what would your mother say, if she were dead and you were grieving?

so hi,

and hey,

someone has to ask the question,
right,
about the grieving thing
which is
"normal"
and if you don't do it "enough"
all sorts of bad stuff is supposed to happen
and besides
everyone will think you're a creep

and God knows, the purpose of life
is to avoid other people's bad opinions

but,
let's ask the dead Mom's
what they would want

and guess what,
this has not been tested or approved by the FDA

so:
hey Mom,
you're dead,
and my question is:

how much should I grieve

and here's the answer I here:

"As much as you want,
but from the dead side
of things,
you really see how amazing
the life side of things
is,
and don't grieve so much
you forget
even for a second
how amazingly lucky
YOU are
to be in the life boat,
the ship of the living,
RIGHT NOW

so stay present while you grieve
and immensely grateful to be alive

and if you want to feel grateful
to me
go ahead,
that's good for you

but why cry about gratitude
I loved loving you

and if you want to keep loving
me,
go ahead,
that's good for you,

but why cry because we can't hug
or talk

just send me love
all the love you want

it's the best you can
do and
loving yourself
for doing the best you can do

is what I want for you

and the yucky sobering part of
grieving
the part where you have these
chilly realizations that you
could have loved me more

hey, forgive yourself,
i could have loved you more,
too,
and it's just the reminder that's important:

love people while they are alive
call them
up
write them,
have their memorial six months BEFORE
they die
not two weeks after

just learn from what you weren't perfect
in
me,
I wasn't perfect either

forgive me
in case some of your grieving is convoluted
anger that I wasn't better

i was perfect
you weren't perfect

that's perfect

send me all the love you
want
and then
quit grieving
and go out and love so living
people better
and better each day

and here's a hint:
you're a living people

so love yourself better each
day
too

good,
love
Mom

prayer to enlightened and ecological abundance

life has many ways
to delight us
and allow
help
goad
encourage us
to be
"Who we really are"

that magnificent Self
inside all the conditioning

One way out of the little
self
is love

and that's a big story
and path of being present
to the other person
or yourself
without the
"Story"/ thought/ judgment
that always brings unhappiness

A second way out
is prayer:
some sort of chat,
talk,
plea
demand,
thanks,
song,
dance
to the Divine, Spirit,
God, whatever

down below is a little prayer of
affirmation for the goodness of life,
a modification of something from the Abundance
Book by John Reynolds Price


and then,
but now now,
nor ever really on the computer,
except to point toward it
and hint you
go down to the river,
or out to the garden,
or under the stars
and find "it" yourself,
the third and great "escape"
back into "who we really are"
is to be
in silence
emptiness
stillness

the empty taking to, listening to,
basking in the vast Void/ Immensity
of "it all," The Universe,
God, call it what you will,
but it has no name,
right,
it's the word less ......
underneath
around
behind
....
"it all"

Anyway,
here's the little lover prayer to the possibility
of how wonderful we are and how wonderful life is:

My inner supply
instantly and constantly
takes on experience, form
& mysterious delight

according to my deep and real needs
and desires

And,
as the Principle of Supply in action,
life is sending my way constantly
and easily
fulfillment, delight, bliss &
opportunities of love, awaken &
serve

This service is of ease, delight and learning
for me
and those around me
in each and every
delightful and awakened
moment

Good
Happy prayer,
and some say always pray
and always start your prayer with thanks
(Paul, Ephysians 4)

ankles and wrists: a movement lesson of the most simple sort

one of the sweetest paths
to now
is
to move slowly
and with attention
variation
curiosity
and a desire to "feel what we
feel like
in the moment"

this is a game for parents of special needs
children
or anyone with an ankle "glitch"

it's pretty easy,
and if you play with it
slowly enough
deeply satisfying "just"
as a game of learning

say you have a "touchy" ankle.
Let's say it's your right ankle.
Then the game will start with left ankle
and right hand.

If the "touchy" ankle is your left
ankle,
swap things around.

