997: to be new

you know
it's just how we are in life
when we breathe and sense into the new:

it's all now

every second instant moment of our life
is only
this:
our experience now

we can avoid that
or miss that
or get fooled into distraction

and even our avoidance,
when we're "thinking" about the future
or "worrying" about the past

that "thinking" and "worrying"
if we to experience it
would be us
noticing our lives

now

so
what's the resolution:
to be present
right now

and let the future rise toward us
or
we rise toward it
one second instant moment
at a time

(and we can have a direction
in
there,
can have intention
and what are we sensing
and what is the light coming in
our eyes
in the moment of
our intending?)

lots of joy
in surfing and experiencing the now

it's our life
the gift
the miracle

the
moment we open to it
realize it
what else can we do
but be in love?

good blessings
to all
your moments

Chris

resolutions, 1

people like to make resolutions at the end of the year

this is the end of the year

the calender makes some sense in the seasons and that life moves forward

and what dreams and aims and goals do we want to move toward this year?

Moshe Feldenkrais talked about real health as
1. bouncing back from trauma
2. making real your vowed and unavowed dreams

and his method, and the way Anat has carried it on
is about this:
teaching us that small and aware steps
taken almost for the joy of the process of taking
the steps
can lead to huge changes

in the so-called "body"
and in our "thinking"
and in
our lives

so, what's next for us this year?

let's have some big dreams
today
and tomorrow
and Saturday

let's take three days
to play
with the big and small and fantastical and practical dreams

and then let's play
and explore
and discover the pleasure in
taking action
toward
these dreams

is that a good plan?

who knows,
and you don't need a plan,
and an idea
can be a glider to soar
on for a little while

and it's the dark time of the year
the go within time
and the party party time
and the drink too much time
or the meditate and get clear time

and time is fictional mainly
outside of the sunrise noon sunset
and fall winter spring summer
thing

and it's time
to come
back to the now

for me

and for you?
your call.
where does you laughter and love and curiosity
and wishing for your dreams
call you

now?

today is not Christmas

today is not New Years
today is not tomorrow

the clouds brought water last night
so little it could barely be called "rain"
but it is water

and the air is moist and
the sky is grey

we can walk outside and not see sunshine

today
is the day
to remember that
the sun is always shining

inside
us


thrilled that we are here
to know it is
here
watching us
be thrilled
about
its being thrilled

and this is supposed to be confusing
life isn't a road to Damascus

it's a swirl of stars
or leaves
or water
woken up inside us
just
once
just this
once
now

today
which is not Christmas

and
is
thrilled we are here

now

what's important

if I ask the question,
what's important,
I could at least he honest and qualify it:
What's important, to whom?

To me.
To the human race.
To most people.
To the Earth.
To the evolution of humanity.
To my finding a community of like minded people.
To my writing something worth reading today?

All are good starters.

So, let's switch it around:
What's important to you?

How did your year go?
Was there more love?
More learning?
Did you plant any trees? (I didn't, and the year is not over yet)
Did you make any new friends?
Did anyone you know become an un-friend, and can you still love them?

Were you hurt, frightened, or angry, and have you used that to create
gold for yourself,
or at the very least compost?

What is a year for?

What are we for?

What is today for?

Who have we helped?
Who would we more like to help?

When was the fun?
Was the fun a time a healing, a time of release, a time of growth,
a time of escape, a time of learning and achieving,
all of the above
none of the above?

Anything fun so far today?

Any awakened moments so far today?

What is today for?

What are we for?

Does next year matter if today is not lived right?

What would living today right mean?

What questions would you write down,
if you were to spend ten minutes with pencil and paper?

Love in the winter

When I look over yesterday's essay I realize
that most people might
not be willing to make the effort to figure that X stuff through.

                   

And that's fine
or tragic
or just the way it is.

So, I'll go over it again, because in a way,
what I said was of grand possible use to anyone who is
struggling with one of life's perpetual problems:
the imperfections in others.


Say, we have a friend, co worker, lover, parents, child
who does something we don't like.

Let's say that they
"Don't appreciate us enough."

Is that a grand complaint that most of us have had at one time or other?

Yes.

So, here's love as a series of actions
that we can chose between rather than a "feeling"
which is either there (when they "appreciate" us enough)
or not there (when they don't adore us, basically)

Okay: here's our options:

they "Don't appreciate us enough.

