Friday, June 30, 2017

The Elephant: Reflection for week 6

It's hard to come in quiet when you're about to do the talking, especially in the beginning when you don't know what's up w the student's body on this particular day, and quite possibly they don't either.

I'm having a hard time with the concept of holding an intention, especially one that may be unrelated to the person in front of me, waiting for guidance about how to be in their body, or where their bodies should be in space. If we are there for different reasons, how do I know where to begin the journey of that class and which arc will provide the questions they want to be asked?

As I come up against places where the student and I veer off in different directions or I'm moving forward and they seem left behind or stuck - I'm finding I need better questions I can ask to figure out what threads got lost and possibly a more accessible way of weaving our experience back together.

I did learn this past week that providing moments of physical resistance, or subtle selective pressure was really helpful to not only guide a student's attention inward when nothing was clear, but also in illuminating the pathways of movement they were taking. It was really interesting to see a kind of crystallization of the idea of agency into something they could feel and clearly delineate in their own bodies.

The shifting of tactics/stories I'm telling are kind of graceless and abrupt at the moment, but I feel like each shift is a broadening of both my awareness and the information I had received in the moments before it, as well as a letting go of preconceived plans to allow the needs of the moment to call the questions and knowledge out of me.

Pathways: Reflection for week 5

I am finding it most difficult to weave together the meditation stuff, movements, and all of the sophisticated awarenesses I've learned in the past 2 years into something truly cohesive, rather than four separate parts with some discussion between each one.

This week I worked with a guy that does the hard labor stuff with me as well as directing modern opera (his masters is in operatic singing) - and was kind of dumbfounded by his lack of movement when I offered it. There is definitely no perfect recipe for dialogue, and like a carpenter, he was much more interested in breaking down movements together, with me along side him, puzzling out how different ideas of yoga speak might be inhibiting the very movements they asked us to exhibit. While he was all about the ideas I was introducing, I was not so happy with how disjointed our practice was, especially as he so sweetly offered himself up to me as a test subject. There was a concreteness he needed to feel safe to explore in front of me, and I suppose having that to offer in my tool kit is something I can't keep avoiding.

For my lack of grace, I am heartened by a text he sent me later about a yoga class he attended later that same day - we had spent a fair amount of time exploring/discussing the upper limbs and scapula, and it felt noticeably different, and he couldn't wait to work with me again.

He mentioned having felt container-less right after our session, and I hear in that, a certain amount of not being held, so I am thinking about different ways to hold people, and different kinds of pathways in.

Thursday, June 15, 2017

Don't empty the ocean, calm the current: Reflection for week 4

It's nice when its more than just one body practicing as I 'teach', since all of us together are less likely to break the spell.

I used the only tool I really know I have - I simply asked questions. One after the other, letting them bubble up from my peripheral awareness, how the sun pressed against the container of my body, the wind gently wrapping around us, the sound of the water and children playing in it, how was it a support, this pull of space, the meaning of texture, the places where it all went in the body, how does our environment land? Am I the container or am I contained? What do I notice, and how many ways can I respond? My students followed my questions like a serious task, but I did not name a shape, I did not take a stance or give direction that wasn't in the form of a question that could swirl around a kinosphere like the rainbow flows on the outside of a soap bubble, noticing or taking in any of those questions, letting them reside inside of that bubble was a choice. The expressions of the two bodies I practiced on in this tiny park were so drastically different, later they both were really appreciative of the 'container' I gave them to explore themselves in relationship to their surroundings, as well as what they were interested in pursuing - and I am not sure what the 'container' was exactly. Was it my voice? Their own sense of their boundaries? Their ability or willingness to listen?

In meditation I am finding that it quickly becomes about how I am everything, expansive, sounds cease to be connected to their meanings, or related to the contexts they arose out of, I bond with all of it. And then I am lost, I am not myself, but a piece of something else - and I wonder if the quiet is so deep that movement has been the only way to feel myself inside of it. Maybe yoga has always been about me trying desperately to feel myself, to find all of the walls and boundaries to know what I am shaped like - and I am really enjoying layering the possibility to move with the kind of attentive patience of meditation, where the thread being followed tastes something like curiosity, in my mouth at least.

