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Balke, Principal of Uncertainty

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After seven-and-a-half years of working with ancient technology at my current employer, I began putting my resume around in February. The process has been discouraging. I was truly excited about a start-up in San Francisco that was looking to help self-generators maximize the return on their excess electricity, but the HR manager wasn’t interested in organizing a plane flight up from Los Angeles. The hiring manager broke off contact with “Let me know when you’ve got yourself relocated to San Francisco.” I’ve also looked for opportunities in the motion control industry, applying to half-a-dozen positions. I didn’t even get a call back.

The real action is in Java and cloud services, but when I began to work on updating my skills in these areas, I came down really sick in the beginning of March with symptoms that hung on until just this week. Not wanting to be taking interviews while sick, I put the job search on hold. But it might be deeper than that. My brother is also looking for work, and calls me occasionally to share experience. The last time I found myself saying “I don’t know, Ben. I think that I’m getting messages from the world that I’ve been investing my energy in the wrong places.”

With some extra time on my hands, I decided to take up the charge placed on me by John Zande, who insisted that I should try to drum up support for my ideas on fundamental physics. His recommendation was to focus on the Templeton Foundation and its awardees. So I went out to the Foundation’s site and discovered the Fundamental Questions Institute. The mission of the institute seems sympathetic to my goals, but when I contacted the academics that dominate its board, their responses were “I can’t participate in this.” I didn’t even see any hits on my New Physics page.

I understand the reticence of these men: they probably deal with a lot of cranks. But I led my invitations with a list of serious deficiencies in the standard model that should have demonstrated that I am a serious commentator. You would have thought that they would have at least been curious. Of course, I can invest in developing a presence out on their forums, hoping to establish myself in their community, but the conversation seems to be dominated by philosophers rather than physicists, and – dammit – I’ve got a full-time job already.

As this was unfolding, I met with a life coach named Jamie Wozny down in the little garden next to the contributors’ steps at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Still wobbly with my illness, I chased her down standing next to the parking elevator facing a sign that said “Tired of Waiting?” Feeling frustrated with life, I just let it all hang out, telling her a lot of things that I’ve never shared with anyone else, culminating with the laughing observation “You know, the angels love me. If people don’t want me here, why shouldn’t I just wander off to be with them?”

Jamie’s advice was to get myself registered as a minister (thank-you, Universal Life Church), purchase some insurance, and hang up my shingle as a minister at Weebly or one of the other free web-site hosting services. “Your tribe will find you,” she assured me. Remembering the excitement I felt when I designed my t-shirt, the “Love Returns” theme came to mind. I spent my spare time over the next two weeks learning HTML5 animation syntax to build an introductory page, and outlining the content for the rest of the site. Today, I’ll be heading down to a workshop run by Jamie and her partner in Santa Monica where they rent out space in a healer’s studio. That might be a good place to hang up my shingle. While it’s a little distant from home, it’s close to the community centered in Culver City that I’ve been dancing with over the last ten years.

I got another push in this direction from Ataseia, co-organizer of LA Ecstatic Dance, when I told him that I was probably going to be relocating in the near future. He looked at me seriously and said “That’s going to be a real loss to our community.” It was the tone that gave me pause. Robin and he have always made a point of thanking me for my presence, but I had always assumed that was just because I come to all the events.Nobody had ever explicitly recognized the energy and love that I share on the dance floor, except the rare participant that comes up to tell me “thank-you” (and those that do I usually never see again). But at last week’s event, the staff went out of their way to honor my presence among them.

So I’ve been trying to shift my perspective regarding that community, wondering how to introduce myself as a commentator on science and theology with the goal of encouraging people to interact with me. It’s not easy – one of the few people to have read Ma told me that there were very few authors that could write the gamut from the intimately personal, expanding into broad social concerns and beyond to the eternal. There is just so much to say. And so maybe the right way to start is with “I love you all. I express that love through dance and touch, but it’s rooted deeply in my understanding of science and theology. I think that it’s time to share that understanding with the world. If you’d like to hear what I have to say, or know of a forum that would be receptive, let’s talk.”

