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Balancing Yoga Bliss

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Having played tennis and basketball as my primary fitness outlet for the first fifty years of my life, upon starting yoga I was immediate impressed by the imbalance between the left and right sides of my body. During the first two years of my Bikram practice, that manifested in a number of chronic stress injuries, particularly around the right hip and lower back.

While the problems were impossible to ignore, I was pleased with the gross changes in my body. I lost my fluff, slowly converting it to muscle. That was really a first for me – I had never succeeded in building much muscle mass through weight lifting. Bikram is an isotonic practice, holding postures for up to a minute under strain, and that seems to really agree with my physiology. At this point, the deep wells in my clavicles have been filled in, and a little bit of six-pack is peeking through from under my middle-age padding.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t until the last year that I realized how the two things went together. One way to maintain an isotonic posture is to lock all of your muscles. In my case, that reinforced and even exacerbated muscle imbalances. I would do my best, checking in the mirror after every posture to make certain that my shoulders and hips were aligned. After many “strong” sessions, however, when the lights came on to start practice two days later, I would look in the mirror to find myself twisted completely out of whack. The instructors were a little put out by my laughter and pawing at my eyes in disbelief.

Simply, in most postures the mirror is a liar. You can take a standing bow posture and think that you’re aligned, but in fact one hip is higher or lower, or forward or back. Sometimes it’s your limbs that hide the truth, and sometimes it’s that the mirror only shows you one view of a multi-dimensional picture. Psychologically, then, the breakthrough was to stop letting my eyes lie to me, ignore what my muscles were doing, and focus on where my bones were.

This culminated recently with the realization that for as long as I have been doing yoga, when I bend over I drop my left ribs inside of my hip. I was collapsing on that side while the right side stayed strong. Consciously avoiding that exposed tightness in my left shoulder, which naturally came forward with my ribs. I’ve been dragging it back, resulting this weekend in severe muscle fatigue that extended to the right side of my neck. Camel posture has been a real revelation in this regard, as the tightness in my left shoulder forced me to rebuild the posture from scratch over the last three weeks. I just couldn’t get back as far as I did when I allowed my left side to collapse.

The other major side-effect has been in the right side of my lower back. I’ve always wobbled in the standing series, and assumed that it was just poor muscle coordination. But in projecting my left side forward, I realized that I’ve been stabilizing my vertical alignment by locking the right side of my hip. Particularly in the lower back, the muscles on the right side were significantly shorter than those on the left. I focused on lengthening them during class, but could feel them snapping back as I walked to the car every night. But of course, that was because I was also using my right hip to project my balance forward while walking.

This was resolved two Sundays ago down in Culver City. I went to the dance celebration and spent about an hour-and-a-half walking around the perimeter of the floor, stopping occasionally to raise my feet gently in point, paying particular attention to maintaining proper support in the left side of my chest. It was frickin’ miserable! I wore myself out in half an hour!

Given the muscle fatigue in my back from my maniacal focus on keeping my left shoulder back, I was a little worried about class on Monday night. Indeed, I did have some trouble with forward bends, but as for the rest, I actually had fun for the first time ever. I had been wearing myself out trying to keep from keeling over to the right side, and having gotten the bones into alignment, all the stabilizing muscles can relax until their use is required by a specific posture. The heat no longer bothers me, I recover faster from postures, and I was able to get far more length because I wasn’t fighting locked muscles.

What can I say? Being a poser is to be your own worst enemy. Bliss arrived in learning to feel what my body was doing.

Doh!

Domain Domination

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As a person with broad intellectual interests, I might be an anachronism. One of the problems of free market economics is that it exploits our strengths and exacerbates our weaknesses. People that seek a healthy balance don’t fit naturally in the system. Fortunately, I took up my career as a software developer during a sweet spot of sorts – enough infrastructure had been established that we don’t have to worry about the details of how a computer manages memory and peripherals or does arithmetic on different data types, but the industry had not yet become a self-sustaining economic system driven by the generation and sharing of digital data. As a generalist, then, I was valuable as a translator between the digital realm and the “normal” world.

