ebb and flow

“An archer must pull back the bow in order for the arrow to fly.” – Richard Hittleman (paraphr.)

A few months ago I taught a class on how to handle pressure. It was a popular topic and apparently an important subject for today’s culture. Perhaps the most fundamental part of the class was a lesson that recently came to me in a new way, and clicked as it hadn’t before.

During a recent singing lesson my teacher commented (not for the first time) that I wasn’t breathing. I pointed out that there were a lot of notes to sing and it’s hard to have time to breathe when there’s so much singing to be done.

She told me to think of the breath as part of the song, adding to the music. I had always felt that taking a breath was an interruption, and essentially created the feeling of stopping and having to start over again.

Instead, following as she taught me, the inhale began to flow easily, adding energy to the notes without taking my time or attention away from the music. At no point did I feel like I had to stop singing to breathe, rather the breath just became its own note, adding rhythm and texture to the music.

When I taught the class on handling pressure, I spoke about changing from a habit of “stop and go” to “ebb and flow”. So often we think of rest as stopping an activity, which interrupts momentum and puts us in a place of having to start up again from scratch when we return to being active. It’s a tiring experience and draining over time.

In the ebb and flow model, rest is itself an active state. As demonstrated in my singing lesson, rest serves to renew and regenerate energy in the course of the activity.True rest draws inward as you move outward, so when you finish something you have even more energy than when you started. When an ocean wave breaks it is pulled back into the ocean, yet there is no pause between waves for this to happen. A dozen waves are already cresting, because the inward pull is continuous. The ocean is constantly renewing itself, so it is able to be constantly active.There are times when we must sleep, eat, or “take a break”. However, if you can think of these times as part of the general flow of the day or week and not stopping points, they can feed your overall momentum the same as a breath taken in the course of a song.