Sacarmi

  SO, if you read Part I you will know of a 2.5hr daily meditation practice that lasted forty days and that the next couple of blogs will share with you the latest Self-Embodiment roller-coaster ride. Straight up…ANY practice done daily helps us meet ourselves. Pouring ourselves through a filter day after day, reveals to us what lays hidden. Daily Self practice allows all that we have repressed and distracted ourselves from to surface. And with courage (and many softening strategies!) we can learn to sink beyond the panic to meet our Unknown and in doing so lovingly confront the reality of our experience. ________________________________________________________________________ It was 31st Jan 2016, the night before I was due to start the 40 days that I decided it was an impossible task unless you lived in an ashram and gave myself full permission to not even consider it. Ha! The following morning I woke at 4am feeling anxious. Without being able to identify the source I accepted it was too much of a coincidence to wake up at this hour and in this state without responding to the meditation challenge. I mean what else was I going to do, lie there in anxiety and watch the hours go by? So this is how I found myself in the practice Day 1. The settling in phase is always a bit foreign. You haven’t had quite enough of the apple to know what you’re dealing with, so inevitably there is anticipation and in equal measure a call for patience. Waiting, a lot of waiting, watching, listening and waiting… My first pattern usually emerged around the 30mins mark, the boundary of my concentration. This became my new training ground and involved some fairly significant habits. Let’s cut to the chase – Super Honesty gets you REAL…real quick. Prepare for speed bumps. Here’s my ‘Get Real List’ Day 4 in. _________________________________________________________________________ I invest an enormous amount of energy in distracting myself from the present moment. I am addicted to the next moment. ‘Something’ in me is numb. ‘Something’ in me wants to avoid contact. This ‘something’ is permanently singing ‘Tra la lah, tra la lah’ like a child trying to ignore it’s sibling. 2.5hrs is a long time. 2.5hrs with myself is even longer. Distraction equals avoidance. OBVIOUSLY! Breadth avoids Depth. I fantasise with a dose of the grandiose. I Think a lot. About a lot of STUFF! I look around the room when I’m meant to be looking internally at my third eye. I slouch. I multi-task. YEP! I move to avoid stillness. “Blah! I don’t find a rhythm, I am not finding bliss… Where is the nectar anyway?” Ah I live by expectations. When I lose my curiosity I lose my discipline. I am an impatient child currently about 7yrs old. Bored. BORED. BORRRRED. Oh no… I use boredom to change tack and avoid going deeper. Bother! I have an 11yr old drama queen in me whose been sent to her room to think about her behaviour… Feeling imprisoned, tortured and proudly insolent. Bombshell breakdown moment – There is a chasm between what I think I am, what I think I uphold, what I think I want, what I think I am and the actual TRUTH. S**T! BTW this is the list I wrote (Honesty 13: multi-tasking) while meditating! yep! true, true! Ouch it hurts being this honest. Here’s what I noticed amongst the quagmire of distraction techniques I have up my sleeve… There can be a comfort in being distracted. Directing one’s mind is often used as a healthy technique however the motivation behind it makes all the difference. I was using activity to occupy my mind to soothe me. Distraction can be comforting. Distraction stops me from going in. It reminds me of my binge-eating days – the soothing moments of over eating (prior to the self-loathing after) – avoidance junkie. As oddly soothing as it may seem, distraction, aka avoidance, demands an enormous amount of energy to keep us out of the body. And when we are not standing in our own body, there is no ground to stand on. Without a ground for our being to rest in we need a substitute for the feeling of being grounded. Much of what passes for culture, entertainment, progress and “personality” tends to fall into this category. Most of our distractions are wrapped up one way or another in our identity so closely, we can’t see that they are distractions at all. For some it’s work or our career, for other parenting and the distraction that children bring, for others being busy and industrious, for some it’s running, cleaning or green smoothies and investing a lot in lululemon. It isn’t just packaged in negative strategies like self-harming, it’s almost worse when they are cloaked in things we pride ourselves in. Somethings are hard to detect in ourselves because we or others value the very same things that are limiting us. Who doesn’t respect a go-getter, a clever career woman or a sportsman. We build sand castles of secondary satisfactions, in our multifaceted and varied attempts to find substitutes for the wholeness that somehow got lost. The problem with an addiction to distraction in whatever small or big form it shows up, is that we are practicing running from silence and from any genuine somatic experience. The result is that, what we practice we make more permanent, practicing disunity results in a large gap… a very large gap. And while distraction in the acute phase may offer comfort, in the long run it itself becomes deeply uncomfortable. And anyway… What