Radical Forcelessness

A practice of mine right now is no force. Radical forcelessness, you could call it. I do not force myself to do anything. The energy of force gets zero space in my life. If I feel the energy of force in my system, I stop, fully and completely. Sometimes I just simply wait, doing nothing, until the energy of force dissipates. Sometimes I ask myself what I need to feel spacious and open again, and give myself that.Sometimes I move my body, take some deep breaths, listen to music or do a body scan. Because of this practice I have changed my entire day’s schedule last minute. I have canceled plans. I’ve had some really confronting conversations with people I love. I have put my needs before the needs of my family.There is a lot of subtlety in this practice.When I say I do not use force most people think it means that I don’t do anything I don’t want to do. I actually do plenty of things on a daily and even hourly basis, that I would prefer not to do. I am a mother of two small babies after all. I don’t particularly love changing poopy diapers or cleaning up the relentless post meal carnage. I invite you to feel how the energy of force feels in your body.For me it feels hard, effortful, clenched, contracted, tense, and tight. It feels like I’m trying to squeeze into a pair of jeans that don’t fit anymore. When I say my practice is zero force, I mean when I feel that sensation in my body I stop and come back to openness, spaciousness, juiciness, however I can.I think most people don’t know how to “get anything done” without force.I know it’s the way I was taught and modeled to go about life. Force. Force. Force. Forcing everything, because, my body could not be trusted. The world could not be trusted. I could not be trusted. I needed to keep my s**t together, accounted for, and constantly forced into the appropriate level of productivity and activity.We tell ourselves that nothing would get done if we didn’t force ourselves to do it.We tell ourselves that if we just push through the initial exhaustion during a workout or at the beginning of an activity we’ll feel better after. And maybe we do. Yet, the inconvenient truth is every time we use force to do something we are wracking up an energetic debt. When we have to push through our body’s clear exhaustion signals to do something, this means we are using stress hormones instead of real, flowing energy. Using stress hormones to create energy requires us to break down our own body to fuel that activity. And the body will need to be rebuilt at some point. It will catch up with us in form of exhaustion, illness, injury, always present feelings of unease or emotional breakdown. These dis-eases that come into our lives don’t just fall on us from out of the sky, they come from years and years of not listening to the whispers of our bodies. They come from going against the Truth over and over again.I used nothing but force to get things done for most of my life, so my journey into spaciousness and calm, grounded healing requires some radical un-force. I feel so much beauty in this practice of radical forcelessness for myself. It feels like life and I are on the same team. When the energy of force is not given weight in my life it means I have spaciousness.It means that all outcomes are on the table. It means that I am not responsible for making it all happen. One of my most cherished spiritual texts The Way of Mastery has an axiom, “I need to do nothing.” Like, I don’t need to do anything. I don’t have to wake up. I don’t have to go to work. I don’t have to own a home. I don’t have to eat. I don’t have to drink. I don’t have to take care of my children. Technically, I don’t have to do any of it. But I choose to do some of it. And I choose to do it on my terms and in a way that feeds me. In a way that makes me feel full and juicy and ripe with life.My days and nights are oriented towards my well-being, not towards some external ideal of what my days and nights “should” look like or some arbitrary checklist. That’s what I mean when I say I don’t use force. Sure, I do a lot of things I’d prefer not to do. But I do them with openness and knowing that I am choosing to do them.I cannot truly be fully fed if I am forcing because it makes me smaller than I am. To be fed I must take up my right size.I must let myself expand into a woman who feeds herself on all levels.Radical Forcelessness is something we will be working with in FED. FED is my new 6 month group container starting in July. It is like a feast for the mind, body and soul. If you feel the pull of it in your bones and body (not in your mind) I would love to speak with you about it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe