How now can fear be?

it curls up around us
as if it owns us
a snake
a big wrap around
and squeeze the life out of
you snake

not the happy type
climbing into trees
and coaxing Eve on:
go on
go on
try something new
set the whole adventure in motion

So what if God gets pissed
that's a story in the Bible
God doesn't get pissed
She's chuckling ever second
at the amusing glory and silliness
and tragedy and glory
of love
love everywhere and every how

but wait a minute,
back to the fear snake
squoozing us
and making us feel like
we can't move on

well, hell
stand up
walk around
sense the ground

maybe we can move after all

go outside
touch the ground
reach up for the sky
feel, hey we can move
and it's an up and down
and amazing world

and then let the fear thought
come out
right on out
and write it out

three times:
slow and serious like you "mean" it
fast and frivolous, it's just words
and then you pick, some third way

realize these is just words

look at them like they run you:
sense how that feels

look at them like you wrote them
and they're an opinion
you don't have to believe

sense how that feels

play back and forth:
I believe in the power of the fear statement

I don't believe in it

write the opposite, see if that could be as true

write a tangent

write a dream

write five things you are grateful for

go back outside and skip walk dance a bit

it's you,
alive

that fear is just a game your mind and heart
habit
are trying to trap you in

it's you doing it
you can stop

AND
have a bunch of fun at the same time

good

Mini Cure for Depression

the depression
thing:

ah,
we can weave ourselves
down and under,
de
press
ourselves

the Work of Byron Katie
I'm doing at SlowSonoma.com
and 108 Days: Undoing with Love

is one way out
of this trap

another
is to just get to now

and especially
the now
of being in our bodies
and learning
to be happier
smarter
and more at ease
in there:

like this
mini lesson:


notice pelvis

turn head left
right

pick one
way

turn half way that way,

move eyes left and right

close eyes
imagine fixed ahead eyes
and turn head right and left from half way L or R,
whatever you picked.

come to middle
breathe

go halfway again
close eye,
rock
R and L on pelvis

stop, open eyes and turn head fully
that way:

notice improvement in ease and range

and if you had depression where would it go
while putting attention on
some many real
and tangible parts of our functioning
and learning
Selves?

following the movement of life

a little longer essay
at SlowSonoma.com
that includes this:

quote
is one of many brilliant quotes
that could be "shared" from ,
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's
New Translation of War and Peace

it's from a dream
Pierre, a central character,
who starts the book as a befudled
and "absent minded and ridiculous man,"
and ends the book, still a bit absent minded and
ridiculous, but full of wisdom

in the dream
a voice speaks to him
and says:

" ' Life is everything.
Life is God.
Everything shifts and moves, and this movement is God.
And while there is life, there is delight
in the self-awareness of the divinity.
To love life is to love God.
The hardest and most blessed thing is to love this life
in one's suffering, in the guiltlessness of suffering.' "

Page 1064.
you've been through a lot
by the time you get there.
Pierre is suffering
and growing hugely
when he has this dream.

Hint, for Pierre,
though not for everyone,
the book has a "happy ending."

Thinking and Non-Thinking and amazing Video to watch

THINKING AND Non-Thinking
AND:
WHAT MAKES A GOOD LIFE?

On a recent posting at a forum for Feldenkrais practitioners, someone presented a link to a rather amazing U tube video. At first you don't know what the hell is happening: this person is kind of buzzing around and doing "weird" things, touching this, waving her hands through water, flapping of hands, touching things with her face, tasting things, smelling, rocking back and forth, scrapping this and that, creating sounds and rhythms and patterns.

Kind of like the things those of us who used to get stoned found infinitely amusing. To watch water whirling in a sink, or a leaf blowing in the wind, a cloud floating by, a traffic light change, to make a little sound of this rubbing against that, and of course: music in bright and full brilliance.

Okay, the world of immediate experience.

Cool, and sweet, the world behind and before "thoughts," if thoughts are defined as "thinking," which is a tenuous proposition, to say the least.

Then the person, silentmiaow, has a narration of typed and spoken (maybe a machine is doing the "talking") words that explain that she (I think she's a she) has her own way of thinking and in her world, letting herself interact fully with the world physically in an immediate and non-socialized way is a kind of thinking.

And she's quite pissed at being categorized as a non-person because she won't get with talking language. She thinks people should learn her language and much as she should learn theirs.

That makes sense to me.

The language of being a baby, or being stoned, or being "autistic," or being "in a trance," or being "primitive," or being a "mystic," is a quiet language, a here and now language deeper than and free of words, a far more powerful language than the yapping kind. Ask anyone who's had good sex, and a nice dance or ski run.

This is one of the wonders of a good Feldenkrais lesson: people come back to their senses, they follow real movement and real sensation in the real moment.

However when silentmiaow calls her activities "thinking," I'm not so sure. Exploration, yes. Satisfying interaction with reality, yet. But "thinking," maybe not.

And, and, and this is important: what most people call "thinking," is not thinking either. Words are not thoughts. They are symbols that can hold and point to thoughts and usually don't.

Observe most cell-phone or regular phone conversations, or party conversations, or, if we are honest: most conversations: blowing of chatter from one void to the other. Gurdjieff compares talking to the shit of the top brain, where breathing out is poop for the middle level and the real poop is the exhaling of the body level.

Or, if we observe our mental chatter in meditation, or while driving a car (if we don’t' drown it out with the radio and music) or even taking a walk in nature: blah, blah, blah. And no real thinking going on.

One of the reasons I left, many years ago, the therapist crowd in Berkeley to join the building crowd and then the landscaping crowd, is that if you build a deck, you can see you've done something, same with a garden. So much of "therapy" back then, before Jay Haley came along, and then Byron Katie, was just getting words to pretend that they were understanding, and they weren't.

Of course, in a good Feldenkrais lesson, you under stand how to stand better at the end, and the understanding is not verbal and the lesson may well have had nothing to do with standing, and yet something in you has "learned" something.

Does thinking have to do with learning?

Is thinking for helping facilitate learning?

Is learning the result of good thinking?

Is thinking promoted by having something to learn?

For example: you want to stop eating ice cream, but you crave it. Could thinking be something like noticing that ice cream is fat plus sweet and what healthy ways could you make that for yourself.

Eggadds, is "resistance" coming up at the thought of doing something other than a habit we say we want to stop?

Ah, so thinking and learning may well have something to do with going out of old territory, getting out of the ruts, leaving the compulsive patterns behind.

This is a good start for today. Too many words and we'll think we have the answer, when the question seems sweet to me: what is really thinking?

Oh, and back to silentmiaow: to me a life in an apartment and with no connection to nature, doesn't seem worth living, whether as a "talking" person who yammers on the phone and watches TV all day, or an "autistic" person, who waves ribbons around all day.

What I want to know is:

How could this life be bigger and more full?

That seems an important question to me, once she gets over the furor at non-thinking people passing themselves off as thinking people, and wasting their time judging her. She wastes her time judging them. And around the game goes.

Time for The Work, anyone?

Ciao for now:

Chris