Maybe you already know this: we have a brain in our belly---literally, scientifically, experientially.   Our heads, in this intelligence-biased, information-intensive era are super-loud. So it is quite easy to bypass this rich fertile more quiet region. This Sunday we spent all day belly-rooted in the SF Tending workshop. A student there reminded me about Philip Shepherd and an interview in Sun Magazine April 2014. What follows is pulled from this fascinating source.

When it came to those college level non-life science classes like physics and chemistry…well, I scraped by. But I totally get this Gabrielle Roth basic physics quote:

“Energy moves in waves. Waves move in patterns. Patterns move in rhythms. Human beings are just that, energy, waves, patterns, and rhythms…nothing more, nothing less…a dance.
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Remember Joe Montana? I am so NOT a football fan. In fact, I’m thrilled the movie Concussion is outing the incredible damage this violent past time incurs on the gladiators who give up quality of life for our insatiable entertainment need. Sorry if I am offending. But incredible damage and Joe Montana played a big role in my professional life.

For twenty-five years my morning ritual has held fast. I sit in meditation. The commitment has not wavered though focus and technique have varied. If meditation success is measured via reduced thoughts, longer periods of quiet mind, this practice has been utter failure. But improvement has been vast if favorable outcome points to a snowballing ability to witness what is happening moment by moment. And that spills off the cushion in so many ways, some of them less than pleasant. Gone are the days of unconscious, less than optimal behavior. I have the skilled privilege of watching myself f--k up. Like using the F word in a newsletter. Really? Yup. Because labeling behavior as f—king up is exactly what I want to talk about.

The Mohawk people, in their indigenous wisdom, practiced condolence ritual, “where they tend to the bereaved with an elegant series of gestures, wiping tears from the eyes with the soft skin of a fawn.” This poignant image and so much more from an interview with Francis Weller, author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. He told of the Southwest Pueblo tribe with their “crying songs to help move grief along.”

Just off the phone with a local yoga teacher calling for an appointment for her ailing body. She talked about what it was like to stand in front of her class last night and name it. What it was like to watch the class do what she could not. What it was like to have a hard time accepting the sympathy extended after class.

Sixteen hours of airline travel, coming home, excited? Yes...and surprised at this feel of reluctance, the tug of Paris still strong, time carved from the norm, daily adventure, wandering with abandon. Wondering about "the norm", the possibility of not falling back into it, the magnetic pull of habit, the comfort of the familiar. How to maintain freshness, awaken each morning wondering what might happen, do something different. 

Break free, drop the same old same old, move out of the box.

Buddhist teachers, existential philosophers and hard knocks college all hammer away on the same topic: old age, ill health and death are coming to us all. If we are lucky. If you're like me you might hit the delete button right now; I wouldn't blame you. I like the sand. Especially when my head is in it.

There was something about teaching every Thursday night that kept me grounded, providing an anchor in a strange and variable schedule. Unhooked for more than a month now, I find myself never quite sure what day of the week it is or whether it is the weekend or not. Factor in travelling east and west on 80 for the past week and it adds up to a bit of very welcome befuddlement. Just returned from San Francisco and looked at the next few days: patients to treat and teaching to do: Rock & Roll Tuesday morning (wow, loving this…) and my last time to hold the Sweat this season at Coloma on Sunday.

There was something about teaching every Thursday night that kept me grounded, providing an anchor in a strange and variable schedule. Unhooked for more than a month now, I find myself never quite sure what day of the week it is or whether it is the weekend or not. Factor in travelling east and west on 80 for the past week and it adds up to a bit of very welcome befuddlement. Just returned from San Francisco and looked at the next few days: patients to treat and teaching to do: Rock & Roll Tuesday morning (wow, loving this…) and my last time to hold the Sweat this season at Coloma on Sunday.

Back in the day, I taught a mat class in the clinic called Loosen, Lengthen, Strengthen. When the opportunity arose to collaborate for a six week series focused on strength at It’s All Yoga, I perked right up.

Power Up! ( https://clients.mindbodyonline.com/classic/home?studioid=4333) begins today: Tues/Thurs 12:00-12:45 six week series. You can drop in anytime and check out this high energy opportunity for "personal training" without strain. No mirrors, no meatheads. This is territory I know and love and have a pretty unique spin on.