I just asked the kinds of questions I wish I could ask into a mirror, and crushed blades of grass between my fingers and smiled at the children who stopped to watch us while their parents pretended not to see us, and took in the sounds and the day shifting towards night and my student's bodies as they let me take them with me along this faint thread, this experience that we were weaving together.




Maybe we're all just spinning a yarn

Years after my father disappeared from my life (aged 5 or 6), post college, he began reading this blog and reached out to me. For a while I waited, to see what his game was, and email after long desperate email came as I considered how I felt about this person I only had the vaguest unpleasant memories about. As Father's Day approaches, I remember these emails, a mishmash of memory and fabrication mixed with what little he could glean from what I was writing about at the time. I am amazed at the deep and incredible strangeness of the individuals who's genetic material I am composed of, and the magical reality they seem to be trapped inside of.

That was almost a decade ago. I finally told him to stop, and that is the only exchange I have had with that man since I was a small child. Here are pieces of those emails:




ive been reading your blog for a few months now...you are an amazing young woman abbigale ruth walsh. (i named you, both) . i read your most recent post today....it told me it was time......damn.....i feel like i suffer from ptsd... i cant remember without reliving.

this is not an attack of your mother..... its a discription of my relationship with her. i hope other people had it differently with her than i did.

because i've read your stuff and i know you are a mature woman, im going to be honest and blunt... as much because its my way.... as because, you deserve the unvarnished truth from my perspective...so you will know why i made the choices i did.

i felt you would be safe with the hillbillies, at the very least. they loved you guys so much. ....i know there is no excuse. i was wrong.

first i want to say.... MY RELATIONSHIP WITH LYNNE IN NO WAY HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH TAD AND YOU. my nightmare relationship with her just made it so i had to wait till you were adults, and away from her to contact you. i never want to see her face or hear her her voice again. ever. you can tell her whatever you feel is important from this...if you never mentioned to anyone but your brother, id be ok with that, too.... but please... dont give her my email address.

you and your brother were the loves of my life. there have been two holes in my soul for 18 years..... but, i have accepted that it was necessary for me to be with lynne, because you and tad had to be born. and i thank the fictitious deity for your births. i hope it wasnt to bad for you guys leaving you with the hillbillies....i was afraid you would be "uninformed" at worst..... but that we could take care of that after you were adults.....i see you have taken care of that all by yourself abby....... mom would be so pleased with you.... .
i wanted to be with you all more than anything... i followed her around the state... drove hundreds of miles each weekend back and forth for years.....i tried to make it.......but, i had to go......my life collapsed so completely and the wound i had from my time with her made it so necessary. im so sorry.

im not a vendictive or hostile man. im a cancer with libra rising and pisces moon for gods sake......... i wasnt prepared for your mother... and then the death of my mother... then the loss of you guys and everything i had....... it was all waaay too much for me and i kind of snapped.

i was going to have her killed abby.....and then take you guys......i had the hitperson.. i had the alibi...i would have been 200 miles away........ i guess you can see that, obviously, at the end of it all... i wasnt mentally healthy.... she destroyed me and my life. my support structure lay in ruins.... she even took my best friend and pseudo business partner away... did she ever tell you the saga of "bruce"?.... my life was broken. when i met her i was an associate producer of news for a tv station with prospects to move up had a mercedes bens and a good life........ by the end of the "sentence".... i was homeless and broken with nothing left of my former life...except my mother's astrology books....YOURS. EVERYTHING ELSE OF MY FORMER LIFE... GONE....separated from my family and friends i ended up homeless living in a tree in island park in sarasota for a week.......


i didnt really come back from the whole experience of being with your mom and that time in my life until about 6 years ago, emotionally..... still not financially...... i was totally beaten down after 8 years in lynne's concentration camp.... she won... her anger, hostility and darkness were all much bigger and stronger than my light... which is considerable... but i was heaped upon with too many calamties at once....

