Learning to Let Go
My teachers start every teaching by saying something like, “Let Yourselves Be Comfortable.” “Make Yourself Comfortable.” “Let Yourself Relax.” This is across the board—all my lineages of embodiment practices, whether it is Zapchen Somatics, Dzogchen or Body-Mind Centering®. Even my Tai Chi/Qi Gong teacher is always reminding us to relax all our joints so we have access to full power of the movement.
For many years when I would hear this, I would think, “what a nice way to be welcomed.” It is like when a friend opens the door, all smiles, and invites me to come in, and take a seat on the comfy sofa.
In more recent years, I understand it as the essential teaching. The “why” of the question, “why practice?”
“Let Yourselves Be Comfortable.” “Make Yourself Comfortable.” “Let Yourself Relax.”
What does being comfortable mean? What does ease feel like? What do I sense in my body that tells me I am relaxed? What thought patterns do I make when I am at-ease?
Somatics, as I have come to experience it over the years, is the practice of and exploration of feeling, sensing and being Ease itself, as whole body-mind organism.
There’s a catch. Which is: being ease, moving towards ease, is not so easy. Letting go is really hard. We tend to hold on, to grip on the patterns that we know, the ways of being we have been doing over and over again.
It turns out, though, that if we return to the practices again and again, new patterns emerge inside that point us in the direction of comfort, in the direction of internal ease.
My teachers in Zapchen Somatics, Dzogchen, Body-Mind Centering® and Tai Chi/Qi Gong, emphasize that practice is the keystone. Without returning again and again, practicing and exploring again and again, there is no effect. The seedlings need to be cultivated.
As body-mind organisms of the human variety, experiencing sensations of well-being is not a constant. The sensations of feeling at-ease come and go.
But, practicing again and again gives us confidence that well-being is real, not just a wish or a hope, but something we can return to (if we do the practices! :) ).
The magic of Zapchen Somatics is that the practices contain the information of ease in the form of movement/breath/sound combinations. In other words, by doing the practices, the information of being at-ease ripples through our body-mind.
We don’t need to try to ‘get’ the practices, or to get them right. We grock them by doing them again and again. As we practice over time, the information of ease is revealed, layer by layer. The practices unfold inside us and show us the way.
The practices also change our nervous system patterns. New roads are formed inside. Roads built with well-being and the aliveness that we are as the foundation, as the reality.
