Have you experienced musical transport?   Heart-cracking melody, bliss-delivering lead guitar, bone deep vibration. Human beings have been making music forever. It nourishes us with life-giving properties that food and water and air just cannot provide. Still riding the energy of Guitarfish where day after day filled with the physicality of dance re-affirmed my love and commitment to the healing power of this modality.

If you’re of Native American descent and privileged enough to live on your ancestral ground, you might be deeply root-connected. For the rest of us in North America, not so much. Last week I saw the poignant, hilarious and crafty Bad Jews, a play at Capital Stage. At one point the protagonist, trying to get to the heart of this root-connected reality, asks goody two-shoes girlfriend “Where are you from?” Girlfriend answers “Delaware” which launched protagonist into a hysterical tirade with roots in this Sy Safransky quote from The Sun July 2010:

My family moved to California in 1958 and I’ve spent major chunks of time in the Sierras ever since. Back in the day, my crazy adventurous parents took us backpacking all around the eastern slope. This was low tech camping---no tent, no stove, no water filter. This childhood experience created a robust imprint. I’ve travelled many mountains since, but this one…I’m just connected to this range. My heart thrives in the Sierras.

A simple turn of the English language can travel right to heart or gut, rattle us for days. I was listening to Thich Nhat Hanh clarify why he uses the word “understand” instead of “know” when it comes to matters of the spirit. To know is a fixed perspective. You know your address. You know that two plus two equals four. To understand is an awareness fluid in nature, shifting moment by moment. To understand is to release, to let go. Of what? Preconceived notions, precious opinions, cherished attachments. Oh those.

Journey Day 10, huddled fireside at, of all places, the Ritz Carlton, grateful for a bit of warmth and food prepared by someone other than me. Time out in the elements is challenging with persistent blustery cold. So we take a morning of privileged respite, knowing that we can, before we head out once again. The Pacific is mighty in its moods.

A week simmering in loss and love, feeling how they are inextricably woven, two sides of the same coin…if we are willing. Last Monday I was sitting with a friend, choosing music for her looming memorial service. Today she is not here. She died the same day I flew to San Antonio to be with my old papa, who is leaving quite slowly, his mental faculties quietly washing away. So much has changed in my relationship with him and I owe that healthy evolution to Gabrielle. For that I am extremely grateful. In full vulnerability, I want to write about that this morning. If you are curious about what Gabrielle Roth has to do with my dad, read on.

I was held all day Saturday at a yoga retreat dedicated to sutra 1.33, the four brahmavihara. This sutra takes the practice of yoga off the cushion (where it might be relatively easy to become enlightened) into present time reality. Very specific instruction on using social relationships as a call to awaken. And unless you live in a cave, this would be a never-ending practice. Want peace of mind?

Sacramento residents cherish spring-surprise February days. Especially this wet year. In a small backyard nook, even in winter depth, I can count on basking on those special days. Yesterday I moved my cherry red Adirondack out of maple-shade and wedged it in that nook. I lounged in bliss-flooded memory precisely where I reclined in the 80’s, leaning against the same fence, watching my babies crawl through the grass. I could almost taste the lingering sweetness, lost as I was in reminiscence. Now they are grown and gone with babies of their own. Time is strangely swift and plodding all at once.

Soft-hearted, change of heart, hard-hearted, heart’s desire, half-hearted, be still my heart, cold-hearted, eat your heart out, broken-hearted, faint of heart…feel my point? We reference the heart in myriad ways in our efforts to describe our interior emotional landscape. This is rich territory indeed. Close your eyes a moment and check into the state of your own heart right now.

I have books on my shelf with titles like Pelvic Power that have been there since the nineties. Because the eighties core stability craze focused on creating a corset around the lower body and neglected to include the pelvic bowl floor. Woops. So my interest in this multi-faceted topic goes back aways.   Teaching patients to coordinate deep abs with pelvic floor was a clinical treatment goal back then.