I was struck by the magic of the digital reality. My father enjoyed sharing stories of how he could make programs break in the early days by abusing their input devices, but by the time I had come on the scene, the electrical engineers had succeeded in creating a world in which the computer never seemed to get tired, made your mess disappear without fuss, and always did exactly what you asked. Knowing men, I wasn’t surprised that many were seduced completely by that fantasy. In my case, I was seduced by the fact that if you knew a little about software, you could get any productive person to talk to you in the hopes that they could partner to parlay their expertise into dot-com fortune.

In translating those conversations into software, I was fortunate to have object-oriented development methods to exercise.  It allows me to create software abstractions that correspond well with the goals of my users. In engineering applications, concerned with the operation of actual machinery, object-oriented methods are a particularly strong fit.

That’s not so much the case in the software industry today. Companies such as Google and Facebook have managed to compile huge stores of data, and aspire to correlate that information with economic activity. There’s really no definite theory behind those explorations, so we’ve seen the rise of languages that describe efficiently algorithms that filter, transform and correlate random pieces of data.

The recruiting challenge facing engineering companies is lampooned in a GE ad in which a new hire finds himself competing for attention against the developer of a mobile app that puts fruit hats on pictures of your pet. GE is competing against nascent monopolies (Google and Facebook again the exemplars) that throw money at developers just to keep them out of the hands of their competitors. I faced the same challenge when seeking to grow my current team.

But when exploring the technologies (Haskell, Clojure, and others) used by Google and others for analysis of large data stores, what struck me most was how terribly dry they are. There’s no sense of connection to people and the choices that they make. To me that takes a lot of fun out of my practice.

This has been expressed in my working through of the examples in Troelson’s Pro C# and the .NET 4.5 Framework. Confronted with examples with names like “ExtractAppDomainHostingThread” and “MyAsyncCallbackMethod”, I found myself figuratively tearing out my hair. Yes, these names are self-documenting, in the sense that they forecast accurately what we find in the code, but they aren’t even entertaining much less actually fun.

When Troelson begins exploring how .NET supports an application that has to perform many separate tasks in parallel, he introduces a class called Printer that writes a number to the screen and then waits a short time before writing the next number. By running many Printers in parallel, we can see clearly the unpredictability of the results in the screen output.

Of course I am offended by this whole concept. No Printer in the world ever behaved like this. So, given this class that does something meaningless while wasting time, I renamed it “Useless.” Rather than invoking “PrintNumbers”, I tell my Useless class to “WasteTime.” As methods for corralling wayward tasks are advanced, I further the metaphor with methods such as “WanderIdly” and “LanguishInAQueue.”

My son and I meet most Saturdays for lunch at the Fresh Brothers in the Westlake Village Promenade. When he interrupted my exercises, I talked him through these examples, and he burst out laughing. Now that’s success.

So what’s the developer trapped in the digital world-view to do? My suggestion would be a return to assembly coding. At Los Alamos in the ’50s, my father picked up the habit of trying to read the consonant-rich listings. He would become mightily amused as he punctuated them with lip-smacks and shrill sirens, decorations evolved in the secret society of machine developers trapped on the isolated buttes of New Mexico.

Decrescendo

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For the last two years, I have had my head “catch on fire” in Catholic services when the congregation sings:

Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.

Today was different. After finishing Sera Beak’s Red, Hot and Holy, I perceive a pathway out of annihilation – to offer destructive personalities the option of surrender through the Divine Feminine for rebirth on another planet.

That still left me scratching my head and wondering why I’m going about it this way. The only hint comes from the practices that governed access to the Holy of Holies during the years in the Desert. The High Priest would prepare himself carefully for his annual encounter, lest he corrupt the energies within and bring ruin upon the people.

So what rules apply to those in the vicinity of events that bend the tide of history? We find some clues in the Bible: only John stood at Calvary with Christ, and only he died a natural death. Was it the will of Christ that the others suffer as he did, or was it their guilt that fed into the stream he forged through time? And what of Mary Magdalene, obviously deeply in love with Jesus, who was warned “Do not cling to me!” Raised to believe that the Messiah would rule as king, how would she not have been dreaming of bearing his child, and securing eternal peace for her people? What would have become of those dreams, cast into the river of Jesus’s will, in the circuit of time that leads from the cross to judgment day and back again?

