Letting go of outcomes and allowing things to unfold | #23

Learning the dance of life by working with energy

Most of my life has been outcomes-driven: good grades in school, speedy promotions at work. This metrics and measurements mindset spills over into my hobbies and interests — catching bigger and bigger waves while surfing, getting into more and more complex yoga poses, getting more versatile and tacit while dancing or doing various dynamic movements, even to the point of nearly buying a harmonium after a year of practising kirtan. 

While progress in any hobby or activity is a natural part of the delight and enjoyment, I have tended to be unhealthily analytical and calculating about progress. I couldn’t just dance because I enjoyed it or do yoga because it felt good. A recurring pattern is my inclination towards putting a yardstick on my progress, often to the detriment of my enjoyment. 

People say your strength is also what casts your shadows and this is true because my strength of being tenacious and wilfully determined are also the source of my shadow. It doesn’t matter if I am a beginner, somewhere in the middle or advanced, I always seek to level up. I’ve had teachers, trainers and coaches marvel at my willpower and how I am good at not giving up. Being around more advanced practitioners never puts me off; in fact, it excites me because I love witnessing possibilities and how far I could go one day. While these are wonderful strengths to have—and I am not here to discount them—to reach these high expectations, I’ve often thought of myself as an engine that can be cranked to optimal speed. It’s like the nuance around my sense of self-worth isn’t based on how good I am, but rather at how quick I can be at improving.  

This approach clearly taints the joy of the process–—the mere act of doing the thing. It isn’t enough just to do whatever the thing is; I need to understand or put some numbers onto why I do it. Exhausting, I know. Imposing outcomes on everything I do and needing a deeper meaning as to how it fits into my life or shapes my identity has led to an escalate-and-explode relationship with my hobbies and interests. I know it stems from a deep-seated need for control because, despite being aware of it, I still can’t help acting this way. While it has been a recurring act of self-sabotage, it has also been a feel-good-factor. 

This shows up a lot in yoga, where comparison driven by ego leads me to push myself harder. Comparison can be a healthy incentive for change not when it is the symptom of ego. As a yoga teacher, I’ve also fallen into the trap of thinking I am a more skilled practitioner. I don’t like that I project this onto others in a yoga class, but I know that I often find myself judging someone else’s pose, thinking they are doing it wrong or need to be adjusted. And I often judge the adjusting method of the person who has been tasked to adjust and assist me! It is confusing to realise that, while a lot of these behaviours stem from what I’d class as unhealthy roots, they still result in my feeling good. Maybe this is why I cling so much to outcomes. It feels good to know that I am making progress even if I am conflating my priorities with my perception of the world’s priorities and what they reward.

When I quit my job to give myself full-time space to my artistic side, I brought that same mindset of outcomes with me. I told people I’d quit my job for an undefined period of time to make art and find a way to be financially sustainable from it. Art is generally a poorly funded space and, as a relative newbie to this field, it was almost like wanting to make partner at a firm without even finishing the first year of uni. Going from zero to a hundred like that is an almost impossible task. I found myself wondering about this: why does that matter to me? What, underneath all these surface desires, am I trying to prove? Even in the making of art, what many would describe as one of the most pure forms of self-expression, I was and still am imposing outcomes. Dangerous, I know. 

I felt an energetic shift and an embodied welcome to letting go of outcomes when chance brought me to encounter an esoteric shamanic and energy healer. Six weeks ago, while I was in a low spell, I came across Lynn’s offering in a Whatsapp group dedicated to sharing conscious events across London. She called it an innerdance with somatic release through sound and energy and, because I was feeling low and in my head, it felt like what I needed. 

It was a two-hour long sound, breath and body journey in a group of three. The music was chronologically sequenced to evoke different emotions. She worked hands-on with our energy as well as healing frequencies through intuitive sound and whistling to enable cathartic releases. It can be anything from laughing, crying, shaking or moving. She screamed, howled, cried and made various whistling or clucking noises while holding while feeling into various parts of our bodies and sometimes we screamed, howled, and cried along with her too. 

