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I notes.doc
".if an (extremely complex) organization
of cells is capable of writing Shakespeare's plays and Mozart's
music, why should we want to be MORE than that? It is a question
of raising our estimation of cells rather than lowering our estimation of humans."
My head is still spinning with this, because I've NEVER embraced
any religion or faith, and believe me, I've tried a lot, but I've
never even been able to fake a belief in a higher power, much less
live with one for long. I see now how lonely that's made me, and
even a little desperate, because what the hell am I going to do
at the end, without faith or belief in an afterlife? I mean, that's
some scary shit.
"Your concern might be that the embodiment approach, which is
a form of materialism, might diminish wonder. My sense is that
the opposite can be true: instead of diminishing delight in what
has been thought of as spirit, it can massively enlarge delight
in the possibilities of material being, which I believe includes
all that has been meant by spirit and more."
I already had a sense that God exists, not in heaven, or whatever,
but in the air around me, and deep inside my unconscious. It's
the God place I'm so fascinated by whenever I find it in my art
and writing. But when I walked in the woods last week, and really
felt my body with deep respect and a sense of listening. My body
was still and quiet, but it was humming and churning. Why does
this make me cry every time I think about it??? What is there that's
so potent? I was stumbling around in the woods, over tree roots
and getting snagged by briars, blind with tears, and I just felt
so incredibly grateful and open to my body. I realized it's all
about my body. My body is Oz. I miss being in the mountains, and
I don't know how to encompass that experience here in small town
America, with cars and sidewalks and ugly buildings.
III. subtle body.doc
"We're
immersed, energy in a sea of energy..."
All I want to talk about with anyone these days is energy! I don't
undestand it, but I'm FINALLY FINDING MYSTERY! Not in Jesus, or God
or the Buddha, but in the mysteries of the body and in the mysteries
of the universe all around us. I can't believe I'm even saying that,
and I never would have predicted this in a million years. With this
belief system, I get to BE a skeptic and I also get to learn and
study and try to understand. I don't HAVE to make those crazy leaps
of faith, which have frightened me since I was a kid. ANd the church
is right inside my body.
II. soul welcome.doc
"...fears of and defenses against
reconnection"
Now this I can really talk about. Maybe! Hey, MAYBE I'm afraid
of my body's power! Of my body's deep knowledge. Maybe I'm
Dorothy, the Lion, the Tinman and the Scarecrow, all approaching
the wizard in fear! And the wizard is my body. Wise and powerful.
I'm crying again. Damn, damn, damn.
"Process,
don't put aside. If you put aside, they are still waiting, if
you allow them and process them, they are gone forever. You change
your structure."
I've spent a lifetime putting aside scary thoughts. When I was
12, I remember the exact moment when I learned to slide my mind
away. I would slide my mind to the right to escape the chaos around
me, and also the scary thoughts. It was like using my eyes to look
hard to the right, but instead I used my mind to aggressively turn
away from reality. If my attention slid back, I'd drag it over
to the right again. To the far away place. I'd do it over and over
again, until the scary thoughts went away.
".the fear gets all encompassing sometimes... and the pain. afraid
to want, afraid of losing, of having to stop -- again....afraid
of the pain of opening my heart up to something that makes me feel
really alive....yet more afraid of not doing so..."
I'm absolutely terrible at treating
myself gently and caring for myself. There's a strong sense that
I don't deserve to be treated decently, andI wouldn't treat a
friend the way I treat myself. Or an enemy. I'm still afraid
of everything, even though I've takedn active steps to face my
fears. Here's my story of facing my fears for a night alone in the woods.
"I hear my body's story through the images it creates. I engage
in a process of deep listening with my body to give these images
form. Then I dialogue with the images - a conversation between
image and felt sensation. At times the feeling evokes the image,
and at other times the images evoke feelings. At all times, it
is a process of connecting bodily sensations through art... I was
experiencing sensations that initially had no words to them in
my body. After engaging in spontaneous image creation based on
those preverbal sensations, I was able to give meaning to the experience
through descriptive language. My understanding of the process I
was engaged in is that this sort of immersion in felt sense, images
and language undoes structural dissociations within the body."
