Begin Again

The doorway that never closes

You can always begin again.
With anything, in any moment you choose.
What has already happened has happened, yes, but you can re-author your approach to any situation with one conscious pause.

The day that starts badly, the argument that falls into its familiar loop, the low mood you immediately pull away from. One micro shift and the entire experience has the potential to unfold differently. The locus of that shift is you.

Instead of resisting the sadness you didn’t expect, you clock your judgement, and at the same time you lie down, fold a blanket around your body, and give your tender heart full permission. Instead of waiting for your partner to totally understand your point of view and apologise, you notice your desire to be right and you choose to listen. Like completely listen to that other human being and appreciate their world, for just enough time to diffuse the battle within. That’s not capitulating, it’s stepping into a realm outside the dominance of thought and opinion.

Every present moment is a doorway to that realm, and it’s wide open. All the time.
The thing that gets in the way of the ever-present doorway is thinking, maybe better described as thoughting. All the things (based on past experience and knowledge) we think we know about what’s going on, and our idea of how things, or we, should be, which is of course nothing to do with what is actually unfolding in front of us. As Dorothy Hunt wrote, ‘Listening to our whole being now is not the same as remembering then’.

For the rest of our lives we have to begin again. Over and over. Because we’re flawed human beings and we get things wrong. Our emotions cloud our thinking, and our thinking clouds our awareness (anyone else?). We can’t depend on our thoughts, or our feelings, because they come and go like the weather. What was here last week, seems like a strangely distant version of the self we were convinced we would be forever (exhausted, lost, blessed, depressed). None of it stays the same.

Beginning again is a kind of trust in who we are, beyond what we say or do, which is the flawed human bit. Trusting in who we are is leaning back into something bigger than our ‘small’ selves. Think of it like this: your mind is talking to itself within a space that isn’t talking. You’re both the small, flawed human mind and the big open space.

Can you feel that?

That space that isn’t talking is like the sky, and each time we move into it, we connect energetically with all the times in the past we’ve found a way to show up, beyond the noise of right and wrong, and begin again. That’s the paradigm of trust.

I seem to be finding my way back home these days through the pathway of meditation. Let’s notice that as soon as I say the word meditation, there’s a box. There’s an already-knowing about sitting still with your eyes closed. And I wonder if we can let the word signify something broader: the act of intentionally pausing. Pausing to listen, observe, and stand beyond our attachment to the automatic, repetitive, concluding mind.

We can meditate on life any time we want, staring out at the trees, damp grass beneath our feet. We can meditate on who we are, in dialogue, held by an elder. We can meditate on love, sitting quietly, watching our child play. I meditate daily on the marvel of being alive through the practice of Chi Kung. And I also sit every morning to formally meditate: to watch my breath, and remember the possibility of beginning again each time my thoughts take me away.

When our thoughts do take the lead, it’s not that they’re bad or wrong — it’s our attachment to meaning-making (aka control) that closes the door on trust. Which brings me back to thoughting: that constant referencing of the map we’ve built of the world, full of collective (and limiting) agreements around money, gender, power, identity, beauty, borders and who and how we’re supposed to be.

A map is a useful thing. But can we remember that the map is not the territory? And can we also see that when we find ways to pause and stop, we naturally create the opportunity to begin again?

I’m off Instagram. Very intentionally, maybe for the next month, maybe more. I’m sure there are universal reasons we all struggle with these platforms: the artifice and performance, the frenetic pace, the empty dopamine hit. But there was something specific going on for me, which was the illusion of community it was giving me. As illusory as thought. It kept giving me the virtual experience of building something and being connected to others, and then in the quiet of my everyday life, I realised there was very little there, and that I want more.

I want to be in life. Not theorising about it, filming it or commenting on it, but right in it.
An experiment. Without any right or wrong.
It’s the practice of beginning again.

Last year I was sitting in front of the fire towards the end of a psilocybin ceremony. I sat there waiting for some magical insight to arrive. Waiting to understand. And I realised there was nothing to understand. There was only the humble stopping. Which was creating an experience of embodied present moment awareness in me; a completely different place to conceptual knowing or understanding.

And then I found myself speaking these words before I had even thought them:

Thank you, Grandfather Fire,
for bringing me the lesson
to not know,
and to listen.

If you’d like to stay in touch, you can join my occasional newsletter, Drift Space, where I share Chi Kung class dates, upcoming retreats, and ways into deeper work.

♡

I am a UKCP-registered Psychotherapist, Group Analyst, BodyMind Maturation Guide, and Elemental Chi Kung Teacher exploring non-dual wisdom, the intelligence of dreams, altered states and the relational field of human experience.