Good Yield

I was recently part of a leadership retreat where we, quite by accident, got to belly laughing. I was leading a guided meditation and invited participants to take a deep breath in, and then exhale, releasing whatever sound might come with it, if they wished. A friend and fellow traveler with deep wisdom in somatic practices exhaled with a groan – sonorous, resonant, and perfect – and there was a palpable shift in the room: an easing, a loosening, and I think a shared recognition that such a sound was both unorthodox and wonderful. I continued to the usual second deep breath, and the second groaning exhalation was even more pronounced, and suddenly the laughter – astonished, mischievous, joyful, and somehow still supportive of the groaner – was released in rolling waves around the room. Seeing where we were headed. I made an amused observation that only made the laughter more raucous. There was no stopping it – and honestly, I didn’t want to stop it. I wanted to encourage and celebrate it. We had a meditation to do, yes, but not before we were done laughing. It felt important, urgent, sacred; I felt like a midwife witnessing the birth of something – of trust and more than trust. By the time the waves had subsided, there was an obvious shared sense of release. Even in that bright moment, the many hard, even terrible reasons people might need such release came briefly to mind – but they were weak and shadowy in the face of our shared hilarity.

Then after our retreat was over, I joined a group of friends who regularly gather to celebrate the changing seasons – solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter holidays. This past weekend was the gateway to Lammas, or First Harvest. As we had at the retreat, this group also practiced a ritual of gratitude and release – and in our conversation, I was reminded that the earth’s abundance is often referred to as yield - an acknowledgement that the earth surrenders her bounty. Robin Wall Kimmerer tells us that “in some native languages, the term for plants translates to ‘those who take care of us’” – that native cultures understand the earth’s yield as essentially a gift to us, a gift we might both reciprocate and emulate. My experience, too, teaches me that one of the easiest spiritual practices is simply to lie back on the ground and look up at the sky – to feel the weight of my body supported by heft and gravity of all that is, and free myself to see the beauty above and all around me. The strength of that practice – of surrender to solid ground and open sky – is a powerful antidote to the human forces that seek to intimidate me into silence or hiding. And when I undertake that release in the company of my fellow humans of good will, the result is magical.