Heart-Centeredness:  We recognize our hearts as portals to spirit and communal consciousness, with the potential to guide us through the limitations of our minds and individual identities.  We embody qualities of unconditional love, healing presence, innate harmony, and compassion by calling our attention and energy back to our hearts and to the communal heart.

In his book The Secret Teachings of Plants, Stephen Harrod Buhner devotes approximately the first third of his book to exploring the electromagnetic field created and modulated by the human heart.  He brings in fascinating and objective evidence to suggest that the primary function of our hearts is not about pumping blood, but rather is oriented toward communicating with each other and every other form of life through energetic modulation.  The flow of the blood, and the way it moves through the heart, is part and parcel of how this energetic modulation takes place.  This subject arises in a book about plants because he suggests that this is how humans are able to communicate with plants.  These are bold claims in a culture not used to perceiving animacy; a culture driven to consider our living earth more a ‘what’ than a ‘who’.  And yet, many older and indigenous traditions speak regularly about communicating with all elements of the biosphere, including and not limited to communicating with plants.  The mystery of the heart center revolves around the ability to develop ways of knowing and communicating beyond what our minds are accustomed to, connecting with other states of consciousness.  In light of Buhner’s work it is interesting to consider that psychedelic medicines, which generally come from plants, also offer altered states of consciousness.  Devotees of the heart center enter such states without ingesting plants to do so.  I count myself in this camp as a relatively recent initiate with a moderate ability to shift my state.  I experience my heart center as a way of finding ‘home’ wherever I am.  Having also engaged significantly in plant-based psychedelic work, something I have a deep appreciation for, I find heart center work to be more integrative and stabilizing. 

As of this writing I have spent about four years studying and practicing Heart Center Meditation.  My first teacher, Dr. Ann Marie Chiasson, studied with Dr. Brough Joy among others, and both of them speak and write on some level about it being work derived from many lineages.  Since being initiated into this work I have begun to see it everywhere:  I notice the many situations in which people not otherwise ‘trained’ bring their hands to their hearts in specific situations.  I have also sat in circles of people sharing what is dear to them with consistent personal and physical references to their hearts.  In essence, there is nothing new or even all that secret about Heart Center Mediation.  Dr. Chiasson often speaks about how the heart center becomes an activated and important place of consciousness in times of great personal and transpersonal change. Communally I believe we are in now in such a time.  

Both Dr. Chiasson and Dr. Joy have books available that describe the heart center with some depth.  I am intentionally not opening or referencing their books directly in this writing because I want to capture the transmission of my experience as it is given to me to share, yet I also want to honor that Dr. Chiasson’s descriptions are to a great degree the source from which I’m writing.  I hope that what I share here may motivate you to read her work too.  

There are four primary qualities to the heart center that I have learned, practiced, and felt revealed to me.  Here they take the form of words and concepts, and so in this form they are at least a step removed from their lived experience.  The purpose of sharing them here is to make them available for you to research through your own somatic experience.  For this I recommend simply being present with your heart space in the center of the chest:  Bring your hands to your heart with a sense of reverence.  Hold your heart with the intention of opening a portal to spirit—opening to the divinity of your own being.  Stay here and listen.  In doing so you may or may not have an extraordinary experience, but you can bring extraordinary presence to your ordinary experience.  Allowing myself to stay present with the ordinary has been, and continues to be, one of the most challenging aspects for me of this practice.  This is not a path toward being special, and yet it is a way of meeting the divine here and now.  I share this so that you may notice if you get taken by ‘inflation’ or ‘deflation’ as you proceed—the sense that you are more or less important or divine than others.  If you notice this, please have a good laugh with yourself as you note the data of your experience.  Let’s also recognize that on some level I am telling you how to move (put your hands on your heart), and how to feel (the below descriptions).  In the first BraveSpace principle of Somatic Research, we’ve already established this as an essential impossibility.  Please laugh with me as you entertain these descriptions:  My invitation is to allow them to serve as inspiration.  