And what of all those, such as Judas and Pilate, who saw themselves as pawns caught up in events beyond their control? Tied in remembrance and spirit to their cowardice and treason, would they have injected rationalizations of their virtue into the stream of time, attempting to bend it to their own benefit?

One way to deal with that pollution is to confront them with the same choices under circumstances that ensure they won’t face any personal threat (either material or spiritual) from either choice. It is to say to them, in effect: “You didn’t understand the weight of the decisions you were making. Now you do. Well, do you wish to participate or withdraw?”

In my particular case, they are all withdrawing, which liberates me from codependency. I think that I’ve given the last of them their freedom. It’s time to rest, heal from the pathologies they bred in me, and prepare myself for the work to come.

As for this audience: I think that this has actually been a tool for expanding my radar. It may have served its purpose.

It’s amazing. After all the strain and passion, I finally feel peace, alone here in my “nation of one”, as a Jewish elder characterized me one night in a dream.

Posturing Women

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It has been fifteen years since I have let a women caress my body. That hasn’t been for lack of opportunities, but after my marriage collapsed, I realized that I am constructed to engage problems that most people run from, and that the spiritual intimacy of intercourse made it impossible for my ex-wife to avoid entanglement. Her response was to use anger as a protective shield. That was disastrously painful to my spiritual intimates.

So I’ve been very careful and reticent about drawing someone else into that milieu.

Dance is the foremost expression of my entanglements, and the context in which women most often flirt with involvement. Having confronted the surrender of the Southern California sage to drought back at the turn of the millennium, I found myself repeating this flow again and again during the celebrations: standing with legs spread apart, I would position my hands over my heart, and lean to one side in a lunge, pushing energy down into the ground. The repetitions alternated from side to side, until a deep yearning would bring me to my knees. Scooping up the suffering spirits from the floor, I would raise them to the heavens, weeping.

I was greatly heartened by the identification Jamie Grace made with Persephone, but even she wanted me to lay my burdens aside. One day as I was dancing alone, I felt her looking into me as she rested against the wall, urging me to liberate myself into joy. An enormous pressure forced me to the floor, and, crawling and squirming, I tried to work my way out from under it. As I spread my awareness, I realized that the source was a spiritual membrane that encircled the globe. There was no escape except through the violence of birth.

The only woman to actually engage me in my dance of restoration was innocent of the consequences. I felt her standing in front of my as I bowed to the ground, and opened my eyes to find her lifting along with me. Surprised, I stood and put her hand over mine as I reached out into the world, thinking “Guide me.” She hesitated but did not run, so I took the world out of my heart and handed it to her. Her face broke in sorrow and fear. I tried to put it away as she fled into the arms of one of the elder ladies. I approached from behind to caress her heart, but she turned a shoulder to me. Realizing that she could not manage the burden she had accepted, I sat on the floor, cupped the pair of women in my hand, then raised my fingers and slowly rotated them to separate her from the moment that had overwhelmed her. Her features relaxed, and she settled more deeply into her comforter’s embrace.

I had a friend tell me that I lost Jamie Grace because I rejected her, but I didn’t see it that way. Every time she came into the room, my heart leapt to embrace her, and she would stop in the doorway and look away, silently begging me to come to her. Eventually we would work our way around to it, but she never let me dance with her again. Perhaps that was because I would dance first with other women, those other manifestations of Life’s thirst for healing. Perhaps she didn’t see in them what I did. The closest we came, until the last day two years ago, was when I stopped, took her hand, and placed her palm on my heart. She paused, then took it away and positioned it more directly into the flow that emanates from me there. But when I turned around to expand our expression to include the community that surrounded us, she became visibly angry. Given past experience, I was compelled to withdraw.

Without anyone to help me channel my creative energies (the second chakra being that source), I am wide open to women that seek to engage that energy in its most primitive procreative expression. I occasionally engage in visualization with those that I perceive have a deep connection to Earth: walking in the forest, and stopping on the shadowed crest of a bluff to rest with her legs over my shoulders, my head on her belly, my mind spreading into the earth through her womb. Or lying naked on the bed as she brings her yoni down on my heart, allowing its compassionate power to rise into the heavens and spread.

But the frequency with which someone breaks through and gets into me sexually has dropped steadily over the years. I am building up resistance, establishing barriers. The great sex-scene in Golem will be read by many as the fevered production of a frustrated old man, but in fact it was my way of saying good-bye to sex – of allowing it to wash over me one more time before putting it aside.

