Lessons from a Geisha, letting go

LESSONS FROM A GEISHA
1.1 I always thought it sad that I could be with someone, think that I love them and then afterwards not ever be able to talk to them again, as if that love had been a lie. After reading “Memoirs of a Geisha” by Arthur Goldman I was introduced to another way of looking at relationship and life. In this excerpt, Sayori, the Geisha of the title, is telling us about the man she loved:
1.1.1 “… an elderly man who was explaining to me that his wife, whom he’d cared for deeply, wasn’t really dead because the pleasure of their time together lived on inside him… I understood that he left me at the end of his long life just as naturally as the leaves fall from the trees. Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories. I’ve lived my life again just telling it to you.”
1.2 I understood this to mean that there is nothing to fear in letting go because we’re not really letting go. The people who leave us become a part of us as we become a part of them. The experience of people we love just moves from the world outside of us to the world that is inside. Helping us to experience love.
1.3 And perhaps in love it doesn’t matter that one day we may have to say goodbye, what matters is that we are with the person while we are with them, being grateful, enjoying the journey as well as “getting there.”
1.4 And getting there, somewhere, then we get a chance to look back at our trip, to enjoy it in retrospect, make it a part of us and then, perhaps after a rest, it’s time for a new journey, with the same partner or a different one but being with whoever we are with.
1.5 I realized that as much as we look out and recognize who and what is around us, as much as we experience life across space, part of life is taking what we experience within and looking back at it across the span of time.
1.6 Expanding across time we get another look at our lives the way Sayori did by looking back at her life with the man that she loved... And it’s the way I interpreted what my friend taught me about sorrow. In sorrow we look back across time and recognize the efforts of the people who have affected us directly or indirectly. Sorrow, looking back so that we can learn, and make those learnings a part of us. But we don’t need sorrow to go within, it’s just one of the ways of getting there. Perhaps it’s a signal that we haven’t looked within in a long time.
1.7 Going inwards we can recognize the parts of our body. But then we can go inwards deeper still. We can pull in from all that is around us. We pull inwards from space, and we expand outwards across time.
1.8 Going within and seeing back across time we can see where we’ve been and enjoy it from another point of view.
1.9 And this is another aspect of rhythm, taking turns to expand across space, being present, and then across time, being nothing.
1.10 Looking back we get to experience life again, but from another viewpoint, across time instead of space. We see ourselves and our experiences from another point of view and just as our view is transformed so do we ourselves become transformed. Looking back, it’s as if each experience is a chance for us to learn ourselves, a chance for us to better know the idea of ourselves, a chance for us to grow.

Sorrow

SORROW
1.1 A long while ago I was deeply interested in figuring out how muscles worked. This was part of my research into becoming a better yoga teacher. One of the things I noticed was that a lot of texts described the mechanism through which muscles contracted but they mentioned very little about how muscles relax. Did muscle tissue or some of the surrounding fiber have some sort of elasticity that pulled the muscles back to length after they had contracted?
1.2 Waiting in line at a coffee shop I mentioned to a friend what I was studying, trying to figure out how muscles let go. She suggested that it was like a relationship, looking back at it and going into it so that we can let it go.
1.3 That was how I felt when I copied my friends gesture of sorrow, it took me into myself, so that I was no longer giving or receiving, I was pulling in from space and looking back across time to see what I’d done as well as those around me from a different point of view. Recognizing what I’d done so that I could expand out into space again and express myself again, but differently if I chose.
1.4 Sorrow, going within so that we can look back across time and recognize when we don’t recognize the gifts that those around us have given us. Going within so that we can learn from those experiences and grow and then expand outwards back into time to live life in a new way, expanding out further from our roots in the past.
1.5 Sorrow pulling us into ourselves exactly so that at our center we can let sadness go.

Ideas, Growth and Expression

1.1 We are ideas. And we are made up of other ideas, things we have learned. As our consciousness radiates outwards from our center we express ourselves. We dance, we write, we sing, we talk, we sew we cook. Any of the ideas that are already apart of us we express. We share our true nature and others see this expression and enjoy it and perhaps are even inspired or energized by it or they get another view of all that is, a view that they haven’t got time to experience themselves.
1.2 Expressing ourselves we send energy outwards from our center so that other centers of consciousness can pull that energy inwards.
1.3 Resting for a moment while still expanding outwards, we see the expression of other ideas around us, and as a result we are inspired, and we see the world in a way that we aren’t able to directly experience. Energy flows from out of us and then into us, and each cycle the expression of ourselves changes slightly, affected by what is around us.
1.4 Now imagine expressing ourselves while directly connected to someone else. At the same time they are expressing themselves and so we change, we both do. And even as we are expressing ourselves we are changed by what we are connected to. Sometimes we change more, or what we are connected to changes more. Sometimes change goes from one to the other sometimes the other way around. Or perhaps the change also originates from a center outside of the centers of the two connected ideas, like they are part of a bigger idea.
1.5 Now imagine that as well as happening across time this happens across space, that we allow energy in at the same time as we radiate it out. So we are changing even as we express ourselves because we are seeing what is around us and seeing how what is around us is changing too.
1.6 It’s like dancing with someone on a really crowded dance floor. We are expressing ourselves but the way we express ourselves is shaped by the expression of all the other dancers in the room. We express ourselves according to the room we have at the time. But at the same time everyone else is doing the same thing. So we all affect each other even as we express ourselves.
1.7 Over a slightly longer time period, as we expand outwards more we connect, with new ideas, new things to learn new people to experience and we change as a result of this connection. We learn new things and how to do them, we learn new people how to dance with them until the connection becomes firm (or we choose to let it go). When the connection is firm, the idea is a part of us, how to do a certain type of math problem, a new girlfriend or boy friend, knowing how to ride a bike. Or we are part of a new idea. And so we express the new idea, radiating outwards from its center as well as out own.
1.8 Resting, we pull inwards from all of the ideas into the idea of ourselves so that we can rest and look inwards across time at the way we have expressed ourselves.