i didnt disappear, abbigale.....i had to save my life. you and tad were safe..... i made a conscious decision...i escaped for what was only supposed to be a short time, to heal myself....I LIVED FOR YOU GUYS....i was in love with you guys.... you and tad were the only good things in my life... mom was recently dead.. my mother was the only OTHER thing in my life that was ever good. i agonized about it for weeks.....no matter what kind of cunt lynne had been to me....she was a responsible and good mother to you and tad....she had an extended family and a support structure.... her parents were good grandparents... no matter what kind of hillbillies they were or how much the old man hated me and everything i stood for.........they loved you and tad...i would have destroyed that and the opportunites that came with it.. had i stayed in your lives. just my presence there would have taken you away from that possible normal future. i decided that to keep interjecting myself in your lives would probably be selfish on my part.... which... now... after reading your writing.. im seeing, may not have been THAT normal... eh?

as a person, im sure your mother is good...i have personally seen her be very good.... but...not to me... your mother and i were always at the point of losing it with one another...as far as she was concerned, i never did anything right...(no one did)...(her dad used to call her the incredible hulk because she got so angry and hostile)..she had a quick, nasty temper and would say horrible cutting things....which shocked the hell out of me, because....when we first met, she was the sweetest kindest most loving giving girl i had known for a long time... till the day AFTER we got married....the day after we got married i brought the wrong shape of bottle of diet pepsi out of a 7-11 for her and it was "goddamn you you son of a bitch"... im not kidding..... i was in shock....right from day one. people who were supposed to love one another didnt talk to each other like that......more on that later..........i think she was always secretly pissed that "keith" didnt come talk her out of marrying me....... after living with lynne for only a short time i felt like a victim of shock treatments.....it took me a YEAR and the loss of my career in broadcasting to tell her... "kiss my ass"..... she threw an overnight bag at me..... (one time after bringing you and tad home to lynes house after a weekend together.... joe said to me with a terrified tortured look on his face, talking about some unpleasantness they had just had.... he said........"kevin... you know what she's like"....and... yes i did...i felt sorry for joe that night) after you all moved to gainesville... and i couldnt afford to follow...every weekend that i could ... faithfully,...i drove from tampa.... religiously every weekend that i could, i would drive hours to gainesville to get you and tad....then hours back to where i lived... florida is a long state.....to be nearer to you two, i finally moved to gainesville and i lived in a shack... LITERALLY... a shack in gainesville @75$ a week, for 6 months and got you every weekend... but i couldnt live on 4.50 an hour so i had to move to a city where i could make enough money to pay your mother CASH.....(which i did for 4 years till she told me "kevin.. dont you tell the state you have been giving me cash all this time.. because i have been collecting from the state too... if you tell the state you've been giving me cash, then....the people who are looking for you for your failed video business will find out where you are")..... the bitch threatened me.... for no reason, just turned around on me and threatened me... right on the steps of the courthouse in gainesville in 91 when our divorce was finally final. anyway... i moved to orlando.... and every weekend that i could.... i drove from orlando to get you guys....hours and hours on the road coming to get you .... going back to my house.....then a day and a half later... making the same 8 hour trip........ it took its toll on you guys... on me and the string of cars i went through.... i came.... and every time i dealt with lynne she was a cunt to me...the last time i came to her house to bring you home....unbenounced to me...lynne, i guess, had cleared out a storage locker in gainesville that i had rented and i couldnt pay for anymore...i had decided to let the stuff go.. (i let a lot of stuff go during my life with lynne).... but i guess when i defaulted, they called her and she went and paid the back owed money to the storage place... i knew nothing about this... when i got to lynne and joes, bringing you home....while you and tad were getting ready for bed....... i noticed "the spaceman".... then i noticed another thing or two from the storage locker...... stuff i had gotten when mom died..... and i wondered how they got to lynne's house...... and your mother, seeing my noticing the things... got this, cruella deville, face of victory and dispicable joy at my loss and this attitude of delight and satisfaction at my failure .. it was an evil glee at my situation....personally, i was happy you and tad had those things.... they were yours after all...( i have your astrology books when ever you are ready to claim them, a little more time worn... all with notations from your grandmother.).....anyway, lynne got this nasty and vile evil look on her face and things and started being a cunt to me... and things began to get ugly... so i left....that was the last time i could go there.