Unconditional love, as quality of the heart center, is a place of emptiness.  It is the void, held with awe and wonder.  It is a stillness of pure presence.  I hear people speak of unconditional love as something we should feel for everyone, and something that should be attained.  This is such an attractive thought, yet the state of unconditional love itself has no conditions.  There is no ‘should’ because there is no thing.  Unconditional love is not personal, and neither is it impersonal.  It is through this quality that I begin to grok that there is a communal consciousness of which we are all a part.  There is no ‘other’ to whom to compare oneself from this place of being, but rather we are all individual aspects of larger whole.  I like how another teacher of mine, Christian Pankhurst, puts it: “You are me cleverly disguised as you.”  This is core to exploring the mystery of unconditional love.

Healing presence, as a quality of the heart center, is movement arising in the void.  It is the longing for healing; the longing for life.  I am reminded of healing presence when I feel pain and then recognize my pain as the healing process itself rather than that which requires healing.  There is no ‘thing’ called pain.  An injury, such as broken bone, can be objectively witnessed and even quantified as to its size and shape, but the pain experienced with the injury may never be exactly known by another person.  As a dancer I have seen people so in love with their dance, and so taken by the life force coming through them, that they could dance with broken bones.  Pain is given meaning through love.  Similarly, I feel healing presence in the way sadness and beauty so often co-arise.  As my heart is broken, it is also potentially broken open.  Healing presence is the quality that arises by observing this process of the life force within.

Innate harmony is a place of resonance, where all the infinite voices meet.  It is the eye of the storm and the place where we thread the needle of possibility.  Innate harmony is perfection itself; the impossible possibility that’s also always right here.  I experience innate harmony as an orgasmic state of intimacy with the divine, yet one without intensity.  Intensity does arise for me, yet its arrival drives me from the state of perfection as instantaneously as I arrived there, for innate harmony exists outside of time.  As a passage and gateway, innate harmony leads me into compassion.

If unconditional love is the empty void, compassion is a complimentary fullness.  Compassion is the quality of being with; some would say suffering with.  In compassion we entertain the possibility of turning pain into light.  We do well to begin by being with ourselves and our own suffering before naturally extending compassion to others.  This state and quality of the heart center has been taught to me as boundless and oceanic in scope, and arises for me with a pulsing and wavelike quality.  It often begins for me as gratitude.  Sometimes I wonder if I am substituting gratitude for compassion entirely, yet I sense they are just deeply related with each other in shared fullness.  Compassion certainly has flow, and I experience that it has the potential to overflow when first oriented internally.

There is a fifth quality of the heart center that arises as the probable result of living the other four:  This is the quality of selfless service.  This service may be given many names and applications, including service to source, spirit, or divinity, yet may intrinsically show up as service to community, family, or anything larger than oneself.  I want to tell you that I experience selfless service as a source of meaning, yet in making the statement I simultaneously notice that meeting my longing for meaning is not selfless.  Such is the paradox of mystery:  These qualities are models and suggestions for where the mystery of the heart center may lead, and yet attempting to grasp the mystery may only hide the path on which it meets us.  

The heart center is a key to holding spaces where we can take the risk of being vulnerable because it is a portal to our inherent connectedness and shared divinity.  When I recognize that you are me cleverly disguised as you then I am given the opportunity to drop my personal inflation and deflation to meet you in shared research of a greater mystery.  Similarly, the heart center offers the possibility for me to meet myself in my own reflection, coming home to myself.  We must hold BraveSpace for ourselves to hold it for others.  The essence of connection to and through the heart is that we are never actually alone.

Response-ability:  We reposition ourselves in relation to others and the world in each moment seeking our consensual and coherent place of belonging.  If we become overwhelmed, frozen, or otherwise unable to respond we do our best to speak to it openly and honestly.  We do not attempt to control others’ actions in order to avoid shifting our own relationship to the external world, although we may share our perspectives and invite change.

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I had a breathwork session from a friend.  It was brilliantly simple.  She sat with me and encouraged me to breathe on my own terms.  She helped me to be gentle with myself, expanding and condensing my body in a delightfully natural flow without trying to get anywhere.  In time I experienced a subtle, full-body, orgasmic pleasure.  I tried to deepen the experience by breathing with greater intensity, but my actions only pushed the feeling away.  The paradox of choice was so clear:  The experience of being embodied can be met and explored.  Yet, in its depth it cannot be completely owned or controlled.  We participate in guiding a lived experience that we are not in control of.  I like the word ‘repositioning’ as a way of describing and relating with this process physically and metaphysically.  We may reposition ourselves by making choices about how we move, perceive, and relate with our bodies, others, spirit, and the environment.  Repositioning does not generally alter the conditions we are presented with, but it shifts our relationship to them.

