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On the longing for village and conversation

9/8/2021

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I am finding the lack of village more and more painful to bear, the isolation, the lack of engaged, supportive community of shared ethos. I want to live amidst people willing to witness, support, inquire at the level I feel is honest and necessary. This is one of the things I have found so painful this last year: the absence, or at least the misleading presentation of the absence, of honest discourse in mainstream public view, the preponderance of negligent narratives, the wilfull and determined ‘ignoring’ of inconvenient, holistic perspectives, the deluge of propaganda, the avalanche of fallacious reasoning given a free pass and repeated airing on so-called ‘respected news channels’, senseless censorship and an unwillingness to have an honest discussion, to own or acknowledge that we do not know; and with this unwillingness, an absence of truthfulness, of accountability and responsibility. Now some might say that a ‘steered’, directed discourse, a ‘convenient’ and ‘political’ narrative to ‘shepherd’ the populace where ‘we want them to go for their own good’ is the best policy. This does not wash with me. It does not pass my gut check.
Satyam eva jayate - truth alone prevails. In truth, we will find appropriate steps forward, not when we lie and dissemble and smother voices that illumine reality in ways that jar us. Maybe we need to be jarred. Maybe we need to make some changes in the way we relate to ourselves, each other and our ecos, our home Mother Earth. Fixated on an agenda hubristically dictated by some centralised yet tiny, parochial group of powerholders, will we not barricade ourselves against emerging insights? Is being hellbent on adherence to a ‘prescribed’ way not just another way to demonstrably prove that the road to hell is paved with good intentions?
I find it somewhat maddening-saddening: is the drive to dominate, suppress, steer and shepherd not what has brought us here, into this mess?
In this situation, where Mother Nature is howling for our renovated attention.
Is it not the hubristic mania for domination and control that has continued to exacerbate our problems?
Where does this hubris come from, this insane wilfulness to dominate nature?  
A few ideas.
Is it perhaps at least in part related to fear of death? As Yudhiṣṭhira, in the Mahābhārata, famously responds when quizzed what is the strangest thing in the world? - ‘That death is the only certainty for every human, yet we each act as if it will not come for us’. We cannot control life, we cannot control death. Did some man cower in the face of the mystery of life and death and then act out against life from this wounding, motivated by vengeance, seeking to dominate what we never can?
Did some man find his vitality choked, his strength and ‘prowess’ blown asunder by the mesmerising, powerful presence of a woman inhabiting annd radiating her vital essence? And then, shamed by what his surrounding ‘culture’ has taught him to be his weakness, take it out on the rest of the world, on Mother Nature herself?
Life cannot be controlled. It is an erotic - in the true sense of the word - dance, an erotic dance of mutually alluring and actually complementary forces. The different parts work together and flourish in a dynamic dance of partnership.
Domination, control, suppression, this never works. You cannot kill the spirit. The ingenuity of life and its innate intelligence to express itself in ever fresh evolutionary ways will not be stopped. Try to confine life, the pulsating, throbbing force of creativity? It will come out sideways. It will come out as one of my Indian teachers describes it, as ‘perversion’: ‘each person having their own version’ that is not in keeping with reality, with the greater balance, health, harmony of the whole, that is not in accord with cosmic rhythm.
Remedial possibilities:
Can we please start having honest conversations?
Can we make a diligent, committed practice of looking with rigour, discipline and calmness into the places we have preferred, or been trained, to ignore? Can we make the heroic effort: diligent, sustained, daily, again and again, to penetrate through the veils of our conditionings? To decolonise the landscape of our thoughtforms?
We are human beings, amazing creatures. Our body-borne consciousness, our animated selves remain a great mystery. The honest scientists acknowledge this, and that there is so much more that we do not know than we do. Those who assert that “Science’ knows’/that ‘we have it all worked out now’, I would suggest are deluded, trapped in the ultimately self-sabotaging and so often massively destructive and violent pantomine of ‘dominance culture’ and megalomania.
We cannot control nature and life. Yet how blessed we are to participate in life and nature, to be part of it. Verily, we are nature. Born, we will die. In between those two great changes we will experience change. Let’s face the music and dance, with the beauty of the amazing intelligence and life force that we are part of.
We are human beings, with but two eyes. There is always more that we cannot see than we can. Yet we each can see something of the Truth. Council circle practice acknowledges this. Symbolically, truth is in the centre of the circle, in that space where meet the spokes of the whole wheel of global reality. None of us can see even the greater part of it. Yet we each can see something of it. When we share our genuine experience and insights honestly, we can bring light to each other’s blind spots.
Please, may we remember how to have a conversation?
Can we not do so much better than this adversarial ’two sides’ tragicomedy? Divide and rule will only tear us apart. Let us remember. Let us gather, and listen, first to ourselves. When we speak, may we share from the heart, from our own experience, not parroting what we have heard, not talking in generalisations or y’knows, but offering our unique, honest voice.
When we listen to others, may we listen heartfully, with our whole being, so we may hear beyond the words and their sometimes triggering associations to the deeper, underlying sense. May we be lean of speech, let us talk about what really matters. May we be spontaneous: let us surprise ourselves. Really listening, giving up planning our crafty response, allowing ourselves to be the conduit for the emerging configuration of our accrued wisdom and our genuine, intuitive presence.
I want to live in communities where we share and converse like this. I know we can. Who wants to join me?


