Zen Crochet: Unraveling Life’s Knots for Spiritual Awakening
When all the knots of the heart are unloosed, then even in here, in this human birth, the mortal becomes immortal. This is the whole teaching of the Scriptures.” — Katha Upanishad
When you are married to someone who loves to knit or crochet, you begin to see patterns—both actual and metaphoric—everywhere you look. Many nights I read across the room from my wife, a world-class talent, glancing up occasionally as she starts a new project. Often it begins with the arduous process of unwinding skeins of yarn the kids or dog have tangled. There are times this disentanglement seems to take forever before she is even ready to get started.
Unlike knitting, done with two needles, crochet is a solitary craft: a single artist, a single hook, a single knot, one by one, over and over, following the vision and rhythm of the pattern maker—a solitary artist and her tool. During the project, there are moments she will stop, look at the object she’s woven and count up the rows as they circle around the basket, rug or child’s toy. As she counts, she compares her progress to the pattern of completion she holds in her mind’s eye. If something is awry, with the tug of the string, each knot loosens as if nothing were ever holding it in place and in a moment, the object is gone, and only a single thread of yarn remains.
Yesterday I read an essay by Ken Wilber called “Are Chakras Real?” where I learned that, in Sanskrit, chakras are properly referred to by the term granthi (knots) and sankhocha (contraction). Like many people I’ve known who’ve grown up in a Judeo-Christian community, I’d primarily associated chakras with Eastern ideas of energy centers in the body that corresponded to emotional states like love or sexual arousal. But, chakras can equally be seen as metaphors for the knots we each form as we wind our way through life, stitching together an idea of who we are. These chakras represent universal mile markers on a map so well-traveled and easily recognizable to the human experience that they’ve been charted for thousands of years into seven categories.
Our first chakra represents the knots of identity we form around our family, tribe or religious community. Our second chakra, often associated with creativity, represents the knots we form when we strike out on our own and form a sense of self or ego—the vehicle we use for exploring our world. Each of these seven metaphorical ‘knots’ exists in each of us in varying degrees of beauty and disorder, depending on where we are in our journey.
Reading Wilber, it finally made sense. As my wife’s pile of unwound thread, our mind was once One. Liberation is found in the untying of the knots we’ve made out of what was once the single thread of our mind. I understood why I hated watching my wife’s unraveling process. As a believer in progress, I love the satisfaction of forward movement, things being built to last, and the feeling of accomplishment that comes with a project’s completion. They satisfy my ego’s need for order and a desire for a sense of permanence in life. Watching a basket or elephant return to a pile of yarn feels like a step in the wrong direction, but only because I was missing the point of the game. Like a swirling eddy in a stream, the patterns made by yarn were illusions masking its true nature.
Matter and energy are the yarn and consciousness, the hook we use to fashion recursive patterns that define our lives. Life is not a level playing field. We come into this life on varying terms. Some are handed a fresh skein of yarn, packaged nicely from the store, with little to do but begin working out an idea for their project. Others cannot afford yarn and must unravel an old sweater to gather sufficient resources to begin anew. Still, others inherit a pile of yarn from their family full of tight knots, which require endless hours of unraveling before they are even ready to consider crafting something new.
Likewise, every business or marriage has a moment of crisis where we must stop and look at how we’ve been assembling our knots and realize this is not at all the beauty or harmony we envisioned when we began. We are faced with a choice: do the Work of unraveling our life’s work and begin pursuing our life’s purpose or resist and, in the immortal words of Weezer’s “Undone — The Sweater Song”, watch life “pull the thread as I walk away.”
One way or another, the unraveling begins, and find yourself naked with work to do, trying to understand who you are when things come undone. The intensity with which we try to hold on to our former creations determines our level of suffering during these difficult times. The lesson we are to learn is that we are the single continuous flow of yarn, not the knots and shapes they make up.
This is the goal of therapy, yoga, lucid dreaming and other forms of self-work: unwinding the knots that you’ve come to believe are ‘you’, in reverse order. You must remember what you have forgotten. As counterintuitive as it may seem to our notions of progress, something changes within us as we realize the knots are not now, nor ever were, really who we are. Many report the alleviation of physical symptoms and chronic conditions connected with regions of their body associated with the knots/chakras they are working on. Others feel emotionally loosened as blissful changes occur and feelings of transcendent freedom arise. The nature of these changes has been spoken of in the mystical traditions of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam.
Traditional religious pursuits are more like knitting needles (the origins of the word religion stem from the word religare, which means “to tie, to bind”). Your religious life and movement are tied to another tool– whether it be a moral code, book, church or spiritual leader. Like crochet, working on your knots represents a solitary, spiritual path unique to each of us. While we will receive guidance in the form of intuition along the way, the unfolding path is one we ultimately must walk alone. Like my wife’s simple pull of the string, once the unraveling begins, you realize there were never any true knots holding you in place, only twists and turns of yarn a tug away from remembering who they were.
You gotta walk that lonesome valley,
You gotta walk it by yourself,
Nobody here can walk it for you,
You gotta walk it by yourself.
