As we move to a new stage of the global pandemic, I’m noticing a pull toward rushing into everything I’ve missed in the past 14 months AND a fear that we will move too quickly. Simultaneously, as I’m healing the broken bones in my foot, I both want to get dancing and hiking and swimming in the river as soon as possibly possible AND I want to give my body the time it needs to heal fully. In both cases, the pandemic and my healing, there is no time to rush.

This is a post I wrote two years ago about this topic.

I had a dream that I died. Or that I was about to die. I had gotten some kind of diagnosis and (true to my food-centric, vegetarian form) the plan was to eat my lunch salad, then take a pill that would end my life.

This might sound like a bummer of a dream but it wasn’t. First, I was overjoyed to wake up. Then I was intensely aware of the unspeakable sweetness of living…and of its impermanence.

Since The Dream, I’ve been renegotiating my relationship to time. I’ve been paying attention to when I rush through, scrabble over, gobble up my life. I’m doing my best to slow down, savor more, embody presence.

Sometimes it goes better than others.

Imagine going on a yoga or a meditation retreat for a week. You learn new thing and you feel amazing when you do them. But when you get home, you don’t do them. Not even once. I’ve done that lots of times. You? One perspective on what might seem like illogical behavior can be found in the Four Stages of Competence.

In these situations, we may learn some things and have some insights, but we haven’t practiced them enough to embody them, so we go back to old habits (moving from Stage 1, Unconscious Incompetence, to Stage 2, Conscious Incompetence). Learning is important but it isn’t enough to change us. Change and mastery happen in a cycle: Learn, Practice and Embody (and repeat!).

This week at The Age of Becoming, our practice is focused around a quote from Aikido Instructor, George Leonard. He says, in part:

"‘How long will it take me to master Aikido?’ a prospective student asks. ‘How long do you expect to live?’ is the only respectable response. Ultimately, practice is the path of mastery. …At the heart of it, mastery is practice. Mastery is staying on the path."

This notion connects directly to the philosophy/practice of Beginner’s Mind and my own experience of being a teacher and student: something I first wrote about nearly a decade ago.

“In the beginner’s mind there are many; in the expert’s mind there are few.” — Shunryu Suzuki (see original lecture)

In 2006, when I was preparing to go to the Nia Black Belt training (at the time, the highest level of teacher training in Nia), I went to a martial arts demonstration led by a Black Belt Kendo Master. At the beginning of the demonstration, he asked, “What does being a Black Belt mean?”

We are changing all the time. And this can be unnerving and inconvenient and amazing all at once. And not just for you. When you change, the people around you might be invested in you staying the same. Especially as in mid-life when roles are changing in big ways, we can grasp on to the way things are/were just to feel some stability.

Which brings me to these stunning words from poet, Diane Ackerman:

Living things tend to change unrecognizably as they grow. Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? Flora or fauna, we are all shapeshifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.

And here’s the thing: that caravan of selves is not a neat and orderly parade. It is messy, melty, metamorphosis.

In April, our practice will focus on the ever-changing, transformation of constantly becoming. We can get caught in the illusion of a solid, unchanging self when actually we are always turning toward something new.

This speaks to the transformational shape and flow of spirals: in nature, in our bodies and in our lives.