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On injury and health, life and death

9/4/2021

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Photo credit: @julialehmanfineart

On injury and health, life and death


I injured my knee at the beginning of August. A month on, I was asked:
‘How is your knee?’
Well, it is not yet functioning to allow full range of motion. Plyometric training not yet on the menu. Neither am I yet playing football or basketball. But ‘how is my knee?’ I have to say, ‘it is magnificent!’ It is showing me the amazing regenerative power of this conscious, bodily vehicle. It is healing well, and the healing continues. I can just about walk again, such that injury is not apparent to an external observer, no longer needing to limp. Extension and flexion are improving. The ligaments are meshing and strengthening back together providing more supportive cohesion and all kinds of alchemy are happening as the meniscus is repairing.
When I first saw the local osteopath whose energy and holistic approach I greatly appreciate, he suggested that I look to nature and the example of a wild animal. ‘Take yourself to some quiet, sheltered place, and as far as you can, do nothing. The body is in healing mode. Allow it.’ Several days I was extraordinarily tired, as it felt as if the body was directing a lot of energy to healing. The injury and ongoing recovery process have brought many invitations: to be still now, to slow, to tune in more deeply; and as rehabilitative practices now come more to the fore, to feel awe and wonder at the body’s regenerative and curative capacities.
Today, this reminds me of a couple of things:
i. You are a self-healing system!
ii. How fragile we are! What takes so much energy, intelligence, time to build/develop/grow can be destroyed or lost in an instant.
In turn, this reminds me of Paramahansa Yogananda saying ‘meditate as if your hair is on fire!’ Or as a friend shared in the words of another master the other day: ‘I try to live remembering that I have a great dagger hanging just above my head, by no more than a thread.’ In other words: give up this living for tomorrow, this ‘oh, I’ll be happy when I get x,y and z,’ this ‘oh, I’ll do what I want once I’m retired…’ Walking in life, death is our constant companion, always a hair’s breadth away, as close to us as the resonance of our beating hearts. Expansion, contraction, inspiration, expiration, life… and death, reality.
There is a famous passage in the Mahābhārata epic where Yudhiṣṭhira is asked a series of riddles, or almost impossible questions. Perhaps the most famous question of them all: ‘What is the strangest thing in the world?’
To which Yudhiṣṭhira answers: ‘that death will come to all of us, yet we act as if we are each the exception.’
How true. And how easy it is to live lackadaisically, absently.
So, this moment, this day, this life, let me live it fully!
In yoga, sometimes the crowning achievement of a human life is said to be to die in peace, fulfilled, free from rancour or regret. How is this achieved? By making life a steady, cumulative practice of sleeping in peace at the end of every day. How? By attuning to and heeding the gifts of conscience, by living wholeheartedly, welcoming to the gifts of the present.
The recovering injury obliges me to pay closer attention to how I carry myself, how I use the gifts of this day. Sometimes people say that injuries can be great teachers. This accords with something I often say - and need to remind myself of! - Nature is the greatest teacher. And She is always guiding us if we will but open ourselves. Right now, is Mother Nature not singing a clarion song, with a seismic bassline, booming phrases and searing refrains? How loudly must she cry to penetrate the miasma of our busy-ness and conditionings? Can we start really listening and heeding the guidance that the broader web of life is instructing us with? Can we empty out the hubristic human ‘know it all’ and negligent ‘what can I do about it?’ tendencies, and apprentise ourselves, humbly, to the beautiful teacher of Life, while we have the chance?

