I hope this next trip of the year around our sun bring more wonder into your world. The good news is that the days will grow long again. In the meantime, embodying joy will be a source of well-being. An underlying fear of joy and delight plagues much of the population. How can you be afraid of joy? So many of us have a history of being reprimanded and criticized for being creative and happy-go-lucky. I hope this blog is a refresh button for the body, mind and heart.
The sheath of joy (called the ananda-kosha orthe Body of Bliss) is characterized by playfulness, laughter, humor, and a care-free attitude. The fun-loving spirit is put down for being too rambunctious, dreamy, or exuberant. Adults who hold strict to house rules and clergymen adhering to their doctrine deny the heart.
Rigidity snuffs out the flame of light-heartedness, joy, and play. Play is the very opposite of control. Impulse doesn’t follow rules. It is not possible to embody joy if one is shackled to control. In spiritual circles, people equate enlightenment with placidity. But the body of joy shows up as the silly, the non-sensical, the crazy. when the Spirit of Silly is let loose nothing is off limits. This is “crazy wisdom.”
Why am I not a certain way? We get caught in to the image of what we should be. This is why we need to come back to our breath. Our sense of our body is our image. Go underneath the radar of the image maker. Commune with our interior.
Any movement practice enable connection with our biorhythms. How about a sensory experience. A body is based on pulsations of the body. What kind of movement sequence appeals to your sensory world? Standing? Floor? Upside down? Upper body, chest, lungs, or shoulders? Irrigate blood in to my neck? Yoga, Pilates, Qigong, boot camp, dance, etc. Virtual, in-person or outdoors. Can we unlearn the fitness of all this. Anyone can do yoga, but not every pose is for everyone. There is always another way.
Why are we splitting ourselves from natural world? Dogma is moving away from the sensory world. Anti-hold. Fatigue is throwing us off of our baseline. Our changing body. You don’t have to conquer your body. Can’t we make peace with ourself? Our own restlessness, comparing one another. We neglect ourself. Can’t things gets easier with age? It does has a letting go quality. There is no pure anything. Our dharma is always changing. What’s the other part? Felt sense, right brain, left brain talk to us at the same time. Middle brain is memory relational. Forebrain, back brain. Unity of all is hard to get. Life sometimes don’t feel so good.
Cultural structure is built around distraction. It distract us from reality. Cravings, social media, how you look. How am I feeling about myself. Trying to prove myself. What am I on to? We fight with our past, fight with our future. Why not build another pattern and not make it hard. We can still release without figuring it out. Now I’ll try something different.
Helen is fully trained in SATYA (Sensory Awareness Training) that is a mindful movement practice done on the floor to balance the structure, open the body without force and to reduce fatigue. This is among other Yoga Practices such as Vinyasa Sequencing, Hands-On Restorative and Mediation Practices.
-A Poem by Mary Oliver
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 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.