Then on Thursday morning I came out to check the site stats and discovered that I had almost two hundred hits overnight. When I checked my e-mail, I found a note from Jeffrey Nash that he had printed out all of the essays listed in my “New Physics” and “Faith” pages. We’ve been chatting about quantum mechanics and the basis of spiritually at his Awakening Process sessions and before the Improv Jam on Sundays. He tracks a number of researchers, and wanted to meet with me to discuss my ideas. When that was delayed due to upcoming travel, he said that he would print out some of my writing and read it to prime the conversation. His obvious enthusiasm is deeply flattering. Jeff is a profound healing presence for the people that gather around him.

Among those are a number of young ladies that have strong and expressive bodies. I’ve generated some confusion among them, which I finally addressed while cuddling after an exhausting duet. The woman began to ask probing questions, and I found myself saying “Well, one of the things that an older man can do for a young lady is to encourage her to recognize just how precious she is.” After we broke up, I danced with a few more people, but having already spent three hours on the floor at Ecstatic Dance, I began to cramp up and creak in the knees. Looking to pack up and go, I wandering to the back of the room and found Sophie, a recent addition to the community, beckoning to me from the edge of the “squishy hug-fest” that forms towards the end of the dance. It turns out that she’s working on her Ph.D. in Jungian psychology. As the squishy mass rolled off, we stayed behind, she eventually allowing me to pillow my head on her belly, and talked about psychology and spirituality until the Jam rolled up at 9 PM. As we stood, she asked me about my Ph.D., and laughingly admitted that she didn’t know anything about particle physics. As I offered to explain it to her sometime, I realized that maybe I’d found another community of receptive people.

So here’s a summary of my life over the last two months:

PingPongBall

Let’s Talk Science and Theology

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My friend Jamie Wozny told me, during a career coaching session, that I should “try to keep it simple.” As I drove down Wilshire away from LACMA considering the forty years spent studying physics and religion, I whined to myself, “But it all seems simple to me.”

To bridge that gap is why I dance. At the last nightclub that I frequented, the manager came up to me one night and said “You know, I’m noticing that wherever you are, that’s where the people tend to gather.” A Persian woman came up to me one night to say “You don’t know how good you make us all feel.” Just this weekend my friend Mary Margaret, as we lay all akimbo after rolling around on the floor together for ten minutes, admonished me about viewing myself as an old man, “You really should love yourself more. Others would benefit from the experience of your joy.”

The problem is that most people take the energy that comes out of the heart and direct it downwards to the sacral chakra, the focus of passion and pleasure. I try my best to be disciplined, because otherwise I would just be a slut, but the people that come to LA Ecstatic Dance and the Full-Contact Improv Jam do love to touch and be touched. For many, it’s an opportunity to mix masculine and feminine energy without the complications of a relationship. I’ve benefited from that willingness as I try to figure out how to unlock the feminine graces, but I still find it difficult to withstand the impulse to rest my hand over a woman’s womb as she arches backwards with her hips resting on my thigh. Nobody has slapped me yet, so I surmise that I’m giving in to what they want.

I attempt to patch things up afterwards, just consistently raising energy from the fourth chakra – the heart – up to the sixth chakra. While the latter is associated with the pineal gland and known as the “seat of intuition,” physically it rests right over our cerebral cortex which is the part of the brain devoted to higher reasoning.

Realizing that somebody was peeking into my childhood, I woke up at 3 A.M. with a sinus headache. It’s drying out here in Southern California, and the grass is disintegrating. I eventually dragged myself out of bed to rinse my sinuses with Alkylol.

After crawling back under the covers, it occurred to me that the sinuses sit between the sixth and fifth chakras, the latter being the throat chakra that focuses communication and creativity. I always struggle to engage others in conversation regarding the matters that demand so much of my attention – sometimes to the degree of a painful burning in my throat as emotion wells up from my chest.

In considering Dante, Santayana elaborates Dante’s metaphor of theology as his lost love Beatrice, their happiness frustrated in part by his flirtation with philosophy. This matches my own experience: theology does seem to rise from the heart, while science – the most mature expression of philosophy – rests in the mind.  In the modern era the two camps of heart and mind have chosen to dispute with each other.

