71: Sun of a gun

Son of a gun

People swear sometimes and sometimes they don’t. It’s all a matter of style and milieu and taste and training.

Swear in your head today if you never do.

Don’t swear today if you usually do.

Listen to your words today, as you speak them out of your mouth, no matter whether they are swearing or non swearing or just ordinary, “How are you doing?” “I’m fine, how are you words.”

Hear the sounds coming out of your mouth.

Relax.

Say things over just to hear if you can say the last sentence in a slightly different way.

Say things over just to hear with your sweet set of ears, tuned in to sound and to your vibration in mouth and chest and head, hear again, the words you said.

The words aren’t important.

You are, in the sense that you can wake up to now and sense your words as you are making words come out of your mouth.

Son of a gun.

You can say silly old fashioned things, and just enjoy the freedom to talk “differently” than you usually do.

You can enjoy the flavor of the words in your mouthy.

You can feel the breathing as you talk.

You can walk your talk, as in feeling and sensing your legs as you talk.

You can be aware of yourself as alive while you talk.

YOU CAN HAVE FUN, SUN OF A GONE, WHILE YOU TALK.

YES.,

Empty Stomach, Curious Mind

Ramadan
starts today

i'm not Muslim
and i'm curious
about this partial
fast that hundreds
of millions of people
do a month a year

no eating
until after sundown

i'm on a modified version:
eating only
once a day

yesterday
and today,
around 2 in the afternoon

since
eating at night
is harder
on the liver
and whatnot

anyway
it's almost two today
no eating since
around 3 yesterday
afternoon

hungry

curious:
is this "hard"
and
if so
how
much of "being hard"
is my story

and how much
my incredible luxury
of being one of the humans
on earth
with food
around
almost all the time

of course,
anyone
with a garden
and orchard
and some nearby
blackberry patches
has
lots of food
around all the time
this time
of year

curious
interested

what will a month
of this be like

hmmm.

March Email to Look at In Color

March is here.
That's good.
We are moving toward equinox,
which means spring. Hmm.
The blossoms sure think that's so,
and maybe it won't snow again.
Maybe it will. Everything changes: how about us?

Change is wonderful and a little scary, because we
become something that is new,
and even if we are happier,
and move in easier ways,
and have nicer relationships,
and are healthier,
we feel a little lost without our old
familiar tension and suffering.
Oh well.

Peace is in the air, the local air, care of Terry and Melissa,
the gals bringing us our chance to help create a U.S. Department of Peace. See them Friday mornings at the Farmers' Market, and/ or check out: Department of Peace. So far 18 city councils have backed the idea. Wonder about ours? I do, too.

Tomorrow's, the day,
to walk on over to the polls,
breathing the good air,
smelling the blossoms,
and vote YES on the parcel tax.

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Try Functional Integration lessons.
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Ten lessons and you could easily feel and move 20 years younger.
For those curious about the Feldenkrais Method, the Feldenkrais Guild has a brand new (several days old) website at Feldenkrais.Com.
And here can explain part of it:
Back, Neck, Shoulder Pain, Carpal Tunnel

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4) There's more. Like straight Byron Katie work. If you are in the mood to heal and transform, and be happier and more of what you really want to be in your life.
Group Meetings Friday evenings, 2nd and 4th Friday night
7:15 to 8:45 PM
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Call to reserve and make sure we're ON.
Or see
Byron Katie / Happiness
Work

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P.S.

A few good questions: And a Department of Peace

What can we do to help make this world a better place? This is a question that has come to us all. Working to understand our own abilities to change and transform is the most effective step. And also: creating change, real and healing change, out in the world: this is another wonderful challenge.


Last night at the library a wonderful start took place, a meeting of the evolving Sonoma chapter of a movement to create a Department of Peace as a cabinet level department in the U.S. government. This department would be charged with promoting peace locally, reducing gang violence and spousal abuse and the whole mess of frustrated lives spilling out into guns and knives and the wounding and maiming of other human beings. The department would also work throughout the world to bring peaceful solutions to issues that have been endlessly leading to war and conflict.

How it would do the international thing, I have no clear idea. But just the idea of the word
and the actuality of a
Department of Peace,
out in the world,
could be a very positive force.

That it could be of huge use in internal violence, I have no doubt.

For that reason alone I think this is a fine idea.