Response-ability is the ability to respond.  To be able to respond to conditions is fundamental to life.  We are self-organizing systems who adapt to internal and external change.  Our responses are sometimes voluntary:  For example you have chosen to read these words.  Voluntary response is typically the level at which we choose to reposition ourselves.  You could choose to stop reading this and put your attention somewhere else.  Yet, many of our responses are involuntary.  For example, if there is a loud and sudden sound you cannot choose whether to be startled—it just happens.  Shifting voluntary responses is simple enough.  The deepest aspect of response-ability, and of repositioning ourselves, is noticing and managing involuntary response patterns.  We may also recognize that many response patterns which at first glance appear voluntary, are actually not as voluntary as they seem. 

It is customary in the time I’m writing this to speak of being ‘triggered’ into involuntary response patterns.  Polyvagal theory, integrated among other somatic psychology perspectives, offers that in situations that in some way mimic past traumatic experience we can lose the ability to consciously respond to what’s taking place.  Dynamics of fight, flight, freeze, collapse, or fawn may essentially hijack our nervous systems, shifting our state of consciousness.  It becomes very difficult to make new choices despite great intent, and we become unable to do what we think we should do.  Neither are we powerless.  We can practice noticing and de-shaming our responses to slowly increase the potential for conscious choice.  This way of repositioning ourselves is often indirect at first:  If you know what startles you, and how you respond when startled, then you may choose not to enter environments where you are most likely to be startled, or you may avoid making important decisions while in this triggered state.  Essential to this approach to repositioning is being able to notice when we are triggered.  Building self-awareness is key to having response-ability.

I had a dream in which I was flying a model plane.  Then I was in the plane, and I was headed for a tree.  I had forgotten that I had any control of the plane, remembered suddenly, and avoided hitting the tree just in time.  In the next part of my dream I was talking with a friend who had just discovered all the places she could get to by train.  She was excited to tell me all the adventures she was having.  As I feel into this dream I recognize themes of response-ability:  In the plane it was only when about to crash that I remembered I had a say in how I repositioned myself.  In the total freedom that flying represents to me, I needed the tree to activate my choice—an external reality to be in relationship with.  Connecting with my friend—another aspect of myself—I learned I could go to specific places mapped out by the tracks.  Mapping train tracks is like mapping my own triggers and states of consciousness, developing awareness of the defined places I go repeatedly.  

Self-awareness is built through somatic research, and often requires interaction with others.  Moving and feeling in community we get feedback about our response patterns.  Our triggers show up when in social relationship.  Our shadows—the patterns in us that we are unable to see—often reveal themselves if we are willing to notice and question our reactions.  If I notice that my shoulders and belly tense when you approach me, or when someone says something on a particular subject, then I’m given a clue about my internal mechanisms.  We typically externalize these responses:  I’m angry because you did something, I’m silent because someone silenced me, or I’m turned on (or off) because someone’s seducing me with their power. This can all be true, and yet there’s also another layer of awareness available which affords us greater response-ability.

A meditation teacher of mine created a sticker with the words “Don’t just do something, sit there.”  This is a great inroad to deeper response-ability.  In relationship to the above example I might notice my state of tension, recognize it as anger, explore how it moves in my body, and wonder at how often I seem to feel this way.  Then, instead of directing my anger at the person who triggered it I could choose to express it by throwing rocks in the river until I’m able to think more clearly and discern whether I still have something to say.  In the case of silence I may find myself generally unable to access my ability to respond, and I may need to rest for a while in my stillness.  I can find a place to come back to myself, and then update others later on the response I wish I had been able to offer.  In time I may be able to significantly shorten the amount of time it takes me to come back into my activation.  I can similarly choose to change course if I’ve become sexually engaged, recognizing that I’m no longer feeling a genuine draw to the other person.  To do so requires that I have the physical and emotional ability to say ‘no’ and to mean it.  In each of these cases I must first recognize that I’m on a certain track, de-shame it for myself, and wait for the intensity to pass before I can proceed.  This is easy enough to imagine, but clearly more difficult to do in the moment.  Response-ability takes practice, particularly at holding ourselves in the moment of discomforting activation.