Yes! This is so exciting to me! Hearing Layla Holguin Messner
read her work at Goddard's residency started everything. It's
me down a completely new path in my writing. Such strength
and power. But her voice is also as delicate as a child's.
Her work feels like a wild animal. Self-possessed and sure,
but it's also authentic and very sure.
".so you say to your extreme states: 'darling body, better late
than never. I understand. I know you are doing your best for me.
welcome. what can I do to help? ...the fact that you are able to
watch is already a form of welcome."
I'm welcoming (and apologizing profusely to)
my body, and I can feel my body welcoming me, but it still feels
like a club I don't mind belong to.
body holism for yoga.doc
"When she contained
me by understanding me better than I understood myself, I came
to trust her. When I learned to trust her, I was learning to trust
. When I learned trust I was also learning to trust myself."
Yes. I'm slowly learning
to trust Bill. I remember when I was suddenly thunderstruck by
the thought, "My god, I love and trust this man!" And
I was absolutely positive. Before that, I'd convinced myself
that either I was incapable of doing love, or that everyone who'd
ever said they loved someone was lying. Seriously. That's what
I believed. Because love had only ever hurt me. Learning to love
and trust Bill, and allowing him to love me back has been a scary
journey.
Love. New. For Alex. But I've come a long
way in a few years. My friend Barbara used to sign all of her
emails to me, "Love,
Barbara," even though she barely knew me. It seemed risky or
disengenuous to me, and I finally asked her about it. She said
that she'd never regretted giving love, and that she got back
so much more than she gave. She's not a fluffy do-gooder kind
of person. She's sharp and funny and she says exactly what she
thinks. So I tried it, and was she ever right! I started spraying
love everywhere, like a tomcat around a cat in heat! And the
love started coming back to me. A hundred-fold more than I gave
out. It was miraculous, and for a while I walked around like
a crazy little bornagain. I'm a lot more used to it now, but
it'll never stop being miraclulous.
"...instead
of diminishing delight in what has been thought of as spirit,
it can massively enlarge delight in the possibilities of material
being, which I believe includes all that has been meant by spirit
and more."
"My premise is that psychological
functions and characteristics ARE, and can be understood in terms
of, bodily structure."
"I do not want to die, and do not
want my beloveds to die, but I think we do die, fully and finally.
I think we don't live well denying that we will die. I think
death-denial is a source of great evil in our and other cultures,
and that philosophies advocating an afterlife exploit and maintain
human weakness. I think death-denial is one of the sources of
cultural denigration of the body, and with it nature, women and
the mother. It is also one of the deep sources of dualist confusion
in religious psychologies, which keep sidestepping what makes
sense whenever it implies final physical death."
".overfed, starved, medicated, despised,
inappropriately used, surgically enhanced, culturally strangulated,
undiscovered, and disregarded. also need to account for why individuals
and their collective culture would wish to so abandon themselves."
That's something I'm fascinated by. I want to understand what it
is about our culture that distances us from our bodies.
"Being open
to the voice within you is how your life happens. Again and again,
it plunges you into the unknown. What is required, it seems,
is a willingness to commit yourself to the whole - known, unknown,
and unknowable - and trust the path your indwelling truth is
showing you."
"...increase of authenticity is increase in discriminative self-care, "enhanced
awareness of likes, dislikes, interests, and curiosities," "increase
in genuine self-expression and the ability to say no," and increase
in the value to oneself of "one's particular nature and ways."
From
Eva Pierrakos' Pathwork of Self-Transformation:
"Through the gateway of feeling
your weakness lies your strength.
"Through the gateway of feeling
your pain lies your pleasure and joy.
"Through the gateway of feeling
your fear lies your security and safety.
"Through the gateway of feeling
your loneliness lies your capacity to have fulfillment, love,
and companionship.
"Through the gateway of feeling
your hopelessness lies true and justified hope.
"Through the gateway of accepting
the lacks in your childhood lies your fulfillment now."
"When we focus steadily on bodily
sensations, perhaps we return to the feeling of ourselves we
had before we were born, when all we knew was this rather inchoate,
floaty, energy-sensitive non-world."
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