Inner Surfing

Starting with Olympic wave news: The latest New Scientist (my favorite magazine other than People ;-) ) reports that the swimming records broken in Beijing Olympics may be due not so much to US supremacy as to wave patterns! The Beijing pool was 3 meters deep whereas the Athens pool was 2 meters. Apparently, a deeper pool allows the swimmer to put forth wave patterns with her strokes, but “get out of town” before they come back from the depths to hit her and slow her progress. In shallower pools, such as the one used in Athens, the swimmer’s own “back-wave” slows her down.

So how can we swim in a deeper pool, so that we can achieve “escape velocity,” and shift from the experience of moving forward, only to hit our own counter-intentions or resistances or karma and move backwards again, in what sometimes can seem like a never-ending loop? In motherwave days, I coined the phrase “get out of the loop and onto a wave.” How can we do that? I am asking this question, right now, for real.

The answer communicates itself in waves, as is often the case in my experience of inner guidance. Before I translate the wave-answer into words, I want to give a cliché-alert, and repeat a quotation from Wendell-Homes that I believe I used before in this blog: “Words are the outer skin of a living experience.” So what I’m about to say may miss its mark in your present, wavy experience because you already “know” this clever answer. Anyway, here goes:

How we can swim in a bigger pool, so that we live free from an endless karmic loop, is to move from a pool into the ocean. Yeah, yeah, very clever Katie, you are thinking. Who HASN’T heard the teaching stories about the well and the ocean? But bear with me: I’m talking about a real ocean in which we are swimming without realizing it, right now. Literally. The ocean is not only larger than a pool, but it is also living water. A pool is completely stagnant, until someone gets into it and creates waves, whereas the ocean constantly runs waves of every kind, from the moon, sun, tides, whales, ships, currents, winds…

The ocean is alive and constantly reinventing itself, which is why coastlines are always changing, which can be a drag if you have oceanfront property. And yes, this is a metaphor: The pool in which I used to spend my time as a child was like one of those 2-meter pools they used in Athens. It was, relatively, an Olympic-sized pool because my parents were clever academics and also socially conscious to a fault. So I was deeply conditioned by the belief and nervous systems of my parents and the British culture in which I was raised. Swimming in that shallow-yet-Olympic pool, I would continually meet myself coming back, and life felt so constricting.

At the age of 18, I had a few spontaneous spiritual or rather “oceanic” experiences that put me on a search, that led me to live in… a deeper pool! The 3-meter Olympic pool of Beijing, in which new records could be set. Now I was in the alternate reality pool; the groovy, hip, New Age, spiritually correct, pool. Hell, I spoke at the International Conference for Science and Consciousness. That’s a pretty deep pool, but so what? It's a pool.

So what is the ocean? I’m dipping my toes in and it’s nothing like the 2 or 3-meter pools. All I can really say about it is that I can’t go there until it’s the only thing I want. All my previous visits, and my ability to be “salty” from dipping in this ocean of love were just like church on Sunday, sin on Monday. Now, as many of life’s illusions have burst like blood blisters, I have been turned back into the contemplation of my real relationship with the Infinite. And I find that my fear of diving all the way in, and my attachment to the fake medals of those Olympic pools, are creating a lot of noise––some very choppy waves at the shore of that sea. Everything is pulling me through that edge. Everything else is resisting. I am doing my best, one day at a time, to cultivate a life of true surrender.

There is not much more I can say about this right now, so let’s move on to Nadal and those buns of steel!

Why I love Nadal?

Well… what’s not to love? That butt, those biceps. But I swear, that’s not really what I love (even though I have been accused by friends of blindly following beefy biceps into banal bardos!).

In case you’re too spiritual to know, Rafael Nadal is the new World #1 tennis player, having finally beaten longtime #1 Roger Federer at Wimbledon, in what is now widely called The Greatest Tennis Match Of All Time. Barb and Lawrence and I watched TGTMOAT for about 8 hours one Sunday, and it was almost TOO exciting, especially for me because I was rooting for Nadal and he almost didn't win…

Anyway, why do I love Nadal so much? Well, he is an interesting archetype. While he is playing, he is so focused that it’s scary to watch (see pic on left). His face scrunches down in a look of absolute intensity, and nothing can distract him. He shows no signs of a shift in focus when he is losing, when someone in the audience makes a joke, or when the other player throws a fit. It’s as though he is not a human with a personal self. In fact, TV commentator Mary Carillo says of him, “It’s amazing that off-court, he is completely sweet and humble, yet on the court he is a savage beast.” In Paris, where he keeps winning the French Open year after year, they call him the “bete sauvage,” which actually means “wild beast.”