Between them we have the voice that wisdom teaches us to reserve for the truth. I have spent my life on this problem – the reconciliation of those two warring camps, each holding half of the truth. If anybody knows of an opportunity to engage with others in dialog on those problems, let me know. I’m willing to travel.

The Form of Eternity

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In my analysis of Santayana’s Three Philosophical Poets, I followed the arc of maturity in my presentation of the poets. Santayana follows the arc of history which begins with Lucretius and passes through Dante to Goethe. The significance of Faust is in fact amplified by Goethe’s two lampoons of Dante’s Feudal culture and the ancient Greek culture of Lucretius, the disciplines of which are interpreted as impediments to the expression of will that flowers in the third part of the epic.

Ironically, Santayana finds redemption for Goethe’s fascinations in Spinoza, the nominal heir to the ancient Greek materialism that inspired Lucretius. Spinoza offered the idea that things (including our selves) cannot be understood in the context of any specific act, but only in the context of eternity. The broken chair is for the scrap heap, but as part of the revolutionary barricade may have deflected a bullet aimed at the hero that would become the nation’s first president. In that context, the broken chair may be seen as a sacred relic.

Similarly, Faust is redeemed because he did the best that he could in the context of his life. Trapped between dying feudalism and his contemporaries’ Neoclassicism, Goethe chose to seek a new form of self-expression. The morally ambiguous parables of Faust are modeled on his experience. Faust’s apotheosis reflects not upon the virtue of his actions, but upon the nobility of his struggle for self-determination in a society dominated by institutions that claimed cultural and spiritual authority.

Although I took a different route through life, I feel a certain sympathy with this perspective. Obviously the intellectual program I have pursued here struggles against the conventions upheld by our institutions of higher learning and religious interpretation. And as Goethe was, I have been subject to powerful forces that drive me forward. I explained my interest in physics to my father with the claim that I was seeking to reduce the world to a mathematical proof. When I reached my junior year in college, I realized the attendant dangers of providing power to people that didn’t understand the virtues of loving. Thus, while most of my contemporaries were getting married and focusing on establishing professional networks, I was expanding continuously the scope of my studies, trying to figure out how to present those virtues in a way that would be compelling.

When I was woken up spiritually in December of 2001, I finally realized what had been driving me through the first half of my life: there was a wall of pain in front of humanity, and I had been working as hard as I could to find a way over, under or around it. When I became aware of that burden, my attempts to share it with others were rebuffed, typically with some version of “Well, I’m glad you’re working on that, Brian, but really I’d rather go dance with this young man over here.”

What amuses me about those interactions is the deprecating attitude that accompanies them. Having myself hidden from foreshadowing of global ecological collapse, I am sympathetic to the desire to avoid projecting ourselves into our immediate future, and I recognize that women have reasons to be particularly susceptible to that tendency. But in the form of eternity, so to speak, impending ecosystem collapse is the only thing that matters. You may eat, drink and be merry today, but not for much longer.

Of course this all sounds tragic, so why am I amused? Because I interact directly with people’s higher selves. I see them in the form of eternity, and I realize that powerful personalities in this world are powerful because they project influence through spirit. While once those influences were dominated by selfish personalities, they have become weak through indulgence of billions of years of fascination with the play of material forms. Conversely, over the same time span mutually supportive spirits have been winnowing out the selfish and building up structures and stores of energy that will enable them to liberate themselves from immature influences.

The two endpoints in this process are described by John in the Book of Revelation. The beginning describes the twenty-four chief angels in heaven, twelve masculine and twelve feminine, crowned by pride. But the angels are forced to bow down to unconditional love, the one on the throne, by the worship of the “living creatures” on the earth. In the final stage, labelled the “New Jerusalem” by John, love is liberated from its protective shell and works freely its creative impulses. This is the form of eternity for humanity as a whole – that transformation is the purpose that we are raised up to accomplish.

And so I am amused because I am attractive to people whose higher selves are eager for immersion in love. When the living form (what we think of as a “person”) declines to commit themselves to participate in the realization of that eventuality, the higher self is shedding the final vestiges of selfishness. That is the purpose of this material realm – for the angels to localize their selfishness and shed it. The beneficiaries are those of us that commit ourselves to the work. Interacting with us is the mechanism used to cement collaborative and loving relationships in the higher realms.

