Do you notice an urge to fill the space with ‘what’s next’?
No sooner has a short space opened up in my life than the ‘using my time wisely’ police show up. I’ve just completed the ‘Becoming Nobody’ film and we’ve scheduled 3 months of workshops, the new Academy of The Sacred Fool ‘Maze online Journey’ is about to launch again and even though it’s now obviously a time for replenishment and leaving space, I can still hear that cheeky slave-driver demon trying to sneak into my decision-making again: “So, what’s next? What’s the next big project? Got to get shit going! Mouths to feed for years ahead!”
It takes vulnerability as an artist or entrepreneur to be still and rest and allow replenishment without taking any direct action ‘out there’ to push things along. I used to find myself addicted to an endless to-do list which became more about staving off my anxious attitude than achieving the tasks on the list itself. I still slip.
Even though I know that Emptiness and stillness, when I allow them, have mostly shown themselves to be FULL, not boring or antsy or inefficient. That non-doing, more yin space, that the ancient Taoists call Wu Wei, is really full of ideas and unexpected treasures and illuminations rushing into that space. That’s where inspiring ideas often arise, in the spaces between my endless to-do list pre-occupation.
Yet there’s an entrenched character in my mind trying to sell me the opposite – a character I put in place long ago as a child, when I had concluded that the way to survive and achieve was to slave-drive everything along with tutts and exasperations as my teachers and carers had shown me.
So me and my slave-driver sit together here in this house. Every time I notice him start his list again I treat it as my alarm bleep or meditation bell to come back to presence as Jamie, the kind man who’s decided to sit still and not get anything done right now.
“Have you paid the Bristol venue?”
“shh”
If I ever communicate with him with exasperation or try and ‘shut him up’ then I know I’ve fallen asleep and he got me. The real me is kind.
And this is how the slave-driver is repurposed and redistributed in my inner world as my newly appointed sparring partner in an ongoing Presence Challenge. The slave-driver now functions as the meditation bell of ‘noticing the difference between my kind, loving, present self and the endless self-protecting, self-cherishing, negative voices’ leaping in masquerading as ‘the important truth’. The slave-driver becomes a tool to notice the mental DJ’s of Headfuck FM who I long ago tasked with making sure I NEVER look stupid, never feel the pain of shame, never risk exile, never risk rejection, ridicule, poverty, unattractiveness, criticism….and every time I notice, I come back to kind presence and wake up from the spell.
To me, knowing the difference is what defines a juicy, awake Life or a zombified, reactive, asleep one.
So it’s worth it, even though now I just wrote this instead of sitting still.
“The first thing to do is stop whatever else you’re doing.
Now sit down somewhere comfortable.
Anywhere is fine” Thich Nhat Hanh
image: Igor Morski
