What I’ve got from Weightlessness with Almog Loven
 
I have now had the privilege of attending two Weightlessness weekend programs with Almog Loven in London, 2018 and 2019. Both times, I organised/re-arranged work and international travel commitments so as to be able to attend. Both times it was more than worth it. 
In 2018, I signed up for the course as soon as I saw the video which was posted with the announcement. (link at the foot of this post) I had a very strong sense that the program would be something I would enjoy and gain a lot from. My instinct was accurate. Nonetheless, I had not imagined just how nourishing and enriching the program would be.
 
What did I get from studying with Almog? Affirmation of:
- Be yourself, trust yourself, accept yourself, love yourself. There are infinite ways to do this, always available. You are enough already.
- Whatever you have to do, do it as far as possible in such a way that you allow every cell of your body, every pore of your skin, to smile.
- Meet what arises with a smile. You’ll be able to meet if more fully, more skilfully, and you’ll be able to navigate/inhabit the situation more joyfully.
- As a facilitator: once you’ve developed your toolkit and you know it works, once you’ve thoroughly tested it in the arena of your own life and teaching: then get out of the way and allow yourself to be a conduit for the tools to serve their greater purpose and help us access more of our underlying wholeness and joy.
 
Both occasions from the Weightlessness weekend, I feel like I received a huge dose of deep nourishment, so affirmative and resonant that it supports me to move more fluidly and efficiently in all the interactions of my life and in my relationship to myself and others months after the program.
Over the years, I have attended some great ‘movement’ programs with really solid, scalable methodology, with safe, inclusive instruction and a great ethos. Almog’s work stands out because it works at the level, I would say, of more of the whole human being. It really does invite us deeper into the recognition that we are enough, and that we have such depths of resources to help and support each other.
For me, this type of work is a way of waging peace. Inviting people to experience how we have such rich resources within is a way to dissolve some of our fears, to peel away some of the weight of our limiting conditionings.

From my perspective, the energy that Almog embodies and shares is a key element here. I would say that Almog is able to graciously offer this invitation because he clearly works from a place of lively presence. He is not forcing an agenda or a particular flow or structure to the sessions. Rather, I witnessed a skillful and courageous facilitator ready to meet the group as we are. From this place of honest presence, Almog invites us into the lived, visceral experience of our own ‘enoughness’. Without forcing anything, the work invites us to experience deeper layers and unfoldings of ‘weightlessness’. For example, at an immediate, physical level, we experience how we can allow functional, beautiful movement with minimum effort and maximum nourishment. At a more holistic level, we gain lived experiences of how we can give, receive, invite and allow support.

Both years, I was hugely impressed by how Almog guided us through the weekend, building a stronger and stronger container in which it was easy for us to dive deeper as a mutually supportive group.
The first year I learnt some new elements that continue to enrich my movement practice. The second year, the movement was not dissimilar, drawing from the same palette, though not the same. What was the same was the spirit of the work. I would describe it as the same river. It has just flown on, gathering greater, nourishing force.
There are some types of workshop programs that one can return to and feel like you didn’t get much compared to the first or last time. This can be the case when the teacher’s work is mainly about sharing nuts and bolts techniques.
However, when the work is about deeper principles which impact all aspects of our life, it can be the other way: each return is an opportunity for deepening. This was my experience my second time with Almog and Weightlessness. The first was easily one of my all-time favourite workshop experiences as a participant. The second one topped it.

I carry with gratitude the gifts that have come to me from my work with Almog. I hope to study with him again and wish that more and more people can experience his great work. To me, it feels like Almog’s work is part of a new paradigm, beyond compartmentalisations and narrow labels. This is not a dance workshop. This is not a movement training. For me, this is about how we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the environment. To my mind, Weightlessness extends a beautiful and highly effective invitation: to skilfully peel away the burdens of our conditioned ideas so we can inhabit our here and now with deepening awareness of the true weight and real light of our conscious human presence.

