Beauty Gazing: Meditation through the Senses

This is no trivial thing. Imagine spending hour after hour, day after day, seeking out, finding, and contemplating the beauty of this world. Imagine how this could change your mind and heart.

This simple act of noticing and then spending some breaths with that noticing is a life’s practice.

You can start the minute you awaken. Take a moment to really see your surroundings. As you shower and get ready for your day, notice the beauty of your own body.

As you move through your day, re-notice things that you’ve started to take for granted. Very likely everything around you carries meaning beyond utility.

That favorite pen? Isn’t it beautiful how easily the ink glides onto the paper?

That wall color. That particular pillow on your favorite chair. The tree outside your window. The specific color of the sky. The smell of your coffee. The feel of your feet on ground or in your cozy socks. The sound of the quiet or the resonance of the music you have playing.

Notice, too, when you intentionally deny yourself some sort of beauty or beautiful experience.

Notice when you intentionally shut out beauty. When you close your senses. When you don’t pause.

Notice without judging and see how quickly you can course correct.

Perhaps add some focused beauty gazing dates to your week. Go places specifically to seek these sorts of experience out. Take notes. Take photos. Sketch.

And then SHARE it with others. Remember that relationship is the foundation upon which we evolve and heal as humans. Invite others into your beauty gazing experiences and notice how much more solid those experiences feel. When we share, we create history together and memories and we change our brains on yet another level.

Dance is an Act of Rebellion

Dancing has always been an area of control for the dominant culture. Patriarchy, for example, has always equated the female body dancing with prostitution, and dancers, to this day, are statistically the most in poverty of all professionals in all arts.

Dancing is freedom. Dancing is expression of truth. Truth cannot be hidden in a dancing body.

And dancing is joy. Joy is power. Joy fuels us. Joy reminds us of who we are and that we are worthy. That is too much for the patriarchy... they want us seated and still.

@notoriouscree

Crow hop styles ##dance ##native ##nativeamerican

♬ Crow Hop - Northern Wind

I do not teach movement...

It may seem that I teach movement. I do not. I teach compassion for self and others. I teach the building of healthy communities of care and support. I teach vulnerability married to self empowerment.

Elder dancer, Flo, who understood the prayer aspects of this work better than almost any other student I’ve ever had.

I do this in the context of movement because we need better ways of being together and growing together. AND we need ways that aren't about food or alcohol or even WORDS because all of that can so easily get in the way.

I do this in the context of movement, too, because most of us are desperately disconnected from the primal power and essential wisdom of these bodies.

If we weren't disconnected from our bodies we would not SETTLE for SO LITTLE in these lives.

We would not EVER settle for ANY kind of abusive "love."

We would never ever tolerate "leaders" who do not give a shit about us.

We would never ever feel LACK and so we'd create a culture of giving and taking care of.

If we weren't disconnected from these bodies, we would never drink the poison of toxic masculinity, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

All systems of oppression, whether internal or external, count on us remaining numb to our feelings, numb to our intuitions, numb to our wisdom, numb to our power, and especially numb to our connections to each other and to this world.

When we re/member ourselves through movement, we are practicing re/membering what we are actually here to do — to love one another so that each of us can be fully ourselves. That’s it.

The Yellow Room: A Joy Gem

We spend a ton of time talking about how the body holds trauma, and the brain is certainly wired that way. It was necessary for survival that we use precious memory space to remember where and who and what was dangerous, and there was so much, from the plants and animals to other people to weather patterns.

Now most of us live in relative safety. It might not always feel that way but historically speaking? Truth.

We live in relative safety but with these damn brains that are constantly, like, WHAT IS WRONG!?!?! What can I find that is SCARY!?

Here’s the thing though: our bodies also happen to hold our good and happy memories. Our joy. Our love. Our successes. Our celebrations.

Just think about what happens when you smell a scent that your loved one wore when you first met them.

Or what happens when you hear certain songs.

