Thinking and Feeling about Death

 While we are alive, live. 

Grand advice, and our work is about 

"more life" 

for ourselves and others, isn't it?

In the Feldenkrais work, the group lessons especially,
you move in a pattern,
you slow down and wake up to yourself
and discover things about yourself
and your patten
and your possibilities in new patterns,
and then
you
REST.

This is like a little death in a way:
a death to the rush ahead,
a death to the "try, try, try"
a death to the "crank it out" schools
of living
or of physical exercise.

The goal isn't to wear ourselves out
it is to wake ourselves up,
to learn
and then give the brain (you)
a chance to integrate.

We go to sleep at night.
Death to the day,
and a chance to slow down, stop thinking,
let go of bodily tension,
stop striving,
give up identification with all the
"I am this" and "I do that" verbal categories by which
we label and limit ourselves.


We die to that.
With good breathing, and maybe some Feldie-ish moves before we
go to sleep
or some nice sex
or a good book
we drift into a recharge zone.
We wake up the next day,
as if reborn.

In Friday's http://slowsonom.com blog
with it's cleverish title: Taxes are taxing, death is relaxing, love is everylasting,
I explored around this idea,
the Sufi idea,
and I think all the mystics really,
this idea of "die before you die."

Think about the "death" at night:
no thoughts,
no "I am the person who is ...." so many years old, owns this,
is related to that, works at this, is successful or unsuccessful at this
and at that.

A sort of emptiness.

Now, death as an activity in life has, to my mind,
one huge disadvantage over many other activities:
it is not reversible.
So you can't try out a left leaning death
and a right leaning death
and a breathing in death
and a breathing out death
and an indoor death
and an outdoor death
and a death by water
a death alone
a death in a crowd
and so on.

Little room to play.

Oh, well.

The advantage seems to be that it is a big sleep:
and end
to
all the identifications by which
we tie down
and limit and
define ourselves as so much less than we really are:
they are gone.

And then again
we can do all that by
meditating
by being present
by doing movement lessons
by joining our awareness to now in nature
by love of another, or our work, or some sweet activity
like dancing or swimming or making love

So, here's a funny place I've come to:
one way to "die before we die"
is to live fully in activities that bring us so much
joy
and require enough attention
and even better create opportunites to play
into new areas we didn't even know we could explore
that we
"die" to all the nonsense that makes life such a drag

Here we are back to the old Buddhist thing:
suffering.

I don't want to explore that much,
now,
except to point out the obvious,
for those who have done the Work of Byron Katie,
almost all suffering that doesn't involve physical pain,
is about our story about reality.

Her (Katie's) question number four
is an ongoing invitation to test out what life
would be like if we just let the story die.

So death of the story is a way out
of suffering.

And deeply immersing ourselves in life
is a way of dying
to the junk with which we often clog our lives.

And I don't think "being busy"
is the same as deeply immersing ourselves in life,
unless we can be busy and present
at the same time.

As I could have been while typing/ thinking this up.
And wasn't much.

However, immersed in the flow of ideas,
I certainly wasn't suffering,
it's just that another layer/ dimension/ gift
would have been had by following my breathing
and sensing my skeleton, spine, arms, fingers, feet on the
floor,
as I went along.

And then again:
returning to the now
of doing that now
and I'm free,
even freer of anything that would be/ could be called suffering.

So death:
a one way street
that comes to us all.

Nothing to get too tweaked about,
if we like falling asleep at night,
unless we have a story about:
"how it's supposed to be."

And Lord, oh Lord,
don't we have lots of stories about "how death should be."

Basically:
it's okay if you are old
and aren't in too much pain
and have lots of loved ones around,
and all the other kinds
are bad/ wrong/ unfair
and so on.

This seems a story worth examining on
any death,
even a death of a relationship,
which seems, almost always at least to one of the people,
to be
"at the wrong time."

So, life goes on for the living.
For the dead, we don't know.

We can think of the dead
and feel badly if we want,
though I'm almost certain if they had a say
they'd want us to be loving life as much as possible,
cherishing every moment.

Back to where we started:
the Feldie world
and the importance of rests
between actions,
the importance of as little as possible,
the importance of something like a death
to our old patterns,
or at least this:
a death to our being stuck in just that one pattern
that isn't working so well.

It's about expansion.

One of the wonderful things Anat brings to this work
is the idea of
emotions as actions,
and in that we can create variation:

feeling bad?

okay: how long do you want to feel bad?
how big?
where is you is the sensation?
can you make parts of that sensation more?
parts less?

can you feel that feeling and add on another?
(she doesn't say that, I do,
I've found huge breakthroughs can be made
by
allowing and sensing a "bad feeling"
say
and adding
on feeling happy as well
and adding on:
sensing our fives lines
and following our breathing

so now the "bad feeling"
(like a shoulder pain,
for which this could work, too)
is a subset of a huge and miraculous deal:
we are alive,
with awareness
and choice )

alright:
buy my book if you want daily experimentation
with ideas and paths to newness

or don't buy it
and go through this day
with a joyous
and curious
and amazed attitude
to how much joy and learning
and awareness
the fact of death
and the story of death
and the thrill of "dying before you die"
can bring to you

good luck
good awakening
happiness and usefulness to you and your day

ciao
Chris