Scattering Seeds of Change

Are the changes that are most profound the ones that we do not force?  Are they the ones that we scatter seeds of over the years sometimes with urgency other times with a gentle push, although mental, and then, one day, we notice how we have changed?  Like the idea of letting go? 

I had thought about and practiced this direction for so many years; I had even given others this direction in my yoga classes: "let go of expectations" or, more simply, "just let go."  It seemed like a good thing to say; a good thing to do even though sometimes I felt annoyed when people would tell me to let go like, "what does that mean?  I don't understand!"  And I would lay on my mat, aware of my frustration.  I thought about this idea in the car on my way to work sometimes too when I was trying to move through a difficult feeling or circumstance.  And therein lay the problem: I was thinking about letting go and often times trying to force myself into a place that I did not yet understand.

And then I experienced it in my body.  I was nine and a half months pregnant with my first child and I was out for a walk.  I was so overdue that the concept of time had been stripped away and I had actually moved beyond expectation.  It was another steamy day but my gentle determination, guided by feeling rather than thought, led me outside.  I walked slowly down the block and I felt it: a loosening in the thousands of muscles wrapped around my enormous belly.  My body and mind in perfect union released her - my daughter - into the world.  A simple freedom filled my heart as I walked home.  About five hours later, I had my first contraction.  And I finally experienced perhaps the most powerful lesson of motherhood that Francesca has continued to teach me: Let Go. 

I like to think that the years of speaking these words, of mulling them over in my mind, of reaching for the feeling on the yoga mat helped prime me for this experience and allowed me to notice it when it happened.  And, if that is the case, perhaps this is the lesson: we have to practice the things that we want like love and letting go and being present so that we can be open and aware of the experience of them when they show up and thus, without really knowing it, change.