As I think about what it would take to create world peace I think of two things: happiness and a social system the was set up for equality and basic human dignity, so that clawing one's way to the top, and having more stuff, and getting more profit for the corporation, and having more goodies in one's life were no longer driving forces in the world.

How can that shift take place?

I don't know.

Does that mean that it isn't worth the effort?

No.

As we say in the Feldenkrais work, the real satisfactions in life often come in making the impossible possible ( a frozen shoulder that can move), the possible easy ( now the shoulder moves well), and the easy elegant ( and now the formerly "frozen" shoulder moves better than it ever did).

World Peace is "obviously" Impossible, which means, we have an idea that it's impossible. And as we learn to ask in the Byron Katie Work: Is it true? Is it true that this is impossible?

I don't know.

It better not be.

We don’t have room for the global warming that war is creating, for one thing.

But: we have too many people on the planet.

What if Gurdjieff's creepy idea that some cosmic force eats dead people if not enough people are living lives of consciousness, and so all these wars are the sucking in of the cosmic need for food from a humanity that can't wake up. Can't wake up to the moment. Can't wake up to love.

Can't wake up to being good to the Earth.

And in a way: this is the root of war, this unconsciousness, this lure of the Enemy, that if we just kill enough of The Enemy then The Problem will go away.

Sigh.

This isn't so easy an issue is it?


We have almost every economic system in the world pegged to survive and thrive only by expanding, which is a drive for more stuff and more people, and more potential conflict over land and resources to get and control and use all this stuff.

We have armies and covert operations designed to help corporations keep the goods flowing. We have a whole new system of World Trade agreements that don't even let local farmers grow the kind of food that need for a local people to feed themselves. How can there be peace in this sort of world.

I don't know.

Is this impossible?

I don't know.

I believe, have a hunch, a feeling that humanity is pressing up to the edge of eliminating itself, and that waking up, and learning a new way to live, a way that doesn't demand so much from the planet, will be necessary for us all the survive.

Can people learn growing their own food instead of going to the mall?

Can people learn to be happy with a walk to a neighbors and not have to roar off somewhere in their car?

Can we have kids that are allowed once again to play in and lose themselves in and find comfort and learning in nature?

Can we come to enjoy sharing, and helping others, in real, life shifting ways, not just charity?

Can we learn to do the simple things again: walk, dance, sing, read, make music, make plays, make love?

Can we peacefully create a Department of Peace?

Sure.

And how?

I don't know.

How do we make that shift?

I don't know.

Does that mean we shouldn't try?

Hell no.

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Meet the good local people (Terry and Melissa and soon more to sit at the booth, I'm sure) who are starting up our small group to help
this
Department of Peace
at the local at the Farmers' Market on Friday mornings.

Waking in the Night

ON WAKING UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
This isn’t about “waking up” in the hotsie totsie Enlightenment way. That would be nice, but for now, I’d like to explore a little this habit of mine of waking after a few hours sleep. Usually four hours or so, and then I’m in the nice warm bed, and I’m not particularly sleepy and I don’t feel like getting up.

This used to bother me. I wanted something to “do,” to entertain myself until I fell back to sleep and I happen to live with someone who is not fond of lights in the middle of the night, so that means “No” to the obvious way of enjoying some warm and cozy hours in bed: reading.

No reading. Ohmygod: What to do?

Well, to tell you the truth, that is one reason I became a Feldenkrais Practitioner. There are so many varieties of slow and gentle and enjoyable movement combinations that I was sure I’d find a bunch that would be useful to the warm and cozy hours of the night.

And they were. And they are.

I mentioned this to my trainer, Dennis Leri, how I enjoyed the movements when I woke at night, and he talked of some anthropologist who realized that no one had studied peoples’ sleep patterns much and decided to do so. This anthropologist discovered that in most cultures, especially those without the lure of the electric light to keep us up to all hours, waking in the middle of the night was the norm.

And people stoked the fire,
or checked on the children and the animals,
or composed songs and poems,
or had visions,
or went out to watch the stars,
or meditated,
or prayed,
or made love,
or had time for those quiet conversations you can’t get around to in a busy day full of work and children and interruptions.

Well, the same partner who doesn’t like lights, isn’t into this “norm” of waking mid way through the night, so I’m on my own.

I have found these hours extremely enjoyable. And then there is this one surefire way that I can ruin them for myself: to worry about getting back to sleep, and thus to get into “trying” to get back to sleep, a hellish state of being, and one guaranteed to prevent me or anyone from sleeping.

