shaking the bones for joy

how does it feel to be in there?

I told a friend that I’m studying to be a qigong instructor. I paused, feeling the smooth curve of the teacup. How to explain?

Actually, what I want is to talk to people about their bodies. I want to poke them and ask: how does it feel to be in there?

Well, no, actually I want to check on their aliveness. I want to ask them when they wake up in the morning: Are you excited? Or do you yearn to return to unconsciousness?

Or, really—what I want to talk about is death. After they plug in their phone and turn off the light, I want to lean over and whisper in their ear: Does your life make sense, given that one day you will be out of mornings?

And… well, actually, I don’t want to talk to them. I want to talk to you. I want to come to your house and peer into your cabinets and toss out your hoarded collection of shoulds and maybes, so that all that’s left is those few possessions that anchor you to love and whatever god you wink at when you’re feeling lucky.

We’ll open your bedroom closet and look through your selves. The Professional in that jacket you wore before you got a raise and lost your confidence. Your Ideal Self looking sexy in two-sizes-too-small pants (tags still attached), and on and on until we get so deep in the closet we find a box you forgot existed.

We open it. And there, curled up in the fetal position, is the Buried Child, still hiding and shaking in a yellow striped shirt, and we gently stroke them on the back, saying shhhhh, honey. It’s okay, it’s okay.

We’ll go to the bathroom and pour your festering grief for the world out your eyeballs, and when you stand up from crying on the toilet I’ll give you a long deep hug in which I lean into your heart and plant a dandelion seed whose roots will eat your heavy darkness and turn it into yellow flowers.

Next we’ll go to the park.

We’ll lie on the grass and breathe sun through our pores and chuckle deep into our bone marrows. By now you’re feeling so liminal that a faint memory bubbles up. It’s of that time you thought to come out of the sleepy void and don a flesh-body, with all its aches and pains and pisses and poos, and come to this rock in the nowhere-neck of the universe, to be bound by gravity with billions of other scared flesh-bodies and their bad ideas and bombs and offensively linear buildings.

Why this seemed like a good idea, you can’t remember.

For here, being, just being, is so very hard, and over the decades there are so many scary things. But long ago you found a real neat trick to make it bearable, to block that torrent of terror that makes your heart shake:

Build a wall between you and Life.

So brick by brick you detached from life and it got less scary, except the more bricks you added the more hollow you felt, but you kept on building because the fear took on ever scarier shapes, like, I Like Them, Will They Like Me? and Your Rent Is Late and A New Heat Record for April and Did You Hear the News? And so you walked faster and faster through your days, hoping to make it out unscathed. You walked your safe routine until your ruts became walls too tall to leave.

You share this with me as we laze under a wide oak, the grass beneath us pressing patterns into our arms. I mention that if you’re walling off your aliveness you’re also walling off your joy—aliveness is the river, and joy comes when you stop fighting it.

When do you remember feeling joy?

You close your eyes. You remember dancing in the kitchen. When was that…?

Do you want to find that joy?

Yes, you say.

You close your eyes and follow my voice down a spiral staircase, your hand brushing the scraggly moss and cool stone. Down and down, deeper and deeper, until you come to a landing where the air is still.

And there it is: a wall.

You touch one of the bricks. You’re dancing in the kitchen, singing. Your mom, lying on the couch with another migraine, yells, DID YOU NOT HEAR ME, FOR THE LAST TIME, BE QUIET! You don’t want your laughter to disturb her anymore.

You touch another brick. You’re at your new school. You’re so happy to have found kids to sit with at lunch that you make the rawr rawr lion noises that made your old friends laugh. But these kids rumple their noses and ask: Are you retarded?

Brick by brick you hid Joy away to make sure you would always Get Love.

Now as you feel the feelings the bricks were blocking, they crumble to dust. More memories, more feelings, more bricks crumble. A small gap opens in the wall—enough to see Joy on the other side.

As Joy smiles, the light shines out your eyes, too.

I count you back up the staircase, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

When your eyes open, you blink at the afternoon sun and ask: Okay, well. How do I stop making fear-bricks?

It depends, I say. It might take you twelve years of sincere prayer punctuated by sporadic tours of rock bottom, or finding one person who truly believes in you and occasionally working up the courage to call them, or twenty-nine lifetimes of being so scared you abort your flesh-body to return to the sleepy void and twiddle your spirit-thumbs until you forget how scary it was and try again.

But I have done all of those things and I still make fear-bricks, I say with a shrug, so I’ve decided it’s simpler to just do qigong to melt the fear-bricks before they harden and get on with it. As the ancient Taoists said, “C’est la vie.”

Here, let me show you a qigong move that will help, I say. It’s called shaking the bones for joy.

It’s not actually called that, I admit, but trust me–qigong is thousands of years old and many things have been lost to time.

I start the shaking in my hips, building it up slowly until it vibrates down my limbs, up my spine, and out my head. I shake my butt back and forth, as if recalling what it feels like to wag a tail. You mirror my movements, albeit adding a dubious expression. You’re trying to trust me, trying to get into it, trying to shake loose from self-consciousness.

Together we shake, and shake, and shake. People in the park walk by and see us, weirdos shaking and jumping and waving our hands in the air like people used to do long ago, when the distance between past and future was still walkable.

A woman’s poofy white dog makes a beeline for us, yap yap yap yap yap yap yap, and for a moment she lets the leash go slack—something in her also attracted to us—before she clamps down on the leash and her jaw and marches on, because she can smell that what we’re doing threatens the walls inside of her, and she needs those walls, she’s spent her whole life perfecting those walls, she’s managing her cholesterol, she’s getting her steps in, she’s measuring her front yard’s tulip plantings so they won’t come up askew like last year, which bothered her more than she could explain.

A guy walks by with his girlfriend and he looks at our shaking and he says to her, I’ll bet that feels good, because he feels it too, and he’s gotten weary of his walls and sometimes late at night he wishes he could rent a psychic bulldozer and fuck it, just feel it all man, just feel it all.

Hearing him loosens you up. Now as you shake you notice a fresh spaciousness. The energy circulates, like a torrent of water through a dry riverbed. As you shake you loosen the fear-bricks you’ve been building. You shake hard and they crumble and those crumbles crumble into energy that recirculates into your lungs, which open to the world, and you become not a scared three-year-old in a yellow-striped shirt but one of the trillion mouths of god, all fed by a source which swirls through your open heart and dancing limbs, and rises out your mouth as a whoop.

Years later, you’re lying comatose in a hospital bed, as you have been for ten days. In a weary voice, your spouse tells the nurse: it’s time, switch off the ventilator.

The ventilator gives one unceremonious long loud BEEEEP.

Then your life flashes before your eyes.

You know how, when you watch a movie a second time, you notice new things? Viewing your life again, you notice that day in the park. The whoop that rose out of your mouth before you could stop it—that was the sound of when you stopped clinging to the riverbank of life and let its wild current take you.

You lift free from your body and hover over it, looking back at its blue lips and grey skin. You’re glad to be out of that cramped and complaining flesh-body, but you will miss shaking its bones for joy.