So: sit at a table
and place both feet flat on the floor,
and start with the non-touchy ankle and the opposite
hand.
the hands are on the table.
feet on the floor.

start with the right hand and the left foot,
and gently press the little toe side of the foot
into the floor
and the little finger side of the hand
into the table
then release

go slowly enough a number of times
each time follow something more
your breathing
the bones of your hand
the feel of your wrists and ankle
the bones of your feet
your knee
your elbow
your breathing

make it a nice little meditation

then rest

now the other side:
thumb
and big toe, again right hand and left foot
for "touchy" right ankle.
press, release, sense, listen, learn

rest

Now front of the hand, to wit, press the fingers into the table
and the toes
and release.
Go slow
this is more advanced than we usually would notice
shoulders
hips
back
pelvis
lots comes in
to
this
go slowly many times
aiming for enjoyment pleasure and learning each time

try the difference eyes open
vs closed vs one eye open

try slightly rounding your back
slightly arching

notice your breathing

rest

and then, of course: heel
of hand and heel of foot

rest

now if you feel up to playing the opposites:
go for thumb and little toe
and little finger and big toe
toes and hand heel
foot heel and hand fingers

but only if curiosity and time
and ease of mindful movement call to you

now
stand and walk around a bit,
noticing what all this diagonal work
hath wrought

maybe even lie down
a bit
and enjoy the differences

then go to "touchy"ankle
and the other hand
and do all the above
except:
A LOT LESS
A LOT GENTLER
IF ANY PAIN ONLY IMAGINE THE MOVEMENT

slow and gentle and aware
pay huge dividends

try it
meditate through it
enjoy it
learn and improve

this is you
on awareness
a nice place to live
from

and/ or
a nice place from which
to live

Good.

For a batch more movement lessons:

click the label below,

on in the cloud at the right which says there are 90 some lessons,

or,

what the heck

just click this: Movement Lessons

subset of Monday post at special needs children blog, a movement lesson/ demo

On Monday's I post at http://specialneedschildren-chriselms.blogspot.com

here's a movement lesson subset, just to keep building the repertoire of them
on this blog


see Movement Lessons in this blog, for the whole gamut

okay, here's the lesson:


back away from the computer a bit and lift both your right and
left arm one at a time
from your knee, forward and up in front of you

go slowly and notice the difference

pick the arm that is easiest
and
lift in again up and forward again
8 times

2 times rocking forward on your pelvis as you lift

2 lifts pushing out your belly and smiling and releasing your belly
as you lift

2 times feeling the ribs on that side as you life

and 2 time actually looking down with your head and pushing out your belly
while you lift

then sit quietly

sense both sides

then lift both arms

feel the difference

and
be happy and excited for yourself and your child
if you have one

you have not been fixed

one side has a lot more connection of
you to you to brain to you to you
than the other

doesn't learning feel great?

alright
short and sweet

happy Monday

Further Eating Thoughts, Slow in the Making/ Tasting

One of the great strength's of the Feldenkrais Method
and
the
Anat Baniel Method
is their love of
discovery....

discovery for the teacher,
discovery for the client

We, as practitioners, don't know where the lesson is going
to go,
we have an idea, and we change, explore,
discover what routes might work,
are working that day,
say something to us
and the clinet

We as clients,
know we can learn,
can discover new options is moving
and sensing and
understanding life, awareness
and well being

Good

And we make some soup.

And we taste it.

Or a smoothie,
if you do like I do: carrots, soaked pumpkin seeds, seed potato,
and a little ginger

and then you sit down
or exercise and then sit down, as is my habit,
about 5 minutes of gentle this and that,
sit down
slow down
and taste

and it's not quite right
oh, well
taste again

what might improve the lot

a bit of salt and some red cabbage
(choices, of necessity, limited by stock on hand,
as in a lesson, where we move next limited by
what we already know, can move easily, and
so on(

add some stuff
mix or cook it up

taste
slow down, sit down, mini meal, eyes closed
following the breathing taste

how we doing?

better

and what else

what does it need

some strength

a little buffalo liver
a little tumeric

try it

we can fail
failing is another name for learning

mix or cook it up
sit
taste

good,
really good

and it could be better
with butter
or olive oil
both on hand

and ask the stomach,
and the time of day,
do we all of us
want it better the yum rich high
quality fat way
just now

no

some days that is what we can add

today,
it's fine to stop at pretty great

so we've tasted our way
to a better and better
soup/ smoothie
and listened to ourselves

and used cooking and learning
and creating
and nourishing ourselves as all part of
a whole


see how much more interesting this is than calorie counting?

crazy happy wonderful

this morning I'm off to Austin
to set up a winter practice
in the Anat Baniel Method
and the
Feldenkrais Method

I've reached 200 days of training with Anat post
Feldenkrais training and I'd recommend her
to any practitioner who really wants to dive in
and upgrade their own inner connections
and their
skills

in Austin I plan to work with special needs children
high performing musicians
those recovering from brain injury
and any one "getting up there" in age
who wants to feel happier in mind, body and soul

also,
I look forward to those who want to be happier
in soil

good food is
such a treat
in this short and endless (if present, or
at least timeless)
life

if you know someone in Austin
I'd like to met,
or vice versa,
let me know

email link:
chriselms@vom.com

Anti-aging, a beginning discussion, with some personal history stuff

Anti-Aging: What the heck?

