Shake it up suggestions from Bianca

Bianca, our posterwoman for Parkinson's Healing has a great blog supporting the many who turn to her for mentoring during their healing. Bianca's ChiChat - an open forum for those actively engaged in the pursuit of wellness with a special focus on management of Parkinson's symptoms.

This from a recent post:
That's my suggestion for the month. Break it up. Shake it up. I retrained my brain through hours of  daily qigong practice. Now I notice how the changes ripple outside my body and into my life. Challenge your comfort zone, but make the challenge itself a pleasurable reward. Have breakfast for dinner, but make it Eggs Benedict, not toast. Go paintballing, try a new recipe or cooking style, rearrange a desktop, a room, a schedule. In the process you may help re-arrange your brain. Enhance the internal process with some external inertia.

Sharon's autumnal abundance

May you be graced by autumnal abundance
          
Listening deeply to your whole nature

So your embodied presence invites new wisdom into your heart and mind.

 ~*~*~*~*~*~  Sending Loving Kindness your way  ~*~*~*~*~*~*~
                                                                                      Sharon 

 

Practicing with death

Here is a bit from Vivienne's recent note to her students, for the full letter there is a link below the excerpts.  Haola Vivienne.

This summer I got a call from my brother letting me know that my mother -- already blind and crippled --  wasn't doing well.  She lived alone as a hermit in the foothills of the Pyrennes in a one-room house she'd built of stone.
...  It was perhaps the most amazing experience of my life. ... Something opened up between us, and our time together became moment-to-moment precious.  I wrote in my journal, "Caring for my mother is the best thing that's ever happened to me.  Life has become meditation, a crash-course in being present."
... I did little formal practice.  I did informal practice all day long.  Constantly organizing the chi field, chanting the organ sounds and the essence mantra as I washed up and cleaned up and went shopping.  I practiced with the intention of "opening my heart as big as infinity, dissolving all karma between us."
... Every afternoon I'd organize the qi field with my mother  ...  I kept postponing my flight home.  ...   Every day, my prayer was,  "May it all turn out for everyone's highest good."
... Two weeks after I'd arrived, my mother was having a good day.  She wanted me to visit a church nearby ... I stood at the pulpit and sang the 8 verses in Chinese at the top of my lungs, organizing the chi field.  It felt so good, I did it three times.  ...  I lit a long white candle for my mother and placed it in front of the madonna and I prayed as I never have before.  "May my mother have a quick and easy passage and may I be present."

Three days later, my mother died.  It was quick, easy and I was with her.  ... I could feel my mother leaving.  ... And I began silently singing the 8 verses, feeling the expansion of  our physical bodies into our energy bodies, expanding into openness, into spaciousness, feeling the expansion continuing all the way out into the universe, into infinity, all old conditioning, all karma dissolving, all contractions of the heart and mind melting into the bright light, connecting with all existence, feeling the freedom, true liberation, as we expanded into Oneness. While I sang, I watched my mother's breathing slowing as we progressed further and further out.  On the last line, "Zhou Shen Rong Rong", she breathed out her final breath.

The room filled with her consciousness.     The room became a cathedral filled with peace beyond all understanding.   A profound silence. I sat holding my mother's hand for an hour or so, my mind completely still.  And then the thought arose. "She's gone."

I immediately heard, "You silly goose, where do you think I've gone?  I'm everywhere." My mother hadn't called me "silly goose" since I was a young girl.

A while later, I heard, "Don't do what I did -- live in the head.  It IS about the heart.  Only it needs to be embodied.  It has to be lived."  I felt the energy of my heart moving down into my dantien, filling my womb.  A delicious feeling.  ...
Love, Vivienne

For the full text of this beautiful experience: LINK

look within

"Your vision will become clear 
only when you look into your heart...

Who looks outside, dreams. 
Who looks within, awakens!"

- Carl Jung

Energetics Explained

There are certain audio files that I come across that I wish all of us teachers could hear, even if we weren't present at that particular lecture, practice or retreat.

Here are two of these:  Link to files

The first explains the energetics of SBM in a manner easily repeated to our own students, a engaging QnA with the other teachers present and a nice practice with the Dig.

The second was recorded at Esalen and discusses energetic gates and points in more detail than we often receive.

Enjoy!

Yes, healing ourselves may seem like a small drop of water, And ...

KarmaTube: I will be a hummingbird

Hip Rotation Clarification

Rhandee Lipp:

I just watched MTs teaching of Hip Rotations on the new DVD where he says to make the circles as large as possible, like Hula Hoop!!!

To me, the instructions in the Supplemental write-ups saying, to NOT make circles like Hula hoops was more helpful, as I feel my tailbone initiates the movement more. Oh my, I'm not sure what to tell my students now. Hmmmm? Any thoughts?

