Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 34

I toss and turn all night because it’s clear I’ve seriously injured my back. There wasn’t a specific moment where I felt it go, just a slow creeping sense that things weren’t OK back there. Now that I’ve stopped to rest it’s screaming out for my attention.

The last time I hurt my back this badly was at the climbing gym in San Francisco in my early 30s. I was high up the wall about to make a particularly difficult move onto an overhang.

While pinning the toe of your right foot to the lower wall you simultaneously have to step up with the left foot onto the higher wall, which is bulging out above you like an oversized, upside-down step.

Then you have to reach up with your left arm and swing your pelvis from right to left as you shift all your weight onto the left foot, at the same time releasing your right hand from a hold on the underside of the overhang and reaching up as high as you can to hook into a hold at least 10 feet above where you are currently hanging.  

I successfully make the move but not without something in my back going ping. I notice it but am too full of adrenaline and dopamine to pay it much notice. I keep climbing.

By the time I get home I’m so stiff I can’t carry my bike up the stairs into my apartment. By bed time I can’t walk.

The next day I go to see my chiropractor, a scatty 60-something year old woman who treats your body with the no nonsense, let’s-get-you-sorted-out attitude of a car mechanic.  I don’t mind because she’s really good at her job.

She prods, pokes, and rubs me down for about 45 minutes before telling me that for the next 24 hours I need to keep alternating between hot and cold.

I remember what the chiropractor told me all those years ago while tossing and turning. At 3am I can’t take it anymore. My partner is also awake. I tell them what the chiropractor said and they offer to get me a hot water bottle and a cold pack from the freezer.

It’s amazing, the human body’s capacity to heal. And just as amazing human beings’ understanding of how to help. Heat relaxes the muscles, relieving tension and easing pain. Cold lowers the bodies temperature, constricting the blood vessels and reducing inflammation.

As I lay awake for the next two hours, swapping between 10 mins of cold and 20 mins of hot, it occurs to me that in meditation the mind works in a similar way as the body.

In order to see clearly the habits at play that keep us locked in cycles of suffering, we need both “heat” – love, warmth, gentleness, tenderness, ease, relaxation and relief – and “cold” – slowing everything down so we can take a closer look and put a stop to the “inflammation”, i.e., where we’ve gotten caught up in afflictive thoughts and emotions.

I am reminded of one of my favourite metaphors I often use when teaching meditation. It’s as if we’re all sea anemones. When we are feeling safe and warm, at east and relaxed, we are completely open, happily swaying in the nutrient rich tide warmed by the sun.

But when we feel threatened, we tighten right up, our tendrils closing in around our soft centre. This is how we go through life, opening and closing, opening and closing, liking and not liking and creating a whole suffering self out of it.

Alternating between hot and cold gives our system what it needs so we can learn how to gently open and stay open, allowing life to simply flow through us. We ease into this way of being slowly over time, sometimes applying effort, and sometimes resting back in the fruits of that effort. Until one day effort and fruit become one.

I fall back to sleep with this contemplation deep in my bones.

I wake up feeling much better, although still a bit sore. I spend the morning writing and the afternoon on Zoom for a couple of hours with other Dharma teachers. We are sharing our experiences of teaching online.

We are discussing the benefits and challenges of live streaming a talk vs. leading a class on Zoom. I realise I much prefer Zoom. I’ve always preferred being with people in process and find it difficult to imagine simply talking into a camera.

I catch my judgmental mind wanting to step in and tell me a story about how my way is better. I have to remind myself that there are different learning and teaching styles and that some people learn through listening.

And yet, for me, I much prefer smaller groups, intimate connection, working through issues together, holding questions in practice. Even on Zoom the crackle of connection can be poignant. I relish those moments where something opens up for someone and is witnessed by others, changing them too.

I decide its ok to have my own preferences and be clear about what I have to offer. Let others broadcast their hour-long talks. I am going to continue to meet with small groups on Zoom, guide practices, and get curious alongside others. There’s room for all of it.

It only occurs to me after the call that perhaps teaching is also a bit like alternating between hot and cold. Sometimes we have to keep things warm, intimate, relaxed. Other times it’s appropriate to slow things down long enough to give people something to focus on, other than their habitual, ruminating thoughts, and in the process offer a helpful alternative.

It’s not lost on me that part of why I am so averse to giving long talks is I know I could do it and probably do it well, but it wouldn’t serve me as a practitioner.

In fact, it would probably only serve to boost my ego in some way. I’d rather stay soft and open with my students. Sharing my own story, fears and vulnerabilities with them, while also holding and bearing witness to theirs.

I often joke that my teaching keeps me honest, I have to practice what I preach.

I can’t hide who I am when I’m teaching. When I’m encouraging people to turn towards the most difficult aspects of their experience, I too have to be willing to do the work.

After dinner we watch the first episode of the third season of Killing Eve. It occurs to me that Villanelle is hot, and Eve is cold. I can’t take my eyes off Villanelle, there is something about her that is captivating, enticing, mysterious, dangerous.

But I also can’t get enough of Eve. I’m desperate for her to resolve her alienation from herself, her life, her husband, her job.

The show wouldn’t work if it was only about one of them. Together, they make it the brilliant bit of television it is. In life, as in fiction, we all need a little bit of both, hot and cold.