What is “aging?”

Obviously, the calendar year keeps moving along and we can only say we are so many “years old,” and this number keeps growing. Fine, but while that happens is it necessary….

• to become more restricted and “creaky” in our body?

• to increase accidents and illnesses?

• to cut ourselves off from new ideas and activities?

• to live in something like a “rut” of established patterns of what we do, who we
associate with, and worst of all, the “thoughts” in our mind?

• to become more limited in our vocal range?

• to no longer skip, hop, jump or run?

• to have habits so deep we don’t even know they are habits?

• to be annoyed by and shy of the “new?”

• in general to narrow the range of movement and thought and feeling and activity to a tight and unchanging range?


The answer is obviously no. No we don’t have to narrow in. No we don’t have to get creaky.

But, even among people who are excited by the new in ideas and the arts, there is often the idea of the body getting more and more “clunky,” if not worse, unless one is willing to engage in endless and strenuous exercise and discipline.

This, luckily, is not so.

I’m a fairly good case study for this. Here’s me, at the top of the page, at 63, doing what I couldn’t at 43. In fact at 43, I could not walk down a wooded hillside where my son and I were camping without his help. My knees were hurting and not functioning that much.

One knee is still in pain in certain positions, but I can do stuff I wouldn’t have imagined back in the wee young days of my forties.

Changing my diet helped.

Doing tai chi helped.

Discovering again Feldenkrais in my 50’s made the huge difference, though. I had gone to Feldenkrais group movement classes in my 30’s and 40’s, often to great benefit, but by my 50’s, “good enough,” as a sort of steady undoing seemed my lot. I was active, even spending a few hours a day creating the 3 acre public garden that became the Sonoma Garden Park, but when I started up yoga in my 50’s, I kept it up as an exercise in doing something I was “bad” at. Lots of pain. Not much gain.

Then, one weekend, I attended a workshop with my yoga teacher girlfriend, where we did 3 movement lessons a day for two days in a row. The girlfriend, who could do almost anything “movement-wise,” felt as if her whole brain had shifted and woken up. I felt, hurrah!, as if I were ten years old again.

Needless to say, when I discovered this weekend was a lead in to a 4 year training to become a Practitioner in the Feldenkrais Method®, I signed up. I discovered things about movement and learning and neck and eyes and ribs and pelvis and knees, yes knees, and feet that I hadn’t even known I’d been craving to relearn. I keep going to what seemed like the source of anti-aging, and though the process was far more complicated than any I’d ever encountered, the joy and delight in how I felt, the enjoyment in learning “thinking” again at a non-verbal level, the delight in so much time spent with other people, all of us present and attentive to ourselves in the moment, was wonderful. Also re-activated was my general enthusiasm to try the “unthinkable,” like running for city council in Sonoma.

Five years later, still hungry to learn, I enrolled in another 4 year program, this time with Anat Baniel. And guess who joined me? The son who’d had to help me down the hill. Anat is an amazing teacher, who some think has taken this work to a new level.
Whatever, this kept my “youth-ing” going, and in my sixties I came to abandoning my Sonoma life and taking an adventure around the country where I lived in Tucson, Arcata, Atlanta, and western Colorado (Gunnison), as well as Orcas Island, while meeting people, practicing my work (this Feldie/ Anat Baniel work, and the Work of Byron Katie, plus coaching in being present and in forgiveness.)


Alright, enough about me.

How could this help you? Whatever age you are, whether you feel like the idea of “anti-aging” and vitality or not, these two methods, Feldenkrais and Anat Baniel can help all of us in all these ways, and more:

• By giving us, over and over, gentle and learnable nonverbal problems to solve (thus skipping all the mental humdrum we’ve accumulated at any age), we reactivate our brains to the learning mode.

• By creating “problems” and helping us discover not one, but a whole range of “solutions,” we begin to learn again about the joy of learning and it’s centrality to our well being.

