20 September 2013

Philip Shepherd [Philip Shepherd]

from Philip Shepherd's New Self, New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-First Century:

Whenever a gap is encountered in our regimen of doing, for instance, we tend to fill it with waiting. Waiting is a peculiar state in which doing doesn't cease; it is just restrained, like an impatient horse. We wait in lines, we wait at bus stops, we wait at red lights, we wait for elevators, we wait for elevators, we wait in elevators — we wait for the show to begin. Such waiting puts us in a kind of limbo in which we can't stop doing even though there is nothing to do: closed off from the energy of Being, our hearts grow tense as we strain towards a better future when we will finally be able to start doing again, as if by so straining we could hurry time along. We are addicts and doing is our fix. . . . [we] have so thoroughly forgotten how to just be . . . as if life itself were up ahead, waiting on the horizon. . . 

I have often found that if I really want to get at a deeply established personal pattern such as waiting, or the incessant need to 'look back' and grasp at perspectives, . . . I have a handful of questions I return to, simple potent questions that reliably disclose my own abstractions — questions like "What happens if I let my heart open now?" or "What happens if I stop doing and just pause?" . . . The essence of such a pause is to release us from the confined, driven agenda of doing, allowing us to float through the heart's gate into the nourishment of the world.