Link to Weightlessness trailer video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K51B-Qwqg-o

The yoga method: Some notes to self September 2019

Cutivate the medi-state as best you can.
Whenever you come away from the centre, patiently, kindly, invite yourself back to the centre.
Pay close, honest attention to what draws you away from the centre and what helps you stay centred.
Take full responsibility for your experience.
Recognise that how you meet life affects your experience.

Do what you are doing with all of yourself.
Make the action its own reward.
All the time.

Practice joyfulness.
Practice gratitude.
Practice presence and celebration.

Questions for inquiry:
From Captain Bill Whorton from Acharn Cha: ‘Where am I in this?’
From Erich Schiffmann: ‘What’s the truth here really?’
From my own practice/investigation:
- ‘Where am I acting from?’
- ‘What is my motivation?’
- ‘Why am I doing what I am doing?’

Bhakti yoga is the yoga of devotion. It is associated with practices of singing, dancing, with selfless service, with the dedication of one’s actions to that which one considers the highest, with the consecration of everything we do.

The word bhakti is from the root bhaj, which means to ‘approach with reverence’.

Bhakti plays a central and foundational role in the yoga method.

Bhakti, together with jñāna and karma, form the three principal mārga-s, or ‘ways’ of cultivating and revealing yoga.

Sometimes, people misperceive this and think that one can choose a path: the karma path for the active, socially minded; the way of jñāna for the person of inquiring, intellectual, reflective and meditative persuasion; and bhakti for those of devotional proclivity. Or: karma for the active-pragmatic, jñāna for the intellectual, bhakti for the emotional.

However, these three ways can also be seen as the interwoven, mutually supportive and enabling foundations of the ‘one true way’ of yoga, that is, the all-inclusive way that invites the whole human being into oneness.

I would say that we will be hard pressed to come to any degree of realisation without a good degree of bhakti.

For example, I have a friend, Bill, a former US Marine Captain. In Vietnam, Bill experienced all manner of horror, and it had a deep effect on his life. Decades later, Bill told me that it was the study of philosophy that saved him and helped him to continue a sustaining inquiry into meaning and reality in the wake of the soul shaking, life changing experiences he lived during the Vietnam war: the horrors and privations, and the extraordinary love and comradeship he had experienced on the exacting field of examination that is the high-stakes arena of battle.

When I met Bill, we were both teaching English at the same university in Thailand. At that point, Bill had already been translating Confucius with one of his Chinese colleagues for more than twenty years, and had been translating Japanese Zen texts and Thai Buddhist texts with colleagues from those departments for years, all while tutoring students in some of the Greek and Latin classics. In the more recent years though, Bill had got to the language and the text that had long fascinated him, with its most celebrated philosophical treatise delivered in poetry of jaw-dropping beauty and perennial acuity - on the battlefield. Bill had started studying Sanskrit with another senior faculty member from the Sanskrit department. After some formative years to gain some familiarity with the grammatical foundations, Bill’s Sanskrit master had granted that they begin work on the Bhagavad Gītā. Bill was thrilled.

Often when he was working on this text, Bill would comment to me on the soul-shaking beauty of the verses, on the potency of Kṛṣṇa’s teachings, and on the unmistakable ‘rasa’ or flavour of the battlefield that the opening chapter evokes, and how that brings a man into the present moment like nothing else.

As Bill was advancing through the text, he got to the twelfth chapter, devoted to bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, in which Kṛṣṇa also describes the devotee who is dear to him. When I called in on Bill in his office, he straightaway commented on the beauty of the verses, but then went on to say:
‘But I have a problem James… ‘
Now Bill knows that I like to sing ‘kīrtan’, that I enjoy some of the practices that are immediately associated with bhakti yoga…
‘I just don’t have a bhakti bone in my body.’
This did not land very convincingly with me. I knew the tenor of Bill’s days. He would rise at 4 o’clock (‘Well I was a Marine, what other time is there to get up?’) and go for his morning walk, during which he will do 100 push ups (‘I’m a Marine, I learnt certain habits’).
And after this start to the morning, Bill will spend most of his day studying wisdom texts, otherwise teaching language, as a means to facilitate more effective communication, in other words as a means to facilitate more penetrating and revealing inquiry, to peel away, as Bill would put it, his highly practised and refined capacity to delude himself; in his ex-Marine’s lexicon: his inestimable capacity to mindf*** himself.
So I said to Bill,
‘How can you say that? How do you spend your days if not soaked in devotion? Is your whole day not devoted to your search for truth, to come out of the mindf***? If you were not dripping in bhakti, I don’t see how you would possibly be able to do what you do every day.’
And Bill said.
‘You know what James, I went to see one of my monk friends the other day, and he said the exact same thing.’

