By Yoav Aftovitzer
Translation by Yasmine Ariel
Meeting The Patient
When Daria stepped into the room she had a look about her that reminded me of a doe entering a glade in the woods, looking around with worried eyes, fearing for her safety.
“I didn’t sleep last night,” she said as we stood facing each other. “I’m expecting a major company client today, and I’ve been thinking all night about how to make the best impression. It’s left me bothered and restless”.
“Where are these thoughts located in the body?” I asked.
“I feel it in my stomach.” Daria waved her arms near her stomach like engine pistons going up and down repetitively. “I feed my stomach with thoughts,” she added.
Our bodies often try to tell us our story, but we rarely listen. If we slow down, and maybe even stop, a previously unseen world appears to us. With this in mind I gave the following guidance to Daria.
“You might slow down this hand motion, and we could see how it affects the rest of your body.”
“I feel the tension in my stomach. I’m always running from one thing to the other, always busy solving problems. I don’t even rest when I come home. I turn on the computer, make phone calls, arrangements – until I collapse into bed completely drained.”
“There’s a sense of great life energy in that,” I say.
“Yes, it gives me a sense of power, like I’m running the world. But at the end of the day, when I crash into bed, I ask myself: where have I been? Who am I? I feel like I’ve operated on my reserve engine instead of operating from my core, which makes me feel like it wasn’t even me living that day.”
In Daria’s life, and for many of us in the modern world, there is no time for assimilation. Daria described it well when she said, “I feed my stomach with thoughts.”
We feed ourselves with massive amounts of information, pictures thoughts, and worries, but we don’t allow ourselves time to assimilate all the input. It is no wonder then, that when our “reserve engine” works relentlessly, we find it hard to be ourselves, and to get in touch with our core.
Taking Time Out
Most of us are so used to living a fast paced, hectic life that we have forgotten to do something that once (when the world moved at a slower pace) was integral. Call it: time spent gazing, or dreaming time.
It reminds me of what a fetus inside the womb might experience, floating in a world that allows us to absorb and assimilate.
Meeting the pressures of the world often starts in the womb. Bad experiences that the mother goes through enters a baby’s growing inner world. Physical psychotherapy shows us different ways of dealing with painful emotions. One of them is called “escaping into our thoughts.” Another way to define it is “continuous motion, or over activity.”
The fetus, and later the child and then the grownup, learn to activate their reserve engines in different ways like the survival mechanism that causes us to avoid pain.
Distancing ourselves from emotion, from the body, and from our quiet essence helps us to avoid pain.
What happens if we pause, if we are silent? Who are we without activity, without words?
In Daria’s case, the nonstop action, pressure, and never-ending thoughts allowed her to feel “alive.”
The ongoing activity is partially an expression of our will to live, an attempt of the body and soul to constantly feel alive.
But, it we have courage to look, we will see how afraid we are of the possibility that the engine might stop the moment we hear our true feelings within the silence.
Rabbi Nachman from Breslau said that speaking begins with silence. Can we start our actions from stillness? Can we be quiet, and still? If we could do this then perhaps we would discover that the only way to discover our essence is in stillness. If we made space for silence instead of reacting automatically, we would act from a place of connectedness with our various aspects. New understandings would emerge.
How can we stop the habit of continuous motion?
Observation And Identification
The first tool is ‘observation.’ When we observe ourselves we are able to identify where we really are. We can make the distinction between the ‘driver’ and the ‘vehicle.’
Observing is a kind of pause. While part of us continues moving, another part rests motionless and watches. Bringing awareness into the body can help us see.
The second tool is ‘identification.’ Observing allows us to identify what brings us down or lifts us up. Are we in touch with our good essence, or are we acting out of an automatic defense or repression mechanism?
When Daria slowed her motions down things became clearer. She realized that her constant state of activity gives her a false sense of power, and that she is not connected to her essence.
‘Waiting’ can also be a kind of tool. My teacher Yamima would say, “don’t be in a rush to understand.” Waiting, even if just for a short time, before we talk or jump into the next activity, frees us from automatic action. Yamima uses the phrase “ waiting for understanding.”
We can contemplate the word ‘waiting’ like planting a seed in the field of consciousness. We can hold the awareness throughout the day, and week observing to see if we wait or pause before we speak. Do we wait before we act, react, understand?
The common thread linking the different tools that I have mentioned is attention. Paying attention is like putting the heart in its rightful place, making it the main access point, or in other words, transferring from our reserve engine to our nuclear engine – the heart.