There are spiritually mature woman that I find occasionally looking in on me. Not long after writing that passage in Golem, I woke one night to some really passionate yearnings. They just wouldn’t go away, and one of my friends showed up in concern. The source of the desire wasn’t apparent, and in frustration she announced to me, “Maybe you’d better just give her what she wants.” As I blissed, I found myself floating in space billions of years ago, regarding the gathering nebular gas as it ignited and give birth to the Sun.

Are we here because it was possible for the infinite she to receive love from us?

Meeting Graziella H.

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Graziella has a fashion and family blog out at Sweet Pea, Apple of My Eye. Having seen a couple of my comments out at Ramona Chrisstea’s blog, she flattered me with a request to review and critique her work. Looking at her most recent post, I found myself thinking that any mom that can get kids to participate like they do must have a really constructive relationship with them. I was also impressed by the thoughts she shared on Father’s Day.

This captures our conversation back and forth up to this point, and creates a space for us to continue to dialog:

Graziella:

I love your insightfullness! Maybe you can look over some of my posts and give me your honest, constructive opinion of them?

Brian:

Thanks for the compliment, Graziella. I’ll be happy to take a look after I have lunch!

Graziella:

Sure no problemo! Take your time!

Brian:

Lol. We’re chasing each other’s responses around.

I didn’t know whether to post this on your home page, as it brings some criticism – hopefully constructive, as you requested.

OK – first off, you have a beautiful family, and the affection and bonds are really evident. Congratulations and GOOD JOB!

I’d recommend being a little more selective with the shots, and trying to work the text around them. Your experience of the environment would also be a plus, particularly when it involves elements that are unique or personal . For example, the rusty smiley face in the last post with your children, or the horse farm in “A Little Country, a Little Rock and Roll.”

As a example, you might look at Ramona Crisstea’s blog (ramonacrisstea.com). What comes from her writing is a sense that she’s sharing a journey with others. I think that you and Ramona have different stories at this point, and so you might gain a lot without risk of becoming “me-too.”

Your post on father’s day reveals that capacity. I’d like more of that! While not everybody can look as adorable as your family does, there are a lot of fashion blogs. The ones that spark my interest are those that relate fashion to the life journey.

So, for example – how did your little boy react to having a daddy tie put on him?

Thanks for the follow. If this is helpful, let me know and I’ll follow back to see how things develop.

Graziella:

THANK YOU. And you know what, I actually found you on Ramona’s blog. I saw your comment and figured you’re the guy I need to talk to. You are so right. I have been battling with myself trying to incorporate my first love, which is writing and my intellectual side, all while hosting a fashion blog. All the advice I’ve gotten in the past was to keep it short and simple, a fashion blog is one thing and a journal is another. But I felt confined! After seeing her blog I saw how you can add pieces of your mind and your own two cents along the way without it becoming too much or boring, and without the risk of losing the reader’s attention. What a fantastic idea to incorporate more of the experience of the surroundings, that’ll be easy to do. I was also thinking maybe write under some photos as if it’s a story book (similar to hers). I love the handwriting quotes, I love expressing my unique view and beliefs of the world, but I didn’t know how to incorporate Fashion, Parenting, & Writing all in one without losing a direct focus or target audience. Like you said, my family and my babies is the one thing that separates me from all the other fashion bloggers. I’ve been told to drop the kid fashion stuff and just stick with me, but that’s ridiculous too. Why can’t I be a fashionable woman, a mother, and a writer all at once? I love my kids so much and even in my about me page it says I’m doing this all for them, and it’s true so I could never think about NOT having them involved in my blog. I only just started on Oct 1st so people and advice like you REALLY help. Thanks a million, I hope we can keep in touch and you can see if I improve as time progresses 😊

Brian:

It’s the exploration of fashion as expressive symbolism that is the key, as I value it. It’s a hard call, because ultimately it’s about selling things, but here’s an anecdote for you: After my sons saw Fast and Furious 6, I asked whether there was any character development. They stopped and thought, and said “Hey, now that you mention it, there was! Wow, that was different!” Which elicited my observation, “I guess that the producers have brought the audience along far enough that they can handle it.” So don’t worry about fitting into a box.

