara refers to the act and experience of withdrawing the senses; going inside. Like inside inside. The big stuff. The murky stuff. The scary stuff. The true stuff. The stuff stuff. The double stuffed.
I’ve understood the roots of prati, to mean “to withdraw” or “towards,” and ahara, to mean “food” or “gathering.” Untethering yourself from anything you don’t need (is that everything? Eventually?) and pulling into everything that you really do and are.
On the eight limb path of yoga, it’s a crucial step to take in order to ground into concentration and open into meditation, and eventually blissful union. NBD.
Though pratyahara is sometimes described as a discipline and control — sorting out what’s external from what’s internal — I see it as a letting go.
Letting go is on the other side of the wall of controlling because it’s an allowing of what is, not necessarily an orchestration of what you want to be.
As Diana May writes,
“Pratyahara is an acknowledgement that what we take in effects us. This practice asks us to choose wisely what we expose ourselves to.
Pratyahara reminds us that to an extent, we have some agency over what situations we put ourselves in. What we allow into our lives.
It is an acknowledgement that our energy is precious. We are precious.
In a way, pratyahara is boundary work.”
Sometimes doing this work is an energized and chipper choice; sometimes it feels like a deep gut necessity that becomes very clear as it overtakes you. Sometimes it toggles, floating somewhere in a free-ish middling.
To me, '“boundary work” is not about control but about realization and release.
This year as I have been meditating on birth, I have been more deeply meditating on death. “We brethren are,” in the words of Emily Dickinson.
They say birth is a death, and a death is a birth, that the veil is thin because the portal is present. We all go through both, at least once. In fact I find myself filling out my advanced healthcare directive in this moment.
As with the experience of death, in the experience of birth we somehow always seem to think that we’ll have more time. I do, I did. And then you realize the time to go inside — wherever your inside is, you’ll know — is here and nothing is quite as you thought it would be, which is exactly as it should be because that’s what it is.
Ah, so. Ah so.
Ram Dass has a powerful teaching on this, beautifully produced - take a listen. I could listen to this a thousand times on repeat and probably have/will.
“Beyond all polarities, I am.
Let the judgments and opinions of the mind be judgments and opinions of the mind.
And you exist behind that.
Ah, so. Ah, so.”
“It’s really time for you to see through the absurdity of your own predicament.
You aren’t who you thought you were — you just aren’t that person.
And in this very lifetime you can know it.
Right now.”
“You don’t worship the gate, you go into the inner temple.
Everything in you that you don’t need you can let go of.
You don’t need loneliness; well you couldn’t possibly be alone.
You don’t need greed because you already have it all.
You don’t need doubt because you already know.
The confusion is saying ‘I don’t know,’ but in the minute you are quiet you find out that, in truth, you do know.”
“Plane after plane will open to you.
I want to know who I really am.”
So, when it’s time, it’s just time. That’s all there is. Time wraps around us, time holds us (David Byrne says it doesn’t but I think he knows it does). Nothing to do, nothing to cling to, just an opening to that. And a trusting that you’ll know when it is that time.
Enjoy your fireworks or Aperol spritzes and long summer days and luscious travel until that moment. Sending you love for the indoors when you go. Enjoy the roominess of it. See you on the other side!