1. get mad and go away

2. complain to them and demand they change

3. complain to our friends

4. complain to our diary

(note that in all of these, we are busy not appreciating them)

5. wonder if something is bothering them

6. wonder who we would be if we appreciated them more

7. notice who we would be if we appreciated ourselves more

8. discover who they would be to us if we just looked at or
remembered seeing them in the present, wordless moment,
no words in our head,
what would we see

9. experience what love would be like
for them
if we were interested in only this moment

10. realized that in this moment
the power of life
is as if we are deeply loving
ourselves

11. expanded our appreciation of our
sometimes lack of appreciation

12. got a sense of humor about how we often do
just what we are complaining about

13. think of ways to shift back and forth from
appreciation to non appreciation to appreciation
and
feel
which feels better

14. and notice how we do that

15. and come to realize more and more
that
love is an action

not a feeling

ciao

chris

Love, 22 minutes to mull this jewel of life

In life we venture out sometimes and bump
up against someone with whom
the sparks fly,
the laughter is easy,
the touch is nice,
the words come straight and true.

Or so we think.
And then, sooner, later, they turn out to be
gasp
just like us
oh, no,
gasp again
imperfect.

As Katie (as in Byron Katie, via thework.com) would say:
Oh, well.

But we don't say, "Oh, well."
we say,  "Oh, hell,
what have we done,
sold our soul
into trouble and damnation."

And then we go about
"fixing" things.

Now in the Feldenkrais work and the Anat Baniel Method,
we don't go about "fixing" people's "bodies."

I refuse even to call what I do there "bodywork."

We are doing whole system upgrading and if that
"fixes" a knee or shoulder or hip or back,
so be it,
but the finished lesson means this:
the person is newer and more true to how they
could best be in life.

And in love,
we forget about whole person upgrading,
especially whole person upgrading of ourselves.

The other person does X
wrong.
This bothers us.

Solution:
get them to stop doing X.

Now, love that isn't "love"
might realize that there are always more than
one solution
and the solution that isn't joyous
and present
isn't a real solution at all.

So, here's another "solution,"
we stop being bothered when the other person
does X.

Another solution,
We are charmed when the other person does X

Another solution,
we are sympathetic to watching more closely
when they do X

Are they in pain

Is this some pattern dropped on them by parents

Are they avoiding expressing something else that is bothering them

And then,
and then,
and then,
the glory of
A. the work of Byron Katie
B. new age slop crap: the other person is the mirror
C. old age Jesus stop about don't get hung up about the
speck in your neighbor's eye
when ya'll gots
a big old log in your own.
(always a tricky metaphor to visualize,
for me,
anyway)

So , in Katie land its called the turn around:

our buddy friend lover love
does
X
and it bugs us

How do we do X?

To ourselves.

To our friend lover mate.

To the world.

So: like this.

Our love is not respectful
in certain circumstances.

Oh My God.
What an awful thing.

Or
Oh, well,
that's the way they are sometimes

Or,
curiosity:
what's really bothering them
and keeping them from being present
when they are being disrespectful?

Or:
the turn around:
when have when been unrespectful and or
disrespectful

to the lover friend person?

to ourselves?

to other people in our lives?


And then,
of course,
the whole boring and always true
family history slop:
when were and how were they/ we
treated dis and or un respectfully when
we were the small dependent creatures
that we are
when we are young?

So,
when the buddy friend love lover
is disrespectful
we have lots of options:

get tweeked

complain to them

complain to our friends

give them ultimatums

give ourselves anger fear depression obsession worry

or

WAKE UP

smell the humanity:

ah, they are imperfect
what's going on

how can I be so present that this behavior
isn't pulling me out of the miracle
joy of
knowing I'm alive

how can I take my tweeking
as a reminder that
I haven't always been treated well
and haven't learned
yet,
that other people just do this and that
sometimes
even though we wish they wouldn't


So,
here's love
here's life:

someone comes along and we get to learn this
about love:

love is an action

the action of loving another person
not only when they are Ms Perfect or Mr Perfect
but when they are
life us:
imperfect



"love is blind"
yeah, yeah:
especially when we think we have finally met the
perfect one

but love should be "blind"
in the sense that
looking at and obsessing on the imperfections
blinds us
to the glory:

we are to miraculous people
together,
for some reason

in this miracle of life


(and that's 22 minutes)

love
Chris

What is good about life? One person's opinions, and opinion is not truth

Dance

Stillness

Walking

Waking

Laughter

Listen to someone you love

Loving someone you are learning about

Learning about what you don't know

Laughing at yourself when your "buttons get pushed"

Loving the weather, whether or not it is "good"

Loving the day, from beginning to end

Remembering your dreams

Forgetting your dreams

Touching other people

Not touching other people

Sensing yourself

Movement with attention

Song, dance, music, noise, quiet

Inner silence

Listening to the inner chatter and not taking it seriously

Various holiday ideas that the culture has: Christmas, New Years, Solstice, all that sort of thing

Having your own ideas

Being wrong

Waiting in the emptiness for what is next

Not caring what is next

Loving what is next

Working

Not working

Loving other people

Being alone

Smiling

Feeling the suffering stuff and then ending it

Helping others out of their suffering

Improving movement, thinking feeling

Variation

The Newness of Now

There's lots more, and

Knowing when enough is enough for you and me
that's good, too.

