One early May morning while on solitary retreat this year, I woke up with the word “Faithwalk”. It was loud, clear and provocative: “FAITHWALK”! I laid in bed for a bit to take it in: it was clearly a command and both a noun and a verb.

Just as the wetlands lie between land and sea, so too does our self perception and body meet in the fluidity of the imagination.

The territory of “somatics” is a rich expression of the continuum between body and mind or body and perception. From this perspective, the body is the ground of our experience and psychology becomes the interpretation of our felt sense, our lived experience. There’d be no psychology without a body.

There’s a practice from 11th century Tibet called “tonglen”. It translates as “sending & receiving. It is a body centered heart practice that offers us emotional self regulation: it can relieve helplessness, loneliness, self pity, and self absorption. It deepens connection to ourselves and all other beings.

To bear witness is a potent act. To bear witness is an antidote to helplessness, it is a testimony to our interconnectedness, and it relieves us of complicity because we allow ourselves to actually see the suffering of the world everywhere. None of us are exempt from the trials of this life. We can’t say “we are all one” and then say “but only when it feels good”.

Many of us know the phrase, “things were going just fine and then the other shoe dropped.” But what if there are actually no shoes that drop at all? What if whatever happens along the way is life unfolding in all its messiness as all one piece. What if when upheaval happens in the middle of our routine, it isn’t something outside of our life, but just life, happening: life doing what it does?

Life from the shoe dropping view…