Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘Personal Practice’

Sep 26

5 Comments

Ravens Show Me

Yesterday morning my ravens showed me the right site to build my barn. I walked the track along the top, heard them making a racket in some pinion trees, turned my head and there is was. It was higher up on flatter ground and more secluded that the one I’d been measuring, yet still looking out to Hermit’s Peak. It felt absolutely sweet and right. I went about my day then decided to check again closer to sunset. Would the spot still attract me? And there they were—three ravens hanging in the wind above the clearing, soaring and soaring, calling out from time to time.

I’ve gone back every day since and no ravens, but the spot is right. Exactly the one. They did their work.

One evening Jamie comes with his chain saw and we take out a couple of trees to make room for what will be a Dancemeditation floor.

Sep 23

6 Comments

Comfort in Practice

My night reading of Koran verses was surprisingly refreshing. I used to find them judgmental—all that ‘do the right thing or be in hell’—but with a new perusing and the leavening of age and experience, that they are right.  They just are. The question is understanding what the ‘right thing’ is. Each sura drops a tiny clue in its bed of poetry to what a right thing is. Most of these clues point to finding and stepping onto the Path. This can be religion. This can also be Sufi. The Path means doing the practices. There is no Path without regular engagement in practices. None. Not for anyone of us. Practices, which constitute Path, are given, are learned, passed down, and proffered as solace for the pain of being human. They free us from the hell of personality—our own and others. All that ‘patting on the head’, competition, reaching for stardom—the fruitless ways we try to wring love out of the world.

The mesa naturally loves. Trees, air, rocks abundantly give. The sky is slow movement. The sky is slow movement. It takes only slowing and opening to receive.

Slowing and opening. Isn’t that truly what most of our Sufi Dancemeditation practices turn toward? Time—Asr—comes then, sits inside us displaying the diamonds in her pouch. It doesn’t require Ravenrock to receive this largesse, though Path will certainly accelerate here. No. Any small undisturbed room will do.

The words tumble out. Al hamdu lillah.
Breath sinks in. Al hamdu lillah.
What is Allah?
A word. A breath.
What is this Word? The Heart knows.
What is this breath? Life.

Aug 4

Summer Mysticism: Returning to the World After Retreat

Post-retreat there is a tendency to go home and blow it. Blow all the money! As one friend says, “It’s easy to piss away all the energy built up in retreat, overworking, over committing, letting it leach away.” It is extremely unwise to squander the work done in training periods because this is dangerous to body and being. In retreat we fill our circuits and forge new tendrils, then these need to ‘set’. They need to cohere. If, after a training period, the we forget about or actively destroy the energy by not caring for our health, eating badly, getting into tumultuous relationships in work or life, then we not only undermine health and mental stability. We also damage spiritual capacity. We damage spiritual potential. We burn our circuits. You can do this a few times, but after a while the body being wears out. It’s like, How many times can your break your ankle in the same spot before it hardens?

I have lifted the requirement of daily practice from those in Intensive Training, but I still recommend daily practice—daily ‘remembrance’, as the Sufis call it. Remembrance of our Truth.  I don’t want to police it, not because I’m lazy; I just think it isn’t serving the people who train with me. It puts the struggle for one’s Path outside the self, keeping the self from ‘growing up’, spiritually-speaking. Each of us has to recognize our resistance, our choices. We need to reflect on them and weigh them. No one can put you on your own center. If you want it—inner peace, authenticity, perception, solidity—you have to strive for it. Struggle for it. A child’s little legs must work. It’s best if I step aside there. Go head—have your own intimate self-dialogue about that.

Our questions: What is important to me? Where does real happiness come from? When do I feel most whole? If spiritual path is where we live in Truth, then a regular return to the Doorway is one of the most crucial stages of growth. Retreat training and personal practice open that Doorway. Over the years, I’ve personally come to rely on a brief but focused daily practice, thus my recommendation. I hope for us all that the heart will cry for it and land us in a quiet room, with closed eyes, breathing, moving, feeling the world beyond thought. I hope the practice calls us to it. Wouldn’t that be wonderful…But if not, well, what are you going to do about it?

Jun 20

2 Comments

Waking

This morning, the Bower is all comfort. I feel inertial.

As I woke, I lay in bed, cool, smoke-tinged air, round as a cotton ball, pushed in the window. I savored being under the covers. The sheets softness matched the silky air. The trees seemed to clean the air that has been carrying smoke from the uncontained Carson Forrest, AZ fires west as far as Ohio. I curled under the covers and waited for the impulse of rising to fill my legs and spine and arms. The time of waiting, which isn’t really waiting but my body’s gathering together into a gesture or act of rising, was delicious.

I wasn’t aware of going toward rising. I was aware of floating away from sleep, from the night. My ears and eyes drifted over their domains, sipping sounds, sipping snippets of view, bird shadow, gilded pine needles. My nose weighed the ratio of smoke to pine scent. A little inner engine assessed and organized these fragments, feeding them to my flesh until I curled into a ball or spilled onto my belly to modulate my core temperature or to nudge my skin to lap the sheet, an awareness coming after-the-fact, ‘Ahhhhhh, that feels good.” The accumulation of these bits, like the building of sensorial friction, revved my little engine into action, and I sat up. No effort. No thought tractor-ed down my nerve branches, pushing sluggish muscles through a brain fog.

