Wednesday: May 31, Chapter 2: How to Use This Book

(the order is changing. this is the way I'm creating the book, discovering as I go. For the book in its final order, I guess you'll have to order a hard copy. Anyway, the chapters are all useful, and I'm reconstructing the book so that every third chapter is a lesson in moving/thinking/sensing/awareness. Hopefully, they'll all, each and every one, be useful to you.)

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
My goal in life is to be awake and happy and useful to others. This book is my offering of usefulness to you. My wish is for you to use this book to make a deep and radical transformation in your life. If your life is good, I hope for it to become great. If it is great, to become greater. If it is troubled and painful, I hope for it to come up, in notches and continuously, to better and better until it is great.

Much of this book will be using the ideas of Moshe Feldenkrais, a physicist and judo master and discoverer who lived from 1904 to 1984. His ideas can show us ways to improve our moving and our thinking and our feeling, how to change the over all tone of our lives, how to recharge ourselves with the thrill of learning, how to come to a more easy and fruitful awareness of the present.

The book will always draw on the Work of Byron Katie, a woman who “woke up” in 1986, in Barstow, California, and discovered a way of investigating our unhappiness and suffering that allows us pathways and options out of the emotional suffering that plagues so many of us, sometimes just occasionally, sometimes in huge and awful doses.

In addition, I will be emphasizing a need to reconnect with Nature and with Earth, and to eat and live in ways that promote deep and wonderful health. I will bring in additional ideas that have come to me, or that I have formulated over the years, all to the aim of helping you to a more happy, aware and useful life.

For this to best happen, I recommend you read this book differently than you might read most books. Read only a chapter a day, or maybe two, at most three. Every third chapter will be lessons in moving and awareness, with the Feldenkrais Method® flavor. They will give you something real to do, something that will produce ease and increased co-ordination in you, but as well, will begin to give you a deeper and clearer sense of who you are, moment by moment. They will improve posture and breathing and thinking and peacefulness.

The deal is, though, not just to do them and then don’t do anything until three days later when you read the next moving lesson chapter. Do some sort of moving from these lessons every day. It won’t take much of your time. And the time you take will be a meditation that will enhance your connection to the present, the present of the present, as well as continue to build a heightened ease and vitality in your self and your life.

And the other chapters, like this one: Don’t just read and then set the book down. Spend some time after each chapter in some sort of contemplative state. Sit or lie down or walk and breathe smoothly. Let the ideas and possibilities of that day’s chapter circulate in you, in conscious levels and deeper, unknown levels. Don’t answer the phones or fall for the usual busy-ness. Allow the ideas to float around without pigeonholing them back to your old ways of thinking.

Have a little journal, and write after each chapter anything you can think that relates to your life from what was said. Write down ideas you liked. Write down ideas that popped up in you. Right down ways you’d like to change or pathways you’d like to explore, or what the present is like for you right now.

That’s always good to write, think, feel and notice: what is this present right now, this incredible gift. This chapter is over, so I hope you give yourself the opportunity to contemplate and write a bit, make this chapter yours, write down something from the heart and now of you. Our life is now. How wonderful to remember and live from that.