Living in our Radiance

...an essay...

Photo Cliff Scholz

There’s a quote I love from Chuang Tzu, a sage who lived in ancient China. Here it is:

“I am going to try speaking some reckless words, and I want you to listen to them recklessly.”

It’s hard to convey some things. But saying things of real value often requires us to speak into the headwinds of cultural conditioning. That’s seldom easy, at any point in history.

So let’s get right to it.

My first teaching role was as a long-term substitute. I took over the classes of the most popular teacher at a private high school. That teacher had been jailed on cocaine charges. He was gone and I was there, so naturally I became a lightning rod for the feelings of hurt, anger and betrayal that people were feeling there. Plus I was a new teacher, which can be a little rough in any case.

I had a nine-month-old baby daughter at the time. One day immediately after I arrived home from another exhausting day’s teaching full-time at $6.75 per hour, her mother had to leave for an evening tutoring job. My sweet little baby clung to me like Velcro. I had zero energy for that, but when I tried to set her down she immediately cried. Feeling a little desperate, I called my sister-in-law on the phone. She had introduced me to homeopathy for self-care a couple years before.

Sitting on the chair by the telephone table with the baby still clinging fast, I said stuff like, “I feel beat up. This job is a drag. I'm being destroyed.”

“Those are all metaphors for physical injury,” came the reply. “I suggest taking arnica.”

Arnica is a homeopathic remedy typically given for injuries from trauma and/or overexertion. It is derived from a flowering plant whose full name is arnica montana, the “montana” part probably referring to the flower’s preference for mountain habitats in its native Europe. Modern science says there’s nothing in it. However, I believe it is still standard in the Homeopathic Pharmacopeia of the United States, so, there’s that.

Back to the story: I got up, baby in arms, and found the remedy. I took it. I sat back down. Almost immediately, I noticed that my girl held me a little less tightly. She let go and simply sat in my lap. Fairly soon, she squirmed to get down and then sat on the floor right next to my chair. Next she crawled a few feet away. After another minute or two she was on the other side of the room, playing happily. I felt better, too.

Later it occurred to me that what had happened was, when I first got home from work, my daughter could see Daddy, but she couldn’t sense me. I was apparently “there” — if you snapped a photo of my face, I’m sure my exhausted expression would have registered on film. But I was not energetically coherent. I was mostly gone. Not-here. I later described this state as having my energy body collapsed below the level of the physical. This would explain the baby’s confusion: “Where’s Daddy?” She could see me, but she couldn't find me. Hence the Velcro clinging. I didn’t have words for it then, and even now in mainstream culture such words are prone to misunderstanding, but I observed that as my energy body or energy field started to expand, my daughter could feel comfortable at greater and greater distances. Daddy was present again. In fact, her distance from me served as an indicator of the increasing strength of my energy field.

In later years I read that as a homeopathic remedy, arnica assists with the translation of the physical body from the non-physical world out of which we emerge, moment by moment. Another way I’ve heard this expressed is that it helps connect the physical body with its energy template, hence its uses in cases of shock or injury. I think it’s a little like referring to a blueprint to rebuild a house damaged by a tornado. This hypothesis is consistent with my observations. But what surprised me most about this early experience was seeing that the non-physical body also emerges more coherently in the process.

Now, this isn’t a post about the virtues of arnica as a homeopathic remedy or homeopathic medicine in general, and I must emphasize that I’m certainly not giving medical advice here. But I was interested when I looked up the plant to see that it’s part of the daisy family, with their characteristic “disc and ray” flowers. Like daisies, the petals radiate from their centers. Many people find that just looking at them helps!

Rest, food, water, sleep and time will also restore our physical bodies and our energetic coherence. The radiance of another person can sometimes help as well. Sunshine, conscious breathing and exposure to earth and water, too. Likewise, speaking our truth. Connecting with art, or nature. Many things can help — so you might want to be aware of this if you sense that the quality or strength of your own energy field is somewhat compromised these days. It’s worth paying attention to. Just as the baby’s distance served as an indicator of the strength and quality of my energy body, the strength of one’s energy body can also be an indicator of our so-called “physical condition.”