after the last time i went to take you and tad back to gainesville......the exchange she and i had, where she drew such delight from my loss and failure, that finally pushed me over the edge. and i was going to have her killed and take you away from her family for ever...much like her sisters husband did with THEIR kids.... did you ever meet lisa's kids? ....after a week or so, i called the hit off....i got hold of my senses and realized that would be WRONG, no matter how much she sucked.....i couldnt do that.... and i should just let it go. i realized... and was deeply saddened to know that as long as i was going to have to deal with her, to see you and your brother that it would be hell and i would want to kill her again... and probably do it...and how selfish i was being......and how it would negatively affect you guys. i realized that you would always be in OUR pitched battle....i came from a very unstable family situation..... it wasnt good........ i wanted different things for the two of you... so, i thought that with joe, lynne and her family to help, they could provide you a much more stable life.....and that i would always be a a very unstable element to interject into your little lives..... i decided.... that it would be best for you and tad if i allowed you to have a family, without the distraction of my crazy family...or my family history.... or lifestyle... i wanted you to have normalcy. and i would just wait till you were both adults and we would find each other...... after being with lynne for 8 years......my life was destroyed, my career was gone and so was my self worth.....after i left wink tv.. i couldnt keep a job.. i hated working in pizza kitchens....but that was pretty much the only avenue left for me to survive.....(in 89,.in sarasota, i was struggling to give her CASH for you guys and i lost my job.....then i lost my weekly rented room...i was homeless and she wouldnt even let me sleep on her couch for a weekend.) for me, lynne was a nightmare....after 5 years with lynne.... she had me convinced it was ME who was fucked up. so.... back to the orlando story...there i was and i had decided that while you were young, having me in your lives would be a drawback of massive proportion......... well... after a few weeks...and an inability to find more substantial employment than "pizza guy"... i decided.... "screw this... im gonna sell pot, acid and ecstacy till i save up enough money to get a lawyer and get my kids.... (not one of my best plans, but by then... my life and video production profession and family were gone and i was at the bottom... im sure i wasnt thinking rationally).......... 6 months after i brought you and tad back to lynne's house for the last time.... on 2/22/92... a guy i knew, who had been arrested, agreed to wear a wire in my house and it got raided....full MBI gear and masks... guns drawn...30 cops kicked in my door.... when i was arrested, i had a pound of pot and 3500$ cash... (i had been saving up for you and tad... i still have the xmas presents from that xmas for you guys)..... i was only in jail for 4 hours... but i was on probation for 2 years....and, at the same time... i had to keep selling to pay back the "people i worked for". after a while and my screwed attempt to wrangle up quick cash.... i had lost all hope.... everything i did pushed me further and further away from being able to get back to you guys..... i took to self medication...(also runs in our family).....i was eating my profits... because i was medicating at my pain of being pushed even further from you guys....it got worse for a while.... my situation never got back to the place where i could offer you and your brother anything positive...... so i decided to fix my life and wait till you were grown up.. and could make your own decisions. i hoped you and your brother would be curious enough to come find me. to yell at me... to tell me to go fuck myself. to meet me.... maybe to get to know me and to hang out some. just maybe to find out why you are so unique... (sorry.. thats from me... from my mom...quite the bohemian she was and she passed a healthy dose to me.. and it would seem....in the first 5 years of your life... to you too.... is your brother a freak too?? hehehehehe... sorry.. kidding.... we arent freaks. im just so happy you arent like THEM)

about your "spirituality"...i have a hunch about that.... if it is your wish that we continue communicating, ill tell you later.... i always hoped you and your brother would be curious enough about me or wonder why you all are different than the hillbillies enough to come find me and ask why....."why kevin, are we so different?" you and your brother called me by my first name and only dad occasionally. most people thought it was strange.....I kinda liked it. you both were whole people right out of the womb.

im so amazed at your talent...you are so fucking talented abby... and im so sorry for your deep deep deep emotional feelings and responses. you are a scorp with leo rising and moon within a degree of the ascendant. thats like being a scorp with a cancer moon and cancer rising.... thats how strong that is for emotionality........ you, my love, ARE your emotions. or at least thats how it feels. and will be jerked around by them until you can step back and look at your life as "karmic assignments".... you've got stuff to do abby. maybe with more than 3 people.... things will end... new things will begin. you have much to do. acceptance is peace.

