Yielding to change: What happens when we stop trying so hard

Cats, the ultimate teachers in taking it easy.

Have we been programmed to miss (take) ease out of mental exhaustion? To assume that boredom is a problem, with its cultural connotations of what we think we experience as tedium but reconsidered, might simply be a wordless, effortless gap into which we might rest if we drop the labels and expectations of how things, we, "should" be? Are we missing the chance to let go of all that burdens us by feeling and feeding the weight of our expectation, instead of allowing some lightening of the load?

During the Autumnal days where the light arrives later and my energy, in accord, takes a little longer, a little more patience, a little more effort, to stir me into motion, I have a tendency to think/worry that I’m losing my edge and becoming slothful and dull. I can make up stories and cause myself suffering by unseasonably expecting myself to be at full throttle and alert as soon as I wake at 5am – my long time habitual time of rising that started with a period of insomnia decades ago and which I then embraced and have since cherished as “my time” and my time only.

Only these days, Autumnal and more often whatever the season, I rise with a little less oomph and a little more grump. Because these days, I am different. I am not the me I was five, ten, twenty, even, three, even two years ago. Change, evolve, revolve, the seasons of Nature/Life say. And yet I resist. And so I suffer.

“You do it to yourself, you do, and what’s what really hurts.” Radiohead

I'm writing this while enveloped in some 1970s throwback velveteen bed sheets, the latest addition to what was my childhood home 20+ years ago, and is now the guest room in what is still, and has been for 47 years, the home of my parents, whom I've come to visit. My Mum has bought the bed sheets to guard against the chill that is more costly to alleviate owing to rising energy bills. They are ridiculous, in all the ways, I think, reverting to the petulant mind of the teenager I was when I used to live here.

It's not yet 7am. I've meditated quietly in my corner, while my Mum has prayed in hers, and my Dad has smoked his first cigarette of the day in his. We each rise in service to our own rituals.

If I were at my own home now, I'd be halfway through a yoga asana routine or some kind of movement activity, while playing with/being played by the cat, preparing my body and mind for a longer meditation practice before moving on with the day.

Previously, when I've visited home (the familial home will always be called "home" where I’m from, which is to say, I’m from a legacy of absolute devotion to family and community, of fierce and unwavering belonging that leaves traces of love and tension such that the ties could never be cut, and no matter how far we go, home is always where we are reminded of who we are), I elbow my regular routine into the corners of this time, space and environment, maneuvering around a space I think I've outgrown, trying not to wake others, trying to tend to my needs.

That's where the problem is, in all the trying, I realise, as on this occasion, I sense the absence of tension, and ease into the elongated morning, aided by the warm embrace of those bed sheets. It all feels gentler than it might have done previously, free as the experience is of my battling for “my structure and my time”.  Why layer tension on to the experience by trying to control it, rather than just going with the flow? Or rather, why not choose otherwise instead.

I soften into the opportunity to rest and accept the embodiment of my Mum’s loving care by returning to bed. I give in – which is to say, I surrender, I allow, and give up the struggle - to being here, rather than piling a bunch of thought-polluted suffering onto it with clutching needs of wanting things to be other than they are – wanting more space to move, wanting “my things” around me, needing silence and more time for “my routine”.

"Untie your knots, soften your gaze, settle your dust." Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu

Attachment, aversion, desire, resistance – the poisonous worldly winds that dirty the lens through which we see, according to the Dharma, and which unnecessarily albeit all too humanly stain our experience with dissatisfaction, aka dukka.

I begin to wonder if actually, this is what it feels like to be content. Maybe this is just the okayness in the hererness that comes when we stop trying so hard. Maybe I've reached a stage in my 20+ years of trying where I can let go, or at least adjust and accommodate what I cannot control to maintain the essential qualities of patience, compassion, discernment and equanimity, without over- reaching my way towards them.

Yes, discipline is absolutely a valuable thing. Structure has saved me many a time when I was on the verge of wobbling off the edge of restlessness and agitation. But what about when structure becomes so tight that it becomes a tyranny that stands in the way of the ultimate ease that is truly the goal of a spiritual practice as I understand it - which is to work through and past and be free of the thinking and behaviour that binds and constructs oneself and how one relates.

When adherence to routine becomes attachment, becomes a proverbial stick with which we beat rather than liberate ourselves from the habits that bind the mind, isn't that a perversion of what we’re trying to do? Isn’t that a call to let go?

The tiredness I feel, I conclude, may well be exhaustion – my body signalling exhaustion at being corralled into keeping on going with ways that need adjusting to accommodate a different reality. The reality of where I am, in a different home, and in a different body, in a different era and age. It’s also a mind in fight and flight that really just needs to settle down. It’s a request to settle, to allow.

The wisdom of age after the age of anxiety

I’ve often wondered why I have such a compulsive, visceral need for structure, why I “need” things to be a certain way.

Seeking the answers both outwardly and inwardly, I’ve come to understand that it’s not just about me, the causes and the conditions for how I am reach further back to the times of my ancestors, known and unknown.

Some of it is my own making, of course, some of those ways I choose in full consciousness, against my better judgement. Other habits are uncannily and clearly the inheritance of being raised, educated and socialised with certain patterns. All are arguably about safeguarding and survival, at the most fundamental level rather than a life or death one, of finding ways to get through the day.

In her book, You Belong, Sebene Selassie explains how everything we are is shaped by ancestry – our memories, our traumas, our physical features, - all of it precedes us and lives within us. Mistrust and fear, paranoia and anxiety, and the antidotes we develop to counter and protect ourselves from those states which manifest as rigour, routine, the need for order, come from experiences of violence.

Whereas Western psychotherapy tends to pathologise the trauma away, indigenous understanding says that trauma can teach us something, that our coping mechanisms can be integrated into a state of wholeness – but we have to see the patterns first. We have to engage in a conscious cleansing of those patterns, to know them, understand them, give ourselves grace for them, feel their presence, and then let them go when we realise we don’t need them to hold us back.

After we struggle, we rest

My ancestors experienced the trauma of forced migration, of exile, of escaping violence and witnessing the inhumane causes and consequences of the colonial agenda that led them in and out of Pakistan and Africa. I see the habits of busyness and constant momentum in my parents, who over the years, have had to keep going because they must, in order to take care, to give care, to provide what is needed, in love and security, to family and community. I have seen the restlessness, the frustration, the insistence that others rest while they have resisted, I’ve seen them practice the ultimate self-care in offerings of time, attention, food and comfort.  

I am me because they are them. Only I get to choose differently thanks to them. Thanks to this legacy which yes, contains suffering and trauma, and equally, contains a whole lot of love and grace.

Old habits dissolve hard. Now feels like the time for that, to dissolve and resolve the ways that no longer serve. So it is that we spend our later lives undoing and unlearning, disentangling and unravelling from the states our younger years bound us up in.

In saying this, I reflect how fortunate an opportunity this is. To have the chance to understand, unpack, learn and pivot. And if that’s the inevitable course of a journey that is inherently patterned by undulating rhythms, then how it’s going is simply how it’s going.

Perhaps this is where the comfort – and the liberation – lies; in accepting without effort or struggle that this is simply it. Stop fumbling, stop resisting, stop trying, and accept the invitation to rest.