Finding wholeness in the tension of opposites.

I marvel at the tension between the sacred and the profane.  

While not universal, people will typically only tell us to go f— ourselves if we penetrate their space or energy in a way that has not been invited.  You can surely imagine a scenario where you might offer this bit of profanity to someone.  Don’t be shy with yourself here… what’s the situation where they would really deserve it?

Having imagined the context for profanity, let’s consider that this phrase can also be a truly sacred invitation:  To fuse with oneself in divine union; to make love internally.  To do so I recognize a polarity or tension of opposites within.  For example, I write here using my thoughts—sharing ideas—and yet this part of me that writes struggles to comprehend or express anything below the surface of my mind.  The emotional and spiritual depth of being is—at least in my experience—not mindful.  The mind observes, but actual depth is in my body, my energy, and in my emotions—energies in motion.  

Emotional power is something profanity excels in, as the power of profanity actually relies on the sacred.  In profanity we make fun of the sacred in order to catch a glimpse of the divine.  I’m consciously directing it here to evoke and point to a heightened state of being.  I know in my body the experience of making sweet love with myself internally, but to communicate this possibility to you we need common ground.  You may or may not have had this experience, but chances are you have some level of emotional response to the suggestion that you “go F— yourself.”  So here’s the tension in action:  The profanity makes the sacred more available, catching your attention.

Imagery is a very powerful somatic structure capable of organizing energy and holding its tension.  I’ve written here about the masculine and feminine polarities within:  I’m drawn to a neo-tantric definition of the masculine as structural consciousness, and of the feminine as an embodied experience held by that structure.  Sure, it’s simplistic.  We could call this division the Alpha and Omega, Bindles and Stenets, or P’s and Q’s.  The point is that there exists a tension of opposites inside us all, and by engaging playfully with this tension joyful wholeness is a natural result.  Imagery for me is masculine.  I can hold inner images of the direction my arm is reaching, the possibilities for my hip, or where others are in the space around me.  I can make moment-to-moment choices about what I’m doing with my body by inhabiting these images.  Inside of this structural container I can feel my body moving, releasing into the sensory experience.  This is the essence of all somatic practice—movement and awareness in relationship.  It is also a basis for inner lovemaking.

Sometimes I work with imagery very literally with my sexual energy.  In meditation I can be both masculine and feminine; both man and woman, in the same body.  I can do this with my breath, my spine, my sounding, and my dance.  It amazes me that we don’t talk about these possibilities more, and that despite knowing the power of this work I am still so often ashamed of my sexual energy.  I shared some of this work in a tantric men’s group and was ridiculed by my peers there for expressing the power of making love with myself in my movement and energy.  It’s not for everyone.  And yet, when I’m anxious, angry, sad, lonely, or otherwise ‘triggered’, coming back to this inner meeting of polarities has helped me be more loving, capable, generous, and whole.  I am also more cocky, penetrative, and daring at times when it seems called, more comfortable with my own masculinity having received it within myself.

Honestly, I get kind of claustrophobic in most cuddle puddles, squirmy and uncomfortable being in one position for long.  While there is surely plenty I can learn and practice here about yielding into the intimacy given by these situations, it kind of cracks me up to see how often Contact Improvisation Puddles manifest at events I hold.  These are a bit like snake pits, with bodies twisting, turning, and tumbling in multiple dimensions all at the same time.  For devoted cuddlers I imagine it might seem silly to expend so much effort.  As a dancer, however, I find these so much more interesting, with the ability to play with where I wish to be in each moment—where I’m going.  I like the feeling of activating my body and receiving the experience at the same time. Sometimes it is my turn to be still and receive the group, or to assist someone else’s motion through my relative stability.  And then I’m often back in motion.

The video above is from the last class of a Contact Improvisation skills series I taught in Boise.  I pushed the group to be up and moving in larger ways much of the time, building skills with each other in time, space, awareness, and the sharing of weight.  For this last dance I let it puddle—as so often seems to happen when a group of humans drawn to such things are given the permission.

I’ll be offering a short BraveSpace Workshop—the Art of Wholeness, and a Pleasure Spine Contact Improvisation Jam in Portland, OR on April 1^st.  If that’s your part of the world please find the details and signup here.  The next BraveSpace Immersion in Boise is scheduled for April 21-23, and a new 3 class contact improv class and jam series runs April 20^th, May 4^th, and May 18^th.

Preparing for What’s Coming

These are wild times—we are riding big waves in the texture of humanity’s earthly journey.  There is so much tension among and between us:  Topics of health, food, race, gender, climate, war, and perhaps most deeply purpose are aching with charge.  It’s easy to blame, shame, and judge, both ‘other’ and self.  I watch myself do it—my way of seeing makes sense to me.  I ‘know’ better, yet the experience of righteousness is by nature one sided.