your mother spins a yarn. your grandmother didnt have 7 husbands. but she did have an adventure of a life..... and she was a great, loving mother and astrologer and re-incarnation regressionist... and you were born 9 months, almost to the day after she died. and, about the worlock thing....dont let your imagination run wild.... lynne and i used to JOKE about the worlock thing...there was never any thougt of magic spells or magic books or anything like that...not like harry potter....there is no such thing as magic.....but there is power and energy and sometimes it sure feels like magic, doesnt it?..... we used the term "worlock" (or at least i did) as a term to describe a male with lots of water in his chart who knows about the occult and has the ability to perceive other people and what was going on around him and to influence people without much effort....someone who had the ability to reach out and grab you with their energy and make you want to know them....and then...changing people through the force of your persona......
its strong in my mother... strong in me... and it was strong in my children......for me, its sun on my midheaven. for mom it was sun on ascendant... for you its moon on ascendant.... etc.... i bet you know ALL about it..... leo rising girl...i bet you hold people in your sunny intense magnanimous gaze with great skill... i bet you influence people, simply by being you..... you have a gift far beyond illustration. the gift of your mind and soul can move people.
when you both were very young, you and your brother could mentally reach out and grab people from across restaurants....or rooms or wherever... tad would pick someone and "charm" them from across the room, months before he could speak. it was a great thing to watch. i hadnt ever seen anyone do it like he did before..... i knew when he was about to start... he would scan the room and search them out like a hypnotist looking for subjects..... and he would captivate someone... and own them....he would reduce them to squishy puddles of goo who had to meet him..... you too...you had sunshine in your heart...and you both came with it built in. and the dog thing with you. you both have a thing. with a thing.... comes a purpose. karmic assignments. have you ever felt as if you may not be here this time for "yourself"?

when i was 10, mom showed me how to do charts........... the math, how to research in the text books.....etc.... mom made me her apprentice. she knew early on that i had a great aptitude for astrology and the occult with my grand trine in water and fire..... with uranus and merc conj in leo in 10th... she always said i was born to be an astrologer.......... she was my mentor..... my BUDDY.....and my mother....... i miss her very much................one time your mom said... all snotty with me during one argument... "and you all write in your books... who writes in their books???" and i said.... "lynne... they are RESEARCH BOOKS"... not coffee table decorations..........

both you and your brother have the "astrologer/occult thing" too

so she says...."mom" taught her everything she knows eh?......... ok..........

one time..... young lynne... shortly after she and i had been "dating"....she went with me to meet my mom.. for the first time... and mom.... in one of her favorite flowery housedresses... (satin mumu)... sitting on her bed.......greeted us cheerfully as i brought lynne into the bedroom where mom was situated that day..... we sat and talked.... mom rolled a joint... and we all got stoned... and mom began telling lynne about karma and reincarnation and how the universe was the place that the religious folks told her it was.... and your mother was very stoned.... had never been in this situation before... and had never heard anyone speak like mom did before........i think for a second... she felt herself jerked away from the reality she had been raised with and she got this startled look on her face...... suddenly, she stood up and said...... "YOU GUYS ARE A CULT.....THIS IS A CULT....YOU ARE TRYING TO ...OH GOD....... IVE GOT TO GET OUT OF HERE.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" i looked at mom like ... whuuuuuuuuttt?????????? and your mother........... walked QUICKLY around the bed and pushed past me at the door AND RAN OUT OF MOM'S HOUSE........... HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEH .... poor little farm girl from labelle............... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA................... still fucking cracks me up.... YOU GUYS ARE A CULT................................ HEHEHEHEHEHEHHEHEHEH. (maybe if she hadnt been so stoned)

anyway................ i followed her out to her little ugly chevette.... i really felt sorry for her... i tried to calm her...... i said... "lynne.... no hon... we arent a cult.."....."we arent trying to recruit you"............... she said..............."I HAVE TO GO.... REALLY."................. and she drove away....... i thought id never see her again...... but..... you and tad HAD to be born... so.....

another thing that just cracked me up about your mom...... we were watching something on tv about the second world war.... i was always fascinated with it.....and hitler......... and your mom told me....................... "you know kevin.. i always thought they were saying HI HITLER..... i didnt KNOW it was HEIL HITLER"........ every time i think about that it cracks me up...........

after spending WAAAAAYYYYY too much time with your grandfather..jerry bussell....".more than i ever wanted to"..... . i realized why lynne freaked out so much when she met mom .....