Mingtong:

both large circle of hip and initiate by the tailbone while keep the up body centered and stable.

Guma:
To make a Hula Hoop go you usually have to move your whole central axis. With my clumsy efforts it seems very much initiated from the hips rather than the spine. I think the key is to have the body awareness (helped by the hands holding the waist) that your central column is aligned and steady between heaven and earth.  Whether the pivot point for the movement is Mingmen or the sacrum will vary with how open that area has become. Ideally we will be initiating from lowest vertebrea of the spine and the consequence is that the hips rotate. All of these lower vertebrea can become free practicing this movement. Investigate and see.

You can always skip the Hula Hoop analogy and find one that fits your understanding.

Other Teachers comments?

Between Heaven and Earth a poem by Judy Tretheway (Guma)

I stand.  From inside, I find myself, humble, ready,

desiring communion, desiring wholeness,

desiring a dance with and within vitality itself.

(palms turning and pressing forward and back)

My desire, spiraling out from a simple turn of the wrist,

senses, from a place way below me, that I am of the earth

and all the earth beneath me supports me.

Drawing back into me, I sense my place,

one, two, three times greater than ever before.

This place here, this planet here, this galaxy here,

all swirling with me through space, space within me, space around me.

(arms lifting, fingers pointing to dantien, then around to the back)

From the swirling galaxies within the deep, dark depths of my being,

my desires rise to know myself, to offer myself.

From the vast reaches of the cosmos,

I turn and look at the radiant glow of my singular dantien.

There can be no doubting the sun itself is within me.

Adjusting perspectives with a turn of my fingertips outward

I become bonded with the infinite expanse,

horizons of potential that surround me

in this special moment of practice.

Indeed in every moment — to the right and to the left

extending beyond, beyond beyond.

This glow inside me circles until it circles back in on itself —

knows its own radiance, knowing all radiance

from the outside in, from the inside out,

centered in the dantien, grounded, embodied

home for the twinkling of my life.

(hands move up to under armpits, circling of fingers)

Lifting up to the heart of my own story

I shutter as the explosion of grace shatters my latest layer of defense.

Pay attention! I challenge myself:

Dissolve the walls around your heart.

Accept the vastness of this love.

You don't need to hide behind this personality any longer.

Shatter the story.

My fingers become flame throwers

quickening, igniting the engine of my true presence.

Spiraling the truth of love's welcome

deep into the tentacles of doubt still hiding in my heart,

then the swirl reverses and draws out all fears

of leading a truly compassionate life.

(from under arms, hands reach forward)

Grateful for the unending grace, I offer myself once again

to the cosmos swirling around my feeble gestures

from the center of my center, I reach out.

From the center of my loves' love, I reach out.

(middle fingers point toward head)

Then in the simple curving of a fingertip I know.

I know I am all that I pray towards.

There in the middle of my head, the sun's own radiance,

burning out all doubt, removing all fears, resetting all systems

in brilliant balance.

Stunned, my mind stops.

Stops even its prayers, and simply glows in grace.

Receiving and releasing have disappeared

canceling each other out in their coming and going

becoming simple brilliance.

(hands and arms moving to sides and then lifting)

In expressing this glow I discover its boundlessness.

The me that was encased in grace is now grace.

The inside and outside have lost all distinction.

The up and the down have lost all distinction.

The heavens surround me.

The earth is within me.

All manner of things are well.

(arms reaching heaven-ward, stretching up)

I have plugged myself into the great stream of God's grace,

the Tao where nothing is needed and all comes without asking.

Every cell, every fluid space in my body

sparkles shimmering with the glee of a giggling infant

alive and made new, eager to know itself, alive in the story of it's life.

(arms pointing up, pull down into prayer hands in front of heart)

A current flowing from a vision for my life

from beyond my ability to know, to sense or to feel

draws down into me piercing every cell.

Aligning my head, my heart, my belly and

through into my feet's love of the earth.

My core essence has come alive in its uniqueness,

alive in its union with all that is.

(turning of the prayer hands)

Then spiraling out like a galaxy of grace

generated from within my very heart,

my limitlessness radiates out on my singular song of love.

Then the universe's boundless symphony of love returns

along these very same pathways

spiraling into the infinite potential of all life,

and my life recognizes the sound of its own song

in harmony with the vitality of all life.

--- Judy Tretheway, 2008  This was written on a crowded airplane. It came to me to pass some of the time practicing. I began visualizing the opening sequence of Lift Chi Up Pour Chi Down, and the images that came to me were so vivid I pulled out some paper and it became a poem. After the opening sequence I simply dissolved, I could not even visualize the next movements, all was Qi.