When we interact with other people we navigate our relational agreements as consent and consensus processes.  Consent is about what we agree to individually, while consensus is communal.  There are numerous practices for getting better at discerning and communicating what is a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for us that are taught in consent programs or at events where being able to do this is important.  One thing I’ve noticed about these practices overall is they tend toward situations where a person approaches, and then a clear ‘yes’ or ‘no’ needs to be offered.  This is an important beginning, and indeed many real-life situations work this way, but many also do not.  There are so many maybes, and also so many opportunities that present themselves indirectly.  We can choose to reposition ourselves so that we may gain access to relationships and experiences that would not otherwise be in our path.  We can also reposition so that we have options beyond ‘yes’ and ‘no’.  This is why I like the model of repositioning as a way of holding response-ability.

In total the shift into response-ability happens when I focus on how I’m responding to others rather than trying to change the behaviors of others.  These course corrections are difficult to make because they go against the flow of deep involuntary patterning, a flow we prefer not to alter.  There is also an important ‘and’ to consider:  My instinctive responses may be the perfect way to handle a situation.  It is easy to fall into the trap of constant self-criticism or self-shaming.  The key here is that discernment comes through repeated experimentation, and a willingness to make mistakes.  In time the state of one’s nervous system—the tone of consciousness—becomes more palpable and easier to read.  Therapeutic and recreational play environments offer the opportunity to practice noticing, evaluating, and re-patterning our responses.  My own capacity for power, authenticity, and joy in relationship has grown tremendously through such practice.  Intentional group containers have allowed me to run into my triggers for sport, inspiring in me both fear and joy as I have been given the ability to make mistakes, make amends, and grow.  These containers give me the chance to consciously navigate how I relate and what agreements I am making with others.  BraveSpace® is such a container, offered in the hope and belief that response-ability may be learned, shared, and practiced to strengthen our communal culture.  It is an invitation.

I stated in some conversation recently that the realm of the spiritual occurs when we consider a frame larger than one lifetime.  I’ve been sitting with this, wondering at such a simple, limited inroad to the ineffable.  The first lesson of the mystery school I was initiated into was to “Get your hands off the mystery!”  It’s difficult to allow the unknown to stay this way—feeling through the infinite instead of trying to logic it into definition. Trying to grasp the formless seems only to push it away, and holding that there is more to life than appears at first blush is also essential to having a meaningful experience

My mother passed into the next realm earlier this week, and for all conjecture I cannot know where it is that she has gone.  Feeling my way though, I am incredibly glad that I was with her through the process.  I had the opportunity to look into her eyes, see her deeply, and to feel deeply seen.  She was clear that she was ready to die, and she did not appear afraid.  She was always clear about what she wanted and what she saw.  I continue to learn about this from her.

I recorded this video in the midst of her passing, which was a three-day process.  As a bodyworker sensitive to energy it was astounding to be near her body at the end:  I could bring my hands near her in the way I generally do to feel someone’s energy field, and they’d simply land on her body.  I typically encounter the energy field as a sense of resistance a few feet away.  In this case I felt nothing there—her field had collapsed to be smaller than her physical body.  Yet, dancing in a park a few miles away, I could feel her.  With the possible exception of at my wedding, or perhaps when I was very young, I never danced with my mom in her physical body.  This video marks something new—dancing with Mom.  I love you, Mom.

Improvisation, the 4^th principle of BraveSpace:  We invite awe and wonder as we inhabit the mysterious gap between knowing and not knowing.  We allow truth to emerge through us and recognize power as the ability to be with what is.

The key to improvisation is getting the thinking mind out of the way so a deeper responsivity can emerge.  In the beginning our minds need a structure or task—something specific and simple to do.  A later learning step is recognizing that whatever it is the mind is doing matters, but it often isn’t the most important thing going on.