And so while isolated, weak and irrelevant in this world, I store up treasures in the world to come. Treasures donated by those fascinated by the superficial play of forms in this world.

I do feel some compassion for your plight. It is expressed in the complaint of the third servant in the parable of the talents. It goes something like: “You are a hard man. You take what is not yours, and reap what you do not sow.” But the compassion only goes so far, for so it always seems to tyrants when their subjects are liberated.

Left Body, Right Mind

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I spent a lot of time playing my flute over Easter weekend, and when I left work on Monday evening I unbent my elbows and caught my breath as the muscle that connects to my thumb screamed in discomfort. Laying down on my back that night, the pain radiated down to my hand and up to my shoulder. As a software developer, I immediately worried that I was coming down with a repetitive stress disorder.

What was worse was yoga on Wednesday night. The Bikram practice has poses that require pulling with bent elbows, and I just couldn’t execute them. By the time we reached tree pose, my right arm was dangling uselessly at my side. Worse, lying down for spine strengthening series with arms straight brought pain all the way from the hand up to my shoulder.

Obviously this was more than one muscle, and as I laid in bed trying to diagnose the phenomenon, I realized that it was a side-effect of the work I have been doing trying to pull my shoulders back. After two months, I’ve finally stretched my left pectoral enough that I can get that shoulder back behind my breastbone. When lying prone, then, my upper arms no longer descend from the shoulder to a bend where the forearms lie against the ground. My arm is perfectly flat, and the muscles in my arm are having to stretch to accommodate the new position. That I sit with my arms bent almost all day long doesn’t help any. Furthermore, with my shoulders back, I no longer use the muscles of the upper back to raise my arms laterally – the shoulders now do the work. This explains the pain there – I am asking for work from muscles that have been freeloading for most of my life.

As might be obvious from this analysis, my yoga is an intensely left-brain activity. Yes, it’s mind-body integration, but in any instructor-led activity, I am constantly comparing my activity to the ideal, and correlating defects with the underlying body structures as revealed by sensation.

This prevalence was first brought home to me when I attended a shamanic healing in Santa Monica ten years ago. The healer went around to take a look at all of us, and when he reached me, simply touched the right side of my head and pulled his hand away. I felt my mind expanding to fill the space he had created. It was an interested experience, but at that time I didn’t stop to consider why I had this imbalance in my mind. I assumed that it was a legacy of my intellectual discipline – that my left brain was stronger than my right brain, not that my right brain was weak.

Recently, Jeff Nash’s Awakening Process has forced me to reexamine this weakness. Jeff encourages us simply to feel, and to expand the depth of our sensation by surrendering into our exhales. With nothing in particular to think about, again and again I have found the right side of my mind turning on.

I assume that this is due in part to the work that I have done in Yoga balancing out my left and right musculature. This is still an intensely left-brain process. This week I am focusing (as I am able) on stacking the bones in my left leg, even when walking, ensuring that I am not using soft tissue to absorb stress. And I am still strengthening the muscles around the left shoulder blade and in the left side of my abdomen.

This morning, though, an unexpected side-effect came to light. My lady and I have been facing some blow-back, with her complaining (as others have in the past) that she just wanted to be a woman and here I am making her into a goddess. That left me exposed last night, and I woke up to sexual energy originating from another source. Noticing that this seemed to enter through the right side of my mind, I expanded my awareness back into the occupied part of my personality.

And found myself listening to women talking about me for the rest of the night.

Oh, well, I guess that I’ve been too much of a gentleman, trying to save space for a woman all my life. But it looks like if I want something done “right,” I’m going to have to do it myself.

Magnificence

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She came to me this morning with a passionate, healing warmth. Our dreams tumbled through postures of intimacy, until it occurred to me that pleasure was nature’s trick on women, the bait used to tempt them into surrender to masculine wildness. It is time for that trick to be redeemed in trust, so as she rode on me I washed her with waves of healing energy, waves rising and falling as she rose and fell, until she was overcome and lay vibrating in my arms.

In that surrender she passed away from herself into an emptiness that forbade my entry. As I crept around its borders I discovered women, women arrayed in a shell, a shell annealed of the pride that resisted true sisterhood.