So body is just ready to be JOY.

But again…asshole brain gets in the way.

We can change this. We can work on this.

It’s all about wiring. And wiring is all about repetition and details and breath. Sounds a whole lot like our movement practices, doesn’t it?

In classes, I have often led people through a process I call “hold the happy.” We start in meditation and we focus on a happy moment. Could be from last week or when you were two. Whenever.

I ask them to get really clear on all the sensory details of the memory. We spend time with this. We breathe with this. There are more advanced things that we do with it after the fact, but this is the important part in this writing.

The sensory details are key and breathing deeply and gently is key and focusing and repeating is key.

Do all of that and you can develop what I’ll call a storehouse of “joy gems.”

Imagine all of that information in a tiny box. See the box. Decorate it. And then put it in a wee cupboard inside your heart.

When you’re feeling like shit or lost or lonely, you then have to remember to access one of these boxes, but the more we work with them — even doing things like making visual representations of them that we place where we see them often — the more we work with them, the more easily this will come to us.

Here’s one of my favorites that has held me and carried me through so very much in my life, and I call it the yellow room.

I was probably 3 or 4 at the oldest, and I was at my Great Aunt Ardelle’s house, a place that is no longer there but that I return to more often than I can say. I am often in her house at night as I fall asleep.

I was outside her kitchen as she was cooking. I had her all to myself.

I was sitting on a chair that my father now has. I was kicking my feet and I was SINGING.

Oh, was I SINGING! I was just singing whatever came into my head, and Delle was just LAUGHING and I could FEEL her smiling through the wall.

I stopped. She said, “Keep going!” and I went into the kitchen, singing and dancing.

And suddenly I was in a room full of yellow. The walls and floor were a yellow shade and the sun was just pouring in and it was like the air itself was filled with yellow glitter.

My chest felt full to bursting. Delle was laughing and I was singing and the world was perfection.

Expanding Our Internal Peace

I have BIG EMOTIONS. (If you know me, you’re laughing and wondering if I could say something more obvious.) I think I’ve been this way since I was very small. My mother tells the story that you could sit me in front of the TV when I was a toddler and I would just basically laugh my little ass off at anything that was remotely funny.

Because of that, for a long time, I resisted the word peace. The very concept shouted BORING to me. Who wants to be all quiet all the time!?

I think a lot of people equate the concept of peacefulness with a certain kind of weakness. I mean, duh, our culture LOVES war in all its forms. It’s our favorite set of metaphors to apply to every aspect of life.

But like the word love, I think we are confused about what peace actually is and how it’s related to feelings and emotions.

Peace is not the opposite of war, just as love is not the opposite of hate. Peace and love do not have opposites. They are the nature of the universe. They are the fabric of everything. War and hate are human manifestations of perceived lack and unresolved pain.

Peace and love (which I see as folded into and the same as “joy”) are our true nature, and they are truly the only states from which we can create justice and goodness and art and beauty.

They do not, though, eradicate the possibility of anger and sadness and grief and rage. Those things exist within the scope of human emotion and feeling.

Peace, love, joy… these are NOT emotions or feelings but rather actions and ways of being.

So we can be angry and then still create justice through the energy of peace. (This is a lot and I’m moving through it fast but just think to the basic teachings of Gandhi, MLK, Christ, Dorothy Day…and too many others to list.)

I now think of and experience peace as clarity of vision and knowing. I like the word “clearness” even better here than clarity. CLEAR. Like clean water and bright light.

I also think that to chase peace can be a frustrating and futile effort like chasing happiness.

I believe this is why meditation to find it often doesn’t work for people. Peace is more like a shy woodland creature for many of us because we’ve known it so little in our lives and it’s not sure it can trust us. (Stay with me, here.)

Our own inner peace is so often very deeply buried under intense pain and fear and just mistrust that we can ever live in this sort of state. We’ve been taught that good things should be difficult, that life is about working hard, that love can be fleeting so watch out, that other people are our competition and should be kept at a certain distance, and that we ourselves are never strong enough, good enough, or worthy enough.