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Fighting Monkey reflection - 2021 Zero and Wholeness Injury and Health

9/2/2021

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Fighting Monkey reflection - 2021
Zero and Wholeness
Injury and Health


I had been interested in Fighting Monkey for several years. 2020, with all my in-person work cancelled, I was able to join their summer intensive. This year, I returned to Ancient Olympia, looking forward to another week immersed in the Fighting Monkey method.
Now, speaking of the ‘Fighting Monkey method’, I must make clear that I am in no way an official representative of Fighting Monkey (FM). Also, as I understand it from its founders/principal teachers Jozef and Linda - its ‘monsters’ in their words - FM is a method that by design is not fixed, but is intended to help us be more real-world-adaptable. I have heard Jozef emphasise more than once how humans are not machines, and that a good human practice, whatever outer forms it takes, needs to be responsive and adaptable. This accords with my own conviction that practice has to acknowledge and work with the dynamic complexity of natural life. This natural life that includes of course ageing and death. I once heard a beautiful description of the FM method from FM teacher Elke Schroeder, I prapraphrase from memory: ‘I think of it as a method for longevity with virtuosity.’ It’s a method to cultivate growing old gracefully in the sense that it can help us keep celebrating life, however long we are blessed to be here. As Jozef has said, ‘being in love with life, more and more, this is health.’
As with much of the other movement work I have explored I ‘read’ FM through the ‘yogic lens’ that I have come to see the world through. I see it in the context of whole life yoga practice: cultivating harmony, resilience, robust responsiveness, equivision, equipoise in the dynamic field of life; deepening practical, embodied understanding of ourselves and broader life; working with the reality of human nature; honouring the pulsations/cycles of life and cooperating with the nature we are.
One of the constituent elements of FM practice is Zero Forms. There is a lot one could say about this. Again, let me make clear, this is my take on it from my experience of it. Others, especially those who have worked with the FM method in a much more immersive and long-term extended way might have very different things to say. Anyway, amongst what I understand about it: zero forms is a part of practice that allows us to tune in to where we are now. Moving the body in a fairly measured, often (though by no means exclusively) slow, always attentive way, allows a practitioner to check in with the anatomy and physiology. Zero Forms often involves moving the spine and the joints, observing the quality of flow and connectivity through the energy ‘corridors’ of the body. It is a great example of what is sometimes referred to as ‘stacking’: doing many things at once but not multi-tasking. It is a focused practice, yet it aims simultaneously in multiple directions. It brings a broad spectrum of nutrients into the system all at once. It tonifies the organs, it cultivates concentration, multi-sense observation and integrated awareness, it begins to invite fluid, rhythmic coordination between different layers of the body’s intelligence and constituent powers; it stimulates the immune system, and depending on how one works with the movement, it can be used to ground, to quieten, to stimulate, to energise, to strengthen, to cleanse and so on. In other words, while some of the outer forms and some of the subtle aspects of the discipline are different, zero forms has a good deal in common with my morning ‘yogic movement practice’ of the last ten-fifteen years. I draw on lots of different modalities: from the realm of ‘classic modern yogāsana’, from things I learnt playing and training for sports, things I have learnt from various teachers over now more or less forty years of daily movement practice. In the last decade or so, people encountering the way I work with movement are sometimes surprised, puzzled, excited, inspired, and sometimes disappointed! ‘Is this yoga?’ ‘Er, is this tai chi?’ ‘Mmm, is this some kind of dance?’ ‘What style of yoga is this?’ ‘Where can I find this type of yoga if I’m not practising with you?’
When I give myself to yogic movement practices in the morning I am doing my best - which is often so far from what I aspire to - to cultivate steadiness and harmony, to set myself up to navigate the day a little more skilfully and joyfully. So the outer form of what I do can be very different day to day, week to week, and may vary considerably depending what environment or climate I am in, what other types of movement or exertion I am likely to experience that day or during that period, and more basically how I am feeling/doing/experiencing.
When facilitating movement practices, I share what I feel is appropriate then and there, depending for example on the setting, the context, the time available and who is in the group.
However, whether in personal practice or facilitating group exploration, I might say that I am aiming towards the ‘zero state’. What do I mean? To answer this I am going to refer first to something that has landed with me from this year’s FM intensive experience, and then share below a section of the notes from a course I gave earlier this year on Indian Mythology.
This year, my experience of Fighting Monkey was somewhat different from what I had been anticipating. I returned motivated to immerse myself in the embodied, active, participative learning experience. Though challenging, I had found the work, especially in the realm of rhythm and coordination deeply valuable, and with the various restrictions over the last months, I had not accessed any of this type of work in person since the previous intensive. So I booked my place, and traveled to Olympia looking forwards to working in a group and to inhabiting the empty vessel, blank slate, receptive state of studentship as fully embodied as I could.
However, before Linda even demonstrated the first steps of the week’s coordinations on the first morning, I injured my left knee, quite badly. The how, why and what of that is a whole other reflection, but suffice to say, I was not thereafter able to participate in so much of the physical practices. Nonetheless, I attended everything and continued to practice zero forms in the morning within the limits the injury described. One afternoon though, feeling the need to buoy the damaged joint in the water, I left the session early.
Later that evening, another man on the course told me how Jozef had ‘been talking about me’ in what he thought was ‘quite a nice way, when speaking about the thinking behind zero forms. I didn’t see you there, but I thought I should tell you.’ From what was relayed to me, I understand Jozef said something like:
‘Zero is different every day. What is my zero now? Look, if James comes to zero forms expecting his knee to be as it was before Monday, he is destroyed, desolate, but he comes and works where he is, where he can.’
What I understood reflecting on this, is that if I show up as ‘zero’ as I can, I give myself the opportunity to experience as fully as possible.
I did not have the FM experience I had anticipated, but I still had a great time, it was still a positive, nourishing, instructive experience.
Zero and whole, fullness and emptiness.
Are these really such opposites?
Perhaps we can see them as different ways of expressing or allowing the same totality of experience.
But do I allow myself a total experience?
Or do I confine myself in partiality?
Do I cling to ideas or thought forms that block my total presence in the here and now?
Do I hark back to previous ‘golden times’, or fixate on some imagined future state and so basically rob myself of the chance to experience fulfilment in the only moment I can ever experience anything which is now?
But letting myself be zero, letting myself be present, this is not always so easy. Which is why Fighting Monkey is a practice. Which is why yoga is a whole life, lifelong practice.  
 Yoga is a practice that invites us to work with the whole cycle, the full spectrum of experience.
And the full spectrum of experience includes death, the only certainty in life.
Reflecting further on the zero, I wondered, what will happen if I do not practice the zero regularly?
Will I be more likely to clog myself up with unhelpful thought forms and restricting patterns that hinder my living authentically fully?
If I do not practice zero, what happens when things get taken away ‘unexpectedly’?
The crowning achievement of lifelong yoga practice is sometimes said to be the capacity to die in peace, in fulfilment, at ease, in a state of at-one-ment, devoid of rancour or regret.
If I do practice the zero, surely I will be able to meet death and the inevitable losses of life that little bit more easily.