And that’s the thing. These public personas, like Jennifer Aniston and Sarah Palin and Rafael Nadal are archetypes for our age. We no longer have a real King and Queen or the Greek gods on whom to project all our issues and inner selves, so we use celebrities (I wouldn’t even call Palin a politician!). I allow myself free rein to read People magazine (or worse), because (1) I can, and (2) I recognize that parts of me are getting mirrored and acted out by all their shenanigans, and I can access stuff inside myself that needs acknowledgement and release, by noticing my reaction to the celebrity soap opera. I was SO worried, for example, that Jennifer Aniston would get dumped by the serial ladykiller John Mayer, and I was bummed when I was right.

Back to Nadal. Bottom line (pun intended): he represents my inner body that is trying to get out. I am tired and done with using my physical body, which is, after all, an animal, as an interpreter, side-stepper, symbolic map and general mouthpiece for my unresolved deep, dark painbody issues. Enough already. I already said that, a few years ago, in my lightwave body awakening, as chronicled earlier in this blog. The process continues. Inside me, or perhaps a few vibrational inches to the left of me, lives another body. It is youthful, healthy, whole, energetic, and free. It is governed by that part of God which is instinctual and connected to the universe. It knows what to eat, when and how to sleep, play… all of it. I call it my soulbody, and have taught trainings about it, yet I find myself still IN a training.

If you don't quite get what I mean by all this, I'll try to clarify. I'm NOT talking about resisting the natural process of birth, death, and all that. But I've come to see that it isn't always a "natural" process. Much of the time what has been happening in my body has been the playing out of other stuff that doesn't necessarily have to happen through a body. I don't mind dying, but I don't want it to be an expression of my resistance to something I was afraid to feel. Unless that happens, and that would be okay too.

But let's say that the physical body is an expression of a virtual body: Which virtual body do I want to express in physical form? My wounded painbody, or my soulbody?

This is where Rafa is one of my teachers. He somehow seems to have come into this life with a body that easily channels the natural ferocity of wild physical power. He may have mental and emotional stuff that isn’t totally free––his awkwardness in interviews seems to suggest that, along with his racquet bag, he carts around a painbody like the rest of us. Yet his painbody doesn’t use his physical body to distract him from his fear/sadness/anger by illness, addictions or violence, or to express all those feelings by vulnerability, hpersensitivity or, again, illness.

His physical body is almost always in the zone. It doesn’t get zapped by his emotions, except positively, in the exultant leaps and fist pumps that explode through him when he scores a winner. Like some kind of archetypal “body-whisperer” he has somehow cultivated his natural physical wildness into an ever-more-effective expression of skill and power.

And then, off the court, he is impossible to dislike, (see pic on right) even by his tennis rivals who love to mock and imitate his habit of pulling wedgies out of his famous butt before every point. Yet they can’t find anything bad to say about him, because he is so humble that even after winning Wimbledon he said in the interview that Federer was still the best. And he wasn’t kidding. He seems to need no personal ego to excel excellently, and that is the point.

I have experienced great ambition in my life. I seem to have been born with an enormous, unstoppable desire to express something big. And I also have yer typical painbody, full of the usual suspects of not good enough, too much, unlovable, and so on. Sometimes these two––self-expression and compensation for pain––get entangled, so that a passion to express becomes a passion to achieve. In that unholy marriage, I spent many years surfing a wave back-and-forth between agony and ecstasy, while I taught motherwave trainings.

Now the urge to achieve is relaxing into a willingness to express. Recently I’ve been living a quiet life doing various writing projects for myself and others, seeing clients, and also cultivating my soulbody every day. I swim––or should I say I “bob”––every day in a pool, wearing my float belt, and allowing my wavy body to do its spontaneous, spiral water dance. Then, three days a week, come rain or shine or backache or exhaustion, I go to the gym and do an hour of weight-training with Adam, my excellent trainer. I’m experimenting with allowing God-through-my-bod to lift the weights, since they are impossibly, ridiculously heavy for my frame, which feels more like a bird than a Neanderthal.

That’s it for now. Vamos Rafa!