Peace feels like a golden carrot at the end of an infinitely long stick and we’ll never ever do or be enough to finally grab it, and if we did, it would very likely turn out to be an illusion and turn to dust in our grasp.

So what do we do? How do we ever find any kind of expanded internal peace/love/joy if they are all that golden carrot but are resistant to “trying.”

We start by getting more honest about all the inner crap that is clogging our way to our true, basic nature.

We do work that clears that. We resolve. We heal. We spend more time in the body, allowing the body to express itself, breathing, settling, getting more and more comfortable with some inner stillness.

The body is the key here. The body can only live in the now. And when we get deeply enough into body, brain and mind chatter start to either shut down or slow down enough that we can identify the problems, the levels of utter ridiculousness with which we torture ourselves every day. We start to CLEAR our inner sight.

For me, this happens most in dance and vigorous movement. It’s like the more my body is being engaged, the more easily I can enter the eye of my inner storm and view it from that place of quiet.

Now, after about 12 years of serious practice at this, now and only now have I finally been able to cultivate a more traditional looking meditative sort of practice, one in which I am actually seated in stillness but this has only happened because I’ve gotten to the place where that inner forest of creatures is no longer scary to me. I feel strong enough in my physical body to enter into the other layers of this body — the emotional, mental, and spiritual.

And here finally, I am able to coax out that woodland creature and feed it a bit. We’re actually becoming friends.

January Yoga Philosophy Practice: AHIMSA (NonViolence)

(This is part of year long series, in which I’ll be personally diving into each of the yamas and niyamas. One per month. There are 10 so that leaves me with 2 months to review. The main text I’m using is this. I’ll be checking in over the month with thoughts, explorations, practices. I would love for you to play along.)

The first ethical practice of yoga is AHIMSA. It’s the ground of all other practices, and when we pay attention day to day — how much violence/harm/just general MEAN we feel toward ourselves, other humans, and the world — we can see why this is the ground of everything and why it’s so damn difficult.

The flip side of my depression is anger. When I’m out of alignment with my own inner gooeyness, I’m either depressed or angry in nonproductive ways.

And wow… over the last four years, WHO is NOT out of alignment?

So starting with this… it makes me roll my eyes, sigh, swear a little (or a lot), and say…yep, of course.

But I’m ready. (My inner grouch just flinched at that.)

Over the last month or so, I’d already started to add in more of my go to devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe (and other forms of the Feminine Divine that is unconditional love and compassion). I could already feel an enlivening of my inner gooeyness happening.

The other day, for example, I was having a conversation with a dear friend. We were talking politics…sorta… but in that very personal way about how it’s affected us and what can we do and all of that, and I found myself writing this:

”We are definitely a nation that is just on the survival end of things but THAT makes it even more vital for those of us who CAN choose differently to be JOYFUL about it. I've been thinking so much about this since before the new year... Like me living any kind of poverty does not make up for someone else's actual poverty. Like me being mad and sad all the time does nothing for anyone. Me denying the joy I DO have does nothing for anyone. Me trying to play down my own LUCK, as it were, does nothing for anyone. Capitalism is the current form of the enemy of humanity being fully human, but there's ALWAYS something BECAUSE we're human and we build shitty things and then we have issues with greed, war, division, etc., because so many have not been loved well or enough. And THAT is the REAL ISSUE right there: the lack of unconditional love (true community) in most people's lives.”

After I wrote it, I thought WHAT? WHO wrote THAT? ((ha)) It hit me that my practices were already taking root.

Here’s the thing…

If nonviolence is the core of yoga ethics, LOVE is the core of nonviolence, and in particular, self love is the very center because it’s from that space that we then react to the world.

The idea of self love can be difficult for some to really understand…what is it? what does it look like? How do we get there when we’re not feeling it?

