Once I felt it, things moved quickly.
Some people thought it made perfect sense. Others said it was happening fast. On the outside, what they did not see was that this feeling had been there within me for years. It had been there within me as a seed, waiting for the timing to be right, waiting for conditions supportive to its growth.
For years, I had a vague sense of what something like this might feel like, yet it felt far away. Like an echo, I could hear something calling me but I didn’t quite know where the voice was coming from. So when the experience arose, I recognised its characteristic sensations because they'd been lingering in my peripheral awareness. What appeared fast on the surface arose from a much slower and deeper process.
Some seeds remain dormant for lifetimes. They wait, and wait, and never get planted in nourishing soil. Other seeds are passed down between generations. In one lifetime, they'll never see the sunlight, and then in the next, they'll be planted, experience the light of the sun and the water of the rain, and spring forward vibrant and full of life.
I’d been skirting around the edges of these feelings, I knew them in part through their absence. I'd dreamt about them, longed for them, and felt the lack of their presence in my life. The other feelings and ways of relating I experienced stood out in stark contrast to the sensations that had been accumulating within me for years. Or maybe they'd always been there, quiet and patiently waiting.
At first I thought about the experience in segments, each moment unfolded at a particular point in time, each moment was a distinct snapshot of experience. The moment I felt something could be seen as marking the beginning. But what about the ‘invisible’ layers of experience unfolding beneath the threshold of my everyday awareness? What about the feeling that I had been in this situation before? This wasn’t entirely new.
Months later, I have been thinking about how I relate to time and how I experience timing and the unfolding of a situation. I find Anthropologist Tim Ingold’s writings on different orientations to time to be helpful in making sense of my experience. He suggests that we can view time stratagraphically; seeing experiences as existing within their own slice of time, a bit like layers of sedimentation in the earth, or we can view time as a braid in which experiences and even generations overlap and weave together.
Ingold highlights how we can experience the past rise up within us and join with the present moment. In these instances the past informs the present and the present may reorganise the past. We may experience something that helps us understand something that happened years before. Another example of time as a braid, manifests throughout the trajectories of generations. In a family we may see one generation lean over another generation, a parent may start down a path that their child or grandchild carries further. If we view time as a braid, we can see how it overlaps and folds in on itself. Beginnings and endings are not always cut and dry; they inform and flow into one another.
Ingold suggests that this act of leaning over is a gesture of care, even of love. Our tendency to let one experience lean over another is vital to the mystery of life, when we let our past lean into the present and the future lean into the past we are braiding a cord of possibility.
What are you noticing at the periphery of your awareness?
As you let the past and future lean into the present, what braid of possibility are you weaving?
On Not Knowing and Paying Attention: How to Walk in a Possible World, By Tim Ingold
In this article, social anthropologist, and wordsmith, Tim Ingold, highlights how uncertainty opens us to possibility. He describes the difference between the soul and the self, and knowledge and wisdom. For him, wisdom invites us into the fullness of the world, while knowledge tends to label things and place them into fixed categories. He proposes that wisdom invites a turning toward the world, which opens us to be replenished rather than just fulfilled by what we witness and experience. I find Ingold’s writing to read like poetry. He has a way of writing around the edges of concepts that honours that breadth and does not try to pin them down or file them into a narrow category. Read the article here
There are 2 spots open - for a monthly supervision group focused on a process-oriented approach and learning alongside other practitioners. There are 5 spots to present a case, you can also join the session to listen, reflect, ask questions and engage in the discussion of each case. Learn more and register here
This 2-hour session will focus on practicing a process-oriented approach to working with others. During the session there will be opportunities for direct and indirect learning. You may bring a question to the session and watch the work, and engage in practice with this question in mind, or notice something that catches your attention within the session and explore the possibility that what you’re noticing has something to teach you as well. There will be an inner work, time to connect in small groups, a demo of me working with someone in the centre, and time to practice in pairs. Learn more and register here.
Are you interested in learning to track mythic, or abiding, themes and patterns in yourself and those you work with?
When we’re feeling unsettled, a desire to engage more fully in our lives and our work with others, we may be experiencing an invitation to connect with the mythic dimension of our experience. This is the level that is both deeply personal and universal and contains patterns and archetypal themes. Maybe you’re feeling stuck with a client, want to take the work deeper or support yourself and others to connect with a sense of purpose and resilience to navigate current challenges and the tensions of recent times. Connecting with the mythic layer offers insight into wherever we are and resources we can draw upon as we engage in our lives.
Join us for a 2-hour session to explore cases and questions through the lens of life myth.
This is a continuation and deepening of the Exploring Your Life Myth, but is open to all who are interested in learning to bring a mythic perspective to their life and work. Together, we will explore how we can bring a mythic dimension to our work by considering how mythic patterns manifest in different ways and at various scales. Learn more and register here