Responsiveness
The word freedom, as clear as it is, as obvious as it seems, really takes much more consideration if you are to really achieve or embody it.
Let’s take the body for instance. Our body is free right? We make most decisions for it, what it eats, when it moves and rests, how and when to clean and care for it. But what about when we move and what activities we do?
Are we really free if walking down hills hurts our knees and we can do nothing about it? We are free to accept that our back pain is a normal part of aging but isn’t the pain itself a chain? A confines around which we make our so-called free choices.
A client once sent me a wonderful picture of her pushing her granddaughter in a wheelbarrow at a pumpkin farm, with the caption, “never thought I’d do this again.” She wouldn’t even have considered it in the condition her body was in prior to her work with us.
Freedom for the body is responsiveness. Responsiveness as opposed to rigidity. The same could be said for the mind. If our body is only able to respond to walking stairs with a pattern that damages the joints, that is rigidity. If the mind is only able to respond to anothers anger with reciprocal anger, that is rigidity. Or even if the mind is only able to respond to another’s anger with retreat and silence. It doesn’t matter so much the action, just more so that it is a predetermined certainty. A reliable pattern. You count on it even as you abhor it.
The first step to freedom is recognizing that it is a real possibility. That you are in no way truly bound to any pattern you’ve had, no matter how long you’ve had it. There are possible effects of the pattern that will need specific care or attention but the pattern itself can be changed. It is no more YOU, than the clothes you’re wearing or the job you do.
Next the means must be one in the same with the end. You cannot use a rigid pattern to undo a rigid pattern. You cannot use force to end up at ease. To be responsive is to be at ease. To be at ease is to be present. Have you ever noticed how unresponsive you get when your mind is consumed with worry about the future or ruminations over the past? You can’t even hear someone who is talking to you, much less have the wherewithal to answer them.
The pattern of rigidity is never just in the body or in the mind. Even if it was, you would need both to work together to change the pattern anyway. The body doesn’t know its patterns except through the consciousness. The mind doesn’t know them except through the body’s senses. So the means must also incorporate effective re-training of mental patterns as well as physical. It cannot just be exercises, prescribed repetitions, and isolating a certain muscle, part of dysfunction. It must involve the whole being, in every regard.
The means of knowing your body, mind and being all stem from the same root process which is the foundation of all LIB programs. You need not learn 10,000 things, you need only learn a few things and practice them 10,000 times. Hence the Bruce Lee quote. The practice itself is a continual noticing of rigidity, dropping of it, and returning to a more responsive state. You can succeed it exactly right now, this second. Its instantaneous. Except then you have to keep doing it to gain further levels of responsiveness, more freedom, and lengthier periods of remaining in that state. Responsiveness must take over the pattern of rigidity. Response-able, the pattern of reaction. Its what all the Master’s know and really want you to know for yourself too!
Can you respond differently right now? What’s the reaction your mind or body has? I can’t do it, I’m not good enough, I don’t have time, I won’t succeed, they are different than me? Do you want to stay in that prison or break out and discover something else this life has in store for you?