Gabrielle Roth

Posted on October 31, 2012 by admin

A wild, beautiful, shamanic visionary has moved on. Gabriell Roth, dancer, musician, teacher, somanaut extraordinaire passed away last week from lung cancer. This is excerpted from an article on huffingtonpost.com. entitled “The Spiritual Power of Dance.”

“Each of us is a moving center, a space of divine mystery. And though we spend most of our time on the surface in the daily details of ordinary existence, most us hunger to connect to this space within, to break through to bliss, to be swept away into something bigger than us.

As a young dancer, I made the transition from the world of steps and structures to the world of transformation and trance by exposure to live drumming. The beats, the patterns, the rhythms kept calling me deeper and deeper into my dance.

Being young, wild and free, it didn’t dawn on me that in order to go into deep ecstatic places, I would have to be willing to transform absolutely everything that got in my way. That included every form of inertia: the physical inertia of tight and stressed muscles; the emotional baggage of depressed, repressed feelings; the mental baggage of dogmas, attitudes and philosophies. In other words, I’d have to let it all go — everything.

At the time, I was teaching movement to tens of thousands of people and, in them, I began to witness my own body/spirit split. Between the head and feet of any given person is a billion miles of unexplored wilderness. I yearned to know what was going on in that wilderness, not only in me, but in everyone else as well.

And so, movement became both my medicine and my meditation. Having found and healed myself in its wild embrace, I became a mapmaker for others to follow, but not in my footsteps, in their own. Many of us are looking for a beat, something solid and rooted where we can take refuge and begin to explore the fluidity of being alive, to investigate why we often feel stuck, numb, spaced-out, tense, inert, and unable to stand up or sit down or unscramble the screens that reflect our collective insanity.

The question I ask myself and everyone else is, “Do you have the discipline to be a free spirit?” Can we be free of all that binds and bends us into a shape of consciousness that has nothing to do with who we are from moment to moment, from breath to breath?…”

Why not. Go for it!

concentric jellyfish pranayama

Posted on October 25, 2012 by admin

I can’t find any images of concentric jellyfish, so you will have to use your imagination a bit. But, the human diaphragm looks and acts much like one of these guys. Imagine your body being made of several jellyfish nesting together like Russian dolls, one inside another, with a common center. To help differentiate the layers, use the breathing, inhaling to inflate the outer and exhaling to shrink the next one in. then in hale into the inner one and exhale from the third one in, and so on. As the each outer one expands and can sustain its size, the inner ones become easier to feel. Feel the expanding and condensing radially and notice which segments are stuck. If a jellyfish layer has a stuck place, you will often be able to feel both an inability to expand in that segment and a sense of being stuck onto other layers, like layers of clothing that have inadvertently been sewn together somewhere. Keep the top of the jellyfish lifting up and maximize the mobility of the peripheral, circular ‘wings’. You can play with a viloma-like breath where you pause between each segment and you expand and condense the individual layers.

After the diaphragm opens more, you can experiment with the each of the ribs, especially the ones above the diaphragm. These ribs tend to be less mobile, but respond very well to the jellyfish image. Let each rib be a jellyfish and breath rhythmically up and down the ribs. Keep the center lifted at all times by the abdominal pressure within the lower jellyfish, not by using the spinal muscles.

Find the jellyfish everywhere within. Surprise yourself. Feel the fluid, oceanic freedom and effortlessness of the inner movements as they liberate the outer body from its holding patterns and unnecessary tension. Feel whole, awake and alive!

Culture as a Field Effect

Posted on October 17, 2012 by admin

As we explore the somatic nature of the three bodies of classical yoga, gross, subtle and causal, we might relate them to the three levels of reality in modern physics: matter, energy and fields. In ‘The Biology of Transcendence, written in 2002, Joseph Chilton Pearce has a lot to say about how culture itself is a field and plays a major role in inhibiting our capacity for spiritual awakening. It also rather clearly, describes the insanity of the modern electoral process. As such, our on-going homework is to remain present to whatever arises moment by moment, keep resting in the infinite spaciousness of the heart, keep awakening, keep nurturing the field of cosmic creativity!

“By the very nature of the human brain we create field effects and are affected by them. In this way, fields become culturally shared and move history accordingly. One of the largest factors in our history, perhaps making that history what it has been, is that culture is itself a field, independent of any of its expressions.” and…

“A new and all pervasive negative field has been growing among people worldwide, an angst or fear without an object and tinged with rage. The angst or fear is fed by the mass media. Saturating all societies our mass media feed into and feed on, this global angst is a typical bio-cultural process. No one knows where it might lead. Already it is a kind of demonic spirit that blows where it will.

This angst ridden energy is nothing less than our longing for transcendence, which, in light of its enormous evolutionary power, must be derailed or subverted by culture, if culture is to survive.

But is culture real? Or is it, like a Tibetan tulpa, a phantom of the human intellect? Once isolated from the intelligence of the human heart, once entrained with and by culture, we interpret cultural survival as our own survival and respond as …culture. We then are culture, just as we are nature and evolution.

Delivery from this massive and ancient error of the mind has been the intent of every great being in history, was surely the intent of Jesus. Tackling culture was the thrust behind the cross. Jesus demonstrated that our true nature is transcendence itself, and his attempt to awaken us to enculturation and its power strikes me as the most outlandish tilting at windmills in history.”