28 February 2008

Faith is aligning yourself with a source of energy, belief is the process by which you give to and receive from this source – like a two-way siphon.

27 February 2008

26 February 2008

Work

This is an email I received from a comrade who attended the weekend workshop, plus my reply:

I feel that I can be sparked by every connection – physical and non-physical. For the connection to be made, I only need my heart to be opened and the presence in my consciousness of the other – physical or non-physical. No activity is needed by the other entity. The better I'm rooted, the loss of energy is diminished. That huge amount of energy should be used in some forms: the common one is to strengthen my body. Another one is to heal myself by letting the energy circulate in my body, especially to sick organs as well as sick mental and emotional parts. The third use is to let that energy hug the world – basically everything that comes in front of me. Halevay (I wish).

And, with your permission, I have a question: I got the impression that during the work you don't tune (physically) the students to their root. Could you explain to me your attitude?


Firstly I would like to say that I think a physical root is vitally important, and that as spiritual work progresses so should one's rootedness, otherwise one floats away. But when I teach is all I can do is teach where I am at. I cannot start working with something I have little confidence in or incomplete understanding of. This time I decided (unconsciously of course) to start with the breathing sacrum and build a world from that, and work with a soft light touch to encourage peoples hearts to open out into each other and into the space. Also, the fundamental truth I am feeling more and more nowadays is that yin and yang are always together – dipolar if you like – you cannot have one without the other being there as well. So the root into the earth generates and is generated by the route to the stars: up necessitates down, soft requires hard, tenderness is weak without ruthlessness, and, most significantly, you need the other as the other needs you (we must admit the emotiveness of the situation – it is a vital part of the elastic). When these "opposites" are together (rather than one following the other), the interaction and interplay between them is intense and dynamic (elastic), but also equal – the coming together draws each into the fray. But there also exists a delicate and nourishing space between them (or is it around them? – both are felt) where your essence can reside and be more fulfilled than it can if it rides either of the opposing energies. If you ride energy then you experience exhilaration and excitement followed by deflation and exhaustion (this is using energy as a drug). If you find the quiet space (the eye of the storm) within the maelstrom then you are eminently stable. This quiet space is everywhere and with work and with time (patience) you develop an affinity for it – a natural tuning with it – and your essence can extend into every such space it finds. This is healing. To find that quiet space you must become aware not just of the two opposing energies, but of the mechanism that forces them together and then keeps them apart. This mechanism we call "Life." When you enter Life in this way – with sobriety and courage and without intellect (greed) – then you begin to be aware of the overwhelming togetherness of the things of life – like an inevitable and all-inclusive design to life where even the tiniest things have meaning and purpose. Your spirit and soul then start to align themselves with this "godly intelligence" and you enter the divine.

25 February 2008

24 February 2008

Energy & Spirit

This for those I taught at the weekend:

The message I try to get across when I teach is that we are energetic communicating beings first and foremost, and that energy and communication work best when directed by the heart. Energy has its own intelligence and obeys its own laws, which we reveal when we wake it up and then leave it alone (relax – don't harrass it with our slow calculating minds or our clumsy lumpen bodies). The thinking mind's greatest invention – language – is certainly insufficient to the task of elaborating and enumerating the world of energy – as soon as we say anything specific about energy then we have to admit every other specific possibility, creating a richly textured world that proliferates as it works. So, language here is useful not because it says anything important but because it forces us to wake up to what it does not say, and then, hopefully, to what it cannot say. This is poetry.

There is a fundamental energy which we call spirit. It sparks life into things. Life is the seething interaction of seemingly opposing energies and forces – energies we would expect to combine/combust or cancel each other out instead find a way of not only working side by side, but in fact encourage each other to thrive. The mix is volatile, exciting and unpredictable, and it worries the thinking mind which struggles to combine the opposing energies into a stable and secure state of affairs. Every action in the universe is sparked (triggered) by spirit and every action in you is similarly sparked, on a molecular, cellular, and gross physical level. Spiritual work is simply the struggle to become aware of spirit so that life can be lived for what it is – an almost seamless flow of sparks of spirit. It is seeing the source of light rather than what the light illuminates; eventually you become that source of light. Awareness becomes becoming.

21 February 2008


A rainbow from my balcony. Too big to catch in one shot, I took many and used a Canon utility to stitch them together, not too well.

18 February 2008

17 February 2008

We're all trying to open the same door. We just need a new handle.
Today I met another Holocaust survivor. He took my hand and said, "I don't have a healthy centimeter in my body, but I have character, and inside I burn!"