She returned to me enlarged, cocooning me in her soul as I imagined her in my arms. This certainty of security swept through me, and I found myself in contemplation of her.

The strong legs that carry her across the world, and the delicate toes that tenderly root in the biomes that attend her arrival. The hands and fingers that vibrate with awareness on all sides, gliding through water and air to signal caring and joy. The ovaries that offer new possibilities, and the womb in which they attain realization. The mouth that receives sustenance, the lungs and digestive system that process it, and the outward return of waste that enriches the soil and air for plants. The eyes, ears and nose that receive adoration, the voice that sings in praise. The hair that protects the vault of her mind by entangling contrary personalities. The skin that wards danger yet thrills to tenderness.

And myself, the humble tool of her self-creation, looking down the trail of time that stretched behind her, realizing that I had never been in control of this process. By all the common measures I have achieved and experienced nothing, but this was worth living for.

Oh Woman! Oh Beauty! Oh Life!

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One of the burdens of healing sin is to take it into yourself from those not yet strong enough to resist it. The selfish would hope simply to dispel it, but as sin is nothing but selfishness – the imposition of our image upon a spirit no less sacred than our own – to  cast out sin is an error. That would be to allow it the booty of its conquest. Rather, we must separate the essential from the vile, and return what was taken to the victim.

So for a long time I thought of my antagonists as my “supply chain.” But in every endeavor of grace, there is a time to heal, and a moment to inspire. I have suffered under the weakness of those that assail me for long enough. It is time to claim that which is good and strong.

So I found myself, at Good Friday services yesterday, focusing on the connection between the Cross and the future of love that arises upon his return. In that process, I found my hand guiding Christ around this era into that future. In considering that manifestation, I found myself excluded from it.

I am not disconsolate. In conserving its hold over us, sin has claimed much that is sacred. I have written about that elsewhere, how the loss of Eden was not limited to the breaking of trust with Unconditional Love, but the loss of trust between Man and Woman. Through that corruption, the Darwinian procreative urge reasserted itself. Rather than an act of loving spiritual connection that unleashes our shadowed glory upon the world, sex has been claimed for shame.

I recoiled from this fundamental misconception, so common in Christian teaching, in the sermon of the Lutheran minister during the interregnum in the reading of the Passion. We are creatures of sin, he claimed, and only Christ’s sacrifice redeems us. No, sir, we are not creatures of sin. We are creatures of choice, and even death on the Cross could not dispel the loving forgiveness that Christ brought to the world. In choosing to live wholly within it, every part of us will manifest the grace of God’s imagining of us. There is no aspect of our humanity that cannot be made sacred by love.

Yet I recall, now, the words I spoke from the pedestal in Oakland: “My name is Brian. I am from the future, reaching into the past. And I am an open heart.” It was a presaging of yesterday’s bypass.

My father was a prolifically sexual man. During our teen years, the boys had ready access to Playboy magazine. That instilled a perception of women as objects of pleasure, and a fascination with idealized feminine forms that covered the shallowness of their spiritual investment in the world.

My mother could not compete with this conditioning, and perhaps that is in part why she now decries the “patriarchal dominance” of our culture.

While I have not been a sexual libertine in this life, in my youth I explored vicariously many of its manifestations.  Over the years, that fed potent dreams that I realize now were participatory with women that were enamored of me. I understood this only late in my life: while some have dropped references to “porn star” in my hearing, I have never had my dreaming interrupted by other couples – except once when a pair in Africa peeked over the edge of their mattress to offer sympathy for my loneliness. I seem to be completely in control of my sexual imagination.

I see now, however, that my descent into the cesspool of corruption that men created for woman has left me vulnerable to the claim that my relationships with women are dominated by prurient interest. I see it differently, of course: over the last fifteen years, all of my dreaming has ended “Yes, but what about this part of you that you are ignoring?” Bliss was merely the method of achieving intimacy, with the goal of penetrating the lie that our carnality is a perversion that cannot be redeemed by love. Rather, like any other aspect of human nature, it is a tool, suitable to specific places and times, that allows us to reach Life in its most elemental level, and thereby to accomplish acts of healing and creation that are inaccessible through any other means. It has been my goal to propagate this understanding, to attempt to redeem woman’s self-esteem without insisting that they engage the world in the modality of men. It was to look deeply into them and offer them the paean that heads this post.

