The Physicality of Trust and Letting Go Spiritual Instruction Module by Cynthia Winton-Henry

The Physics of Trust Trust is not ControlMystical Trust is Still PhysicalTrust InitiationsThe Primo Trust Practice: Learning to Fall

Big Body Hope Poem

I know what it is to be seen and to be unseen.I know what it is to be there and not there.

I know what it is to long for Sunlight.To be watered from above And below

I know what it is to feel life arising. I know what it is to feel the sunlightand to stand in the rain that makes me grow. I know what it is to bloom where I’m planted. I know what it is to scatter the seeds.

I’m here. And you are here. And we are here. And I see you.

Susan Pudelek

The Physics of Trust

Trust and letting go are partners in a dance. It is difficult to “let” anything happen when I don’t feel trusting. And, it is difficult to feel trust if I can’t let go of control.

I am grateful for mystic experiences of Great Love that elevate my sense of divine support and allow me to trust and let go! On the other hand, as love of life increases I naturally fear losing what I love. Then, Divine Love oddly opens me to suffer human loss, physical duress, and the sorrow of compassion. As I learn to lovingly create and suffer, I humbly learn that trusting and letting go are in an ongoing dance and that I’m held through it all. I’ve learned that this approach to life feels better than suffering on my own and going crazy.

I find improvisation to be the best practice for learning the physics of trust. In contact dances, lifting and being lifted by partners, I must manage my own center of gravity, landings and safety. So do my partners. Before I saw this physically exaggerated, I assumed that safety had to do with reliance on others. Now I know that trust is in me and that it is up to me to listen to my own body wisdom. This is why I teach,

“Everyone gets to take care of their own body.”

Trust requires that I honor reality for what it is, submit to reality, and learn two keys to trustworthiness: consistency and competence. Their presence is what allows me to say, “I trust you” or “I trust that.”

To trust basic reality it helps to slow down and notice conditions that support consistent, competent trustworthiness, conditions that are so easy to overlook.

1.Breath: To exhale is to let go. My body trusts and lets go every moment. Exhaling, I thank the reliability of breath. I AM my breath.

2.Ground: The earth is supportive. I drop my weight into the earth and enjoy its firm support. I Am grounded.

3.Pulse: My heartbeat is steady. I connect to it and play in its ongoing rhythm. I am my steady heart.

4. Shake. After gripping from fear, I tighten and release muscles, shake out, open and close hands, arms, legs, and chest. This assists my mind and heart to follow.

5. Play with art or skill:–move, vocalize, tell, and hang in there as I develop an embodied grasp of the dynamics of life. –Create fun, beauty, humor, and joy to make it easier to “let go.” –––physically learn about time, space, energy, effort, limitation, and freedom to increase competency and confidence to engage life. –––Practice builds mastery and allows me to play and be played by art, the greatest joy of all in letting go.

6. Change. Change. ChangeI remember the 1989 earthquake, (the same year InterPlay started) The Earth reminded me that consistency and competence can show up in more than one way. I had to shift my understanding of reality to include the shaking of the earth as part of reality.

Trust is not control

As a young person I felt quite powerless. It was difficult to be consistent, competent and good. Not knowing how to let go, I began to develop control muscles and mannerisms. Fortunately, at church I learned about prayer, spiritual life and that self control and controlling others is not the only path. Parents, teachers and higher powers helped me develop an ability to think, be moral, and rely on others by incorporating the ideal of a higher shared power. Even American money carries the adage, “In God We Trust,” suggesting that to let go of money is an act of trusting God.

With time and practice my own higher functions kicked in. I learned to self-sooth, self-regulate and sometimes transcend my survival instincts. While it’s still hard to trust uncomfortable truths maturity challenges me to accept reality as reality, humans as humans, nature as nature and all of life as unpredictable.

Moving through this wisdom initiation I open even more to suffering

and joy, shifting from resisting feelings to creatively engaging life through compassion, mercy, and forgiveness. As I dance with change and finitude I notice what is most reliable. This shows me a way to deepen my allegiance to life’s enduring realities.