Graziella:

Absolutely. And I was hoping to express the same ideal in the future posts I have with my daughter where a lot of what I’m wearing has nothing to do with fashion per say at all, but with being in tune and in love with her as she serves as an inspiration to me. For example, there’s some necklaces I have that are pastel colored and have hot air balloons on them. I only bought that because of my daughter, it reminded me of her. And the story and pictures that I envision came to mind immediately as soon as I saw the necklace. Because it reminded me of her, and through her all these thoughts and motivations were born, as it always is constantly in every aspect of my life, not just fashion.

Brian:

And there’s a lot that you might be able to do in the way of relating fashion to the preparation of your children for their life transitions, or for parenting them through their joys and traumas. In other words, making it about dressing them in what they need, rather than dressing them to please us.

Not that they shouldn’t look adorable. And, being the kid that wore stripes and checks to school, not that I have much real-life experience in the matter…

An administrative detail: I may try to relocate this conversation to a new blog post (“Meeting Graziella”), just so it doesn’t distract from the topic of this post, which was really important to me.

Graziella:

Ok you do that or let me know where I can respond back because I really like your thoughts and wanted to not only thank you again but chip in and elaborate a little further and see what you think 😊

Reflection

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In Golem, the goddess Zenica turns to her protégé Beilda and asks,

Does a man have free will if he cannot count his options?

I am coming up on a year of consistent activity at Word Press, and see that I have published 200,000 words here this year, on topics ranging over human nature, religion, politics, physics and programming. Reflecting on that experience, what comes to mind is the assessment of a friend who went spelunking in my mind one night,

There’s no bottom to you.

The problem, of course, is that there’s also no place to stand. No one will ever come to EverDeepening and think “I see where Brian’s coming from.”

And while that means that I probably don’t have much appeal, that’s all very well, because it’s for the counting of options by others that I write.

I alluded a few days back to the tyranny of convention that I have struggled against. It has a valid basis, which is observed in the psychological maturation of children. They go through phases of trust and distrust with the world, driven largely by their experience of significant trauma. Convention is a strategy that we use to protect ourselves from traumatic experiences.

Unfortunately, the sense of some anthropologists (see my summary of Jared Diamond’s perspective) is that the conventions of modern cultures foment mistrust. My own observation is that there are few adults that sustain a perspective of trust. But as a Christian, I am committed to the arrival of an era in which all of our relationships are anchored in trust.

That may appear paradoxical, in that much of my writing is to decry the untrustworthiness of those that sustain the conventions of mistrust. So what’s that all about? Am I not just adding my voice to the echo chamber?

First, I hope that it is clear that I don’t just deconstruct the logic of mistrust. I do try to describe the alternative as I experience. Yes, the world is in pain, and many of my posts are great cries from the heart, but what I find is that in expressing that pain, a lightening occurs. That lightening has two parts: the suffering spirits are relieved of their fear of being forgotten and so lost; and then God enters into the darkness through me, remaining even after I turn my attention elsewhere.

When I revealed my burdens to Diane Hamilton at a Buddhist Geeks conference, her first reaction was to declare “No one person can carry that burden.” A day later, she testified that the “Cosmic Mind” enters to assist us when we open our hearts to problems that are beyond our strength. Her reflection was in response to my testimony that its essential nature was to be “infinitely enamored of the potentiality of living things.”

So that’s one half of the coin, and I hope that I have presented that choice to my readers. I may sound crazy at times, but this is really the way that I experience life, and my experience does contain great and inexplicable gifts of beauty.

But there is a flip side to the Cosmic Mind: “inexorably destructive of selfish personalities.” That seems contradictory: if the Cosmic Mind is committed to the creation of living things (“selves”), why is it set against them? The reason is that selfishness impedes the elaboration of the potential of life. The predator would consume all its prey, and so must die if any life at all is to survive.

So for those of you that still read this, I must beg your pardon. Much of what I write here is a form of exorcism – it is a violent characterization and excommunication of ideas that contradict the formation of trust.

I had great hopes, in beginning this project last year, that it would stimulate reading of the parables that express my dreams for humanity, and so to inspire others with hope. I realize now that is unlikely. But I do feel that I have come to a much brighter place through this work. There are far fewer dark corners in my mind.

