Jan 28
Practice: Shafi Chant (To Cure, to Heal)
Lie on your back on a comfortable mat, knees bent, feet flat on the floor. You can rest your arms alongside you or rest your hands on your belly. Close your eyes. Be at ease. Connect your attention to your breathing. As you breathe, let your bones, your muscles, your organs, your fluids sink more and more heavily into gravity. Let you skin become tender. Let your skin breathe. Read more
As I continue w. ‘no pain’ focus in daily practice, I sometimes feel lost, foggy without those sharp edges to define the experience.
Pain has been the signal letting me know that I’ve reached the far extent of my sensory world. Pain has been my containment: I can go just ‘this far’ before it hurts. Read more
We stood in a circle, holding hands, chanting “Hayy’. The chant was work, but work by a willing band of people knowing where we were going, willing to dissolve but stay with one another. The chant was a continual auditory negotiation, a choir tuning itself as energy burbled in flutes made of twelve sets of lungs, diaphragms, vocal chords, tongues, teeth, skulls. These flutes bellowed toward single sounded-ness. We struggled. I felt nauseous. Read more
Dunya: I love being back into my daily practice. (I let go of it for the summer– first time ever–just to see.) It feels wonderful coming home to it!!! Absence makes the cells grow fonder.
Catherine Ryder: Did you really let go of it for the summer? I can hardly believe it. But I suppose to find the balance, that is good. Read more
I’ve been a long-time advocate of having a dedicated practice space to help establish regular practice. I have my room with the carpets and music all there and a set of practice clothes ready to put on. For the past couple of weeks I also left my mat unfurled in the middle of the room so I could just walk in and get to it, but Read more
Practice: Rhythmic Breathing
Rhythmic Breathing tames straying, chaotic thinking, energizes your body, and evokes embodied present-ness. The breathing will be repetitive, shifting its pace and density as the body’s levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide adjust. The lineaments of the movement generally have a strong repetitive element as well, which calms the nervous system and settles left brain dominance, though the movement can be non-repetitive. Read more
Practice: Exploring Three Spaces
On earth, we have three moving relationships to gravity. Low space is movement on the floor; middle space is any motion between standing and lying down, and high space is movement standing up. The words ‘level’ or ‘stratum’ work as well, but I prefer ‘space’ for cue-ing the body; it gives a spherical feeling to our explorations. (‘Level’ and ‘stratum’ might flavor our work with hierarchy and flatness. In these three spatial explorations, leave out horizontal locomotion initially and focus on relationship to gravity. In others words, do the whole practice in a 6 X 6 X 6 foot area.
by DDMcPherson (excerpt from new novel)
She let her breath sink oily and heavy into the bottom of her pelvis, then drew it up, hand-over-hand, along the center of her body. It made its quiet way into her head. where it spread, tickling the inside of her skull. Her breath touched its tendrils gingerly along this membrane, fine veiny lines of sensation, filaments or root hairs.
In Dancemeditation™ practice, there is a point of getting through The Crust. The usual psychological things that impede doing a practice include habits, laziness, resistance, fear, boredom. Those are one type of Crust, but today I encountered The Real Crust for embodied practice—the physics of getting going.
In yoga, inversion means upside down. In dance, it means taking the way a dancer characterizes a motion and doing its opposite: my arm reaches high in the front, so perhaps a leg might reach low in back. This sounds dull. Today I played Bach and did inversion upon inversion, and it was not at all dull. Read more
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