How did you go with your time for forgiveness? Did you experience any positives? It can take a while to work through the layers if you haven’t gone through that process before. It can also be confronting to acknowledge how many emotional conflicts and memories we’re carrying around one way or the other. It might seem like too much to ask to stay up to date each day with fresh forgiveness, but there are a lot of good reasons for trying. Among them is the ability to stay calm and graceful under pressure, so today we’ll all practise taking a bath.
Although we don’t always have the time or resources to refresh ourselves with a physical bath, we can mentally take a bath whenever we need one. If you work with humans, that might be every 20 minutes or so. The little mental break it gives us helps to create a useful pause before responding to any situation. In that pause we can review our emotional and intellectual states, check in on our five circles and double-check that we’re not about to perpetuate something we’ve been working at forgiving. Sounds like a lot to cover but with practise you’ll be doing all that during one deep, slow inhalation.
While the quincunx gave us a model to put parts of our world into relationship and so help us deal with different challenges that come up in one realm or another. We’re taking that further now that we’ve begun to add the aspect of time, or rather deal with the fact that time is constantly happening to us, we get a chance make a distinction between things we can influence and things we need to simply let go.
One of the most draining things about contemporary culture is the combination of the ‘fear of missing out’ (FOMO) and the expectation that we’re all ‘always on’ (available via social and digital media at all times for all parts of our life. For many normal, everyday people downtime is a thing of the past. You can’t always burn your smartphone and day after day these pressures create a type of fatigue in us.
The fatigue is built up of layers of events, layers of reaction and super-quick responses that we’d like to think more deeply about but have to keep going as something else has already come in. We scroll through feeds, flicking past short headlines, maybe tapping ‘like’, often thinking how nice it would be to share more than a meme with each other. Then there are the layers of repetition that come from dealing with stupid rules, idiotic expectations, basic inequalities that are structural and so considered ‘nobody’s fault’. Each of those things is a toxin in our system and they slowly poison us into a constant knee-jerk position. Without detoxing, unwinding, we’re on the edge. You’ve got a hair trigger on the constant loop of reaction.
Run a bath
If you’re a bath person, you know you need at least an hour or so to put aside for this ritual. Let me step you through it. Firstly you check the tub, give it a bit of a wipe and just make sure it is ready to host you. Then you start to run the water, deliberating over adding salts and unguents or going with fancy soaps. Maybe at this point you light some candles or set the lighting how you like it. Now select some music that suits the mood you want. We’ll go for something calming and happy today. Check your favourite towel and or bathrobe is handy, turn off or unhook the phone, perhaps lock the door and get ready to enter the water.
You slip into the water, which is a perfect temperature for you. Perhaps you like it a little hotter today so it can seep into all of your muscles. You stretch out slowly, feeling comfortable, and feel the water swirl around you to accommodate your legs. You lean back and take a deep breath. You’re really here, it smells wonderful. The water is supporting you, the tub is warm, and the music starts to sound clearer.
Feel your legs, your toes stretch and wiggle, feeling free for the first time in ages. Your calves relax, your knees, and then slowly your thighs heat through and feel soft and heavy. You unclench your buttocks, why were they so clumped up?! Doesn’t matter, they hold so much of our daily stress, so just let them relax now. Continue moving up your body, letting each muscle group warm through and let go. You’re safe and supported. You’re in a beautiful place. Close your eyes and breathe deeply so that your abdomen rises. Your mind relaxes and is free to drift along the waves of the music. You feel wonderful. Your troubles can be dealt with soon enough, right now you’re doing something important for you.
The view from the bath
Now that we’re relaxed and floating, visualise the quincunx, and if you have a big bath, starfish out and float in the balanced place between all your worlds just like in the picture. The view from the bath is that most things that upset us aren’t really important enough to let ourselves get unbalanced by (and that is why we started with forgiveness, because if you feel frustrated with yourself that you do get thrown off balance by irritations, forgive yourself again and let that frustration wash away. Otherwise our own self-criticism continually sabotages us). From the bath, we don’t want to get out, pull on a robe, unlock the door, turn down the music and interrupt our pleasure in order simply to respond to some other person and their issue just for the sake of responding and staying up to date or efficient or whatever your bugbear is that gets you twitching when your phone rings. No. let’s stay put and enjoy right now.
It is easy from the bath to make the decision to wait a while and think about what is actually important enough to respond to, and how best to do so based on your larger goals, your higher purpose, or the values you’ve chosen to live by. From the bath, we can clearly understand the importance of balance in the now and the value of backing off from the hair-trigger.
The metaphor of taking a bath and the visualisation to go along with it is about refreshing ourselves and also making a space inside normal time for considered choice. If you regularly consciously have a bath (bravo!) or if you just relax and run yourself through that visualisation sometimes, thinking of it in this way becomes a tool for dealing with that tiring round of constant expectations and FOMO pressures. From your bath, you get to make a choice, you get to let some things wait, or even just to let them go. You don’t actually have to answer every message or email or have an opinion about every news event or celebrity scandal. Over time you can tap into that deep relaxation in a single deep breath if you want to. You don’t have to have any other excuse for checking out on issues that you aren’t committed to, and you’ll have more energy and focus for the ones that that matter most.
So slow down, run yourself a bath, and make some time for deep relaxation and your values. No need to get back to me on this one.
Image source
We’ve talked about starting over and it is worth touching on that idea again, because the pressure is often to do Big Things. You know, Those Boldly go where no man has gone before expectations*. That’s fun for a while if you are an intergalactic adventurer, or a woman. (I mean I even got to make a pennyfarthing where no wo-man had gone before) but at a certain point, most of us just want some help with the basic “boldly go” part. Those first steps or stumble in a new (for us) journey are their own bold adventure. It could be asking for help to plan an overseas holiday when you’ve never left the city but everyone around you is infecting you with their itchy feet.