Читать книгу Tamed By a Bear - Priscilla Stuckey - Страница 15

9

As I listened to Bear’s voice, my own voice began to shift—growing lighter during each session, a shift plainly audible over the course of each recording. Many mornings I woke up too early, at three or four, feeling jangled, trying hard to restore some sense of peace and fall asleep again. Sometimes it worked, but often it didn’t, leaving my voice at the start of a Journey later that morning still sounding heavy, questing. Yet without fail, after only ten or twenty minutes of chatting with Bear I would lighten up, my voice easier, more amused. Bear, I discovered, was nudging me toward a more cheerful frame of mind.

It took only a few weeks for Tim to start commenting on the change. “You seem happier,” he said. He was right. Though the prospect of moving was staring us in the face, and though Tim was still deep in the throes of career change and I was bringing in practically no money so that family finances looked worse than terrible, and though I had no idea where this Journey practice was heading and no clue how I might be able to earn a living—or when—my outlook was indeed becoming more cheerful. How could it not? I was hanging out with a perpetually cheerful Bear who seemed to think that the purpose of life is to enjoy it. Under Bear’s influence, I was beginning to enjoy it more too.

Buoyed by the changes I could feel happening within, I looked forward to my almost-daily time with Bear. That sense of communion, that feeling of Bear like a warm cloak around my shoulders—every time I returned to it helped me nestle a little more firmly within its sanctuary.

However, just because I was receiving a sense of warm support from communing with Bear, a feeling that I was hearing and being heard, doesn’t mean that the Journeys flowed naturally from the start. Much of the time in those early weeks I felt that I was taking lessons in a foreign language, trying to shape my mouth around an awkward “Hello! . . . How . . . er . . . are . . . you?”

One day I noticed that a Journey flowed more easily if I kept my attention a little lighter, like floating across the top of a river’s currents instead of staring hard into the water, studying each eddy, trying to figure out where to navigate next. The habit of watching the river a little too closely only yielded a ponderous, slow conversation. Slipping into that heavy mental focus seemed to be one of the ways in which, as Chris liked to say, “we get our own fingers in the mix.” The mind begins to think it has to work hard, and instantly the magic is gone; one no longer feels buoyed up by friendly forces. If I started to work too hard, it was likely a signal that my own mind, not my Helper, had begun to direct the flow. Giving my Helper a freer rein meant bringing a lighthearted, even playful, spirit to the process—a spirit of trust, a spirit of fun. Journeys were meant to be enjoyable, to feed the soul.

But at the same time, skimming across the surface of a river of pretty thoughts or concepts was not flowing with the Helper either. It was a mind sailing away on a frothy feeling and losing all connection to the heart. I had to stay simpler than that.

“No fancy thinking,” Bear said. “Following one of those tempting, beautiful trails can get in the way of simplicity.” The best thing to do, if I felt myself about to spin away on a gorgeous thought, was to pause and breathe, to come back to the body, back to the heart. To focus again on my Helper. “It doesn’t take fancy mental dance moves,” Bear said. “More simple, more love. Which is also more open.”

That’s why, Bear explained, coming back to the body is always a good thing to do. “Compassion for the body and for the material world is a sure foundation,” he said. Was I trying to ignore the body, or was I opening fully, with love, to all its physical weaknesses? “Accepting what is in each moment—that is the greatest simplicity,” Bear said. “It’s a good way to check,” he added, “that one is seeing clearly.”

Trying to master the grammar of this new language, hoping to become fluent, I practiced keeping my attention focused yet open and light, in that Goldilocks place of “just right.”