HI HITLER!.........


Wednesday, June 14, 2017

you’re not asking about a property of space, but rather a property of yourself

VII.
Ideas as Artifacts
Motion and Gesture
a part of our language
Narrative
an embodied form
of discourse


VIII.
Immune System
as an act
rather than
an organ


IX.
creative drive
sex drive
death drive
thumb drive
disc drive


X.
interface
what is our human boundary
when we modify ourselves (as a human race)?
race against what?
techno hack vs body hack
genetic modification vs microbiome
integrity of the body (modesty)
replacement organs
anxiety as an artifact


XI.
How do you heal the landscape
without erasing its history?


XII.
The difference between Sacred and Rigid:
Holding Space vs Space being Held

Community holding something is different
Than a Structure holding something

Am I the Container
or am I contained?


XIII.
Memory
is a person a thing a process?

identity/structure

is the meaning in the words
or the person who hears them?


XIV.
a transition that feels
like there was no
transition


A pearl: the oyster's autobiography





When I first moved to NYC, I had responded to a craigslist post looking for 'promotional models', for a roofing/epoxy treatment company. It involved dressing up and wandering around city blocks flirting with the security and supers around freight entrances, trying to get the contact info of each building's Engineer.

Once, a very talkative Building Engineer told me and my accomplice about a repeated compromise of the seal around the basement of his midtown building - apparently the underground rivers of Manhattan are alive and well, constantly trying to reassert themselves through these ancient pathways, in an endless battle between nature and its colonizers.

I remembered that story while walking through the park today when we encountered a place where a few of the honeycomb sidewalk tiles had collapsed and pure clean water sprang up from it like an urban spring, like the water in the creek next to my house growing up in Florida - a place where veins of water filtered up through the aquifer, since we lived at or just below sea level.





Friday, June 9, 2017

Untelling a story: Reflection for week 3

As far as I deviate from familiar landscapes and their respective maps when guiding another's body in and out of form and space, I'm finding their ideas and relationships to certain shapes are tied inextricably close together. It's not that I'm surprised by these tangled balls of yarn, but that I feel very much like I'm furtively tugging at strings in the practice/person unfolding on the mat in front of me. I'm not quite sure what I'm looking for.

My use of inhales to notice/exhales to move has shifted towards exhales to respond, since even the lack is a response in its own way. As the student listens inward, I've talked about the possibility of trying something else if it didn't feel quite right the first time they responded. I think starting class with a conscious internal conversation, a simple game of choose-your-own-adventure might help students start to develop a vocabulary of their own deeply individual sensations that no words may exist for - something that may be really important (I suspect) for students to eventually perceive the amount of agency available to them inside of more traditional asana.

At various moments during my student's practice, when they chose the path of familiar shapes, I asked what story they were telling at that particular moment. And I asked again in other places, along the way - much the same way yoga teachers often have to remind some of their students to breathe, both are such important things to notice, to fill our bodies with, no matter what the shape we've poured it into. That was remarked on, how interesting it was to have their awareness called to their idea of something rather than a body part, how all of it gets lost just like the breath sometimes when focusing on what their body looks like from the outside. How strange it was to notice in themselves how present the stories were, guiding the choices they made inside of their practice. Sometimes they realized they had no idea where the story they were inside of, in the moment I asked them to notice, even came from in the first place.


xo

Thursday, June 8, 2017

what to change in order to become yourself

As I relaxed into the embrace of the floor, I could feel myself there, the honey and tawny strands of the floorboards spreading out from underneath me, the sun spilling down on us through the windows. But I could also feel the past bubbling up to the surface, I considered the particles of memory floating like dust motes in my field of vision between me and the floor receiving the forces pouring through me. A shitty little house in Nowhere, Florida with almost no furniture and an empty fridge. The places where my brother and I slept were two couch cushions on the floor, shoved in opposite corners of the room, my body still small enough that I could curl myself onto it, as I watched the roaches skitter around in the dark. That house where my brother and I were mostly alone, I was too small to reach the sink in the bathroom or the countertops in the kitchen as we tried to feed ourselves, if I needed water, to clean myself. Once I reached up to the top of the electric stove in curiosity while my brother's back was turned, and seared a perfect spiral onto the flesh of my tiny hand, radiating out from the center all the way to the fingertips. I think he was just tall enough to boil some hotdogs for lunch. That was when my father still claimed joint custody of us, and those weekends still pop up in my emotional radar sometimes, collateral damage while my parents used us as pawns in a game I was helpless inside of.