Trees, nature, sky, dirt, skin, breath, fingers, toes pelvis all that good stuff

the joys of fear

One of the books I want to write is the joy of divorce.


along that theme will be today's little essay, or poem,
we'll see how it comes out.

Something along the lines of how to use fear
for a better life.

And grand start is to differentiate fear that has
a basis
in reality
and that which doesn't.

So, we all have fear.

Sometimes it's real: a car comes too close. Something falls towards us.
A dog barks behind a fence as we are walking along.

In the old days, in the jungle, things wanted to eat us.
In bad situations, people want to harm us.

Then fear, as an alignment of the emotions and body to ready
for action, makes sense.

We freeze and prepare to run, or fight.

We might even faint.

All in all, we aren't "into" the part of our nervous system, parasympathetic if I
recall,
that wants to laze, and mellow and digest our food, and take
a little nap.

If we are about to be eaten, the food in us isn't important,
our lives are.

Okay, and then their is the "fear"
of saying the wrong thing
or being disapproved
or making a mistake
or getting lost
or being unloved
or.....

on and on.

These fears come with stories and pictures
in our heads,
they seem real,
and yet,
if we were to quiet our minds
they wouldn't exist.

The adrenaline might still rummage around
from story we told,
but without the story,
who are we.

This, of course, is the fourth question in the Work of Byron Katie.

This level of fear is a mild addictive way
of avoiding life.

Maybe it's a grand signal that we aren't being present
and aren't clear about what we perceive
and want
in the exact
now
moment.

Then again, we could be sitting in a boring room,
and afraid we are wasting our lives,
and that might be true,
but then again, in the present,
we can evaluate: can I just get up
and walk out.

Sometimes the consequences are too high.
Oh, well, then there's always sensing ourselves
in the present
and following our breathing
and turning open our minds to the real sounds
and real light
of the moment.

This may be less about fear
than the ongoing chance we all have
to be
awake to our lives
in the moment
or not.

If i'm afraid this essay wasn't good
enough,
I'd be missing my own message wouldn't I.

Hope you enjoyed it,
and if you didn't,
follow your fear and happiness all day today
and see what you can
discover from your self.

Self realization
is always
an inside
job..

Ciao,
and
Love,

Chris

Mary Oliver: Do not have to be good. be the animal

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

can we love the nonsense

you say
the "bad guys"
want to keep humanity asleep

some evil coterie
enginerring chem trails
and 9-11
and economic meltdowns

okay
okay
focus yourselves around the enemy
if you must

keep talking
talking
talking

and that will
change
.....

nothing


being asleep
is
being asleep

and looking at the mote
in the other's eye
has been an escape from self realization
for at least 2000 years

and so
what to do?

hey:
judge your neighbors

(you hate the bad guys people shouldn't get so worked up)

write it down

(see above)

ask 4 Questions.

1. is it true?
who knows. probably not.

2. can i absolutely know it's true?
nope

3.
when i believe the folks should get all twisted into
worry, yap yap, organizing others to agree with them as pretend action,
feel self righteous,
what happens to me:
i get self righteous, wrapped up in myself, off now
and all that I spout "they" shouldn't do when
concentrating on "them"

4. who would i be without the story:

just a guy getting ready to fly on a plane
with uncertain sleeping arrangements on the other
side

fun

so
it's all good is sloppy

and it's all now
is real
when we experience
that
as experience

like the fingers
my fingers
me
typing now

words appear in front of eyes
and there is a bigger world out there
when i become aware how narrowed in my
eyes
are
on a computer

and that's the "bad guy" game:
to narrow a focus

and that's the Chris knows that right
way
game

too narrow
a focus

and how big glorious and amazing
is life

you feel it realize it for you


good

i'll do it

now
or
never

for me

the kingdom of heaven:
even now and
soon i'll stand up from the computer
and
love
you
and me
and
all
of
life