And that’s the problem, we equate love with a feeling when it’s actually an ACTION.

So think of it this way: you are self loving WHEN you treat yourself with the same compassion, kindness, and grace with which you treat the people you care about the most on this planet.

If that space is rather empty, well, you get most current politicians — people not well loved, trying to fill some giant void, not understanding compassion for others because they’ve never felt it for self.

If that space is full, you get people like Gandhi and MLK and too many to name, but also quite possibly YOU. Or ME.

When we function from this space, we are trusting the world, trusting other people, trusting LIFE.

There’s so much to this, but I want to leave off for now with a quote about how much courage and love are entwined:

When love became the Lord of my life, I became fearless.

— Swami Rama

Roller Skates & Batons: Reverse Engineering Your JoyBody

I have a super wise private student right now (well, all of them are wise in different ways).

I’ve always talked about going back to the things we loved as children to tap into our essential/original nature and to rebuild the container that is your joybody.

But she came up with a phrase for this word that I love: Reverse Engineering. (I know this term is already a thing, of course, but I love how she used it for THIS.)

I love this above all because it implies work. (Of course! HA!)

I get a lot of “I don’t remember…” or “I never played…” as instant responses to my questions around childhood joy. I get it. Trauma.

BUT regardless, it’s there. Somewhere. We are all human animals and human animals play.

Bringing in the term reverse engineering tells us that yes, we might not know right away, but if we follow trails backwards, pick up breadcrumbs, look through photos, research our own pasts… even asking siblings, aunts, cousins what we were like, what they remember about us.

Eventually, we can make our way to the core of what brought us joy.

The work doesn’t stop there.

We have to ENGAGE with that joy.

Here’s the catch: WE CANNOT EXPECT IT TO BE THE SAME. We can’t try to 100% replicate it. We can’t expect the exact same feelings, especially not right away.

I loved roller skating and my baton. So I recently ordered myself a baton.

I SUCK.

But just having that baton to look at, firstly, brings me some joy. Triggers POSITIVE feelings in my body/mind.

And now I get to learn again, which is good for my brain and my fingers, wrists, and shoulders, as it turns out.

For Christmas, Craig bought me the most magical pair of roller skates. MAGICAL.

Again… I SUCK.

I fell right away. But I laughed and got up.

The second day I didn’t suck quite so much but still… laughable.

I used to be GOOD on my skates so this could stop me right away if I let it. I won’t.

I created a playlist that triggers me back to my roller skating days.

This will take work and again, it’s also great for my brain and my freaking GLUTES and lateral hip muscles. I already have strong glutes and I work laterally every single day but new movement equals new muscle experiences.

When we take the time to rebuild these sources of and paths to our essential joybody, we’re strengthening our joy muscles in general, and we are increasing our capacity to allow joy into our lives in all sorts of other ways.

When we lost these pathways for whatever reason, that was the start of our joy diminishment, and over time, many of us learned to not even EXPECT joy anymore and to only tolerate it in small doses.

We are made to live in these joybodies 24/7. Regardless of what’s happening around us, and you know full well, I’m not saying we won’t ever feel pain or sadness. I’ve never ever promoted any of that spiritual bypassing bullshit.

But when we do encounter inevitable grief and anger, we’ll be able to more quickly process and integrate, and we’ll have the skill of simultaneous emotional states — we’ll be able to grieve AND see and experience the good things too.

Invocation for Sensitive Hearts

I wrote this just a couple of years ago for a workshop for highly sensitive humans who are prone to depression, anxiety, and despair due to the state of the world. Some of us do take in more from around us. There are physiological/neurological realities to this. There’s nothing “woo” about it. Some of us have more sensitive nervous systems, to overly simplify it.

But humans are built for empathy and empathy brings pain. We just have to watch for that pain snowballing. We have to take care. We need other humans around us for nurturing and grounding.

This invocation is about all of that. Use it, perhaps, during a meditation or print and sit a copy on your altar.