Anyhow, there’s a lot packed into this little story. Quite a few things described here: a medicine that most modern physicians dismiss, the concept of an “energy body,” the idea that a field of presence and information surrounds and suffuses what we think of as the physical body, a field that expands, contracts, and in fact can extend amoeba-like into our environment — all this “isn’t real” to many people.

I know this can sound kind of “woo-woo,” but at a basic level, we know when we’re feeling radiant and when we’re energetically compromised or collapsed.

The questions I’ve been pondering are: To what degree am I habitually shrunken-down, contracted, or existing in a kind of “beaten-down” state? How big might I yet expand? What would it take for more of us to, perhaps rapidly and dramatically, increase our presence and field strength — to be truly radiant? And what will happen in the world as we do?

A few hours before writing the paragraphs that follow, I was sitting in the waiting room at my dentist’s office, wondering how I was going to complete this essay. Quite honestly, I wasn’t feeling very expansive or radiant at the time. Suddenly out of nowhere I thought, “Uh oh! I think I may have left the car unlocked and my phone on the passenger’s seat!” My legs walked me back out to check.

When I reached my car I saw that, no, I’d stowed my phone in the console and the car was locked. I then hurried back toward the door that led into a foyer shared with an ophthalmology clinic next door. As I approached the outside door I saw a woman with a walker coming to the same door from the opposite direction. She appeared very frail and unsteady. I slowed down and came to a stop. Our eyes met.

“Hello!” I said. “Would you like me to hold the door for you?”

“Yes. That would be very helpful,” she replied. Her progress on that last five feet of sidewalk before the door was going very slow.

I waited.

“No hurries, I have time.” I said.

“I was recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s,” she explained. “Sometimes I freeze up.”

And indeed I could see this was happening: she took very short steps punctuated by long, trembling freezes. She needed both hands on her walker at all times. I didn’t see any way she could have negotiated that spring-loaded office door without some kind of help.

So all of a sudden I’m in communion with this other human being. Everything else dropped away. It didn’t matter why I happened to be out on the sidewalk we suddenly shared. Nothing else mattered but the starkly vulnerable reality and the human intimacy of the moment.

“People are so kind,” she said as she finally crossed the threshold after several minutes of effort.

“Eye doctor or dentist?” I asked once she was inside.

I held the door to the eye clinic. I then took my seat again in the waiting area next door.

Oddly, just sitting there, I felt better. I felt stronger, fuller, more expansive. Something about what had just happened drew my energy forth — the physical movement, the unexpected interaction with another person, the pause and dropping away of everything else as events unfolded. One could say that as events unfolded, so did I.

I mean, seriously: Did I help her or did she help me? In retrospect it seems we probably helped each other. Important lesson here: whatever our physical condition, we still radiate. And our radiance doesn’t merely have amplitude or strength, it has something that cannot be quantified: it has qualities.

An hour later when I was leaving the dentist’s office feeling eager to get home and finish this essay, there on the same sidewalk was another older woman, also looking none too steady on her feet and taking short steps, although this time with no walker. She had arrived via a public transportation van just as I was heading out. Again I held the door.

“Oh!” she said. “Perfect timing!” She smiled.

I’ve been seeing this dentist and visiting that office for twenty-five years. Nothing like these events had ever happened to me there before. Call it a coincidence if you like, it seemed the universe was trying to get my attention.

So here’s some more reckless words: As we expand energetically, we reach not only into space but into time. We reach from the depths, we reach into the depths, and our reach extends well beyond our awareness. Through the reach of our radiance, we are in deep dialog with our world. As part of this dialog, often, it seems, the world wants to share something with us.

Shasta Daisy in flower. Photo Cliff Scholz