are we busy running from? The threatening presence of no-thing. What do you notice about your patterns, habits of avoidance and distraction. What activity do you engage in, judged by yourself or others as positive or negative that helps you avoid being in direct contact with your Self, what helps you avoid closing your eyes or sitting still or meeting your unknown or connecting to your truth? Give yourself 3 mins on a timer and storm it out without too much thinking, go into the feeling of avoidance and describe, list what comes to your attention. Remind yourself – this work is a practice of moving into the Unknown with trust. A practice of witnessing ourselves as we think we are. A practice of acknowledging ourselves as we actually are and everything in between. It’s not a motivation or instruction to change your reality, in fact please avoid trying to do so. It’s a call to befriend your idiosyncrasies, notice them, sit with them but do not not force them away – practice getting closer, be stealthy and move quietly, notice what emerges to block you from getting closer. These are the gems you are after finding. This is where the work starts. Home Practice: As the blog is monthly see if you can practice a month’s commitment to an 11mins daily meditation. 2.5hrs is possible if you fancy it…but 11 mins if you have never sat with yourself before will be quite long enough Keep a journal of what happens. Your 11mins could be sitting quietly it could be a specific meditation but whatever you choose, repeat the same one each day. It is the accumulative affect of the same practice that gives you the hidden treasure. Should you find a panic surfacing now or as you start to practice, this month’s podcast will guide you through some preparatory softening techniques to help you sink beyond the panic to the heart of the matter. If you are new to using intervention strategies you could always choose one of these as your month’s practice. As always keep me informed, feedback on Facebook Self-Embodiment Page and support each other in the process. BodyMind Blessings, Sally X The post Forty Days & Forty Nights ~ An Embodied Retrospective Part 2 appeared first on Sacarmi.

I’m cozied at a small table at my favourite cafe with the best 6oz flat white ever and no one else around. It’s been a baptism of fire 40 days (explanation later) and I have some Significant Changes to integrate in my next birth year, starting April 8th 2016. Here’s the process, Step 1: I commenced a forty day commitment to a 2.5hour daily Kundalini Yoga meditation on Monday 1st February, 2016 called The Long Ek Ong Kars. Why? – is another story. Step 2: Sitting with myself for 2.5hrs a day, reveals a few things. Let’s just say you get to meet yourself. Step 3: Kept a journal each day of what happens and noted who showed up – turns out there’s an entire crowd in here! Step 4: Yesterday, after mulling over new content – I realised just may be I could be brave enough to share what surfaced during this the latest Self-Embodiment roller-coaster ride. Step 5: Today, I’ve ordered a warm beverage and then really had a think about what moved me and mattered the most retrospectively these last 40 days. Step 5: I then chose five things I’m going to focus on in the next year as a result of this 40 day board meeting. So lean in and sign up for my next series of The Moving Self Podcast & Blogs as I attempt to pass on what I learnt, but for this episode here’s an overview so you can decide if you want in… What did I learn? I learnt how simple IT all is once I get past all the complicated distractions I create to blur the view. I reflected how there were fewer highlights than I wanted in some areas of my life. And the small matter of the difference between where I think I am… And the actual reality… Turns out there’s a gap… A Big, BIG GAP! My first Reaction “Oh f**k!” hysterical laughter. When I wipe my tears (50/50 laughter/dismay) I settle into my new awareness, sinking into my body and waiting, patiently. This is the moment when my ambitious, doer personality wants to come out fighting, driving things forward, the big urge to make stuff happen, take control – it will happily use up all my energy and leave me gutless, lying in a heap of exhaustion and disappointment – but the resistance to “not doing” is pulling out all the stops. Engaging with this knowingly destructible behaviour is crazily seductive. Our Hidden Personalities (yes, there we all have more than one. Yay!) each having its own well-established agenda. In this case, let’s call it Little Miss Ambitious – whose real identity is really Little Miss Scarce, tightly bound around, funnily enough, scarcity. Not enough time, not enough money, not enough energy are features with a big whallop of power and authority issues with myself. Somewhere something is attached to the belief ‘I am not enough’ and in a flurry of over-compensation, a short term vomiting of controlling activity helps numb the truth and detach from reality, a kind of spiritual bulimia. Time for an intervention… here’s how: Step 1: Acknowledge the Hidden Personality. Let it be. We know it’s somewhere between 0-7 years old, so be with it as you would a child. Step 2: Soften the edges of its keenness by paying attention – listen, watch, sense. This in itself will start to give it space to move and relax. Step 3: Sink into the energetic display and begin to move beyond the frenetic