The Call to Be All That You Can Be, and The Need to Know Your Limitations

A wonderful feature of modern times is that almost everyone is living a long time. Global life expectancy in 2016 was 72 years – 74 years for women and about 70 years for men. Over the past hundred years, women’s roles have expanded to include all the functions that used to be male specialities. Americans have women fighter pilots. Women are heads of corporations. Because people are living so long, it’s as if they live three or four lifetimes in sequence or simultaneously.

Along with this increase in freedom comes an increase in expectations. It is as if every woman is supposed to be Superwoman. A full-on mother and also entrepreneur and social activist and wife and friend and athlete. This is wonderful, and exhausting. Guilt over not actually being Superwoman is now part of the female experience.

Part of daily meditative experience for women is sensing the fatigue and burned nerves that come from doing it all. If you can feel it you can heal it.

In meditation we bathe in this set of conflicting opposites: the call to be all that you can be, and the need to know your limitations. This changes daily, for as we push up against our limitations, sometimes we get stronger and they change. It’s like working out. Other limitations are more fixed. There are only so many minutes in a day (1440 to be exact).

Whether you are male, female, or a nonspecified gender, you will at some point be confronted with the fact that you are not Superwhatever. And there is an odd form of shame and guilt that arises when you realize this. Accept this shame and plunge into it. There are many skills inside this that you will only learn by practice and paying attention. The process is similar to working out on a muscular level. There is a science to pushing yourself just enough that you can heal up overnight. People who push too much without rest can develop chronic injuries. It is an eternal struggle: the striving to do more and awareness of your limitations.

Getting Through a Stuck Place in Meditation

To get through a stuck place in meditation, you may need a particular kind of nutrition and healing, of the kind that comes from inside our body when we face a crisis.

Nature knows how to heal. When we go as far as we know how to go and then take refuge in rest, the body heals and adapts. As we face each difficulty in meditation, each intolerable set of weird sensations, each strange combination of our own instincts, and then take refuge in rest and relaxation, the body brews up its own magic chemistry to support us on the jouney.

Yatra (yātrā) is journey, expedition, pilgrimage, and also “support of life.” Yatra includes the sense of provisions for the journey. Some of the provisions we need come from soma, the magical chemicals the body brews out of the wildness of our experience. There are body chemistry keys we need to get through some doors. The body produces these automatically in the interplay of the percevied urgency, then the access to rest deeper than sleep, then the activation of all your senses, and the welcoming of all our instincts. There are moments in which we give up. Then we rest. When we have done our part of facing our fears and then give it up and enter the state of ease provided by the mantra, the body knows what to do here. Our exhaustion is the most sincere form of prayer to the gods of adaptation. Having stretched ourselves, the genius of life repairs us and rebuilds us. Sometimes this happens in an eternal moment of meditation, one of those times when a minute is a long time of torture. Sometimes we need to go sleep. Sometimes we need to go wander in nature and Do Nothing. When come back, we find by surprise the way is open. The soma has done its work.

All this is why you want your meditation to be as luscious and juicy as possible. You need access to both the state of rest deeper than sleep and the nutrition you get from exposing your senses to beauty. This combination is what allows you to face the situations inside or outside that are crushing you. To use the metaphor of an engine, there is just a thin layer of lubricant allowing the piston to slide back and forth thousands of RPM, revolutions per minute. That thin layer is what allows motion. Inside ourselves, we need nerves and sensory information to flow together. We need the vision gifted by soma to enable us to see the path ahead of us.