Learning to “Lie Back”

Honoring our habits and our humanity

Last night my sister and I went out to dinner to celebrate our grandmother’s birthday with Pisco Sours, her favorite cocktail. These glorious New Hampshire summer days stay light and hot until 9, so we had a late dinner, the kind where the waiter asks what you’d like for dinner but you haven’t looked at the menu yet, and when you finally finish eating you notice that all the tables around you are empty. I could barely believe the time when I got home—11:15! I hadn’t seen that hour on the clock in quite some time, especially not on a Sunday. By the time I finally got to sleep it was midnight. As I turned out the light I tried to decide: sacrifice eight hours of sleep, or wake up late? To me, this choice was hard because it symbolized a failure to live by the ground rules I have recently set up for myself. 

Let me explain. In my previous life as a high school principal in San Francisco, I traveled a lot, both to our various schools and for fun. I got up between 5 and 6 every weekday. A full eight hours of sleep was a weekend luxury and it was not unusual for me to arrive home at 1:30 AM from the airport and wake up 4 hours later to go to work. Sometimes my eyes would twitch from tiredness. Sometimes I felt like I needed an IV of coffee. To put it mildly, it wasn’t a sustainable way of living, for me at least. So knowing that sleep is something that helps me be my best, most present self, when I moved to New Hampshire and began to build my life here, I set as a cornerstone that I will sleep 8-9 hours a night. 

I also know that I am a morning person. On Mondays, I usually set aside the entire morning to make a strategic plan for the week, write my journal posts, and prepare for my coaching and facilitation sessions. Sleeping in throws this rhythm off and means the day will be well underway and I’ll be neck-deep in meetings without having had the quiet of the morning to think.

Perhaps now you see why I felt so conflicted about going to bed at midnight on a Sunday. But this feeling also comes up around other habits, like exercise. Did I do my 7-minute scientifically proven workout right away when I woke up? Am I running enough to be ready to run the Covered Bridges Half Marathon with my friend Rebecca? Did I do the body scan my coach told me about to release tension I am holding in my body? Have I meditated? Have I brushed my teeth yet today?

Last week I wrote about discerning what really matters to me as I contemplated my own mortality, and I said I gained some perspective about details. Am I diving into the work and the lifestyle I want to live, vs worrying about details in my home or in my finances? Am I attempting to control my surroundings, or am I being present in them? But habits are something a little different. All these things I am trying to create a routine around—sleeping enough, waking up with exercise, working at the time I know my mind is sharpest, feeling and letting go of tension in my body—are meant to help me be more healthful and present. For other people, it’s eating a diet free of gluten or dairy. Setting boundaries around social media. Stretching, doing yoga. We all have practices we hold ourselves to because ultimately we believe they make us feel better for doing them. 

But how much do these habits really help us if, when we fail, we experience feelings of disappointment or shame?  I know it may sound dramatic, but I literally feel that I have been lazy or disorganized when I am not able to make meditation, journaling, or my 7-minute scientific workout happen in a given morning. A huge part of my identity is being reliable, even for myself. I believe I’m determined, I’m willing to do the hard work and show up for myself.  And it jives with everything I learned growing up, that using our time productively is good, that the early bird gets the worm.  When I worked for someone else I felt as though my indulgences of late nights and sleeping in impacted others, but now that it’s just me it’s less clear why this hits so hard.  It’s like I’m replaying the shame of not having cleared my inbox down to zero on a Sunday night, only now it’s about these things I am trying to do for myself. Are you chortling at the irony yet? I am. 

I want to tell you about an episode from my Soul Quest a few weeks ago. It’s hour five.  I’m sitting on the hard ground and my butt is hurting. I’m deep in the woods, and I’m cold. The black flies are out, and they’re landing on my forehead and buzzing around my eyes. I’m waving them away every few seconds. Between hand flaps, I’m indulging a thought of how hungry I am and how much I can’t wait to get out of here. I stand up. I pace around. I sit back down. Wave. Smack. Shift weight from one buttock to another.  Sigh. Then, I lie down. I prop one leg on top of the other knee. I look up to where the sun is filtering through the pine branches and I start to feel it on my skin. I notice the tension in my lower back feels better. Then I notice that the black flies are not finding my face. They’re circling my foot up in the air, and down here I’m safe. Is lying down allowed on the Soul Quest? I ask myself. Mentally, I shrug. It’s working. I’m going with it. 

As I reflected on the experience of the Soul Quest, “Lie Down” became an important piece of wisdom about how I may want to evolve in this next stage of my life. There’s a choice we all make, that we may not even realize we are making, between feeling bored in the circle, feeling molested by the flies, feeling constrained to remain in a sitting position when our hips are tight and our back is sore—or lying back.  Lying back is about becoming comfortable in our surroundings. It’s about relaxing instead of holding a posture. It’s about coming into greater contact with the earth at our backs, turning our faces fully up to the sun above. Lying back does not make the time in the circle less than. Nowhere is it written that you can’t receive enlightenment on your back. And yet I somehow felt guilty about it. As I experienced this moment, and now think back on it, I am struck by how many constraints I put on my own life, without even realizing that it is me who has assumed they are necessary. 

I am in the post-Soul Quest phase of Incorporation, when we work to take the nuggets of wisdom from our time on the land and weave the threads into our daily lives.  The metaphor is imagining yourself going out on the land and finding this beautiful ball of golden yarn. We can regard the experience as so sacred that we put the golden yarn up on the mantle, where we look at it every day but we never use it, we never weave it into the fabric of our lives.  Wisdom found but not utilized is just knowledge. It’s putting it into practice that makes it special.  (And as someone who’s spent her whole professional career studying how people learn, I can tell you this is true of any type of wisdom, not just the experiences of Soul Quest. It’s one thing to recognize a concept as truth, it’s a much more difficult thing to integrate it with coherence into our daily lives.)

The meditations for this part of the journey talk about being on guard against reverting to our previous lives, where we watched Netflix, played video games, ate fried foods, and acquired more possessions than we needed. When I listen to these recordings it tends to turn up the volume on my sense of shame and disappointment about the practices I haven’t done yet today, or the fact that I re-watched Episodes 1 and 2 of Downton Abbey this weekend when I could have been writing poetry or sleeping. Last night’s unexpected late dinner brought this subterranean sense of “I’m not doing it right” bubbling back up to the surface. Okay, I thought to myself. I’ll have to get serious on Monday morning.

And as I reflect on the lessons that came out of my Soul Quest, I’m wondering if my personal version of Incorporation is not about tangible practices, but about reaching for the attitude of Lie Back whenever the strong voice of my Inner Manager speaks up to denounce the choices I have made. It’s not about following the examples spoken in the Incorporation Meditations, or even using them as points around which to draw lines of constraint, within which my version of Incorporation must reside.  Though I thought I would emerge from my Soul Quest having glimpsed clarity like a nighttime landscape illuminated by lightning, instead I feel that I am walking in the night, a little firefly of wisdom flashing occasionally just beyond my reach. 

Would it be a good idea to stay up till midnight drinking Pisco Sours every night? Almost certainly not. But even worse would be not to do it ever, on principle. 

Here’s what my firefly has shown me: When faced with a decision, listen to your body. (The Body Compass is a tool I learned from my coach, which I now like to offer to my clients.  When she first taught it to me I couldn’t get any signals because I had muted my physical reactions in favor of my analytical evaluations.) My body said yes to Granny’s birthday dinner. My body said yes to splitting a second Pisco Sour with my sister. And if my body says to stay in bed for another hour to get that full night’s rest, well—we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.