Improvising is a divination process.  A core perspective of BraveSpace that we are not in direct control of most of what we do—that our identities are managing the ride of life as it comes through us.  We can thereby approach our bodies as spiritual texts given for us to interpret; texts that we don’t have the capability of writing ourselves.  Somatic movement, dance, meditation, breathwork, and touch experiences shift our state of consciousness.  These practices give us greater choice in how we participate with life because we learn to interpret what is given to us from multiple perspectives.  When we recognize the process of moving and feeling our bodies as a sacred mystery available within ourselves, a natural attitude of awe and wonder is likely to occur!  And, of course, this attitude is difficult to embody when pain or discomfort arises, whether physical, emotional, or otherwise.  This is when the mind steps in to save the day, often refusing to get out of the way.  We use rules, guidelines, and logic to direct our minds, manage our experience, and create maps of our perceived reality.  This kind of ‘knowing’ that occupies our minds is super important, and the principles of BraveSpace represent one such structural map.  Simultaneously we can recognize that the field of what we ‘know’ is infinitely smaller than the realm of the ‘unknown’ that operates through us.  The mystery we are divining in improvisation lies in the tension between these poles.  We can hold what is known loosely without abandoning it.  It is ironic that we can most often wonder at the oceanic unknown only from the shores of our knowing.  To improvise is to dance, sometimes quite literally, in the gap between the finite and the infinite.  The aliveness of this is sometimes terrifying, and it is extraordinary!

In many respects this gap between known and unknown is our most accurate place of residence.  We are always improvising because the conditions of our reality are always changing.  In the realm of dancing, the known might be a piece of choreography that I’ve practiced many times to the same piece of music.  The unknown could be a dance I do with no forethought or rehearsal.  We can look at these dances as having more in common with each other than not:  If the room is cold, I will move differently than if it’s warm.  If I ate something I can’t digest then I’ll be nauseous.  If I just won the lottery I’ll be happier than if my wife just requested a divorce, and in either case I’ll be hugely distracted.  There is also another very social element:  Dancing by myself is radically different from dancing for 10,000 people who are watching me, dancing anonymously with 10,000 people who also are dancing, or dancing closely with someone I am in an intimate relationship with.  If the stage lights come on too soon, and my partner fails to appear, it’s clearly time to improvise.  Choreography matters, but it’s only one part of the larger whole.  Interacting with varied conditions I cannot entirely predict or control, internally and externally, is dancing with the unknown.  

We are also always referencing what we know.  In considering Trans-Formation as a BraveSpace principle I explored the concept that everything we do is patterned.  We repeat patterns in phrases, from beginning, through middle, to end.  Beginning a phrase, unless there is an interruption, will bring about its completion.  In an improvisational dance I cannot help but use patterns my body knows.  Just like it is possible to differentiate one person’s walk from another’s based on their individual repeated patterns, it is also clear who is who when watching people dance an improvisational dance.  Now, go ahead and imagine a dance; any kind of dance will do.  We are referencing the known simply by defining this movement you are imagining as dance.  ‘Dance’ is a shared nomenclature that gives both I as the writer and you as the reader an understanding based on our previous knowledge.

To improvise, given these examples, is to be able to merge the known and unknown elements of anything towards an intention.  There are levels of scale in the shared ecology of self, other, and place that the improviser connects through their perception and action.  The temperature of the room, the social environment, our past experiences, and our collective intentions generate a particular moment of being.  As a dancer my intention when improvising is often exactly to let the physical and social environment move me—to put myself in service to it.  In sports the guiding intention is to win the game.  The movements have been practiced again and again, the needs and rules of the game directing how they are used.  The outcome of such an emergence cannot be pre-determined; that’s why underdogs always have a chance.    

The power given through improvisation, and particularly through the practice of improvisation, is to be able to adapt to continually changing conditions.  Improvisation increases resilience—the ability to rebound from impacts and maintain wholeness.  Improvisation is essential in creating places where we can take the risk of being vulnerable because the conditions given within us, through the divination of our own bodies and being, are consistently shifting as much as those outside us.  To know ourselves is a research endeavor with no endpoint.  Revealing ourselves is a process of discovery that only improvisation can meet with integrity.

Trans-formation:  We recognize that our movements and personalities are comprised of patterns that take form in our bodies and behaviors, and that these patterns may include traumatic responses.  We are willing to change our form, face trauma, and invite discomfort in order to grow in alignment with purpose, truth, and community.  We simultaneously seek to avoid injury to self, other, and world.

