It's never what you think

Movement as a way of fluid aliveness

“The way yoga is sold in the United States—like everything else—is that it’s supposed to be good for you. It isn’t. It has nothing to do with anything that’s good for you. It’s the one activity which you do for its own sake, and not because it’s good for you; not because it will lead anywhere. Because you cannot go to the place where you are now, obviously.

Yoga is to be completely here and now. That’s why the word yuj means “join.” Get with it. Be completely here and now. This is the real meaning of concentration, to be in your center. And the Christian word for sinning—in Greek—is amartánei, which means “to miss the point.” And the point is eternal life, which is here and now. Come to your senses.”

— Alan Watts / Limits of Language

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Movement was my first chosen art. Or rather, the first art that chose me. Yoga entered my periphery when, at 15, I realized my friends were going to the gym… and though, maybe I ought to do something like that. But I couldn’t imagine running nowhere on a track, so I turned to handstands. I didn’t know then that they were a direct pathway to my nervous system. To secret knowledge hidden in plain sight. I just loved the feeling.

I couldn’t have named the profundity of calm in uncertainty.
The possibility of levitation.
The summoning of strength I’d never seen.

Yet in my bones, I knew this feeling was important.

Reciprocity. Fingers pressing into ground, ground giving exactly what’s put in.
Stability. Hips, the core of the compass.
Direction. Feet that flex and point and wriggle free.
Connection. All parts communicating, coordinating, rearranging.

With a stable center and the right training, you can move anywhere.

Legs akimbo. One hand flying in the air. Curves like a snake and lines straight as an arrow.

Movement.
A Self-generated Self-organization process.

~~~~~~~~~

Yoga has both everything and nothing to do with any particular shapes or quantifiable entities. It’s a matter not of form, but of what’s within. I rather call it Movement, now that yoga has become synonymous with postures and suppositions of what “flow” is. As if you can define an unending thing. As if shape is static.

What is shape without awareness?
Habit.

But when full of attention?
The same form becomes a transformative portal.

Boundaries dissolve and you are left with what?

~~~~~~~~~

When I was in the midst of my darkest days, I came upon the Zen art of ensō, a practice of circles hand-drawn in one or two uninhibited brushstrokes. I didn’t start drawing ensō, but I did have three circular forms tattooed on my arm, after reading the phrase, “when the mind is free to let the body create.”

I knew I’d need to be reminded from time to time, to come back to my senses.

To bring my attention to here, now. To the feeling of things.

To the river running.

Ground touching hands, feet, spinal column.

I knew I’d need self reflective surfaces.
Ways of releasing stubborn tension, overplayed shapes, performances.
I knew I’d need to slip into the clear spring below, and remember.

The undulating center.
A strength gentle enough to reveal.

A strength that comes not from confidence, perfection, luck, or talent
~ but consistent movement toward reality.
Undefinable. Transitory. Postureless.
This is it.
Dropping deep ~ in to the darkness, where a clear spring flows.
Tapping in ~ to the stream of fluid aliveness
~ the source that never fails ~
and pouring out.

Keeping the channel open ~
through joy, pain, fear, ecstasy,
through illusory stillness,
through depths of uncertainty,
heart, spine, mind
welcoming.

~~~~~~~~~

“It must be obvious, from the start, that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. But the contradiction lies a little deeper than the mere conflict between the desire for security and the fact of change. If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure”

― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

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