Oh, Gosh

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One of the joys of dancing is that in caressing the air around people, they eventually come to realize that I’m clearing a space for them to manifest their strength and beauty. The most precious moments for me are those when I’ve lost track of the effort, just kind of puttering around the floor playing with my elbows, hips and knees, and I find myself wandering into a space where someone is really focused on understanding what is happening.

Usually they are off to the side, or sitting in lotus, or lying on the floor – but always with their eyes closed and a look of intense concentration on their faces. I come into their orbit and it’s like a force field comes up and I’m just compelled to address them.

It happened several times today – I had a really great experience at MovinGround and Ecstatic Dance LA. It was a lot of energy – roughly 4 hours on my feet, with another hour of rest. I also stubbed the nail on my right big toe, hard enough that it bled and looks completely ready to come off (it was pretty loose anyways).

But one encounter rises above the rest. The woman obviously had trained, her elegant features alight with pleasure as she moved the strong and slender body of a dancer. But she hooked me as I was puttering around, gliding through the other dancers. Noticing her attitude, I turned to face her from about four feet away, raised me hands to the heavens, and invoked my retinue. Slowly lowering my hands, I draped them all around her, opening my eyes to make certain that she was assimilating it well, and caught her peeking at me under her lashes. She quickly closed them in submission, and so I really went to work.

It starts with the motor sulci, a raising and lowering, stretching until the crown chakra opens. At this point I drop down into the heart, and I often get a surge of sexual energy, but I lift it back up until the heart and prefrontal lobe are enmeshed, then lift the crown chakra until it merges with my retinue.

I usually slip away at that point, but she stepped into the space I vacated. We didn’t flirt with our eyes, but followed the flow of energy leaving the fingers and running up our spines.

One of the joys of engaging a skilled dancer is that you can get really, really close without worrying about incongruous bumping and grinding. We got pretty deeply enmeshed, so I stretched it out around those that were close to us, finally flirting a little bit. We went on for several minutes until I found myself behind her, hand just millimeters from her back, caressing her heart chakra, and she just spread her arms and blocked my way. I stretched my arms as I dropped into a shallow lunge behind her, and she lowered her forearms until they rested against mine.

Contact dance can be physical or sublime, and this was definitely the latter. Just one or two points, a shoulder against the back, hips coming into contact as she pivoted behind me. Finally, when she lifted her leg to get around my crouch, I grabbed it and pressed her foot into my hip bone, reaching out with my left hand to accept her grip. She smiled in bemusement, not expecting this from an amateur, but rose to stand with both feet on my hips. Gripping her lower back, I stood.

It went on from there, never becoming overtly sexual. When we were done, I offered, “You’re an incredibly transparent person. Energy moves gracefully through you – you don’t grab on to it.” After she recognized the compliment, I said “No, thank-you for being you.”

Maybe I’ll see her again. I don’t know why, but most of the time, they don’t come back.

Dreams of a Worthy Man

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When I took my sons out to Georgia three years ago, my uncle led the way up the highway to his boat house. He pulled over at a wilderness station, and as I dropped down from the driver’s seat of his VW bus, I was immediately ravished by the lush exuberance of the woods. He made his way into the station for some purpose, my sons following, but I stayed in communion with the sense of life that had become so desicated in Southern California. Eventually, he came out and said, “You know, there’s an exclusive resort on the other side of the hill.”

I don’t know why, but I thought of that when my son started talking about Jimmy Carter. Since Mr. Carter’s illness was made public, I have had this urge to go out to Plains and sit in on his Sunday school. When I shared that with Greg, he said “Well, maybe you should.”

A couple of Saturdays back, as I was puttering around the house in the morning, I found myself visualizing what would happen in that event, finding myself guided into a role as interpreter of a passage of scripture. As is perhaps obvious from my writing here, it’s hard for me to couple my experience of life to the world of daily affairs. So I fumbled around with big picture issues – meaning of life and process of Christ abstractions – until I finally struck on “You know, what I really want to do is to celebrate you, and the contributions you have made to society.”