There I sat, empty, not standing or lying down or changing in any way. Time ticked by. My fine-pointed awareness faded as the wave of morning routine washed in—make the bed, get the tea going. The day of thoughts, plans, actions began.

And then I arrived with my tea tray in the Bower. It is all comfort. I feel inertial.

May 20

2 Comments

Spirituality in Dance Tele-interview

Lisa Michaels, VP of Sacred Dance Guild interviews Dunya May 19, 2011.
The Sacred Dance Guild and Natural Rhythms offers an exciting tele-interview series focused on exploring the many ways people express spirituality in dance, hosted by life long dancer and current SDG Vice-President Lisa Michaels.

DUNYA-Spiritual Dance Guild Inteview 5/19/11

Aug 17

1 Comment

Witnessing Expanded

I lay belly down on the deck of my cabin, rolling my thighs on warming wood, smelling the day. I watched a small brown bird hop from blade to blade in the grass. All of sudden my breath opened deep. I felt my body melt into the wood, and my back absorb the blue sky peeling away the fog cover. All the days spent witness dancing in workshop in recent years, where I learned to watch people without ‘leaving my body’, suddenly clicked in. I’ve worked diligently over time to stay in my body and see, stay connected to my breath and see. This morning it blossomed naturally,  unbidden and un-labored. I was seeing, breathing, feeling my body.

In the past, I’ve so often seen through a haze of my preoccupations. I’ve been afraid of letting time pass, of letting it slow, of letting it stop, sit beside me, and open the tight little packet in my chest.

Today the bees still toddled from dandelion to dandelion, but there were the front edges of autumn — choke cherries veined with burnt red, the sun leaning down at angle, and the first migrating ‘v’ of birds. Time so full. My body filling with it all.

Jul 26

dn-light-3
1 Comment

Her Breath

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.

Read more

Jul 7

7 Comments

Head Smack

I was raising my front window, the sort that opens down so you can wash the outside easily, which has a faulty latch. It swung down and bonked me on the head. It’s heavy. I felt my neck crunch.

So there were three options:
~ Follow my body.
~ After checking Google to to learn that I should see if my pupils are unevenly sized (they weren’t — a good thing), I could  go to the hospital emergency room where I would sit for a few hours under fluorescent lights
~ I could ignore it, push on, then wonder days later, why I feel wonky-blinky

I did the first. I lay on the floor and — this is why I’m sharing this tale — my body did not want to rock. She went right into that slow roll we did one day in Summer Movement Monastery. My skull rolled very slowly along the floor into gravity, the cervical spine quietly extending  and realigning. From time to time my spine wanted to gently twist rather than extend and contract, the head blow having come at an angle. My spine unwound. My cerebrospinal fluid had a chance to distribute itself (I could actually feel this pulse underneath the top layer of sensation), and whatever chemistry was happening inside my cranium could stabilize.

Nausea subsided. The light-headedness and weirdness around my eye sockets muted. I sat up, gently. All those sensations rose then subsided as well. Mostly.

I move around delicately. Keeping an eye on things, I lie down from time to time and let my body do what she needs. It brings me immediately back to the acute level of awareness I cultivated during retreat. Why does it take a blow on the head to get there?

Jan 11

1 Comment

Morning Dance

In the land of false flowers, there is a mirror.
Stop gaping there.

Turns your eyes in,
where Gaze has heat running under the skin,
and marbles of pulses roll
along the canals between the eyeballs and toes.

Sensation is the first way of Knowing who we are.
This Dance is not what you think.
This Dance is what you don’t think.

We are incarnated, blood everywhere,
in and out.

Don’t turn from these flowers,
these carnations.
On Earth, hearts forever pray such blooms,
gratitude for what’s Real.

Nov 21

4 Comments

Unhurried

My recent practice has been silky. Not the muscles and bones so much. In fact they have been balking, heavy or weary or sluggish. But despite my lack of physical vitality, connection to my body and movement has been richer than ever. I find it easy to watch the inside of my forehead as I move. I have no resistance, and that inner gaze quickly transports the initial recalcitrance in my limbs. Moving inside the meditative state is, currently, an imperative for me. Inside this deeper state, my perceptions are clean, precise, unhurried, surprisingly content — all qualities that have always been so difficult for me. Now it seems I begin there.

But this is coming about because I turned inside myself this fall. I turned toward my Path in my heart. Instead of leaving everything, I wanted to take this turn right in my own world, in my apartment, in my family, in my city, and in my teachings. It was an imperceptible inner motion which has very likely made no difference to those outside me. I haven’t had to abandon anything or to radically alter anything. But it is radically altering me.

During the NYC Intensive, someone made a comment about about feeling safe in my workshop. What came to me, and I spoke about it, was that Dancemeditation at its greatest depth reaches below personality, below early formations of ‘self’, and settles in the Unified Plane. This is where we all belong, where we are safe because we are not separate, and therefor cannot be obliterated or opposed. This is one of the qualities of One-ness. Of Unity. We are safe.

My daily practice doesn’t take me that deep, but the depth where I silkily move touches the edge of that black velvet. Brushes against it. Softly.

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »