Practical Wisdom: What Lives Beneath It All

I'm writing from Oregon on a beautiful spring day. More specifically, from a regenerative farm in Yamhill County called The Ground. I’m in residence here for the next few months designing and implementing a retreat program that I hope some of you will enjoy personally.  

The landscape here is beautiful, rolling hills and warm mornings, and air that smells like flowers I can’t name. I live in a house that celebrates sunrise on one side and sunset on the other.  In between, the day is filled with birdsong and beautiful, warm-hearted people. It all inspires awe, in the truest sense of the word. I feel remarkably grateful.

At the same time, Mark hasn't arrived yet. I’m here alone. My family and the friends who know me best are elsewhere. It’s been a chore to find the right grocery store, the gas station with the best price, and the post office to mail Mother’s Day cards.

Amidst all the good – and there is SO much good - I’m a little unmoored.

This is the kind of disconnection that happens when you've removed yourself from the familiar scaffolding of daily life and suddenly notice how much of your sense of self was resting on it. The morning routines. The voices you expect to hear. The geography that knows you as well as you know it. When those fall away, even temporarily, something gets exposed. It's useful, actually, to feel that exposure. But it isn't always comfortable.

The paradox I’m experiencing has resulted in my thinking a lot about trees.

A tree in full growth is doing two things at once. Above the soil, it's reaching, leafing out, making itself known in the light. Beneath it, it's anchoring, sending roots deeper and wider, negotiating with the soil for minerals and water, talking in chemical signals to the network of fungi and root systems around it. The visible part gets most of our attention. The invisible part is what makes the visible part possible. What most of us don't know, and what I find myself turning over again and again, is how much activity happens beneath the surface that we never witness and wouldn't recognize even if we could.

Life is like this too. The soul has a root system. It reaches into our lineage, into the people who carried us before we even truly arrived, into the stories and prayers and griefs and songs that our ancestors held.

We usually only think of ancestors during the dark season, but our ancestors have a place in every aspect of life. They hold an accumulated wisdom that lives in the body and, when brought forward, can root us deep and wide so we can grow in new ways.

We don't talk about this enough. We tend to focus on the branches, on what we're building and creating and putting out into the world. But the branches hold only because the roots do. Trees with shallow roots fall easily.

Here is what I've been practicing when the unfamiliarity of this place presses in: I breathe into my dan tien to strengthen my roots.

The dan tien is a concept from Chinese medicine and martial arts, the energetic center located roughly two inches below the navel and two inches inward. Think of it as a basin, a reservoir that sits at the physical and energetic core of you. The pelvic bowl. It’s a place where energy settles. When we're anxious or scattered, our energy rides high in the body, up in the chest, throat and head. When we breathe consciously into the dan tien, we bring ourselves back down into our own center of gravity.

It's a simple practice and a radical one. Inhale slowly, letting the body breath as deep as it wants to and letting the breath drop all the way down past your chest, past your navel, into the pelvic bowl. Hold for just a moment if you like. Exhale in a long easy way.

Repeat this breath and focus combination until you feel the weight of yourself, the fact of yourself, the simple animal reality of being a body on the earth. You don't have to be anywhere else. You don't have to be anyone else. You’re here, rooted in the center of your own life.

This is what I mean when I talk about the roots and branches of a life. The roots aren't romantic. They're practical. They're the practices, people and ancestral connections that keep you fed and stable when the branches are reaching into unfamiliar air. They're the reason you can be in a new place, doing new work, waiting for the people you love to arrive, and still find yourself intact.

I've been calling on my ancestors here in Oregon. That might sound strange if it's not your practice, but it’s a very old and ordinary thing. I get quiet, I breathe into my center, and I let myself feel the invisible company, the women who came before me who were also far from home, also building something, also waiting. They know something about this. I don't have to explain it to them. I just let their presence be a kind of ballast.

I've also been letting this land speak to me. It has its own ancestral aliveness. One of the gifts of a regenerative farm is that the people here live in concert and connection with the land. They’re in conversation with the life in, on and under the soil. When I walk the property, I slow down and let myself enter the conversation. Not with words, but with attention. With the willingness to be known by this place, rather than just knowing it. That's a different posture. It's slower.

What I'm learning, again, is that stability isn't a feeling. It's a practice. You don't wait to feel rooted. You root yourself.  You breathe into your center. You call on what has carried you. You stand still long enough to let the ground beneath you become familiar. And slowly, the branches find their reach.

Wherever you are right now, whether you're in a strange new place or a familiar one that has recently felt foreign, breathe down. Fill the basin in the belly with your breath and your awareness. Let your roots grow longer, deeper, and wider so you can be more present.

Keep awareness on your roots as you stretch out your branches. Let this happen in the body rather than the mind.  Your body has so much more wisdom. The mind sometimes gets in the way of the body’s intellect.  Make space for the ancestors to support you. 

They are waiting, down in the soil of your life.

With love from Oregon,

Ahriana