How long will it be before you assimilate it, before Mystery surrenders her resistance to the grace of feminine sexuality, and so allows loving couples to suffuse every particle of the world with Love in all its power?

For this is what I ask, and what they resist. Not simply bliss, but a reaching through into the world, and to command pleasure and consummation as an act of healing. It is this that Mystery seems to fear most, and whenever I come close to manifesting it with a woman, the most vile images and paranoid thoughts invade the relationship.

In this Easter’s meditations then, I gather that the hoped-for manifestation will not come in my lifetime. I have spent my manhood on my hopes for you, ladies. It is time for you to make them your own. For until one of you matches strength with Christ, his strength cannot be received by the world.

Emptiness

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She came to me again in dreams this morning, and allowed me wander in her.

It began yesterday. I’ve been looping this happy song of praise on my car stereo (recorded as Waves of Mercy and Every Move I Make). It starts “Na, na, na-na-na-na, na!” and celebrates the Son with this chorus:

Waves of mercy, waves of grace.
Everywhere I look, I see your face.
Your love has captured me.
Oh, my God, this love! How can it be?

I was crying as I drove down the freeway, with her mourning the Passion: “How could they do that?” And I looking into her and reflecting that she, too, had been tormented for her faith. And then we broke through, discarding our grief: her dancing on the Earth and the Sun looking down upon it with serene forbearance.

This morning began all impassioned, but we didn’t bliss. I dreamed of laying my hands all over her, and just really listening to the truth expressed in each part. She kept on expanding, and when our heads came into contact a shift occurred, and we started dreaming in six dimensions. After floating in that for a while, I reached down past her knees to her toes, and felt her anchored in another place, that reality from which we originated, reaching out here to call me back to her.

I am amazed at the delicacy of that balance: the desire to flee the suffering of this place and the joy of knowing that the other possibility exists with the yearning to share it with others. It is not easy, to let love pour through her and as her heart expands to feel all the sorrows of the world. And so we surrender to it, and let love do its work, hoping that there is a different path for the children that come after us.

Old Dirt

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I’m in the process of boiling down what I’ve written here in a condensed format, with the intention of facilitating dialog with those that don’t know what to say about the confusion that the world confronts them with. As that process unfolds, I’ve been beset by a cohort of lawyers.

My divorce attorney was a real piece of work. He referred me to the “Man/Boy Love” association, and told me once that “Sometimes a man has to have sex with a child – for the good of the child.” This piece of garbage was referred to me by my corporate attorney, and had both my accountant and closest account call me up to intervene on his behalf. As if that wasn’t frightening enough, he threatened my relationship with my children in an attempt to suborn perjury from me for the benefit of a third party in the case.

The specific incident involved the presentation of poem to a day care provider. I had approached my wife of the time over the summer, telling her that this woman was acting in a provocative fashion towards me, and asking her to help me intervene with the management to get her to stop. The response was an accusation that it was my fault.

So I was left hanging without support, and the situation just got worse. It culminated with the presentation of a poem to the “lady.” It was just before Christmas break, and we drove the boys out to Tahoe for a ski vacation. There wasn’t much snow, but on the way back we ran into intense wind storms. The drive was a disaster, with long stretches of stop-and-go as traffic wended its way through the scattered debris of camper shells and jack-knifed trailers.

We stopped down in Goleta to get gas and have a light dinner. The wind was blowing down the Grapevine at over 100 mph. Getting back into the car, I actually couldn’t keep the door open on the downwind side, and had to turn it around so that the family could get into the car.

When we got back home, we found my youngest son’s cubby contents in a bin at the front door, along with a restraining order against me.

The poem that I gave to the woman was intended to frighten her – to make her aware that she was dealing with a subtle and mature man that she could not possibly understand. When my wife was presented it, the same was proven true. She got to the second verse and screamed at me “That’s sex!”