Now Bill himself had pointed out to me, earlier in his work with the Gītā, how he knew first hand the difference between habits and discipline. He owned quite openly that the getting up at 4 o’clock, the walk with the hundred push-ups, and the always carrying his wallet in a waterproof plastic wrapping (‘A Marine is prepared’) were not so much ‘discipline’, just well-established habits, known in Saṃskṛt as ‘saṃskāra-s’: ways of operating that are well-formed, well-made, well-established. (Just as Saṃskṛt refers to the language that is well-structured, well-codified, well-arranged, well-ordered, well-made, so saṃskāra - another form of the same word - refers to a habit that is well-made, well-established. Well-formed.)
However, Bill had also owned that the commitment to keep exploring, to keep inquiring, to not settle, but to keep fathoming the depths of one’s almost - as one keeps looking - unbelievable capacity for self-delusion, for willful blindness, for tricky, refined, polished mind-f***ing, well, that takes real discipline. That requires courage and commitment. Other things that Bill learnt from his years of service.

The fact is that real practice, on any particular personal path requires courage, heartfulness, requires devotion to the cause. It is so easy to settle into the ways of denial, delusion, of wilful blinkeredness. A practitioner needs qualities of a warrior. But a warrior needs love to stay true to the cause when the real duress comes.

From the outside, Bill’s path might have seemed like one of jñāna, of the intellect. He was spending time at his desk, in searching conversation and applied effort with other ’students’ who were also Professors. He was thinking, reflecting, re-formulating. However, how could he have continued his efforts without devotion, without bhakti? For Bill, his inquiry into Truth was his ‘Highest’ and it was to this that he was dedicating his efforts. His ‘Highest’ or ‘God’ might have taken a different ‘form’ from that which people more typically think of, but his devotion to it was real and sincere, illustrated irrefutably by the way he dedicated the currency of his life force.

Sometimes people think that one can just do karma yoga. ‘What’s the point of this meditation and study (jñāna), of this singing and dancing (bhakti) when there are people hungry? When there are bridges and schools to be built? But again, how can one work effectively, efficiently without inquiry and attention (jñāna) and without dedication, commitment and devotion (bhakti)?

As so often in modern times, I feel that people often reduce the meaning of terms, wanting the security of compartmentalisation and of easy ‘tick-box’ assigning of big concepts to convenient and non-threatening little boxes. This is particularly problematic when it comes to yoga. Because yoga is about coming out of all limitations, freeing ourselves from all limiting beliefs and ideas.
Consequently, genuine yoga practice demands that we go into the unknown. Yoga practice can only begin, or proceed, when we own that we do not know. The delusion and self-deception of ‘I know’ will block it. The slavish ‘believing’ of ideas, theories, systems - scientific or otherwise - will block real practice. The way of yoga is to wilfully step into the unknown, honestly, with our awareness and our discernment as our companions. Whether we are of the intellectual (jñāna) or practical persuasion, this is impossible without bhakti, without heartfulness, and courage. Only with bhakti can we approach our activity and our inquiry with the attitude of reverent presence that will most empower it.

There can be no practice without bhakti. It is the enabler of karma and jñāna.

Similarly, there can be no practice without karma, the action that enables bhakti and jñāna; and there can be no practice without jñāna, the attentive inquiry that enables and checks that our karma and bhakti are actually inviting a deepening of yoga.

The way of yoga is the way of the whole human being. Yoga includes.