I haven’t gone out to price travel to Plains – I’ve been distracted by other issues. But it keeps on popping up, and became particularly pointed this morning. I found myself standing in a long line outside of the church, and realized that I didn’t actually need to be in the class. I went to the door and introduced myself to the Secret Service agent, saying that I just wanted to offer Mr. Carter my blessing.

So I was ushered into a waiting room. He sat calmly in a chair. I walked up and placed my hands on his shoulders, and then on his scalp, trying to feel the shape of the wound that he carried. A chair appeared behind me, so I sat to embrace him gently, rubbing my hand in circles on his back over his heart. As I laid my left temple against his, I felt this shaft of anger and fear piercing his mind – the anger and fear of those that had fought to sustain control against the influence of the tolerance and caring that Mr. Carter manifests so consistently.

I moved my hand so that my fingers interrupted the painful flow, and sent healing behind it. With the pressure relieved, his grace bloomed outwards into the conduit, relieving fear and pain as it went.

He was eager to leave at that point, but I held him still. “I want them to see your radiance,” I explained. I pressed our hearts more firmly together, and arched as the power of Christ filled him with joy. As he took the floor, I watched in the doorway as the gathering stared in awe.

T-Shirt Heaven

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I prepared an experiment last week by creating some t-shirts that tried to explain what is going on with the energy that surrounds me. It was pretty much an act of desperation. I accepted long ago that when you send love out into the world, you surrender control over what is done with it.

In the specific context of the dance celebrations that I enjoy so much, what happens is that people channel it into sex. I’ve gotten to be much better, over the years, at controlling the reflection of that corrupted energy, but it’s been pretty exhausting. The political consequences are also disruptive to my life. A lot of men are visibly angry when I come into a club and start dancing by myself while the women stare in wonder at me. My son shared with me once that his female friends described it as “like discovering fire.” I kept on hoping that the men would be inspired by the beauty that wells up in a woman when she encounters a man that doesn’t want to dump poison into her, but in most cases the male reaction is rather to try and beat me down.

I thought that I was going to have to postpone the first trial this Sunday. I’ve been shifting energy in my yoga practice. It started three weeks ago when I held balancing stick posture beyond my normal point of collapse, and I felt energy emanating from my root Chaka and flushing up along my obliques, the wave cresting just under my ribs where the nerves erupted in burning. I knew that I had displaced something, and it manifested more recently in vertigo focused on the right side of my head. It was different from the normal cochlear vertigo (stimulated by a trapped air bubble), and finally shifted to the top of my head, directly over my foremen. I was a little panicked by that change, and was relieved when one of the ladies in class reassured me that “It’s just trying to work its way out.”

But with my obliques fully active, I’ve been building strength in them, which has led to stiffness in the area. That culminated on Saturday when I strained my right side during standing head-to-knee posture.

I wasn’t sure that I could actually dance – I could barely get in and out of the car on Sunday morning – but I went down to Culver City anyways. When an acquaintance asked me how I was doing, I explained my situation, and he jumped right in, rubbing, pulling, and massaging the right side of my back from hip to shoulder. I didn’t realize how much blockage I was dealing with, and when he was done, I was far looser that when he started.

So I went in to change and came out with my t-shirt on. He approached me almost immediately, sharing that he was an engineer and offering where he had heard similar thoughts. It was the first meaningful conversation that I have had in that community.

But what was most amazing was that people didn’t struggle against the energy that I organize when I dance. This was most evident in a young Filipina. She caught my attention, and we kind of skirted each other for a while. When I left the center of the room to rest against the stage, she took up the space I had vacated and began waving her arms gracefully in the energy there. Surprised, I pointed my finger to push energy into her heart, stilled the sexual response that came back, and then connected her cerebral cortex to the community of thoughts that was celebrating her courage.

When I had done this in the past, one among a group of men always approaches the woman to steal the gift from her. This happened next, and this lady just ignored him, staying focused on her dance. Finally, she turned to me, building a ball of energy in the air with her right hand, and pushed it back my way.

There was more – much more – and some of it wandered down the familiar pathways to sex. But as I laid Sunday evening on the couch trying to relax my abused muscles, I felt this great glow of energy enter my heart through the channel of the world. I’ve just kept on sending this message out: “Don’t focus on me. I don’t need more of it. Look rather into the world, and liberate people into the healing of it. It’s from there that the energy is magnified.”