Metal ’25: From Alignment, We Bow

This is the third excerpt from the first free hour of my Metal ’25 retreat. You can find the previous installment here, with more installments coming over the next two weeks. May your autumn be gracefully honed.

There’s a whole lot that really matters in our body as preparation for majesty, by which I mean preparation for sh** going down that you can only say, “God, you and I have a different value system, don’t we?”

That’s basically what it what I’m calling majesty, is those deep recognitions that God and I might have a different value system. It’s nice to go trotting along feeling like, “Yeah, me and God, we have the same value system.” No, that suddenly becomes not apparent, or this would not be happening. You would not have made that choice… “God, this is not the way it would be if I were God,” and suddenly it’s so clear that I’m not, and also really, really clear that even though it’s obvious that God’s value system is different than mine, I still have mine. And what do I do with that?

That moment of majesty, that moment of deep recognition, head on, of the gap between my value system and God’s value system (or Heaven’s value system, if we want to stay in a Chinese medicine metaphor)—that’s called grief. The process of reconciliation between my value system and the value system of the Heavens is the grieving process. Inshallah, it’s a healthy grieving process, a transformation from grief to righteousness. It’s a process requiring a deep inner structure, so that in the gap between my value system and the value system of the heavens, I am not crushed. I continue to have a spine that is not crushed.

That’s the overview of why I’m going to ask you to feel, first, for your axis. You might want to move a little bit side to side and back and forth, so that you can feel where your plumb line is. Where’s the plumb line? Where, inside of you, can you feel for gravity, little bit of leaning one way forward and back. Move a little forward, a little backward, until you find that place that’s upright. Move side to side as well, to feel for upright.

Note, please, that the finding of the true upright in gravity is a very different question than, “How am I most comfortable?” It’s a really different question. It’s also a different question than, “What is my habit?” I always have to kind of keep double checking: Have I found it? Have I found that place where I really am upright in gravity, or in alignment?

There’s a point on the spine right between the two Lung Shu points called Body Pillar. That’s what we’re looking for: our Body Pillar, the place inside of us that is capable of aligning with a higher law. When I say higher law, I mean something that’s not just your opinion or my opinion, your truth or my truth, and it’s not just a matter of perspective.

Gravity is an example of a higher law. Gravity is absolutely not subject to opinion. Over in the Wood element, we had lots of perspectives and we had lots of opinions, and we had to work with those creatively, especially when they conflict.

In Metal, I don’t care what you think. I care what is straight in gravity. It’s not for your convenience, and it’s not your comfort zone. It’s not mine either.

Another example of what I’m calling a higher law: Water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. I don’t care if that’s convenient or inconvenient for you. I don’t care if you’d rather arrange it differently. It’s the spirit of “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” How self-evident are they?

When there is what one might call a crisis of truth, this embodied feeling of ‘I don’t need somebody else to tell me which end is up,’ is very helpful for being able to broker agreement. Let’s start with the truths that really are self-evident, like my backbone and your backbone in alignment.

There used to be this game that we would play out at Sufi University where we’d have partners, and one partner would tell a story that was a true story, but somewhere in the story, they would start to diverge and go off into something that actually wasn’t true. Our job was to stay so aligned that we could spot the moment when the story went off.

It took letting go of our mental-analytical figuring-it-out habit, and just learning to trust that there’s a truth detector in there, and it’s spinal, but it’s not spinal by itself. It’s spinal in alignment with gravity, and higher law—a recognition of truth beyond individual ownership.

Preparation for majesty means preparation for times when outward forms are disappearing, and the breaking up of ordinary life. We’ve got Earth, which is ordinary life. Then we’ve got Metal, and oh, this is something special… Is it a celebration or a disaster? I don’t know, but it’s definitely a punctuated equilibrium.

Find that axis in yourself, find that through line, because it is from that sense of spine that we can say, “Okay, there is a higher law than me. There is a higher law than getting what I want, although I still have my value system. I still want what I want.”

This is the nature of the capacity to bow, to go through a process of curling the spine in that downward movement. It’s a way of saying, “Gravity, you’re bigger than I am. I yield. I yield.”

Give it a try in your own body, that feeling of, “Okay, I yield. Gravity is bigger. Gravity wins, God, you’re in charge. The Heavens are in rulership. I bow.”

Especially as I rise back up again, I’m feeling how different it is to bow than to collapse in a heap.

When we bow, we acknowledge: This is how it is. Gravity wins. It is what it is. It has been sent by the Tao. It has been allowed to happen. I am not collapsing in a heap on the floor. I’m not shouting in rage. I’m not stiff with denial. I am not crushed. I do have to acknowledge and yield. I bow. I bow. I go with gravity. Then I rise.

How have you been preparing for the endings that are coming with the season, or coming with the times?