• By working in the range of ease, and less effort (babies have very little muscle), and slowly, and with attention, we start to re-experience life at the level when we were all pretty much a genius: when as a baby, we went from blob, to rolling over, and sitting, and GI Joe lizard crawling and “normal” crawling, and walking and talking. All actions of immense complexity, that we learned by making lots of “mistakes,” which just means going down pathways were the learning is “this doesn’t work.” This is sweet territory to which to return.

• By creating movement patterns, in movement lessons, where DISCOVERY is everything and “Doing it Right,” is learned to be a dead end, we tap into the learner/ explorer/ discovered in us every night when we dream those crazy dreams.

• By the emphasis on staying with pleasure in our learning, and the pattern of doing something many times, but each time with pleasure and awareness in a different part of ourselves, we activate the joy in life that is our birthright

• By acting and resting and acting and resting over and over in an atmosphere of presence and ease, we come to another aspect of our “real selves,” the one who lives and thrives in the present.

• Learning is fun. Moving in new ways is fun. Fun breeds fun, and in an atmosphere of exploring and discovering and being present, we heighten our sense of fun as something easy and available, not an activity when we use a lot of substances and blow off a lot of steam.

• The process of learning and learning and learning retunes us to a life of vitality, and we somehow rediscover patterns of movement that are easy and pleasurable, patterns of thinking that are easy and pleasurable, and if we are lucky, even patterns of feeling that are easy and pleasurable. And then we are a bit ruined to the falling apart and creaky world of normal “aging,” and find ourselves in the world of learning, and being present and vitality and “anti-aging.”


Good.

spine and rotation, easy, fun, learning

Rotation, not standing, but oh well

Playing in our spine

Stop somewhere and stand. Stand on your own two feet and feel what that is like. What one foot feels like, and the other, and both of them, and the toes and the ankles.

Breathe.

Begin to ever so slowly turn yourself to the left and then back to the middle. Notice whether you started at the feet, or hips, or shoulders, or head or eyes.

Turn again, starting ever so gently from the head and neck. turn to the left and then back to the center several times, as if a little dance. Now add on some shifting in your weight and bringing your pelvis into the turn. Left and back. Left and back.

Rest.

See if that woke up something in you.

Now put one hand on the center of your chest and one hand low on your belly and turn a bit to the left, Keep your head facing whatever direction this is, and begin figuring out how to gently and easily move your belly one way and your chest the other. Feel the twist, the gentle, enjoyable twist in your spine. Feel good.

Rest. Notice how you feel.

Hands as above, turn to the left, and back to the middle, feeling what it is like to start with the belly, start with the chest, start with the head. Play, turn, enjoy. Rest.

Hands as above. Turn to the left. Stop. Let your eyes go more left and back as your head goes the opposite way. Do this very slowly. Enjoy this.

Throughout the day play with head and eyes and chest and pelvis in turning. Make standing around a meditation in movement today.

As part of the game, experiment with hips one way, chest the other and head the same way as the hips. Make it easy, pleasurable and turn to the right later in the day.

Sense your spine all day and give it movement it likes.

Hopping in at least two ways, side hopping

Hopping and paying attention.

Yes, yes. This is “movement” again, and again, this is the simplest and quickest way to activate real thinking, rather than our usual verbose roundabout not-really thinking “thinking.”

Stand some nice place. Hop your legs wide and back together. Many times.

Rest.

Slowly, combine this hopping with having your arms go out when your legs go to the side and arms back in when your legs come together. Not as many as the usual “many times.”

Rest.

Now, go slowly and figure this out: do the opposite with your arms: when your legs go out, your arms come to your side, when your legs come back together, your arms go out.

Take it easy.

Start over.

Breathe. Get an ease to this.

Let your attention and awareness get more clear.

Rest.

Now try the thinking/ awaring version, like this: as you hop your legs out, have your arms at your side. As you hop your legs back together, let your arms go to the straight out, outside position. So, this is like a reverse jumping jack, feet out, arms in, and then: feet in, arms out.

Go slow.

Catch yourself and smile when you get confused and go back to the “normal” way.

Rest.

Then do it the “normal” way on purpose.

Rest.

And the backwards way, and see if you can do two or three of one way and two or three of the other without stopping completely in between.

Have some fun. Sense your five lines all the rest of today.

Sitting twisting

try this

sit at the front edge of a chair , bench, rock or log

put one elbow near a knee,
and with the hand of that arm,
cup the side of your face

put the other hand behind your head,
elbow toward the sky

do two games:

pelvis in circles


up elbow in circles


let these circles talk to each other