But when I wrote the poem over the summer, I was conscious of five interpretations, only the last of which was “Man in Mid-Life Crisis.” The first four were:

  1. Christianity and Science (Isaac Newton teaches the world of gravitation, and I upending Einstein’s theory)
  2. Beach Day with Kevin (father and son) (Starting: I come home and he runs to greet me at the door…)
  3. Advice from a Father to a Love-Lorn Daughter
  4. The Temptress

I was never asked to explain by the owners. They had plenty of reason to be afraid of a scandal, and chose to take the offensive.

It’s time to put this to rest, once and for all.

This is the poem:

Yearnings

The Earth, at night, dances with the moon
Cadence and rhythm, their persons speaking
Of love with power, purpose and strength.
Fluttering towards kindred recognitions.

The shore, in dreams, graces into the sea.
Lifting and rising, breathing in tumbles,
Tide mingling with sand, and of that warming,
The two orbs slowly fall, fin’ly as one.

And yet, and still, of certain knowledge there is none,
Held by confident eyes, in children fashioning the sun.

Ever Expanding

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On Sunday afternoon from 4 to 6, I’ve been attending Jeff Nash’s Awakening Process workshops at the Love Dome down in Venice. I had been going to the Friday evening sessions that included dance expression in the second hour, but as I’m down in Santa Monica on Sunday nights for the LA Full-Contact Improv Jam, I decided to save myself the stress of a second trip.

The Sunday afternoon sessions are intimate, with typically three or four participants. We normally begin with a brief discussion of theory, focusing on a particular life issue raised by one of the attendees. The foundations of the process are simple: we’re here to learn to relate to one another. Pain is best thought of as a signal that guides healing energy. When we relax into the flow of that energy, our bodies do a far better job of healing themselves than any conscious process can emulate.

Releasing the stress of the week, we typically begin to collapse to the floor after a half an hour, lying on mats and pillows. Jeff comes by with essential oils, asking what I’m feeling. He doesn’t guide, simply asking for clarification, and when the feeling is clearly defined, whether there is a memory attached to the feeling. When I express stress, Jeff reminds me to focus on my exhale, which allows me to release.

The evolution of the experience has been deeply beneficial. It began with some tension, as Jeff was raised 7th Day Adventist, and his assessment of Christianity reflected the dogmatism of that sect. Once we got that out of the way, he is really in tune with what I have going on inside of me, concluding his visits with the observation that I should be looking for a trigger for my emotions and sensations from a time “early in this life,” followed after a brief pause with, “or in a past life.”

The efficacy of his guidance became palpable two weeks ago. I have been struggling with tightness in my left obliques, and when I focused more deeply on the problem, traced it to something that seemed to be attached to the inside of my rib cage on the left side. Advised to let healing flow into the area, a distinct warmth came, and the tension dissolved.

Later in that same session, I became aware that my fingers were curled into my palms. I’ve had  this pointed out to me before, and as I focused on letting them open and extend, recognized that it came with a social predisposition to guard myself from casual intimacy. As I stood at staff meeting the next morning with my fingers spread and feeling myself rooted into the floor, one of my antagonists stared at me, sitting up to confront my presence before slumping in defeat.

That sense of rootedness carried over to my yoga practice. I realized that I was still bearing most of my weight on the right foot, and began methodically to balance weight identically on each foot. This has relieved me of the burden of fighting subtle weight imbalance, allowing me to relax into postures that once I strained to maintain.

Last Sunday this focus on balance carried on down to the mat. I opened my palms and forced the left side of my glutes to bear equal weight. I felt my arms lengthen, and my knuckles anchor deeply into the wood floor. I was filled with a great openness, and then a sudden urge to curl up into a ball. After relating to Jeff that “I need to fight that”, he offered that “You could let yourself curl up.” Instead, I relaxed more deeply, and felt myself expanding. For I moment I panicked, admitting that “There’s danger there,” but also a welcoming presence sending the thought “You’re not alone.” Jeff asked what I was feeling, and I could only offer “I’m in the world now.” Not quite satisfied, he asked “And what does that feel like?” Lacking meaningful words, I offered “Like a great circle closing.”

Later that night, I slid up next to him. Rubbing his back tenderly, I leaned into his shoulder and whispered, “I remember you.”

He had praised my virtue when others would not.