Sixes and Sevens

Posted on June 28, 2020 by Brian Balke | Leave a comment

This month Ecstatic Dance LA starts its seventh year. Next month, I start my seventh decade. That could be an a coincidence, but I find an odd meaning in that parallel.

The Hindus chose seven chakras and the Holy Books have seven days of creation. Understood correctly, the two are related. I look back at the last three decades and I see the chakras progressing through the heart (seat of wellness and social trust), throat (seat of social expression), and third eye (seat of personal realization). Looking forward, I pray that my seventh decade will lead to divine manifestation.

In entering its seventh year, Ecstatic Dance LA has no other path forward. Until January, I made the trip down from Ventura twice a month to join you physically on the dance floor. In February, facing financial ruin and suffering from a premonition that disaster was about to befall us, I stopped. It was only a month later that the doors closed and the dance became a virtual experience.

That may be frustrating for many of you, especially those that rely upon physicality to engage reality. The body has its perks, but also pitfalls. Confronting its dominance during the dance, over the years I did my best to raise consciousness. Sometimes the response was grateful; sometimes incredulous; sometimes hostile.

Ecstatic Dance merges personalities through music and movement. Through physical contact, we facilitate that merger, negotiating control and surrender. If Ecstatic Dance is going to survive, we must see beyond the physical metaphor. We must reach up into the divine realm, knocking humbly at the gates of love, and allow it to temper us as we merge in the realm of spirit.

I hope that you will join me there.

God, the Father-Healer?

Posted on September 29, 2017 by Brian Balke | Leave a comment

The first time I read Louis Cozolino’s The Neuroscience of Human Relationships, I read a treatise on the chakras in between chapters. I was surprised by the correspondences: the progression of the Vedic practitioner through the chakras closely paralleled the stages of human maturity that unfold as a human child replaces primitive survival responses (imitation and crying) with behaviors motivated by social expectations (cooperation and empathy).

Cozolino emphasizes the role of a mother in the progression. Cuddling, nursing and facial expressions offered by the mother all create the expectation that physical needs will be met. The growing cortex learns to suppress behaviors that avoid danger in favor of behaviors that create engagement.

This is to speak of the ideal, but mothers may also distort a child’s development. Seventy percent of mothers operate in Cozolino’s “good enough” regimen. They allow the child to explore independently while remaining open to provide support when frustration or danger arises. These “free-autonomous” mothers produce securely attached children.

Further along the spectrum, “dismissing” mothers fail to provide consistent support. Their children are “avoidant,” not becoming upset when left alone, but not seeking affection either. Anxiety becomes obvious in the children of inconsistent mothers that remain aloof unless seeking to control the child’s behavior. At the far end of the spectrum, mothers that respond inappropriately or amplify fear may raise children that act out (even to self-injury) to deflect attention from external dangers (in effect trying to protect the parent).

The experience of children along this spectrum has a direct impact on the development of brain centers that integrate our social experience. In his therapeutic vignettes, Cozolino describes how conscious experience can be used to improve that integration, allowing the patient to attain more reward from relationships.

The difficulty in reversing the programming received from mothers is that much of it is encoded early in our lives in the non-verbal parts of the brain, the seat of Freud’s “sub-conscious.”

In Buddhist circles, the role of conscious self-reflection (“meditation”) is lauded as a psychological practice for bringing our behavior into better alignment with our social reality. We grow up, and our mothers no longer dominate our lives. In meditation, we learn to replace our instincts with conscious action.

As I watch people struggle with this programming in Christian communities, I now wonder how the image of God the Father as taught by Jesus might relate to this process. It is not rooted in physical experience; rather, God exists in heaven, projecting love down upon us that we may choose to reject. Even then, the parable of the prodigal son promises that God still loves us.

I wonder whether there might be some therapeutic advantage in having a Father-God image in this role, as opposed to a Mother-God image?

Let’s Talk Science and Theology

Posted on April 5, 2016 by Brian Balke | Leave a comment

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.

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Tag Archives: chakras

Sixes and Sevens

Let’s Talk Science and Theology