Shapeless Movement

Early in the first term of the Short Form my teacher would introduce the concept of shapeless movement. The image he used was that of the baby in the womb gently swaying to and fro in the amniotic fluid. The foetus has no idea of self and no separation from that to which it is naturally connected, so its movements express its connectedness (it moves with the mother) rather than its feelings of self importance or uniqueness. My teacher used to show us that if we remove all localized movement from the body and get everything from the waist then we touch something very like the shapeless movements we would have made before we were born. He would add that the feelings associated with shapeless movement should be like a home-coming: we enter a state closer to the perfection that we once possessed before the stranglehold of ego throttled our awareness of natural connections. It is essential that these memories start to be rekindled, otherwise your progress will be erratic and off the mark. What drives the passion of your practice should be a yearning for the perfect connectedness you once knew. If this is your beacon then, as long as you are honest with yourself, you will naturally know when things are right and wrong: a natural ethical sense develops within you. The seat of this is, of course, the heart.

This evening, working with John, he made a point by quoting Shakespeare:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste

Imagining the tragedy of such a possibilty should be enough to make us redouble our efforts.