The thing that resonated with me most was how spiritual practice has to come out of some sense of longing, yet often it is difficult to connect what happens in practicing to the motivation to do it.
And then you touch this "place" of space and silence and it is the most natural thing in the world, you can't imagine losing touch with it. Until you do, and then you can't really imagine being in touch with it anymore, and the exercises to get you back there seem empty and contrived. Which in some sense they are, as it always is there. You're not trying to find it, you are learning to see it in everything.
And this longing matters. A longing for something that we have never lost, but that we cannot contact without this longing. A longing that shows us we have only arrived when we know we still have a long way to go.
Well, I do hope this is sort of what you meant to point to. Words always fail in these matters anyway, as here they have an even higher tendency than usual to mean opposite things at the same time.
Thanks for this article, makes me happy to see others poking at the edges of things I also feel I am trying to poke around.
I like the returning to things over time you mention in different states. It’s like all the metabolism in between brings the things alive to you in new ways, even the ideas themselves which have lived through you and changed you and vice versa.
I keep what I call a commonplace rhizome in an app called Craft. It is a glorious mess and serves me well!
Mmm the luminous presence which connects all things together. This feels like an essential aspect of a wider collective transformation. Where we sit in the mythos of being.
I once attended a 'shapeshifting' workshop by a profoundly skilled body worker Trevor Wills here in Australia. He described the crux if his work as being a 'tracker' - working on people's bodies, tracking the lineages of their trauma through their soma, confronting it and staying with it. Bringing his clients to stay with it. A colleague who had gotten work done with him described the experience "he does really long sessions, 2-3 hours. And he won't let you 'leave'. Anytime he senses your presence wavering or beginning to dissociate, he... somehow commands you back with his voice and his touch. He keeps you in it. It's extraordinary."
In this workshop I was shocked to experience that he is able to do this at scale with a group of 40+ people at once. At any point the focus of the group began to leave he would call us back into presence. Into being there together.
We did somatic exercises to re-inhabit the bodies of our ancestors, but not just of human ancestors, but going further back to when we walked on 4 legs and sniffed about with a sensing snout. I had the profound experience of remembering what it was like to be an aquatic animal. A fish, and felt my heart break with the trauma of a trillion evolutions of complexity that had separated my being from the simplicity of ancestral forms. The way things were. Trevor spoke to how with every evolution something is traded away and a price is paid. Even for homo erectus to stand bipedal on 2 legs, the amount of energy consumed by the brain to sustain the microcalculations of balance increases 500%.
He shared that in contrast to the heady busyness of our time, that indigenous peoples in their original cultures and environment would spend around 80% of their time in a soft, tranquil stare of presence and being with themselves, the land and all about them. Soft gaze, unfocused, feeling, being, sitting in connection. Through Trevor's 'keeping us here' (which I can't express enough seems to be some kind of extraordinary ability I have never heard of or experienced anyone else being able to do), and some further exercises, the group began to inhabit this soft, peaceful presence of connectedness together. He invited us to all sit together on the side of a hill in a clearing among the forest, spreading out, touching and leaning on one another to form a kind of mycelium network of touch. And in this constellation I became the organism of all us, my presence becoming our bodies and the earth, the bird calls, the trickling stream nearby, the forest and it's inhabitants all around. To really experience the luminous presence that was once common to our ancestors that has now been somewhat forgotten. And it felt like coming home, to a deep home which I'd forgotten. It was profound, and it was in this experience that I had a personal realisation that "wow... This must be what the theorized Tourquoise meme in spiral dynamics would feel like. Organismic and whole."
And so this post hit threads of remembrance with that experience. And like another commented here, as 'modern' people oh how we forget it and then search for it again! Feeling unable to be without it when experiencing it, and unable to imagine having it when it's not there.
It appears that there are many calls in the space that point to a redefining of education as a prime means for remedying the meta-crisis of our time. Perhaps we need to find ways to teach the children of the next generation how to hold onto this magic of beingness, and speak it fluently like a first tongue. How to form a deep intimacy with it in a way where it will always be nearby, like breathing air or drinking water.
