Being relaxed applies to many things for me, but especially to sight and touch. I am learning the pleasure of a relaxed gaze. It is not a calm gaze. It is not a gaze that gathers all the nuances, texture, color and shape of something like a chair. A relaxed gaze is one that settles into and absorbs whatever I am seeing.
A relaxed gaze brings the Niagara Falls effect to whatever I am looking at. I am so totally connected to what I see that there no longer is a separation between us. It is the same for touch. The touch, the gaze could be only of the pen in my hand, the keys under my fingertips. There is no distinct separation. My body extends out and absorbs what I see, what I touch.
While I feel the pen or the keyboard keys through my fingers, I am aware of it with my whole body. Perhaps, it is more accurate to say with my whole heart, because my heart extends to the full margins of my body. My heart is where I actually see and where I actually feel, not my eyes or fingers.
My awareness often begins as the action of an observer. It begins when I notice the shape, the color, the firmness, the temperature …… all the attributes of sight and touch. When I relax into the experience, I have more than the awareness of a round writing tube in my hand or hard keys under my fingertips. What I touch or see has a willingness to share its essence, and I experience that essence when I relax. I’ve noticed that I also know what to do.
Yesterday, I experienced frustration when I was attempting to hang lights on a tree in my garden. The lights seemed to resist getting untangled. They stubbornly kept getting stuck on branches. My first notion was to pull harder and force them apart. Instead, I simply relaxed, looked at the situation, and slowly untangled, released the string of lights.
I was able to get involved in the tangled lights in a deeper manner than simply experiencing their tangled-ness. I didn’t actually do anything, like stop acting impulsively. I simply relaxed and observed what is, and the rest happened naturally. I became intimately aware that yanking the tangled lights was likely to fail and would likely cause damage. I knew instantly that I could not force, control the lights to untangle without the chance of damage. It actually was easy once I relaxed.
This was not a thought-out conclusion and controlled action. It was not a resistance to the impulse to yank. It was a deep observation I felt with my whole body, and my whole body relaxed into the appropriate solution. After doing this a couple of times, I simply fell into the pattern of relaxing and untangling.
My body doesn’t always respond in such a calm manner. Probably because I am sometimes not so skilled in absorbing the whole situation. In a paradoxical manner, the relaxation that I feel through my body sometimes releases a deluge of energy. This relaxed, total absorption of the situation often has the effect of tapping an energy that flows into a surge of action. I feel the action with my whole heart / body.
This energy flow didn’t seem to be much of a problem when I was more “in control” and when it was weaker. Because I can relax readily, the energy flows readily as well. I’m trusting that as I become more skilled in my ability to observe, the energy may be expressed in appropriate ways. For now, it seems more like an enthusiastic, energetic puppy at times.
When I relax, I know I am surrendering control and the tightness of control. I also know that tightness is an indicator of suffering. I am committed to rid my life of suffering as much as I can. To do that, I am learning to relax, to abandon my attempt to control. I settle into whatever there is. I accept it as it is. I relax.