surface, go behind the scenes, deep inside the feeling, deep inside the the voice and its belief. In my case I sink into the voice ‘I must stay ahead of the curve, I must be the first, I innovate, that’s what I do, I’m an innovator’. Step 4: Get to the bones of it. What wound or memory is this voice, identity, feeling over-compensating for? What Hidden Agenda does it have? Ask… What is it that you need? For me, the ambitious innovator is being used tactically to cover up, to hide the fear ‘I am not enough’. Step 5: Sit with, alongside, what you found. Breathe. Place one hand on your heart and one on your navel. Connect your navel and heart centres and breathe. Wait, patiently… Sink inside, like a stone sinking gently though water… Exhale. Breathe. Wait until the feeling peaks and drops and settles on the bed of your ocean. So..if any of this resonates with you stick with me by subscribing here or jump over to the Moving Self podcast if you would like to join me for a 15mins kriya and 11mins meditation for the Radiant Body to help contact a sense of completeness and contentment. Here’s an excerpt from the transcript and a copy of the mantra if you want to participate in the meditation. “In Kundalini Yoga, we view ourselves as having Ten Bodies. One physical body, three mental bodies and six energetic bodies. The tenth body is called The Radiant Body and it expands 9 feet around us. Energy comes into the body through the crown chakra, goes up and down the spine picking up speed and then extends and builds up the Radiant Body. An expanded Radiant Body holds the link to Source, to the true Centre. When we embody our full Radiant Body our communication becomes impersonally personal, we are beyond comparison and competition. Our presence communicates contentment, containment, completeness and consciousness. When it is depleted we have to do everything. We make comparisons of being better than some people and worse than others. We grasp for some security other than our Being and the Infinite. Hidden Agendas are rife. We hide from our natural charisma and radiance. We reach out to find solutions or distractions rather than sink in and meet the wisdom and power of the truth. Ask yourself: Will I allow myself to be creative and courageous? Will I allow myself to be noticed as I truly am? Will I allow myself to attract whatever I want? Do I want to make commitments to strengthening my Radiant Body? Ready to meet your natural Radiance? Click here. The Ajai Alai mantra and translation: Ajai Alai – Invincible, Indestructible. Abhai Abai – Fearless, Unchanging. Abhoo Ajoo – Unformed, Unborn. Anaas Akaas – Imperishable, Etheric Aganj Abhanj – Unbreakable, Impenetrable. Alakkh Abhakkh – Unseen, Unaffected. Akaal Dy-aal – Undying, Merciful Alaykh Abhaykh – Indescribable, Uncostumed. Anaam Akaam – Nameless, Desireless. Agaah Adhaah – Unfathomable, Incorruptible. Anaathay Pramaathay – Unmastered, Destroyer. Ajonee Amonee – Beyond birth, Beyond silence. Na Rangay Na Rangay- Beyond love, Beyond color. Na Roopay Na Raykhay – Beyond form, Beyond shape. Akarmang Abharmang – Beyond karma, Beyond doubt. Aganjay Alaykhay – Unconquerable, Indescribable. BodyMind Blessings, Sally X The post Forty Days & Forty Nights ~ An Embodied Retrospective Part 1 appeared first on Sacarmi.

  Martha Graham once asked, “Haven’t you ever been in a room where someone you loved, who no longer loved you, walked in, and your heart fell to the floor?” While the act of falling can be an embodiment of psychic, as well as physical realities it doesn’t always have to involve a collapse or defeat. In fact for Martha Graham, it became a laboratory for analyzing weight and gravity, in defiance of the soaring upward thrust of ballet. Outside the world of dance few of us concern ourselves with one of the fundamental balancing forces of man. It’s just kind of there. It only enters our conscious awareness with the neurosis of aesthetics and age. From a Somatic fanatic’s life lens, falling, weight and gravity are foundational lines of inquiry, ways to observe how I feel, think, how I move and act. Exploring Gravity has helped me acknowledge the degree to which the body-mind can let go, surrender and recycle tension, life force, fluidity, fears ~ watching the substrata of life as it moves through me. But hang on a minute.. Isn’t there, like, a scientific thing happening here too? Newton dreamily watched the apples fall many, many times before he wondered why they travelled earthward instead of skyward. In the cosmos there is no “up” or “down” as we think of them, no north or south. Instead the apple falling “down” is in fact falling “inward” a gravitational pull to the centre / a centripetal force. To be more correct it means falling towards the centre of the nearest massive object. Whoa! In my anatomical body, my centre of gravity then is closest to my pelvis, just below and behind my navel, all things being pulled towards my centre. However shift my focus, to “me” in relation to the planet and I observe that I am being held to the earth (as the nearest massive object!) due to its centre – in particular its COG, it’s centre of gravity. Shift my view further out and I can examine the earth’s nearest massive object and so on. While a potentially overwhelming journey, as observer I can now connect how ‘I’ via the earth and all other stars and planets in this solar system are being organised from the centre of our solar system, the centre of gravity at the barycentre, not the sun but close to it. All eight planets, all moons, the stars and asteroids are pulling on each other. Each’s gravitational pull is pulling the other planets towards it. They are all doing this to each other and this is how the shape of our universe is sustained. So above, so below… As the observer can I return now to my human self and keep a feel for these facts. Can I embody my relationship to these facts and notice if and how that changes my thinking, feeling, moving and action.   