Thank you for sharing this.
The thing that resonated with me most was how spiritual practice has to come out of some sense of longing, yet often it is difficult to connect what happens in practicing to the motivation to do it.
And then you touch this "place" of space and silence and it is the most natural thing in the world, you can't imagine losing touch with it. Until you do, and then you can't really imagine being in touch with it anymore, and the exercises to get you back there seem empty and contrived. Which in some sense they are, as it always is there. You're not trying to find it, you are learning to see it in everything.
And this longing matters. A longing for something that we have never lost, but that we cannot contact without this longing. A longing that shows us we have only arrived when we know we still have a long way to go.
Well, I do hope this is sort of what you meant to point to. Words always fail in these matters anyway, as here they have an even higher tendency than usual to mean opposite things at the same time.
Thanks for this article, makes me happy to see others poking at the edges of things I also feel I am trying to poke around.
I like the returning to things over time you mention in different states. It’s like all the metabolism in between brings the things alive to you in new ways, even the ideas themselves which have lived through you and changed you and vice versa.
I keep what I call a commonplace rhizome in an app called Craft. It is a glorious mess and serves me well!
Mmm the luminous presence which connects all things together. This feels like an essential aspect of a wider collective transformation. Where we sit in the mythos of being.
I once attended a 'shapeshifting' workshop by a profoundly skilled body worker Trevor Wills here in Australia. He described the crux if his work as being a 'tracker' - working on people's bodies, tracking the lineages of their trauma through their soma, confronting it and staying with it. Bringing his clients to stay with it. A colleague who had gotten work done with him described the experience "he does really long sessions, 2-3 hours. And he won't let you 'leave'. Anytime he senses your presence wavering or beginning to dissociate, he... somehow commands you back with his voice and his touch. He keeps you in it. It's extraordinary."
In this workshop I was shocked to experience that he is able to do this at scale with a group of 40+ people at once. At any point the focus of the group began to leave he would call us back into presence. Into being there together.
We did somatic exercises to re-inhabit the bodies of our ancestors, but not just of human ancestors, but going further back to when we walked on 4 legs and sniffed about with a sensing snout. I had the profound experience of remembering what it was like to be an aquatic animal. A fish, and felt my heart break with the trauma of a trillion evolutions of complexity that had separated my being from the simplicity of ancestral forms. The way things were. Trevor spoke to how with every evolution something is traded away and a price is paid. Even for homo erectus to stand bipedal on 2 legs, the amount of energy consumed by the brain to sustain the microcalculations of balance increases 500%.
He shared that in contrast to the heady busyness of our time, that indigenous peoples in their original cultures and environment would spend around 80% of their time in a soft, tranquil stare of presence and being with themselves, the land and all about them. Soft gaze, unfocused, feeling, being, sitting in connection. Through Trevor's 'keeping us here' (which I can't express enough seems to be some kind of extraordinary ability I have never heard of or experienced anyone else being able to do), and some further exercises, the group began to inhabit this soft, peaceful presence of connectedness together. He invited us to all sit together on the side of a hill in a clearing among the forest, spreading out, touching and leaning on one another to form a kind of mycelium network of touch. And in this constellation I became the organism of all us, my presence becoming our bodies and the earth, the bird calls, the trickling stream nearby, the forest and it's inhabitants all around. To really experience the luminous presence that was once common to our ancestors that has now been somewhat forgotten. And it felt like coming home, to a deep home which I'd forgotten. It was profound, and it was in this experience that I had a personal realisation that "wow... This must be what the theorized Tourquoise meme in spiral dynamics would feel like. Organismic and whole."
And so this post hit threads of remembrance with that experience. And like another commented here, as 'modern' people oh how we forget it and then search for it again! Feeling unable to be without it when experiencing it, and unable to imagine having it when it's not there.
It appears that there are many calls in the space that point to a redefining of education as a prime means for remedying the meta-crisis of our time. Perhaps we need to find ways to teach the children of the next generation how to hold onto this magic of beingness, and speak it fluently like a first tongue. How to form a deep intimacy with it in a way where it will always be nearby, like breathing air or drinking water.