I imagine that every spiritual, mindfulness, or self-help lineage discusses in some form that the only constant in life is change.  As a dancer it has felt self-evident to me that working with my body in movement is a spectacular way to access all sorts of personal trans-formations, but I didn’t begin to experience this until I actually started dancing at age 20.  Learning to move my body in new ways gave me access to new ways of being with myself and others.  It opened my access to my emotional range and began releasing me from what could be termed trauma patterns, both personal and trans-personal, so that I could meet myself and others in new ways.  

I don’t want to get stuck debating what is and isn’t trauma, but it is important to look at its fundamental basis.  We can consider trauma with a big ‘T’—clinically diagnosable trauma linked to deeply damaging events that may take people completely out of their ability to regulate themselves in everyday life.  This is PTSD as seen in soldiers coming from war, or that often occurs in people who have experienced rape.  Yet, we can also consider small ‘t’ trauma—like being embarrassed in front of a class—experiences which people also commonly speak about as traumatic.  The reason it has become common to speak this way is that the underlying principle is the same even if the degree of effect is drastically different:  As human life-forms we are patterned beings, and these patterns are created in relationship to our life experiences.  Injuries of all sorts—traumas physical, emotional, and spiritual—often lead to patterns of movement and behavior that are not maximally easeful or efficient.  

Have you ever seen someone walking toward you from far away and known who it was just by how they walk?  We walk differently from each other, yet we also consistently maintain our own individual style.  It’s key to recognize that these differences aren’t performed consciously most of the time.  This is how we are as bodies—patterned and mostly unconscious.  If this were not the case we’d be overwhelmed every time we needed to get across the room.  Conversely, noticing our patterns of walking or breathing are meditation techniques exactly because they corral the mind into the present moment and allow us to witness the miracle of all we would usually do without conscious control.  In the noticing also comes an interruption.  Sometimes when I bring my attention to my walk or to my breathing I get tripped up a bit.  Everything feels awkward as I become aware of my own patterning.  Part of the awkwardness is that bringing in my awareness actually shifts what I’m doing; observing our own breath or walk without changing it in some way is difficult if not impossible.

Transformation is a change of form.  One’s form is generated by their patterns.  In the body we know this in its most literal sense:  People lift weights because repeating the pattern changes the form of their body.  When we consider that everything we do is composed of patterns that we repeat, from our movements to how we engage with our thoughts, it becomes clear that transformation arises when we shift our automatic, unconscious patterns.  Interrupting our patterns, and in time learning to stop initiating certain patterns, is essential to transformation.  

All movements, just like this sentence and paragraph, have a beginning, a middle, and an end.  This way of parsing flow is called a ‘phrase’ in Laban Movement Analysis.  Flow is the ongoing nature of being in time—we can think of it like a river.  Phrasing is how we parse and attempt to control the flow, with a rush here, and an eddy there; perhaps at some point we go over a waterfall.  Every breath is a phrase in the larger phrase of a life.  As with a river, it takes effort and intent to stop in the middle, and when going over a waterfall it’s completely impossible to stop.  Initiations lead to conclusions!  Bringing attention to what’s happening within our mostly automatic phrases is typically uncomfortable and awkward.  It also empowers us to make new choices, and to create new patterns that may better serve our lives.  When dealing with particularly deep patterns of trauma we may have to interrupt ourselves at the first hint of discomfort to avoid going over a waterfall of cascading responses.  Tolerance for discomfort, and the ability to repattern ourselves more quickly, comes with dedicated practice.  

To grow is to be willing to be uncomfortable.  This does not mean that everything uncomfortable is growth, nor that all moments are the right time for transformative pattern-shifting.  Trauma—and all the patterns—shift by following the natural rhythm between leaning into discomfort and then coming back to easeful regulation.  It is deeply empowering to be able to engage with our own phrases of transformation when we are ready, and at the pace that fits.  It is also hugely important in holding BraveSpace—places we can take the risk of vulnerability—to honor our own phrasing and that of others through our shared changing of form.  It can help us keep from falling over life’s waterfalls when we aren’t ready, and to enjoy the ride when we are.