Lynn offered me a one-to-one journey in exchange for filming our journey for her social media. On Monday, she held me through two hours of energy exchange, de-armouring, holding, releasing, surrendering and allowing my body to guide our path forward. I won’t be able to explain fully what happened because it was a felt journey, dropping into the body to wayfind together. What I can say is that afterwards, I felt lighter. I wasn’t feeling particularly heavy before; in fact, I’d had a pretty awesomely packed two weeks of seeing friends, making art, practising lots of kirtan, ecstatic dancing, drumming and contact improv. It was like I’d come to Lynn at the right time, feeling energetically well and positive, open-hearted and not seeking anything in particular. It was more that we’d done some very deep work together, and releasing the holding that probably had become normalised in my body made me feel light. 

She encouraged me throughout the two hours to not be in my head; she encouraged me to drop into how I felt in my body and to focus on the emotions that were coming up. There were some words exchanged between us, but it was primarily an energetic exchange that was movement-oriented. She made sounds, felt into the energy and touched, cradled or applied pressure to various parts of my body. Quite a lot of the work was my surrendering to her hold, her pressure and her touch while my eyes were closed, and I think I was slowly able to unfold and surrender because I felt safe with her. 

We worked on the pain in my psoas at the start, then she could sense that I was contemplating the heavy walls that had over time been erected around my heart. This was the exact moment she mentioned a grandmother figure wanted me to know that it was alright to feel and soften. My armour started to come down and I began dancing and moving to the music while singing. I played with various tones in my voice; I explored expression through the music and started massaging and prodding areas around my throat. 

Towards the last part of the journey together, likely because I had begun to feel more comfortable, open and at ease, I let out a long and painful soul cry. I cried out ‘my heart’ and I was clutching it. I was feeling into a long-term pain that had become a crusty shell and a cool poison circulating around my heart. I didn’t know it was there, but I could feel it starting to fall apart before I proceeded energetically to purge it out of my mouth. Through furious coughing and dry tears while kneeling, she held me as I released a lot of deeply-held pain. And then I was under a blanket, recovering from the two-hour journey. 

We chatted a bit afterwards and she encouraged me to be gentle. I walked home and felt exhausted for the rest of Monday. I cancelled my evening yoga plans, made dinner and went to bed early. That first night I was restless and didn’t sleep well. Over the next few days, I felt nuggets of embodied insights surface. I could see there had been an energetic shift in my body; I was softening, and letting go of outcomes. 

I saw all the assumptions I’d carried with me all these years around the right way to live, like how rushing would allow me to fit more in, and how outcomes-driven I had been my entire life. I saw how these things didn’t make me happy, but rather perpetuated the anxiety that led me to those assumptions and beliefs in the first place. 

In some ways, I saw myself anew for the first time, how I still tried to fit so much in; how I think I’ve become better at not being busy for the sake of being busy, but I am still so bad at sitting still. And most of all, how my life is always lived in the future because I am always thinking of each moment as a passing moment towards greater outcomes and a bigger, brighter and more improved future. I saw how this got in the way of building real connections, true friendships and a deep sense of belonging. If I am always grasping outcomes and dictating how my life unfolds, then how can I truly be in the moment? That is what is required for authentic and genuine connection. And that is what is required for true friendship. 

I saw a readiness in me to slow down; I saw myself relinquishing the tightness I hold to outcomes. I saw myself cancelling plans, choosing to rest and not ‘achieve’ things, and I didn’t feel guilty about it the way I normally might. I saw the lens through which I viewed my life change its focal length. On a daily basis, I was overly focused on the birdseye view wondering how I was going to make that view magnificent without appreciating that it arises out of many small and beautiful moments. The hyperfocus on outcomes meant I didn’t know how to enjoy each moment because I was rushing onto the next. 

I felt my full-bodied self letting go of how I wanted things to be, instead I saw a readiness to just be with each moment and allow things to unfold. This isn’t some revelation about becoming anything. In fact, it is precisely the opposite: easing into not needing my self-worth to be based on anything and being deeply okay with that. This is about journeying into deeply held beliefs and truly letting go of them, surrendering to what is and allowing things to be what they are.