Mysticism is a practice of holding the unknown with open hands.  My mind wishes to grasp—to determine what is and what’s coming.  My mind is a pessimist, so if I let myself hold on then I expect the worst.  If I try too hard to counter it then I paint the world with roses.  To immerse myself in mystery I simply sit in awe, holding my own heart with unconditional love in presence with the unknown.  It is a vulnerable, embodied state.  As I approach it I tend to shake, shiver, and start.  It’s an internal making of love–sometimes subtly orgasmic—and at times feels like a death through which I’ve thus far been reborn.

I have been leading events I call Somatic Mystery Journeys.  We drink cacao, work our breathing, move in awareness, and eventually turn up the music for ‘ecstatic’ dancing.  Through our bodies, and in the group field, we invoke the sacred space of mystery.  We let our bodies move in the permission and intention that we don’t know what’s coming.  I imagine that people have always done this, yet it seems particularly important right now.  The body has a way of knowing and being with others that’s very different from the mind.  Even thinking about it barely touches the power of the experience.

To prepare for what’s coming, especially as we don’t know what that is, we benefit from ways to hold and channel the intensity of emotion.  Anxiety is rampant, and when anxiety controls my actions I rarely make the best decisions.  We are communal beings, and the deepest anxieties often revolve around being isolated, shamed, and otherwise left unloved.  The power of journeying together in ceremonial movement is finding out who we are when we take off the masks (as many as we are aware of), dive under the anxiety, and perhaps let ourselves die.  As I read this it feels dramatic.  It may in fact be boring and banal—just a human being.  And yet, this is exactly the whole of it—humans consciously navigating our drama together.  

That pain is evidence of vitality came up yesterday in an Advanced Ongoing BraveSpace group I hold. We were mapping our experience of our bodies and then sharing what we discovered there. Pain was a theme. This isn’t unusual in my experience with groups. Perhaps it’s because culturally (universally?) we tend not to bring attention to our bodies unless there is pain. Yet, one of the things that has helped me make ‘sense’ of pain and how to engage with it is recognizing pain as evidence that I am alive. When I come from this place I am better able to hold my pain with grace. Pain is a form of longing–a longing for healing–and longing is a key way vitality manifests. I share this not to minimize the sometimes excruciating experience and effect of pain; yet pain is most likely affected when we understand that it is not objective.

Pain is an experience. It is often linked with the physicality of the body, but it is not a quality of the body itself. Pain exists in the subjective realm of consciousness. To affect my experience of pain, I use practices that shift my consciousness. Movement, breath, and meditation are pretty effective.

I’m offering a free Online Movement, Breath, and Meditation class Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6:30am Mountain Time for the foreseeable future. Here’s the class link–you will need to signup in advance to get the link.

Teaching Contact Improvisation(CI) in a community that has had little experience with it I have learned to teach social aspects first.  To me this is consent work in the body—learning to navigate where we choose to be in relationship to someone else, and how to actuate those choices, moment by moment.  Our social training and cultural norms around touch, movement, and power don’t necessarily prepare us for this kind of interaction, so engaging consciously with these dynamics has proven to be very empowering for people.  I do this work in the BraveSpace® workshops I teach.

I’m about to offer a more technically focused contact improvisation (CI) workshop in Boise in which we’ll dive directly and deeply into the physicality of CI—sharing weight and organizing ourselves in space and time to create the art of the moment.  This division that I’m drawing—between the physical and the social—is of course artificial: The two are fused in practice, yet useful when considering pedagogy.  I’m excited to have enough of a contact community in Boise now to have critical mass to dive directly into the physical.  I think it takes a few people who have been initiated into the consent aspects to hold the social field with people who have had less experience.  Consent (typically 1-1) and consensus (group fields) co-create in this way.  In my experience the social aspects arise from the physicality—from what our bodies are doing, learning, and creating as art.  That’s the primary way I learned and continue to learn CI.

I write about this all the time, and it bears repeating. As a somatic therapist my role is to connect people with their body from the inside of their experience. I help people become more aware of their sensations, patterns, emotions, images, and stories. Often we also explore how this internal experience integrates with the objective reality of anatomy. We experiment together through movement and awareness, opening up the gap between what is known and unknown. This is a powerful spot—a place of mystery: It is here that new solutions to common problems and patterns emerge. In this video Kelly and I find that her ribs have been held tight, use touch to help them move, and explore implications for her and all of us.