The water reaction

From: Five Elements Five Dakinis
Full transcript
Audioclip

Become aware of all the ways that you react in water: the way that you gently evade a question, or deflect a question, or encompass what the other person is saying or doing so it becomes part of your world. They’ve moved into your world, you don’t have to go into theirs. Other words you dissipate any energy, anything which may disturb or disrupt the way you want to experience the world.

And as you feel that quality of dissipating, or deflecting, or evading, encompassing, you become aware that part of you at least is feeling threatened, possibly even attacked, so you feel that. Maybe there are physical, emotional, conceptual components associated with that.

And underneath that feeling of being threatened or attacked, you’re feeling that if you don’t do this [dissipation etc.] you’re just going to be engulfed, you’re going to be swept away, overtaken. It’s like you’re standing right at the edge of a fast flowing river and your feet are in the water and you can feel the current pulling at you and you don’t do something you’re just going to be swept away. Or maybe you’re in the surf, and like the wave is just about to pick you up and carry you, or the tide, or the current—so you feel that fear.

And as you touch that fear, there is a surge like, "Gotta dissipate this energy, get it out of here."  So you start to wriggle away from it, or deflect it, or try and do something. But as your efforts become more and more extreme you find you’ve run out of room, you can’t do any more. And you feel frozen and you can’t avoid it.

So now you try even harder to evade, deflect.

These are the components of the water reaction.

Reactions have three components

From: Five Elements Five Dakinis 3
Full transcript

Audio

All reactions have three components. 

How they manifest physically in the body, which typically there’s a kind of tensing or contraction. There can be actual physical sensations in different parts of the body. Your stomach feels churned, or like it does butterflies. There can be a constriction in the throat. I mean there all kinds of possibilities— your heart can beat faster. There are always some—and sometimes some quite strong—physical components to the reaction. And most of the time we aren’t aware of them, which means we aren’t really aware of the reactive process taking place.

So in this set of practices that we’re doing, stay very much connected with your body—what is actually happening in my body. Again you don’t have to analyze it or explain it, but be aware of it and actually experience it.

Audio

The same is true at the emotional level. Maybe looking into someone’s eyes triggers fear, maybe it makes you anxious. Maybe you feel squirmy. The sense that someone is seeing you without any judgment may make you acutely aware of your own judgment. I think one of the things came up earlier is a feeling of being special. 

And I have one student in LA who’s working with that particular issue at this point. She’s very chagrined about it. Because she sees how much of the way that she relates to the world is coming from holding a feeling that she is in some way special. So it allows her to negotiate a lot of situations very easily. But at the same time there’s a certain pride and feeling of superiority. So that’s something you may watch for. Maybe a feeling of being naked, revealed, exposed. And there could be a whole other set of reactions connected with that.

Audio

And there are the stories that come up, which is the third component of reaction. This is the component of reaction that we most often notice and believe immediately. We don’t question it at all. And again someone looking at us, really seeing us and seeing us without judgment, we may say to ourselves, “Look what do they know?” Or, “What does she want?” These are what I mean by stories and they again those thoughts come up, I mean we don’t even question them—we just take them as fact.

But if we’re in touch with the physical and the emotional we may appreciate the fact that these are simply thoughts and ideas and may not have that much grounding in reality. And so now we can experience things very, very differently and experience all of that as, “Oh, this is how I’m reacting to this possibility.” You know all the discomfort, all the stuff is in me, even those intended see the projected out there.