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On fullness and emptiness, pūrna and ṡūnya, wholeness and zero

9/2/2021

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On fullness and emptiness, wholeness and the zero, pūrṇa and śūnya
- excerpt from course notes for an Indian mythology course I gave earlier this year. Here and there the text is referring to ideas we explored in greater detail in the class, but I think what I share here makes decent sense

One of the magnificences of the Indian system is that God/the ultimate/the source/the essence is recognised very overtly as being beyond name and form. There is nowhere God is not. The source, the wholeness is everywhere. This is one of the reasons why God is represented in so many ways, to remind us: the name and form used to represent it are not it! Thousands of (countless) names, thousands of (infinite) forms. They remind us that no particular name or form is it. The names and forms just help us orient towards that which is beyond name and form.
One way this fullness, completeness, wholeness is represented is by the circle. All at once a symbol of wholeness, of the all-encompassing womb of existence, of the ceaseless motion of the cycles of life, and of the zero state of undifferentiated pure consciousness.
In its practicality, the Indian tradition recognises that generally,  it is not so easy for humans to orient towards the formless absolute, or to worship the zero state. The zero state of fullness that is evoked by the mantra:

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pūrṇamadaḥ pūrṇamidam
pūrnāt pūrṇamudacyate
pūrṇasya pūrṇamādāya
pūrṇamevāvaśiṣyate

pūrṇamadaḥ - that is full
pūrṇamidam - this is full
pūrnāt - from fullness,
pūrṇamudacyate - fullness emerges/comes out/up
pūrṇasya - of/from fullness
pūrṇamādāya -when fullness is taken away
Pūrṇam - fullness,
eva - only
avaśiṣyate - remains

All that is full, all this is full, it is from fullness that fullness emerges; when fullness is taken away from fullness, only fullness remains.

