Last week I got a migraine so bad it made thinking itself painful. Lying down in the dark wasn’t enough: my eyeballs were making micro-movements, following every mental thought as eyes do, and just that tiny reflexive movement was shaking my whole skull. So I got very specific. I decided to try relaxing my eyes so completely that my fussing, moving mind had nothing left to work with. The eyes and the thinking mind, it turns out, are running the same operation.
“Soften the gaze, let your eyes sink back into your skull”. Meditation folk use this prompt often, usually in passing, before moving onto more exciting practice. I’ve been saying it myself and doing a halfway okay version of it for decades. But this migraine laid me down and said “girl, you will learn to let ‘em go for real this time.” And suddenly every tiny muscle in and around my eyeballs finally released. For the first time ever, they were completely passive orbs, open and aimless as a corpse. And my scanning, planning mind fell apart along with them.
And the moment they did, my body came alive like something uncaged.
Warmth flared through my gut and chest like a fire that finally got air. Something mercurial and quick moved through the belly, the way water finds its level after a long time being held in shape. The meat of me felt earthen, mountainous. And my eyes didn’t feel like eyes at all anymore, but like two small pools, just reflecting the sky. The hunting, controlling, pointedness of my habitual mind, which is constantly mirrored by movements of the eyes, finally went slack and in that power vacuum my body was freed to be as it really is: a weird living landscape. Just a place, doing what places do, moving and feeling and existing for no reason at all and without anyone’s permission.
It was weird and overwhelming and freeing and wonderful and scary and very much out of my control. And miraculously, the headache was gone.
In the Buddhist tradition, the elements — fire, water, earth, air, space — are a way of knowing the living texture of reality itself, how it moves and changes and dances on its own. The elements are not on any self-improvement mission. Fire is just warm. Earth just heaps. Water coheres, air moves, and space accommodates. Nature is not FOR anything. It just IS. Us too.
But easier said than felt. We tend to reign over the wilderness of the bodymind like land-developers, trimming the unruly underbrush, damming up the emotional rivers, paving over the spooky swamps where the wild things are. Even stillness and meditation, tools of self-discovery, can get co-opted into this project of self-control and self-curation. We don’t even realize we’re doing it. And as a total and continuous experience of being, it is exhausting.
Working with the elements is an antidote to that exhaustion. It’s a direct practice of unwinding the uber-control in favor of being with the weird magic of what’s here. We rest the feeling of being a pointed thing hurtling through space on a mission, and come home to being a place. This place. We rest as messy, moving, unpredictable landscapes.
Of course, the curating mind will pipe up again. The eyes start to dart and hunt and track. You lose nature and return, lose nature and return, again and again. But gradually the experience of yourself starts to include both. The aimed and the aimless. The mission and the mountain.
I’m a person with projects, who gets untimely migraines and tries to fight them off in the name of forward motion. But underneath that story, I am the untameable elements that reveal themselves when I let go. I am fire burning, I am pounding rivers of blood, I am dense earthen weight of bones on a couch, air pouring into lungs like a gale through a forest. And I am the space that holds this whole landscape, too. All this life is just occurring, wildly and particularly, and just because.
I am a place. Alive the way nature is alive.