WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN WITH DAVID PASCOE

Dave is a palliative care doctor and mindfulness teacher. Originally from Ireland, he now lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his dog, James. Dave shares his corner of quietude, what it means to be human & how to flourish living a life of presence & stillness.. You can follow his Instagram journey for more inspiration @dave_pascoe

Tell us a bit about what life looks like for you these days?

Well, I’m currently taking, what some might call, a sacred pause; giving myself the space and time to bring a little more awareness and compassion into my life before responding to what unfolds next. The last couple of years have been a season of letting go – coming out of a decade-long relationship and leaving my job as a doctor. Perhaps there was a natural end to both, requiring a period of dormancy before the next season emerges. In the meantime, I’m completing a writing project I’ve rather grandly titled What It Means to be Human. Having started as an approach to alleviating the suffering that comes from the loss and uncertainty we face when dying, it’s now grown into an exploration of how we flourish. Which seems to be how life is, right? The difficulty comes when we resist the letting go.

What does it mean to you to REBALANCE?
There’s a beautiful phrase by the natural science writer, Janine Benyus, that says life creates the conditions conducive to life. Life exists in systems – interconnected relationships held together by qualities that unite around a unifying purpose. We’re not meant to exist in some perpetual state of balance, so when we understand that life is a constant process of rebalancing, we can begin to see change as something to respond to rather than resist. Our bodies know how to do this instinctively but we’ve become rather good at pushing ourselves beyond their natural rhythms. Most of us have probably thought at some point about the relationship we have with our body, but I’ve recently started to ask, how does my body feel about me? Does it like what I put it through, how I treat it, what I think about it? Each of us is not simply a human being, but
also a human belonging who flourishes in love. If we can learn to be a little more loving,
especially towards our bodies, then it’s easier to let go into life’s flow.

How do you intentionally carve out moments of REST in your day?
We get so tangled up in the stories we tell ourselves about how things ought to be. We’re
constantly comparing and judging and trying to cling to what fits with our narrative and getting rid of what doesn’t. So for me, rest is an intentional moment of untangling, of getting out of my stories and into my body. It’s about being present to what is without all that judging. Being mindful like this doesn’t just mean meditating – it can be watching the birds, baking bread, soaking in the bath tub. Whatever takes us out of the habits of thinking and into the flow of feeling. It’s about coming back to our senses or, as the poet Mary Oliver says, “mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.” I’ll be the first to admit I’m not always so great at carving out such moments, but meeting friends for a sea swim and sauna is now a regular part of my week and, of course, James is pretty good at pulling me back into nature.

What do you understand RITUAL to be?
I’m starting to see rituals as little containers for loving presence; ways of reconnecting our bodies to our larger belonging. They don’t need to be grand gestures – as Vex King writes, let the ordinary become sacred. But that doesn’t mean rituals can’t also be wild. I was in Bali earlier this year and each sunrise and sunset I would go into the ocean and just let the waves batter me around. I had to learn to trust the loving presence within the force of each wave, but I came out of the water a different person each time, as if I’d been rinsed out so life could flow through me again. Perhaps that’s what rituals are, opportunities to untangle ourselves from our stories and rinse the residue that keeps us from feeling fully alive.

Please share your favourite travel destinations for those seeking a refuge of quietude:

I’m very fortunate to have been able to travel to beautiful parts of the world like Bali, but (as long as you don’t mind the weather) Scotland is still one of my favourite places to find
quietude. I guess there’s a lot of familiarity in the landscape now, that it knows me as much as I know it. They talk about thin places here, where the air feels a little more sacred and numinous, like your soul is remembering itself. For me, these are places of refuge and shelter. But as much as I love the mountains, I’m most at home by the sea. Hunkering down in the sand dunes while watching waves roll in along a windswept beach; there’s both a comforting nostalgia and a hopeful solitude in such moments. Like I’m coming home to myself.