Some people prefer to think about this pūrṇa as śūnya, that which is devoid of characteristics or distinguishing marks, the zero state of unalloyed pure consciousness/infinite creative potential.
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When singing/reciting this mantra, I find the sound quality very lovely. I would say that we can feel the energetic invitation to relax into the underlying wholeness. The Sanskṛt here brings a calming and assuring quality. Energetically, the meaning resonates.
However, when we alert ourselves to the ‘intellectual meaning’, it can feel like a bit of a mind-bender. Because, well, I do experience separation, differentiation and ‘less than wholeness’…
However, the mantra still carries a lot of practical instruction. Here as so often, we see the combination of description and prescription.
From fullness comes fullness.
How am I? Day to day, where am I acting from, moment to moment?
Am I bringing myself into wholeness, togetherness, integration as best as I can, and acting from there?
Am I cultivating coherence between my mind, heart, gut as sincerely as I might like?

From Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount:
‘Ye shall know them by their fruits’ (Matthew 7.16)
What is the ‘seed’ of my actions? What type of fruit am I sowing? For as the saying goes, ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’… How clear is the clarity of my intent? What is the quality of my intent? Practically, how might I seek to clarify/purify it further?

Paraphrasing a student of Osho:
‘Only that which is created from a place of love will have a truly beneficial, healing effect…’
From fullness, fullness comes.
The mantra gives us a description of ultimate reality, but also a prescription for practice.

As the Yoga Sūtra reminds us, practice is everything we do, all the time. And Patañjali encourages us to practice wholeness. Just as  pūrṇāt pūrṇamudacyate, so abhyāsāt vairāgyamudacyate.
From abhyāsa - practice as the long-term, constant, wholehearted, dedicated effort to foster steadiness - comes vairāgya - the ‘fullness’ of no longer thirsting for the external, ephemeral things that come and go as we become established in the richness of attunement to that underlying conscious awareness which is always full.

So, cultivating wholeness:
-Where am I acting from?
-Am I acting from wholeness/congruence?
-Am I acting devoid of expectation and its ‘tinting’/veiling effects?
-Am I acting from (a sense of) lack?
-Am I reacting and perpetuating the ism-schism game?
-Am I ‘vengeing’, ‘resenting’, ‘scapegoating’?
-Am I ‘outsourcing’ or ‘offloading’ responsibility?

To paraphrase some of the timeless wisdom encoded in Bob Marley’s lyrics: ‘Now me sick and tired of the ism-schism game… of the fussing and fighting divide and rule game… aiie… you can fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool all the people all the time, so now we see the light, what we got to do? Stand up for our rights!’
No more going along playing somebody else’s tune, towing somebody else’s line, a line that has been produced not from love but from fear.
So what we got to do?
Stand up, samasthiti,
Stop, look, listen, 360degree equipoise,
Claim sovereignty
 Pūrṇam! Let me see, let me uncover it, let me recover, let me look deeper!

pūrṇasya pūrṇamādāya
pūrṇamevāvaśiṣyate

Take fullness from fullness and only fullness remains:
Who am I? When I strip off? When I strip away my conditionings? When I unmask, disrobe, step out of my personae?
How might I shake off some of my veilings?
How can I let go of these blocks?

One practical way the Indian system offers us is to focus on an aspect of reality that is ‘proximate’ to ultimate reality. Through the focus, we shed the distortions and quiet the noise. This type of focus can then become a vehicle we can ride home to wholeness/completion/zero.
For example, Gaṇeśa and his vehicle Mūśika, let us make ourselves a portal for the mahākāya, the great body of mahāgaṇapati, to carry us home, with the skilfulness/ingenuity of the rat and the grace and ease of the elephant.
For another example, Śiva. Let me orient to that which is a symbol of THAT: that whose name, form and stories help me, in this vehicle of a human body that moves and experiences in the realm of name and form; let this be my support, my means to recognise that which really is, that which remains.


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