Water Always Finds Its Way

Have you ever put your hand into a flowing river? The water pays no mind to the interruption of its flow. The river continues to flow as if nothing happened, the slight direction change around your arm being the only difference as it continues toward its destination. If the flow is strong enough the river will take you with it. Merciless in its determination to return to the ocean, water always finds a way.

A river isn’t a fixed object, it’s a constant change process. Although its destination is inevitable and known, it never tires. It carries a lot – Leaves, branches, whole trees, animals, rocks, and tons of bacteria. At times, the water is too low for it to carry many of these things downstream, but one brief storm can change that all.

Thus, you and the river are quite similar. You are also a constant change process. Sometimes you’re flowing more, sometimes less. You have moments where you have less capacity to carry what you contain. And you also know where you’re going. Your energy is headed back into a great ocean of consciousness once you’re done here.

Where you and the river differ is your response to change. Change is frightening for human beings because we can attach to how things are. To our discouragement, attachment ends up taking us out of flow. Change is flow. We don’t always see it that way because sometimes change hits memories of painful experiences.

Then, the flow is no longer exciting because our fear of pain is projected onto it and we say ¨if this continues I will be hurt.¨ So we put a dam in the river of our life process and use internal tension to hold onto how things are. This takes a lot of energy because the flow continues to bump up against our holding pattern and we constantly have to reinforce the tension.

We can only sustain holding for so long before the river of life takes us, whether we want it or not. Usually, this comes as a personal crisis. However, there were likely many prior signals of necessary change that couldn’t get through our holding pattern. Through the personal dilemma, the flow is restored naturally because we have no choice but to surrender to it.

This brings me to a fundamental predicament in life. The power to choose to step into the river of life and flow downstream or to swim upstream. Moral, ethical, and spiritual transgressions to the laws of nature will always bring about consequences. The consequences reveal themselves as the work needed to restore the balance. Remember, water will always find its way. In other words, life will complete itself no matter how long it takes.

There are many ways in which we are ¨paying¨ for the ethical transgressions of our ancestors. Energy and climate crises, wars, and cultural, gender, and racial discrimination to name a few. These are all the symptoms or after-effects of humanity’s choice to go against the river of life in the past. And there is a lot of attention on these symptoms today because we need to make things right.

What does making things right mean? It means that, through us, life is recapturing the energy of the transgression. In other words, going back to the source of where the choice was made and taking care of why that choice was made in the first place. This is how life completes the cycle.

When there is a block in the river, many of the symptoms are caused downstream. Lack of water, no crops, no fish, the buildup of harmful bacteria, etc. But the dam is the source of the suffering.

Just in the same way, our assignment is to take care of the essential energy (i.e. a dam) that causes a misalignment in the first place. Otherwise, we will always be dealing with the symptoms and never get to the core of the problem. In other words, the problems will continue, as will our effort to change them.

But as we talked about, life wants to restore itself. It wants to be in flow, so there’s usually not so much of an effort to create wholeness. We think there is, but that’s because it has become normal to effort our way into things. However, the effort is usually on the level of the symptom and keeps us from touching the intense and deep pain of the misstep.

So thinking our way into solutions usually ends up creating more problems. More fires to put out. If we were instead to be with the natural process of life restoring itself, we would be better off. And this is not a passive strategy– anything but. If we surrendered to the intelligence of life we would know exactly what to do and when to do it, within the immediacy of the moment. We would be connected to the authentic movement of nature and therefore know exactly what to do to live out our purpose.

Not such an easy task, though. It’s not so clear where the flow is and what it asks of us. At least not always. We definitely have moments of clarity, but I think most of us can say that we’re not constantly living in flow, let alone knowing the next step to take. Therefore, misalignment has become common.

So, I’m not saying that we should obsess over finding or being in the flow because that would be a part of the rigid effort. What I am saying is that we should know that life has a tendency toward flow. It desires to continue moving, evolving and transforming. If we were to establish ourselves in this fact, we could relax a little of the tension and be more available for what’s needed in the moment. We would have the capacity to be with our unique process.

What I am asking of us is that we come to an embodied understanding that our life is a constant movement in which we can participate. Which means, we have the awareness to look at our life and notice if the river is stuck. If we have the courage to stay with this ¨stuckness¨ a new movement might emerge.

We may not always ¨get it right¨ or be swimming with the current, but we can trust in the intelligence of life to know. Meeting the moment which will reintroduce movement to the system, it’s inevitable. Our job is to clean up where this is not the case and do our best to listen to life’s movement (or non-movement) through our bodies.

We clean our energy by realizing and therefore taking responsibility for misalignment. With our ongoing awareness here, alignment becomes more common. This is living authentically. Inevitably, as we expand our awareness of the holding patterns of our family history and societal framework, our responsibility also extends.

Life then begins to use us more. We become a refined tool for recapturing energy that was lost through our own or ancestral transgressions. We learn to recycle misused energy – which is great – but also to be more skillful by recapturing the inefficiency in the system and learning from it.

In other words, we have more life energy to put towards things that feed rather than deplete us. More aliveness, spontaneity, purpose, drive, fun, excitement, and joy are the side effects of allowing life to complete itself. It’s what all the mystics have promised us. Life will always find a way to continue in the direction it needs to go. Water always finds its way.