A second, and slightly lesser way to ruin the peaceful night time warm cozy hours, is this: to obsess with something I “should” or “need to” get done the next day. This can be a bit of a drag, but if I slow, and allow this quiet dark time to be one in which I can visualize and give thought experiments to different options, ah, that’s nice.

And finally, besides Feldenkrais and thought experiments, there’s the sweetest alternative of all: doing "nothing." (See earlire essay on the doing part of "doing nothing.")

So, in this "nothing," I'm involved in: Following my breathing. Sensing myself, seeing if I can sense down to the cell level. Enjoying being exactly where and how and who I am.

This is sweet and ironically, so peaceful, that it often brings a sleep that I no longer care about.

Happiness and Inner Quiet

Yoga in the living room

HAPPINESS AND QUIET
This is all it takes to be happy: stop being unhappy.

The trick is, this isn’t a matter of “trying” to be happy. This is a matter of turning off the juice that is lighting up the unhappiness.

Now, the essay on Byron Katie shows a simple and direct route toward turning off this juice.

Here is another route and, as in the Katie work, it is both “simple” and profound all at once.

This is it: feel the pain as sensation and separate out the words about and around the pain, and stop paying attention to them.

Some examples. Someone does something that makes you really angry. Okay, fine, you are angry. Sense where in yourself that anger resonates. Discover where in your body you feel tightness, or a muscular readiness to strike out, or a changing of your breathing. Sense each and every particular of this conglomeration you call “anger.”

And then drop all the accompanying words about how bad, stupid, selfish, awful, f….ed up, and so on that so and so is.

Just sense the anger, and skip all the words. In a way, this is exactly question four of the Byron Katie Work: who would you be without the story? Except that this is not even an answer, this is just a pure sensation of yourself in the moment, with whatever feeling you are feeling minus the usual words that keep your misery fueled for hour after hour (or, year after year – don’t we all know someone, if not ourselves, who has nursed a grudge for decades?).


Another example. One day, I was working in the community garden and someone told me that a friend of ours, one we knew had been struggling for quite a while, was dead. The immediate effect was as if a small blow to my heart area and a sort of pressing in our myself from all sides. As I sensed this and walked in the garden, looking at the flowers and feeling this pain, I felt, wordlessly sad, and at the same time, immensely happy to be alive and to be sensing this “pain.”

Then, the words kicked in. I should be visited. I should have written and sent a poem. I should have….. And then I felt awful.

And why not? All these shoulds are impossible to do once the time had past. The here and now sensations in me where real, but the “should have…” story was completely unreal.

In reality I could be both sad and happy and full of life at the same time. Out of reality, it was just more of the everyday unhappiness that we can get anytime we blast ourselves with a bunch of words of shame or blame or guilt.

So that’s it: sense whatever you are feeling and leave the words out of it and experience what that is like. If I tell you what will happen, I will be denying what this is all about: sensing our own reality, for ourselves, in each and every moment.


(Note. The essays are rotating through the three blogs, more or less one per day.
So you might want to check:
WakeUp Feldenkrais®
and
Tai Chi Yoga Health Weight Loss Joy

for the last two essays.)

Happy and Amazing New Year to us all. Yes.

NEW YEAR
Hurray. The New Year is here. Marlie and I went to bed early. She has a free yoga class on New Years Day morning, that is widely appreciated, and wanted her healing and happy sleep, and anyway, we both like to get to sleep early.

Now it’s 1:48 AM, and the New Year. Big deal? No. But another fun way to remember the possibilities of life.

My New Years Resolutions:

1) To go to sleep and to wake up in a state of gratitude and love and awareness.

2) To put something up each day on one of my blogsites, every day that I have access to a computer and the Internet.

3) To play a little each day with either the guitar or the piano.

4) To continue my habit of walking or riding a bicycle to all events and activities and shopping less than four or five miles away.

5) To be happy and do the Work of Byron Katie any time I’m not.

Wow. That is a lot. Dare I put that into writing. Yes. Can I do this?
Yes.

Can I do this with joy?

Yes.

Happy New Year, one and all.


(Note. The essays are rotating through the three blogs, more or less one per day.
So you might want to check:
WakeUp Feldenkrais®
and
Tai Chi Yoga Health Weight Loss Joy

for the last two essays.)