Wanted coffee. Walked into Chocolate Fish. My window seat was taken. Took the middle seat I didn’t want. Didn’t even notice the gorgeous ocean photo on the wall. Decided what I really craved was a latte. The music is too loud in here. Hate that. So wrapped up in myself, I didn’t spot the full-in-bloom white oleander out the window. Didn’t even notice when the guy in the window seat got up and left. And so it goes. Want, don’t want, doesn’t even register.

About six months ago, I was phone-dreaming/collaborating with Jenny Macke http://presence-studio.com/?page_id=204 about Harbin Hot Springs https://bodyjoy.net/5Rhythms-workshops-sacramento.html#harbin, throwing ideas, visions, intentions into the juicy soup pot between us, stirring it up. We both want to lift us out of the sticky day-to-day ensnaring web that consumes us, creates a barrier to truly knowing who we are and what we really need. Words were flying all over cyber-space until, almost in the same nano-second, we uttered “cultivating space”. That just nailed it: cultivate space, inside and out. It’s always there, inside and out, it just gets obscured in the daily fray.

We all need deep personal support and sometimes it comes from sources way less visible. There is unspoken sustenance that may need to come out of the closet: stillness, withdrawal from the exterior world, turning inward. Heartened by my three days of silence at the end of 2014, I made a resolution. I never make resolutions. But I did. One day a month in 2015 for complete and utter unplugging. The only rule? At home with no screen time: no phone, no computer, no TV X 24 hours.

I first heard the term “holding space” when I dove into dance as a moving meditation. Curious how this phrase tenderly moved through me and informed every bone in my body. I knew immediately that this was the ineffable language for what I had been doing as a medical professional all my adult life. I just didn’t know there was a name for it. It’s a skill I’ve honed over a lifetime and still I fall short time and again, get up, dust myself off and keep learning. It comes most naturally for me when I’m at work one-on-one seeing you for physical therapy. It is more challenging to refine in the classroom setting, for me, easier in yoga than dance. Actually it’s a life craft we all practice, whether we know it or not. For most of us it shows up in our work lives and in our personal relationships as well.

Wind sheds chaos in the trees, light is a subtle shade of brilliance and 67 people are acutely aware of how precious the time remaining is. For that I am humbly grateful. I am one of them. Very few are privileged enough or even see the point in carving three days out of time to focus on the biggest perspective. Most of us are so busy making a living it is easy to forget what a sacred and rare thing living is.

I hadn’t been feeling well for several days. Yet it was Saturday afternoon and this commitment to teach Intro to 5Rhythms was long-standing and I am too much a professional to do anything other than show up. Maybe you’re like that too...a woman of my word, sometimes to a fault, for sure. As the first sounds filled the space, I felt my spirit lift on wings of music. And what to play and what to say and how to impart my deep love for this practice in a quick two hours, to the diverse variety of experience present in the room…well it all just began to flow. By the time we were complete, I felt immeasurably better. It is so obvious that movement is medicine. Look for the next Intro to 5R in this perfect space on April 11.

“Really? That’s just an old story.” Ever been on the receiving end of this condescending comment after baring your naked soul? Confiding hard-earned insight, true childhood root of why your all grown-up self just behaved like that? Maybe you actually censored that insight all on your own or maybe this pearl dropped from your own lips in response to a friend’s revelation. It’s a pop culture catch phrase. “That’s just an old story.” As if our old stories have no value. Ah but they do, they deeply shape us.

I had opportunity and loving support to bathe in deep silence for a long-short two and a half days. Long enough to know my busy and future-oriented mind, which is not new information. In the quiet frigid days there was beauty sprinkled, as well. I walked across forest floor meditating into an eternity reflected in plant decay at my feet, enjoyed the pure and intense physical pleasure of just breathing, marveled at delightfully easy heart access. And for about an hour, well into the second day, a clear sense of teaching territory spontaneously revealed itself.

“We are the ones we have been waiting for...”

The origin of this phrase is controversial but its inherent, powerful truth resonates deeply. Hopi elders used this expression to conclude a well known metaphor: a river flowing swiftly, letting go of the shore, seeing who is with you and celebrating...creating your community, being good to each other...and to not look outside yourself for the leader.