For the last couple years I’ve been working with Stacy Hayden who has coached, cajoled and carried me into cyberspace, spreading the word about the work I offer. Social networking, web design, promotional materials…it is a brave new world out there and I am grateful to have this brilliant young person holding my hand. So I trusted her when she said let’s throw a new web site up but I wondered why we needed to. Clearly though, the organizing, the re-writes, the photography…the whole process clarifies and invigorates the Body Joy world. Take a look, surf around, enjoy. And for those of you who have been teetering on the March 23-26 workshop fence, especially click on workshops and waste no time enrolling in Light & Shadow. 5Rhythms doesn’t get any juicier than this in Sacramento!
Presence is really the bottom line of our practice on the mat and the dance floor. When we experience the beauty of it in practice, we begin to more fully show up in the rest of our lives. My investigation this week led me to break it down into these three energetic states:
Not Here: There are so many variations on this theme and the biggest hurdle, the first stepping stone, the entry to the whole topic is knowing we are not here. This might seem obvious but it is a huge leap in consciousness when we begin to catch ourselves asleep at the wheel. Once we start to notice, there are infinite variations on this theme. Sometimes we are simply resistant to being here, thank you very much, just don’t want to show up right now. Other times we would like to be here but we are seduced by distraction, often in the form of obsessive thinking: past stuff, future planning, judgments, stories. Sometimes we are deeply mired in feeling states—grief, anger, fear—and cannot find our way clear to that precious witness place. Please add your own favorites.
Arriving: Now we know we are not here and we want to be so we commence trying. Out in the real world me might have our own strategies: connect with the breath, feel our feet on the ground, soften our gaze, expand our visual field. When we are in class there are invitations, varied instructions, offerings that we can try on, bring our attention to, focus with. Some of them work better for us than others. Those are the ones we practice out in the world. In this state of Arriving we are often conscious of the struggle as we catch ourselves sliding right back into Not Here with a frequency that can be discouraging. But this is rich and fertile territory and every time we return to Arriving is an incredibly golden moment.
Here: Now as much as we would like to believe that this is our goal, that this is where we should be getting more often if we were good at this…well, that is just not my personal experience. And from what I understand, long periods of blissful Here-ness are not attainable by most. But I love those moments of presence, those blips of clear, uncluttered focus. There is a brief soft aaaah and then as soon as we notice it, note it, mark it…that’s how fast we are plunked back into Arriving.
And so it goes. On the cushion, on the yoga mat, on the dance floor we drift around through these three states. Practice often delivers us to more time in our lives Arriving and Here. Here are three opportunities this week to spend time waking up together:
Let’s move together somewhere this week and practice arriving…
love, bella