The floor. Like reflections on a soap bubble, the past swirled around me as I watched. And it was the past, so I let it fall away to feel the coolness underneath my body that balanced out the heat on my skin from the window.

As I moved, considering the instructions from the teacher of what and how to explore, I found a familiar wall of panic when I reach a place where it feels like I am incapable of doing what I was being asked to do. Getting as still as possible and trying to slow my breathing, I knew I needed to stop moving before I triggered a full blown panic, but I could feel the painful contractions starting around where I imagine my vocal chords to be and instinctively pulled myself inwards, like a reverse unfurling of a fern. Like a switch was flipped, I was free, I could move past the paralysis at the beginning of a meltdown.

Once when I used to babysit the neighbor's triplet toddlers, I was around for a birthday party. The father was a problem, and not much long afterwards they went their separate ways (he took the older son, she took the triplet girls), and I don't remember what he said or did, but one of the girls started crying from a startle. I was in high school, just helping in every way I could because I saw the mom needed help, and I heard something I recognized in that little girl's cry - after the third one that sounded exactly the same, like a computer, a record caught on a loop, I knew I had to disrupt the repeating pattern and I gathered her in to me. While her parents snapped at each other in whispers, her cries multiplied and then subsided after a fractal shift. My mother has mentioned a few times her early experiences of being potty trained - my grandfather punished their accidents by making them wear their soiled panties on their heads, overlapping their face, their breathing pathways. Recently I've started to wonder about how being shamed about something you have no control over affects us as adults, maybe the thread of chronic constipation she has suffered her whole life is a story I am telling about her relationship to shame and her need to be in control even at the cost of our relationship. Her inappropriate sharing with me of her sexual escapades as I moved from prepubescence into sexual maturation also gives me the perspective of how her bowels turn to liquid when she is emotionally or sexually attuned to a man, and in her lack of control, we were often forgotten in her blind hunger for something only her interactions with these men could potentially fill. I wonder if her inability to let stuff out is intimately related to my inability to receive.

Manifesting is both a concrete and completely unpredictable thing. I wonder if noticing any of those potential connections might be a way for my mother to knit back together some damage, to be able to tell new stories about how she relates to others. I wonder why I have the distinct habit of relating everything I experience to a few early similar experiences, instead of being able to fully be inside of something new. My mother and I, why must we always be in control over everything? I can't even bring myself to what seems like a childish place of hoping for a return of adoration in a sexual partner, to let myself be so lost in something as unpredictable and defenseless and dangerous as being 'in love' whatever that silly fabricated idea arises out of.

This is not my father's floor and I am not that child on a couch cushion. How can i wade through these stories, untangle these threads enough to make a different choice and not succumb to the emotional bubbles trapped inside of them? Maybe I am exactly where I need to be, learning how to love the floor, how to receive its support, how to give it the fullness of my weight. To know it can't be taken from me, the it won't turn me down, that when I lay in its embrace, it is impossible to fall.





Thursday, June 1, 2017

Experience vs Story: Reflection for week 2

I didn't make a plan to do anything different - I just listened. To myself, to the 'students', to our ideas of shape and space and roles and expectations. To the places where those things grated on each other, and where they seemed aligned. Where they needed the story I was unwilling to tell. Where I told stories because they made sense on someone's body once, somewhere in the past, but maybe had no place when I tried using them again.

Some things that I heard/noticed - There is an underlying support that I need to be able to offer, even when re-calibrating my expectations and shifting directions, how being caught up in the motions of telling a previous story can leave the 'student' feeling lost or unsupported. Even though I have a fear of naming a familiar shape because of how present our preconceived ideas/patterns of relating to it often are, I can't just remove all of the rules, not everyone is so ready to give those up. What are the structures that support that kind of chaos, that inspires curiosity, the ability to play? Sometimes stories are a really important way in, a thread to follow when it feels like all that is available is darkness, that stories can be a map for an experience someone may never have had so that they may be able to consider and eventually find it on their own. The more I can listen, the more responsive I can be to the complex set of questions being asked at any moment in time by the individual I am relating to in this particular dynamic.