Mystical Trust is Still Physical

Someone said, “Mysticism is the highest reach for wisdom” A mystic’s trust relies on a will and a power greater than one’s own. In the Biology of Transcendence author Joseph Chilton Pearce recalls working on his book, The Magical Child. He wondered why nature would build into children a “compulsion to play” while adults teach them about learning to survive. One night,

“I leaned back, exhausted, my enthusiasm spent and nothing accomplished. In the most genuine and spontaneous prayer of my life I called out, “Oh God, what is the purpose of play in our life?”

With no warning, a wave of energy swept my body from my feet up and I found myself physically propelled at tremendous speed into an infinite black space slowly populated by a universe of unending stars and galaxies. I was tossed again and again, gently and playfully in an exhilarating but helpless fashion, much like a juggler tosses a ball or a father his child, from one end of this vastness to the other in joyful exhilaration. This ecstatic experience went on and on and I found myself shouting out, over and over, “God is playing with me!” After what seemed an endless time the event slowly wound down, the starry space dissipated, and my room formed around me. I wept for a long while afterward from sheer gratitude, awe and wonder over such a gift. From that point on, however, I knew that play was the whole reason and essence of life__ not just for children, but for all of God’s children, whatever their age; and I understood that our great model’s observation that we must become again as little children meant precisely what it said.” (P181)

Mysticism nurtures trust and letting go. I agree with Caitlin Matthews who said that “The common mundane nature of mystical experience is one of the best kept secrets; its neglect and cover-up has given us a

society in which we have no framework for speaking about our mystical perceptions–be it a sudden impulse or synchronicity, the urge to write a poem or song, or a vision of immense beauty.” (P.33 Singing the Soul Back Home).

Mystic confidence grows from our simplest appreciations. Play and contemplation are key. As Mary Oliver describes in her poem Praying,

It doesn’t have to beThe blue iris, it could be Weeds in a vacant lot, or a fewSmall stones; justPay attention, then patchA few words together and don’t try To make them elaborate, this isn’t A context but the doorwayInto thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak

Trust Initiations

“You are an out pressing of eternal existence, of God. When this astonishing realization registers, it becomes at that moment a dance in your spirit...The simplest experience you've ever known, and at the same

time the least specific.” George Fowler, Learning to Dance Inside

Learning and continuing to trust enough to let go requires courage. Thank goodness for prayer, meditation, song, and dance: actions that create oxytocin, the trust molecule. (See article, The Trust Molecule),

What practices help you let go and let God?

• Trusting who and what I AM evolves from knowing who I am not and listening to my own wisdom. I am initiated through circumstance, challenge, and discoveries that I am not someone else. Nor am I perfect, super-powerful, or a total wreck. If I can know that I AM loved, sync up with what my body wants and knows, and determine what I can and cannot tolerate I begin to discover who I am.

Do you claim who you are emotionally, physically, intellectually, vocationally, culturally, sexually, spiritually, and even economically? Can you let go of each incarnational reality when its time to change?

• I name that I AM in integrity with all of creation. I unite with myself in love and strengthen my I Am-ness in brief meditations while dancing, singing, making art, being in nature, and prayer.

In one meditation I was shown the seat of I AM awareness. It rests behind my vision and below my crown (see image). When I AM in this place I open a spacious feeling of unconditional neutral regard, which I can extend to my heart, guts, above my head, my feet, and through my open arms.

I honor the water, air, fire, and earth in my movement meditation and by making altars to claim Divine love and power in me and in all of things.

What are your physical I AM practices?

• I claim that I AM Powerless and Powerful. It is easy to forget that something greater is in charge. Letting go into Life is both ordinary and adventurous. Finding the right mix of using our gifts, survival

instincts, gut wisdom and drive alongside letting go can feel like waiting, being moved, led, and literally including something greater.

I open to divine guidance even when it isn’t offered. Mother Teresa who when a reporter asked her, “Mother when you pray, what do you say?’ said, “Oh I don’t say anything. I just listen,” When the reporter asked, “What does God say?” Mother Teresa smiled and said, “He doesn’t say anything. He just listens.

I say the serenity prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Physical gestures like handing over, kneeling, and prostration increase my ability to remember to let go and give over.

I practice ecstatic movement and song to experience the joy of letting go as a free and natural state that generates energy. When I do this with others in InterPlay I trust others more.

• I experience and claim that I AM in relation! I seek and find playmates and teachers who confirm my interior, mysterious journey, who remind me that I do not have to do things on my own. I AM not alone. I AM supported.

