The Art of Yielding

by David Anderson

Yield and maintain your integrity, be whole and all things come to you. — Tao Te Ching

The moment we enter a space, especially if it is a space new to us, we might observe some micro-happenings. What happens? First, my senses sharpen and tune into what is there. They make a scan of who is there, what’s happening, the tension and qualities of the atmosphere, dynamics between people, whether or not I feel safe. In this first moment, like all first impressions, I take in perhaps a hundred pieces of information. My senses are “‘a tiptoe”, as Shakespeare says. Once I’ve assessed all this, my senses relax (if the space allows for that). In an emergency situation, my senses might stay at or even intensify the heightened state of awareness. But usually I settle into the environment. Unconsciously or overtly, I seek: where can I get comfortable or have a little taste of what’s familiar? At home, I plop on the couch, unless I identify an urgent need in the house. In the social field, I might move towards someone I know—someone who will most support my presence there, most accept my everyday habit self. My body is drawn to a place in the room where I don’t have to work too hard.

In these moments of falling back into my safe and familiar self, I notice my senses grow passive and dull. They stop taking in new things and they reheat the old meal of known impressions, judgments, and feelings. I go to sleep a little.

Sometimes life demands of my senses a more sustained and focused attention. I enter a space and meet an upset partner, a conflict situation, an emergency. A situation that requires effort. If I resist this demand, I feel exhausted by it. If I welcome it, say Yes! to it, I feel exhilarated and enlivened. If it challenges me, I might grow through encountering it. My senses awaken a new capacity of response-ability. If I fail to meet the challenge, I also get learning. I see what doesn’t work.

Even without a demand from life I can choose to sustain this heightened awareness of my senses. When entering a beautiful landscape, observing a flower, experiencing a piece of art or a moment in poetic time, I choose to engage my senses. The beauty or the well-spring of life inspire my interest.

Sometimes, without any obvious reason, outer provocation, or a recognizable catalyst from the world, I stay in there. I keep perceiving, even without a focus point or a central object for my perception. As if something in me were asking: What is this? What is here? What is speaking? I inwardly lean into the symphony of sensations and notice how they assemble themselves—how they organize and coalesce into a picture or wholeness or meaning or insight. No longer seeing, hearing, or sensing what is tangibly there, an intangible yet objective perception emerges.

This seems only possible after my senses have alighted in the space, become present within my body and within the body of the space. I have to be there first. I show up. My senses lean in. Then I can pull back and give space to what wants to emerge from these perceptions. Without retreating to a passive comfort zone, I stay present in my sensing but I yield to what speaks through these perceptions. I am as present as I was before, but I give space to the intangible qualities, movements, and meanings. In this it can feel like an expansion of presence, an enlarging of the field of my perception. If a hint of passivity or laziness enters this, these perceptions can become full of fantasy, illusion, projection, or desire. If I can sustain this yielding without filling it with my own habit responses or judgments, the senses can go beyond what they have sensed before. They seem to evolve. Borrowing from Goethe, a new organ of perception awakens. It is an organ for this unique revelation of presence at this moment in time and space—something like discovering a new star in the firmament. It was always there, I just hadn’t developed a capacity to see it yet.

My interest in this process can allow it to become more objective and scientific. Subject and object, space and time, come into dynamic relationship, each working with the other, both contributing to what unfolds or comes to consciousness between us. Together we open a curtain for the light of a new star.

This process has a kinship with the soul movements we can experience in speaking. If I let the sounds of my speech find a fully-embodied and pure presence, with the right amount of my offering will, a space is born. The sounds and the life of the words create a space. If I yield to that space, together the space and my attendance create a vessel or perceiving organ for revelation. Something can enter the speaking that wasn’t there before. A sense of living Word may emerge.

I might experience this as joining hands with what is perceived. I am not fixed on the object. I let my attention soften without letting go of the activity of sensing. This vessel, created by the subject and object in tandem, holds the space for another level of perception. I actively give over to its voice.

This process is familiar in preparing for meditation or artistic practice. I show up in the space, sense all the outer and inner traffic and noise, perceive the tensions in the body. My sensing alights upon all of them. My awareness fills the form of my body. I lean in to what speaks. I likewise engage with the space around me. Then I gently pull back and make space. The space inverts.

Sometimes I get stuck to some experience and it won’t let go. I get entangled. Sometimes I back away so far that I fall asleep. But in the dynamic middle is a sweet spot. I am there, not so much there as to crowd the space but not so little as to be passive. I actively yield to a space that opens at the intersection of my perceiving senses and what is perceived. I surrender to that inter-relational space. This convergence and inter-relationship beget a new field of phenomenology.

The next time we enter a new space together, rather than passing through these micro-events at the threshold, let’s stay awake to them and sustain their processes of perceiving. Let our senses reach out, unite with what is there, and then patiently, humbly, receive what would be born from that union. Let’s attune to what lives between us. Open our senses to the dynamic field and inter-play of our togetherness, full of infinite potential for unfolding and empowering intangible presences, in this space, at this time.

David Anderson is a co-founder in 1997 and the Executive Artistic Director of Walking the dog Theater (wtd.hawthornevalley.org) in Hudson, NY. He facilitates courses and workshops in Drama and Inner Development throughout Asia. He lives in Taiwan with his family.