Softness

As always when teaching I'm struck by the importance of softness. And its scarcity. With a class of advanced students you can be pretty sure that softness, or the magic of softness – the tingle and life of softness – will be absent. Everyone knows that softness is important, but few worship it and place it at the core of their being – an ideal they are constantly striving and failing to attain, and yet touching regularly, if only in others. On Monday night in Mallow there was one soft person in the room and she was probably the least visible and least recognized (certainly the least assuming) there, and yet when she entered the room it was as though she entered with an entourage or equipage of magical creatures, dancing attendance. When I put my hands on her during the application work I was lost despite the fact that she did everything 'wrong' – another confirmation of the triviality of technique. I can still feel the hole her softness created for me, and if I stay true it'll stay with me for the rest of my life. Experiences like these grow on you and increase in intensity with the passage of time – beacons of light shining through the darkness of self. What marked this person out, or set her apart from others, was the fact that she vibrated, or trembled, with something other than self – a nervousness and acute awareness of her own insignificance in the face of reality. Relaxation, if it is taken to mean sinking more deeply into self which it generally is, is deadly and repulsive. Real relaxation is the removal of tension so that you can feel and connect to what's really there, which is always totally awe-inspiring and just this side of overwhelming, especially this time of year. The verge (all three meanings – edge, wand and inclination) of life and death.