30 November 2007


Max is 15 today. Time flies.

Connexion

The fundamental way we consistently get it wrong is that we tend to draw away from God and into self or the self's projections. By this I mean that we retreat into technique – into what we know, even if that known is a path into the unknown – anything rather than have deep faith in something infinitely larger than ourselves. It is crucial to our development that we always have a feeling for and belief in the much larger picture, of which we are a tiny but significant contributing part. In those moments of working well we become the bigger picture, and the temptation is to manipulate and distort for our own ends. If we can resist this temptation (i.e. if we can truly love God) then we live in a state of constant grace. It is really just a matter of cultivating and getting used to the idea and feeling that the area of reality on which we operate most effectively and efficiently is always the one beyond what we are conscious of. What we know, feel and imagine always gets in the way of real connexion.

29 November 2007

Energy of life

The student of energy must understand and become liberated by the fact that energy is hindered by both the mind and the feelings. Directing energy with the mind both slows it down and dulls its impact, and feeling energy, or directing energy with the feelings, is equally limiting – generally descending into histrionics and indulgence. We must instead liberate the energy from mind, body and feeling so that it can become its own entity, connecting, responding and influencing of and by itself, without our conscious, physical or emotional interference. This requires lightness and single-weightedness – a freedom from the dulling and conglomerating effect of gravity and root. Lightness and single-weightedness encourage detail and delight to proliferate – the texture of our humanity if you like. They allow the structure and intelligence of spirit to reveal itself.

27 November 2007

Suffering

Someone (one of the many jewels in my life) pointed out to me yesterday that when repressed emotions release in the body they manifest painfully. It is only the painful ones we repress. Movement, and by that I mean motion within and then out of a place in which we are stuck, which is basically what all movement is if we are as deep as we can be, is always accompanied by emotion. The trick – survival technique – is to feel without becoming in any way disconnected. It is essential to feel otherwise we are repressing again, but it is also essential to hold true and survive. The elasticity is in the play between these two. Without the emotion we become stiff and blocked, without the alignment with God we lack true purpose and basic connexion.
The literal meaning of Israel is "aligned with God."

23 November 2007

Strength

One of the problems with tensions – blockages – is that because they manifest as knots of immovable energy they are often perceived, by men especially, as strengths – strengths contained; and when they dissolve, if only just for a moment, the predominant feeling can be one of weakness and loss. We must realise that the only really valuable strength and power is that in and of connexion, and not that contained by the body. To be clear and connected, and to have the emotional strength to hold, elastically, to that clarity and connexion despite the inevitable anxieties and fears, is what is required. It is only through such emotional strength – probity if you like – that we deepen into what is essential, rather than build superficial energetic edifices: testaments to both our hard work and our cloistered fears. The problem with hard work is that unless it is tempered and conditioned by a real engagement with life and life's practicalities then it really goes nowhere valuable to either ourselves or to others. It becomes just another ego-trip.

20 November 2007

The mind has memories but the body has history.

19 November 2007

13 November 2007

I wanted a life that was dominated by and permeated by silence. And then, out of that matrix of silence, I hoped that the deeper words would come, the primordial words. But the only words that would be worthwhile would be those which are connected with the original Word, the Word of God, the Word that became flesh.

Father William McNamara

10 November 2007

Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order.

Samuel Beckett

05 November 2007

Body

The mind keeps the world at bay. When the mind stops, not so much stops thinking but stops pushing away – fantasizing, then reality presses the skin with a firmness that brings us not just into our body and our senses, but also into the natural, into Nature – ruthless, unsentimental, dehumanised and totally invigorating. This reality thrusts up through us from the Earth and down into us from the space above, so that the skin becomes like that of an inflated balloon – receiving energy (pressure) from below which must be equalized from without. The more we can allow the world to press in, the less we reside within our own bubble of self, and our senses can start to experience the real world rather than our selfish projections upon the world. Energy is always equalized – the more that we generate from food, Earth, enthusiasm, the more the world presses on us and the more it reveals itself. This is a natural, self-regulating process, maintained with ceaseless vigilance.
we must find the heart of the fire

Allen Fisher

02 November 2007

I am saying that the metempsychoses of the animal (as we are also that, as well as possessed of a "geography" of places in us, things we depend upon, and are called on to pay our respects to, such a mt range as the spine, such an arctic of it as the head, and that tropic, the tail, that antarctic, the feet go cold when the sun of this system, the heart, starts to cool—or that valley of the breath, the lungs, that exit of it the throat, that knot of a membrane which declares the weather blows through that valley, the sea the kidney is (a sea before that cell we are emerged from salt water, long before, long ahead of 300,000,000 years ago), the mounds of the bones of us, the lakes of those lacuna, and the storms, of those newest known things, hormones ...

Charles Olson, The Chiasma, or Lectures in the New Sciences of Man, volume 10 of The Journal of the Charles Olson Archive, 1978.