Spirit

What we work for and towards is absolute freedom and independence of spirit. This means, first and foremost, independent of your own mind and body – thoughts and feelings, but ultimately independent of death (and therefore life). Independence and freedom, surprisingly come from and through love, and only when you have earned independence can your love be also independent – freely given – unconditional. Whatever clings to your spirit must be put to rest, not by destroying or repressing (they ultimately never work – your past always comes back to haunt and catch you), but by encouraging what clings to openly present itself so that it can be understood and then appeased by being loved. This is the only way and is really exactly the same as working correctly with another person. It is effectively coming to terms with your past – making peace with yourself.
Each day, new insights, fresh start.

15 February 2008

Resistance=tension.

If there is resistance then something needs to relax.

The main resistance is the resistance to connexion.
Feel free.

14 February 2008

Don't let expertise become a barrier: when confronted by another's humanity, your expertise should dissolve into nothingness.

Also, don't let your expertise force a result of your own design. This is just hardness.

13 February 2008

Those good ideas, like faith, compassion, humility, honesty, aren't there to make us good people, but to relax our heart and energy so that it can better connect the way it wants to, rather than the way we want it to. Happiness the same.
Nothing special.

12 February 2008

If the centre has the place then there is distribution. That is natural. There is a contradiction and naturally returning there comes to be both sides and the centre.

Gertrude Stein

Photo: Nira Rabinowicz

I am making a mappemunde, It is to include my being.


Charles Olson

11 February 2008

09 February 2008

Shabat

Sitting here on my balcony with my feet up, the hot sun healing the mosquito bites on my ankles, gazing across the rooftops of Givatayim and absent-mindedly pondering the nature of heart, I realise that there are some fundamental truths (principles) of heart that are quite apparent if you have the heart to feel them:
  1. Heart leaps out to touch other hearts (see yesterdays post).

  2. Heart is terribly optimistic: if it leaps out and touches an object without a heart it will readily and happily invest that object with a heart. In this sense optimism could be defined as giving life.

  3. Heart attracts heart: my heart tugs those hearts it leaps out and touches. But similarly my heart is always being tugged by those hearts around me that have opened up to my heart. In this sense simple connexion is not enough: there needs to be some elastic play along the connexion – communication.

  4. When two hearts open up and become aware of each other and therefore become drawn to each other, then the ensuing communication always approximates a figure of eight rather than a circle. A circle encloses and unifies – the two hearts become one – whereas a figure of eight, whilst connecting and promoting communication, still allows (requires) each heart to keep its integrity and identity. The space between the two hearts then becomes incredibly charged – effectively it fills with love. Walt Whitman understood this when he said his fantasy was to sleep between the bride and the groom on their wedding night.

Spontaneous me, Nature,
The loving day, the mounting sun, the friend I am happy with

Walt Whitman



The first two lines of an astonishing poem where Whitman likens writing the poem to masturbation.

08 February 2008

Affection

Beauty (appearance) is perceived by the senses. Truth (essence) is perceived by the heart. Beauty and truth merge when the senses lead directly into the heart rather than the brain. Then all the senses effectively become touch (feeling) because there is an aspect of touch that enters through and beyond the mere tactile sensation (surface) and encourages communication – essence joining with essence. So, when I hear that baby cry I don't just hear the cry, my heart travels down the channel opened by the hearing, down the sound to the babies vocal chords/feelings/heart. And when I watch a student doing Tai Chi I don't just see their postures, I get drawn in, through the visual connexion, and start to feel what they are feeling. This is akin to entering the opponents energy in Tai Chi at the beginning of each posture. A leaping of the heart into every perception to touch, know and affect the thing perceived. When your heart enters things in this way then it encourages heart and good feeling: you leave a trail of affection wherever you go. It is the opposite extreme to the observing scientist who strives to keep himself as a vital being out of the experiment; an approach that may yield reliable and manipulable data (upon which false realities can be constructed), but not a healthy one by any stretch of the imagination.

07 February 2008

06 February 2008

DAO: in Chinese philosophy, the principle of dividing one into two and combining two into one

from Chinese-English Glossary of Medical Qigong, published in China, ISBN 7-110-02374-5

03 February 2008

If you're properly aligned with yourself then nobody can make you do anything you don't want to do.

01 February 2008

Any situation with an external measure of success is not going to take anyone forward internally because the temptation (conscious or unconscious) to succeed at any cost (cheat) is too great to either ignore or resist.