To what extent can we make use of the ‘facts’ in our self-Embodiment Training? Exercise 1: How does your physiology, your structure, your felt experience and your sense of balance express itself when you emphasise being organised in relation to an “up” and a “down”. How does this ‘feel’ in your body / senses, your mind / thoughts, your emotional sense? Secure, heavy… Etc? ~ Shake that off and now move into the second embodiment experience relative to being part of larger forces. In this construct there is no ‘up’ and no ‘down’ instead we move into the felt experience of an “inward” centripetal force and an “outward” centrifugal force allowing us to walk and move freely on the side of the earth. Can you get a feel for your centre being supported by earth’s centre? How does this ‘feel’ in your body / senses, your mind / thoughts, your emotional sense? Consider how secure or insecure you feel, any difference in weight or dimension? Does it change the degree to which you use effort to stand or move? It occurs to me that we would be more flexible if we got a “feeling’ for the centre of things, for this gravitational pull being towards “centre” not just the perspective of “down”. We might not pound the ground so hard with our heels. We might accept the centrifugal outward (upward) thrust of the earth and balance our forces to meet it. * ever noted the upward push of the earth when stepping off a curb that was high or lower than anticipated? * So we might note here that we don’t get pulled all the way to the centre of the earth! The rock beneath our feet does not give way underneath us, nor do I lay in a heap on the ground. So what happens here at this level where my feet meet the ground and I stay standing…Is there an equal and opposite force to gravity? It wasn’t until 2003 when I started training with Judith Aston in Aston-Kinetics (then Aston-Patterning) that I heard of – ground reaction force (GRF). When my most weight bearing aspect meets the ground, the ground does not give way underneath me and therefore an “equal and opposite reaction” takes place ~ Ground Reaction Force (GRF) – if you like a recycling of energy. Together gravity and GRF act upon objects deflecting their forces through the objects own angles and opposition of forces at play within it. This is where it’s easier to see the futility of fixing your posture as you go about your life! Your body’s relationship to itself and to the balancing forces acting through it, your body’s relationship to the planet, to other people and daily tasks creates a dynamic moving equilibrium enabling us to sustain a perpendicular life. Forget holding your body in a certain shape or posture and fixing it as “good” or “bad” but instead can you allow a responsive posture, to emerge out of this ongoing negotiation of ‘balance’ moment to moment. Your dynamic equilibrium is constantly being organised moment to moment by your differing aspects staying well-proportioned and relative to each other. Sounds complicated… So take a moment to breath here. How can we use all these things to our own advantage? If we consider ourselves as the object and we practice aligning our centre with these forces, we experience the ease and lightness of balance, inhibiting less, allowing, receiving, trusting and listening more. To make the unconscious conscious, we can study gravity and GRF  as it moves through us ~ join me in this month’s podcast to explore doing just that. To develop sufficient body communication skills yields a relationship with your body that, like learning a new language, can open unexpected doors of perception and possibility. Among these, a sense of freedom, a lightness of your body, a lift of attitude and change of thought patterns and self-image. As an example of the benefits of honing in on the counterbalancing of forces are the simple results of a more direct weight bearing through your skeletal system. Muscles, which are often constricted because they are called upon erroneously for structural support, are set free for responsiveness, for action, for expression. The result is less compression of joints and muscles. Learning how to use Gravity and GRF can serve as a lift–both physically and psychologically, releasing bodyweight into a more solid, connected relationship with the ground and a friendlier relationship with gravity. There is an accompanying podcast to this blog. To receive my monthly “The Moving Self Podcast” you can SUBSCRIBE here. This month we explore gravity as a way to establish where we are in relation to our source of life, identifying how open or defensive our system currently is and what signs to look out for in your  own body. We will also introduce ground reaction force and its perpetual dance with gravity to energise you throughout the day. Sally   The post Adventures in Gravity appeared first on Sacarmi.