I learned that we are co creating a new story about a million different things between us, my clearest job/question I have found this week is about how to Be With - both myself and the student. How can I be fluid while being a support for self and other? How does my witnessing and supportive presence help give others a platform to feel comfortable enough to engage with their own stories and to possibly let some go, to make the space to tell new ones?

And how am I changed in the process?

What am I Becoming-With?

Breath as a Medium: Reflection for week 1

This one struck me because I have found breath-as-respite a confusing concept - evidence of a transition between states of emotional coherence/control, an often annoying mechanical function I'm usually pretty happy to ignore since my body can do it without my direct involvement, and the idea of anything as a potential form of expression is a line of inquiry I want to lather myself in, (like a baby with a jar of peanut butter) to unearth how it can be harnessed to help a voice be heard.

Before I took the time to consider my relationship to breath this past week, I had no awareness of the disconnect I was feeling when instructed to go back to the breath, to use the breath, to notice it at all. A piece of my childhood keeps coming up, especially as I followed this question - My stepfather used to shut me in the bathroom when I got upset because I often lost control of my ability to form words through the heaving, hiccuping, strangled breathing, like I was drowning on dry land. He wouldn't release his hand from the doorknob outside until I could breath normally, which sometimes took a very long time. In retrospect, I suspect it was a kind of anxiety attack I was having, and that loss of control and inability to speak up for myself, these shadows of helplessness and shame are the last places I would probably want to go looking for an anchor or sense of connection. As I consider how many times in a yoga class I've instructed about returning to the breath, of finding it, filling a shape with it etc, all respectable statements in light of its lineage - it seems a really clear example of a place where I've repeated motions rather than speaking from or even considering my own experience or relationship to what I am asking a body of individuals to partake in. At work, I make a real conscious effort to never ask one of my crew guys to do something I myself am not capable of doing, so this bit really shook me.

I feel like there is a strong correlation between drawing and practicing asana, layers of focus and awareness, and by flipping one for the other I get to take away the groove a student (of either discipline) might comfortably lean into. For Sunday's teaching game, I played into the idea of the Perceptual Cycle and the limited resource of our Attention, as well as Sam's meditation that involved shifting our states of awareness - I really liked how those shifts were so distinct in the back to back contrast. So I asked my partner to use his inhales to take in what he was looking at, and let his exhales become a gestural release/exploration of the information received via a pen in his hand to the sketchbook in his lap (I blocked his ability to see the paper, an attempt to remove the focus on judging its product, which alters the ability to engage fully in the noticing).

How does what comes in (via environment, senses, interactions) become an expression of its affect on us? How does an inhale transform into an exhale, how does a breath become a movement?

Both of the individuals I taught this week talked about regular difficulty and lack of connection to their breath, when we talked about it afterwards. I had continued the inhale to notice, exhale to move, and they both experienced the drawing mediation described above prior to taking it into the rest of the body. My non yogi friend felt that the literalness, 'concrete' in her words, of pen to paper drew a distinct connection between a familiar action and the presence of breath - and that bridge helped her feel agency, ease, and purpose in the breath focused movements we explored. I wonder if that is one of those things so fundamental it gets forgotten, not just our awareness of it, but our RELATIONSHIP with breathing. How can I take a step even farther back and help build something to anchor to? How can I weave the sensations of breathing and movement together in my language and my daily life? How many ways can I find to bridge between the taking in and the letting go, to maybe see how our individual expressions arise out of the conversation between them? How can I create a dialogue not based on the assumption that the foundation is already there, when I may be trying to build something on top of uneven ground? I may not be the only one who sometimes feels like I'm drowning on dry land. What is the pathway in? Can my words and the space I shape be a kind of divining rod?




I'm also starting to get a clear sense that it is a collaboration, that there is something between the teacher and student being woven, crafted, made real, but I can't quite see the nature of the artwork that we are working on together, whether I am the student or the teacher. At least not yet.