InterPlay provides me with affirming mystical playmates, all experimenting with what each body wants and how to create what we want together.

• I play with natural resistances to suffering and a tendency to control life through honest humor, altar-making, prayer, ritual, and compassionate words and actions.

• I keep my “letting go” muscles warm byusing easy focus to open my view and my body. opening my hands and softening to my feelings. welcoming laughter, tears, yawns and sighs. apologizing and making amends when I err. expecting and including failure, even though I don’t like it.

shifting my behavior when I overthink or want to perfect everything. improvising. shaking out any method that becomes another form of control.

The Primo Trust Practice: Learning to Fall

In Dance A Sacred Art: Discovering the Joy of Movement As Spiritual Practice, I suggest “Falling for Liberation” to release control and let go.

...Fearful of making a mistake, tired of hanging onto something (or someone) too tightly, maybe it’s time to play with a little falling. Maybe it’s time to let yourself feel the liberation of letting go of upright rigidity and allow gravity to bring you home. Perhaps its time to stop trying so hard to be “graceful” and let yourself just be yourself.

1. Find a “friendly” floor, soft couch, or bed. Seated, gently fall in different ways, slowly, to the side, to the back, using your arms in different ways. (Do this exercise where you will be safe. You don’t want to add to your fear of falling!)

2. Having fallen, lie on the floor, couch, or bed for a minute, noticing how it holds you. Notice what it’s like to get up, to rise again.

3. You may want to try falling from higher up. Go to your knees. Fall, and get up.

4. Now put on music and practice falling, resting, rising to honor— instead of trying to resist—gravity.

5. Perhaps you want to stay close to the floor rather than falling again and again from a higher position. If this is the case, use the floor as your base. As you lie down, push yourself up, spin, suspend, and relax again. Using the support of the floor, pretend to fly. This can be one of the best workouts of your day, but it can also be a spiritual exercise.

6. Reflect for a few minutes, or write in your journal about sensations while falling and rising. How do these small “recoveries” compare to getting over other difficulties? If you can get up in your body, perhaps you can get up from your hardships, too. Can you imagine God supporting you at each part of your rising and falling?

At some point letting go just happens. Like death it comes. Perhaps this is what Ernest Holmes invoked in writing “She Let Go.”

She let go. Without a thought or a word, she let go. She let go of the fear. She let go of the judgments. She let go of the confluence of opinions swarming around her head. She let go of the committee of indecision within her. She let go of all the ‘right’ reasons. Wholly and completely, without hesitation or worry, she just let go.

She didn’t ask anyone for advice. She didn’t read a book on how to let go. She didn’t search the scriptures. She just let go. She let go of all of the memories that held her back. She let go of all of the anxiety that kept her from moving forward. She let go of the planning and all of the calculations about how to do it just right. She didn’t promise to let go. She didn’t journal about it. She made no public announcement, and put no ad in the paper. She didn’t check the weather report, or read her daily horoscope.

She just let go.

She didn’t analyze whether she should let go. She didn’t call her friends to discuss the matter. She didn’t do a five-step Spiritual Mind Treatment. She didn’t call the prayer line. She didn’t utter one word.

She just let go.

No one was around when it happened. There was no applause or congratulations. No one thanked her or praised her. No one noticed a thing.

Like a leaf falling from a tree, she just let go. There was no effort. There was no struggle. It wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad. It was what

it was, and it is just that.

In the space of letting go, she let it all be. A light breeze blew through her, and the sun and the moon shone as always.

I wish letting go were always easy. I know that when I turn my attention to love God, and dance, sing, and pray then trust and letting go

are present. (Or Oxytocin, the O in God)

When I physically trust that I AM and We ARE directly connected to the Divine, I relax into God’s intimate presence and feel care for each and every being and all the elements.

I take a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. When I can’t let go and let God have her way with me as Alison Luterman's poem suggests.

Entering your body as softly as a tribesman enters the rainforest, tracking

the elusive wild animalof your spirit, quiet

as dawn.

Here.

Turnover, let me lie on you, a warm cloud

in the sunny middleof the afternoon, middle of our lives...

Lie here now,while the rose of yourself

opens

Nowwhile some old star that governed my fate

burns out

Nowinside this thimbleful of tenderness

while the towers fall

again and again and again