I RESPONDED LIKE THE SHEETS ON THE CLOTHESLINE

Last week, a client told me that expanding her reality was really just denying the facts. 

Yep, that would appear accurate from the three-dimensional physical-only reality perspective.  I mean, how can you deny the physical reality? You can’t and you shouldn’t. 

But there’s also more than three dimensions. There’s more than the physical. But the physical is still there and still begs for attention. As it should. 

When I hung up the phone call I tried to put myself in their position. I tried to go back many years ago to a time when the physical reality was so strong in my life that I couldn’t deny it. I remember thinking I had to make friends with it on some level. I had to go into it, through it, and out the other side. If that was even possible. And the only way I knew how to do that, was to go into the feeling of immense spaciousness.

When I was growing up, the physical reality was often so harsh, it took everything out of me. So I consciously chose to unleash into nature’s care and kindness to see where that could take me.

My body carried the difficulty of the three-dimensional only reality in physical symptoms beyond my control. My distended belly would send bomb-like spasms to my screaming head. I wanted to claw off my face and all the skin on my body. I couldn’t breathe. I would run from the back door of our house as far into the outside cocoon of nature as I could get, before collapsing on the grass that was usually saturated with cold rain or heavily piled with ice-crusted snow. 

I would lay there with as much of my skin touching the cold, or the chill wind, as I could. I would plunge into the harsh elements and engage the cold moving right through me. 

I sensed that if I let go of all barriers, all resistance, and just became the elements, I would be free. 

So my practice was to become the wind, for the wind wasn’t cold or in pain. It just moved. It had no resistance, so neither did I. 

I remember that if I stopped this practice suddenly or didn’t trust it even for a moment I would become cold and I would feel the wet. 

So I allowed the elements to go right through me, to take me along with them so that I too was the wind. I had to become the snow, the wind, the pelting rain, the cold. I had to be more than Jonni-in-pain, because, of course, I was so much more than that, in my essence. I couldn’t stay fixed and solid in the current perspective, because something inside me knew there was more.

One day I watched the sheets flapping on the clothesline, the wind whipping the clothes-pinned linen, snapping them to surrender. The sheets dried because they didn’t resist the wind. They welcomed it. They were fully open to it. They received it and became it. 

So the next time the pain began to overwhelm me, I responded like the sheets. I lay outside, beneath the clothesline that extended from the French windows of the laundry room to the cedar pole nestled in the row of trees seventy feet out. I could feel myself transforming as though I were threads, loosening, as the gusts swept right through me. 

Some days I lay on my back and deeply engaged with the formidable row of poplar trees that divided our cherry orchard from the backyard. My friend, the wind, had its way with the tops of those poplars. Their trunks were solid, but the peaks were whipped like those sheets on the clothesline. They yielded to the wind as though knowing there was no purpose in resisting. Knowing it was exhilarating to let go. 

When I stayed with that feeling long enough and deep enough I forgot who I was. Or at least the limited perspective of who I thought I was. 

I would forget that I lived in the huge soulless house. I would forget that I had painful allergic reactions to nothing that could be diagnosed. 

When I expanded beyond that limited identity, when I became more than just that perspective, I soared. With the wind. With the treetops. 

Then the physical bodily ravages would cease. Or at least they weren’t my only reality anymore. I rippled out into ever-expanding circles. It was transcendence.

I look back on those experiences nowadays and know them as surreal and yet ones I completely believed in. My practice was in never resisting, in freefalling. And I trusted the wild call I was answering. It gave me the feeling of security that only true freedom can.

Over the years my studies and experiences in my work have filled in the mechanical language understandings of what I’d been doing in those days when the pressure pushed me into expanding. 

I understand now how the mind and the body corresponded with the emotions, igniting the entire cellular system. 

I understand how our brain can be refocused, reprogrammed, re-educated. 

And I understand about will and want, about belief and freedom.

Non-ordinary states of experience are what transpersonal psychologists call my unleashings, my answering the call of the wild, my going deeper still. 

And even though the experiences proceeded the understandings, it was survival at its finest. It was thriving.

Love, Jonni, Wind Warrior