Some people working the land may have set working hours, but many, particularly if working for themselves, have no schedule other than all the hours between dawn and dusk and beyond with a long list of jobs that never end. Balancing available time, energy and the never-ending to-do list may be very hard at times.
Sometimes we all come to the edges of our energy and realise we need to take some rest. Other times we push and push, oblivious to our limits and break down. We get sick. And if we really break down, it may take a very long time to recover. So it’s helpful to learn the language of our body and listen to it. Because the body knows and it will tell us, if we just pay enough attention and respect its needs.
Underneath our excessive striving there may be an unhelpful belief, perhaps erroneously gained in early life, that we need to earn our worth and value, that we are not quite enough as we are. So we keep pushing ourselves to the limit, never reaching a sense of worth, at least for any length of time.
With these unprocessed, unintegrated emotions, we hold ourselves in a tight grip at our core, like a fist. This is chronic inner tension to help us feel safe and to hold up our persona. We try to control ourselves, other people and our environment to maintain a sense of safety. We’ve learned to believe that nothing will happen unless we make it happen, that we have to improve ourselves because we’re not good enough as we are, we need to work harder, try harder. Human striving is a way of creating some ground underneath us, when as a culture, we’ve forgotten how to trust the deep ground that life provides us with. One of the participants reflected:
“This weekly talk engaged me from the start as it felt that it perfectly described some of the challenges I am experiencing and my pervasive thought patterns. The offer to be kind to oneself again runs through this talk, like it does in those preceding it… I do find this hard to set as a default but recognise the relief it offers me. Thank you team C.F I am finding the connections you make to working and being on the land so relevant and valued.”
Sometimes we may sense that however hard we work, it never seems quite enough, there’s still uncertainty, the circumstances are shifting and changing and we feel out of control again. It’s as if the ground we’ve built is never fully stable, like there are cracks in it. We may even develop addictions to distract ourselves or to numb ourselves from seeing the cracks, because facing the instability of this shifting ground may bring us to the realisation that we are incapable of creating stable and permanent safety in our lives, that ultimately we are not in control. Farmers faced with increasingly unpredictable weather patterns or volatile markets feel this viscerally. Even when we are lucky enough to live a fairly stable, sheltered and comfortable life, ultimately we’re all going to face loss, illness and eventually death.
Sometimes this realisation is imposed on us, some adversity takes place that throws us off balance completely and however we try to deny the problem or we try to fix it, whatever we try to do with it, we realise it is beyond our control. We have to let go. And in that letting go, as frightening as it is, we may discover a deeper ground, we might discover that life really does carry us, even though there is loss. We are being held by something much greater than us.
Turning the boat to follow the flow
Life is moving and it’s unfolding with or without our attempts to control it, and instead of trying to be in control we are invited to take part, to participate in the flow of life. Instead of fighting a losing battle going upstream we might find that we can turn the boat around and use the energy of the stream. Perhaps steering is enough. We might not arrive exactly at the place we had planned in our head, but we might find that the new place is more interesting or has more opportunities or a possibility to grow.
However, it is not necessary to have great adversity to come to trust life, there are other ways to arrive at it. Acknowledging and making friends with our fears about the lack of safety and control, can allow this trust to develop. In terms of embodiment, our gut and our pelvic area is the region of safety and survival instinct, control and power, trust and groundedness.
But often when we feel things are out of control, rather than allowing ourselves to feel the fear of being out of control and letting go into trust, we contract and tighten our grip further. Often the tightening of the grip can be felt as tension in the belly or the solar plexus area.
This is something that lives in our language: even when someone is feeling a little scattered, we tell them to “get a grip”. What if we told them to “trust the flow of life”? It doesn’t mean we don’t act or have agency, but acting from a place of trust comes with a different bodily feel to it, with a whole load less stress and fear. The outcomes we’re working towards may differ also, we can sense how working from fear or anxiety might result in something different to acting from an underlying recognition of trust.
Gut instinct supports our intellect
Loosening our grip and our need to control allows us to tune into our somatic ways of knowing, which opens our bandwidth exponentially, not just to information about our needs and what’s going on with us, but also the outside world. As such, our gut is the seat of our inner knowing.
A farmer may find a problem with a field, and perhaps can’t work out why it’s happening. Or find themselves in a situation where one of their animals is behaving strangely, and despite checking against past experiences with animals, all they’ve been taught, all they’ve read, learned from the vet, none of it quite fits the picture or makes sense… but spending time with the animal deeply tuned into the body, may result in an intuitive sense of what’s going on with her. The acquired intellectual knowledge may well end up supporting this direct inner knowing, but a lot of time, energy and money may have been saved by tuning into and listening to the gut instinct.
Perhaps there’s a big decision that needs making in terms of managing the land or the whole operation but none of the strategic approaches, lists of plusses and minuses, SWOT analyses, calculations and predictions of potential outcomes are resulting in a straightforward answer. It may be helpful to spend some time in silence on the land, tuning into the place through the body, listening as a full being, perhaps even asking: “What about this option A? Shall I do it?” And feeling for a sense of resonance or dissonance. To support the strategic analysis, it may help to set aside all the calculations and reasoning, just for a moment, and inquire: “What is right for THIS piece of land? What is right for this farm, for my family, for the families to come, for my integrity?”
Resonance and dissonance have distinct felt senses in the body, as one of the participants shares:
“Decision with clear resonance - calm, grounded in my body, at ease in the world, settled, safe.
Decision with dissonance - conflicted, uncomfortable, unsettled, uneasy. It's difficult to settle with - it feels all wrong. I usually change my mind in situations like this.”
Through the gut we find our ground
Our gut is a portal to deep groundedness. Often the first sign of groundedness is that we can feel our legs, and they feel really alive and connected to the earth.
Being grounded we are in tune with our inner compass. We can check for resonance or dissonance and feel for what rings true, in a deep way, and navigate the territory in which our cultural norms say “no, that’s not right” or “not that way”, but life says “yes”. It may be a sense of everything lining up inside, like a click, or a sense of clarity or aliveness in the body and a relaxation of that tight grip. Seated in this embodied wisdom, we can begin to gain perspective on our defenses and protection mechanisms as well as the unhelpful and limiting core beliefs we have about ourselves and the world.
On one level we can be grounded in relationships, purposeful work and pleasurable, nourishing activities which are all really important and healthy. The more we sense our interconnectedness and the source from which all life arises, the larger the container in which we are grounded becomes, the deeper our roots. To put it in a different way, we are living more authentically, more aligned. And that correlates with a growing sense of safety and wellbeing no matter what is going on in our life.