Where I am closed I am false.

(Click the link above for the audio recording of this letter)

I am writing to you from a little desk in a little (literally) hotel room in a tall building in Tokyo. ‘Dust’ by IKSRE is playing and I am sipping oolong tea from a small antique cast-iron teapot that I got from a market here on the weekend. I love being alone, and a stranger in a strange place. More on that in the next letter I think…

This morning I was reminded how important real authentic slowness is in our moving embodiment practices. Slowness is integration. Without integration nothing - integrates - into the depths, aka, our living breathing ever-evolving gravity of being.

I have been on a boring health journey these last couple of years, and so my personal movement practice has been less of the advanced sensing feeling honeyed noodling jelly-fishing around that most of you who have worked with me know me for. My system has been in such a state of critical collapse that I have had to introduce a lot of strange things into my new way of living, like weights, jumping, shaking, strength training, stuff that can quickly evoke a baseline of resilience and power in my system, just to be able to show up for the basics of living. But this morning I got to play around on the floor for longer than an hour just moving very very slowly through all of the layers, once again feeling and sensing my way through this flesh and bones and watery inner realms, with utmost awake curious moving presence, without collapse.

What a gift to really feel my moving body again.

When your system is in a state of burnout, you often only have two modes of being in my experience; collapse or contraction. Teasing receptivity back into consciousness is definitely an art, and cannot be forced (in my experience). But I keep knocking on the door, until from time to time I get to slide through. One thing is sitting in meditation, which sometimes can slip into disassociation, another is to keep the state of open listening whilst moving, bringing the whole bodymind into the open conversation.

Something that is repeated a lot in Dzogchen is that to realize our natural state (recognition, awakening) we need to be relaxed. They repeat this again and again and again. When I came out of the last retreat I started playing an old talk of Adya and in this talk he speaks of the egoic function simply as a contraction. A contraction around identity, a contraction of separation. He even went so far as to say that awakening is simply the act of releasing this contraction. And that all states that we perceive as “good” - love, curiosity, ecstasy, joy, etc - these are all expansive and relaxed states. Our egoic function lives on a spectrum from the most contracted (when we feel the most separate) to our most expansive states (marked by a profound sense of being one with our experience, with other people, with our environment) where we can even taste a sliver of “losing ourselves” in direct experiential presence for example in extreme flow states, in ecstasy on the dance floor, in a rave, making love, running, or whenever the seams begin to blur between where you and ‘other’ begin and end, between the subject and object of experience even. Have you ever felt yourself becoming the music? Or hearing colours? (Btw don’t confuse this with individuation and boundaries as something “bad”, it is paramount for the creativity of life to experience itself in the play of the seemingly “separate” “you” if we can see it for what it really is.) I am also not suggesting that a temporary moment of what you can also call “flow-state” (see the research into flow state, pioneered by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) is a recognition of true nature, but it could definitely be a gate opener bringing us closer to Reality.

Adyashanti reminded me in this talk, that even in our most contracted states, what is “un-contracted” in us, is always there, it never leaves us, it is unbroken, unborn, undying. It is the very ground of being. Available in any moment, without denying the contraction at the surface, it can always be accessed.

I call it the sanctuary of our innerness. My beloved Irish mystic John O’Donohue calls it what is ‘eternal’ in us.

It made me also think of this line from a Rilke poem - ‘Where I am closed I am false’.

It is not always available for us to open the fist we oftentimes clench around our heart or our experience, but even remembering our suffering, our conflicts (inner & outer), our loneliness, our stinging sense of separateness as simply an act of contraction, can open up for the slightest possibility to remember, recognize, maybe even touch into the place underneath it all that is “un-contracted”.

This place is always there. Any moment holds the potentiality of it being accessed. As the Indian Bhakti mystic Kabir said, “Wherever you are is the entry point.”

. . .

As a closing afterthought I just want to mention…interestingly last newsletter ruffled some feathers… It was the most unsubscribed newsletter of all time I think. And I guess what triggered some people underneath a typical and ordinary letter sharing reflections on spiritual practice coming out of a retreat, was the little end footnote sharing about a poet in Gaza who is struggling to survive a genocide (-that most of us are actually helping to fund through our tax money) and an opportunity for mutual aid.

Let me be clear that I am always happy for people to unsubscribe at any moment. I pour a little bit of my heart and soul into these free letters (that I am slowly making more frequent), into my work, and of course I only want them to be shared and received amongst those who resonate. So whenever that ceases to be true, we all change, I am very happy for people to leave my space. This newsletter is my inner circle. (And on a practical note I pay the newsletter platforms for the number of subscribers so again, good riddance! I am also due a cleanse, which I’ll get to soon, and just delete those that are on here but don’t open them :) )

But anyway, something urged me to look at last newsletter’s statistics, and apart from it being the most unsubscribed letter, I noted that one person ticked the box “inappropriate content”.

Which I thought was brilliant.

This is what a fragile section of the spiritual “scene” has turned into. This is the bypassy - love and light brigade.

Reality is just too much. It is in fact “inappropriate”. Mutual care for our fellow kin is inappropriate. A poet in Gaza was their red line.

Interesting isn’t it. Of course I am glad to wave them out the door. Never have I been more glad to cut relationships than over this little genocide issue. It points to something larger. That our fundamental idea and understanding of what yoga and spiritual practice is and leads towards is fundamentally misaligned, beyond repair. I don’t share this to shame anyone or scare others from speaking up, as we know, it’s been very bad for business to speak out these last years, - but actually to double down on it.

We live in such a mad world. It is also so filled with beauty. But this is the era of the long dark. And I have no time for the deniers of our time. I am not their teacher nor their student or their collaborator.

I want to be even clearer in that I am here for the whole, for the liberation of all. I don’t believe in a hyper individualized type of spiritual pursuit, as the late Joanna Macy famously said (and I can also say that her book “Active Hope” is really very helpful for our polycrisis times) -

“A heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe”.

I believe this is key for real spiritual practice.

I will be incorporating more grief tending into my work, because this the first step to softening the barriers we make around our heart, in order to practice intimacy with reality in times of overwhelm. Which is all I ever strive for in this work. To practice intimacy with reality, both within and without.

With love, and for the rebellion,

Rikke