The year was 1970. I was stretched out in the dark, atop a floor mattress in a funky duplex in Sherman Oaks. A commanding voice boomed out of the FM radio, spoke to a part of me I knew existed, just had never articulated. Baba Ram Dass might have been the first person to speak directly to my soul, describing the ineffable in a way I understood. There in the pitch black, vast worlds became visible, territory I’d yet to journey, landscapes terrifyingly immense but seductively essential.

I’ve been doing a lot of hanging out lately. Meaning I’ve been upside down, letting gravity have its way with me, allowing elongation. Slowing down and breathing fully. A gravity assist into revised perspective. Traction-ing open hunks of vertebrae, sanctioning disc expansion, yawning ribs free.   In suspended shapes off my couch, treatment table, strap sling, I experience much. What it feels like to breathe into my back body, especially upper right and lower left, the air entering and emancipating what yearns to be free. The exhale calling in the opposite diagonal, inviting it to draw to, align to center.

I saw Moonlight last night, an incredible film that placed me squarely in the life of a gay black young man growing up in a drug drenched neighborhood. In her review, Carla Meyer commented on the movie’s conclusion: “Because an insistence on hope is as much a part of the American psyche as the demand for uninterrupted liberty.”

Must have been early 2007 when my right foot started to complain about holding me up. This was something new and extremely disconcerting: my physical connection to the ground no longer dependable. If you’re alive and weight bearing on this gravity-infused planet, there’s a likelihood you know this one: pain emanating from the sole of the foot. Starts with a little twinge, a random ache here and there, a curiosity. Then it starts to get louder. Wow, first step out of bed exquisitely painful, easing a bit as it warms up. When it never really goes away, when it begins to haunt your every move…well now it has your attention. It can be very shaky ground.

Presence does not seem like such an optimal strategy when your breast is squished between two hard plastic plates, the technician prompting you to hold your breath and the rat-a-tat sound of technology like incoming wounded. I watch myself take a swift left turn into numbness and then just as quickly call myself back. There has been a lot of growth over twenty-six years of practice in this annual predicament. Breathe, be here, be grateful.

Musings from the Portland airport…no matter what their unique specialty, medical professionals tend to treat their own problems. I’m no different. Mostly that’s worked well over a lifetime of various musculoskeletal challenges. But last year at this time, I needed a partner in treatment: another set of skilled hands and eyes, a coach and witness.

Back deck the other night, completely feeling my place on this planet, aligned between myriad stars blinking away up there and molten center of earth deep below. We folks in teaching-land love to throw concepts like “grounded” and “centered” out there as instruction platform. Here is what I felt that night: there is simply no way you can think or understand your way into the physical sensation of being grounded. Let alone the metaphorical poetic meaning of it. And centered? This is not something you wrap your head around and “get”.

Sometimes I’m just up in my studio, minding my own business, moving freely to some new tune and, without warning, inner worlds collide. The analytical part of me wants to know what creates a fertile ground like this, as if I could hang on to it, or make it happen at will. Not so simple. But three elements always seem present in an alchemical moment. Something---a concept, an abstraction, a teaching---has piqued my interest, my body is in a wave of motion, my mind is relatively unengaged. It always comes on like a download from the universe.

A strangely cloaked woman lurked outside the Berkeley workshop, her pinched facial features the only skin visible. She was unable to enter the room until all cell phones were turned off. It took two days before everyone understood that off means off…not mute, not airplane mode. Apparently there are highly sensitive canaries out in our world, people who adversely sense the man-made electromagnetic field (EMF) that has quickly been established on our planet. Without voting on it, without research, without careful consideration…we surrounded ourselves first with electrical wires and now with cell towers.

“Let me tell you a story.” Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen opened with this invitation after lunch break, every imaginable student body imprint sprawled over Asian rugs. The story of the egg poured equally over us all. The egg that lived in your mother, inside your grandmother, the egg that became you. The valiant brotherhood of sperm, one triumphant. The first division to yolk sac and amniotic cavity, evolving into front body and back body. The front giving rise to breath and digest, the back enveloping skin, sense organs.