In the aftermath of cyclone Gabrielle, I’m hearing reports of 10,000 landslips in just the Auckland region alone. A small but significant one of these was on my property. This, in addition to the thousands of reports of flooding, destruction and devastation the cyclone has left in its wake. It’s mind-boggling and overwhelming to take this in, and I’m aware that it’s not even a fraction of what’s being experienced in Turkey and Syria after the earthquakes in their region.
It leaves me wondering, how do we find solid ground when even the ground beneath our feet is not stable?
As a trauma therapist I work a lot with the concept of grounding as way to settle and soothe the nervous system. This is the practice of finding solidity and stability in the contact our body makes with the ground beneath our feet and the surfaces our body is resting upon. It’s been a hugely helpful tool for both myself and my clients, often enabling a tangible shift into the ventral vagal branch of the parasympathetic nervous system (our calm, connected, healing state). However, in working alongside survivors of the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes and now in the midst of the recent cyclone, I often find myself contemplating where we go to find this solidity when even the ground is shifting, shaking and crumbling beneath us?
At the end of this deeply unsettling week of chaos and natural disaster, I found myself sitting in a 4 day meditation retreat. The timing was perfect to observe at first hand the effects of the preceding days on my mind, body, nervous system and spirit. Although I ostensibly felt ‘fine’, having survived the worst of it with my home and loved ones intact, what I noticed was a profound unsettledness in the core of my being. Nerves rattled, thoughts raced and old memories were shaken loose. The echoes of fear and unsafety permeated my meditation practice, leaving me restless, twitchy and tense. And I faced into an existential question of what to hold onto when you realise that nothing is really permanent and stable on this earthly plane. This reality is a huge challenge to the human mind with its love of planning, predicting, order and control. On a grand scale, really very little is under our control.
Like a guardian angel appearing just at the right moment, my meditation teacher for that weekend was the amazing Stephanie Lopez from the iRest Institute. She held a steady loving space for my vulnerabilities to be felt and acknowledged, and guided me back towards something bigger than our daily human experiences, something all-encompassing and universal, something spiritual. Her wise words pointed towards our essential nature, the backdrop to experience that is stable and unchanging, that has been with us from the moment of our first breath to the moment of our last (and perhaps beyond, depending on your belief system). Different traditions point towards it in different ways, including thinking of it as our essential nature, Buddha nature, prana, life-force, spirit, witnessing presence, or as the divine. It’s the field of awareness in which everything else rises and falls away. It’s always there, always unchanging and always untouched by what is unfolding. It’s like the backdrop of sky that can hold any of the weather systems that happen to be moving through. It can be hard to grasp through words alone but there’s a felt sense, an inner knowing that we can sometimes sense glimpses of through practices like meditation. It becomes obscured as the mind fuses with the everyday experiences of thinking, feeling and living, but nothing can ultimately take it away.
As I progressively rested back into that awareness over the course of 4 days, there was a relief and peace that began to unfold. A sense of ‘Ah, here it is’, a sense of home ground, of something I can trust and return to, something that will never let me down. People, places, events in our lives all come and go, but this remains steady and consistent throughout.
Some things in life are just too hard for the small human mind to grasp and make sense of. In these moments I’m reminded to reach for something bigger, something that transcends the cognitive and can hold all of our experience. I think of this as spirit. I think of this as home. Whether you know it or not, whether you practice meditation or not, it is always there and it’s closer than you think.