The Passion Project

How would you like this in your relationships:


Presence, Purpose, Play, Passion

Awareness, Attention, "Anti-Aging"

Sensitivity, Sensuality

Silly, Serious, Sexy

Intimacy, Integrity, Identity

Oneness, Organic, Orgasmic

Nature-connection, Nurturing, Now-ing



Notice, now, who and how you are right love.

That's the beginning and the middle and the continuation of love.

Now.

Presence starts the list

Now-ing ends it.

Come visit for a free first hour session with your sweetheart to see how delicious the now can make even the most wonderful relationship


Chris

10 Steps to Happiness

Want to be happier?

Let’s play with some ways this could happen, and let me start out saying that happiness is a byproduct of being present and engaged and loving in your life. It’s not something you chase, it’s a barometer that tells you that you are living right.

Okay, let’s play.

One: Do something wrong. If you do tai chi, do some of the moves wrong. If you always button your shirt from top to bottom, go the other way. If you always come late, come early. If you always come early, come late. ( Once. See if the world crumbles)

This came from giving a Toastmasters talk on happiness where I offered 5 ways of being happy. The Sacred Rule in Toastmasters is to always present 3 things. So I presented five and by doing that demonstrated the first step.

Here, I don’t know how many steps I’m going to give which leads me to

Two: Living in “I don’t know.”

Sometimes a very fun thing to do when answering a question is to answer, “Well, there are three/ four/ five aspects to the answer.” Not knowing what they are. And then wing it and fill in.

Goals are sweet and nice and good for your character and all that, and a central trait to all happy people is the ability to let a new goal emerge from the present, a surprising and interesting path that hadn’t occurred to them until just then.

And when people ask you a question, or you are telling yourself you should have it all figured out, Hang out in “I don’t know.”

Three:

Be present.

If you don’t know what’s coming next, or what you are going to say next, or do next, you do know what’s NOW.

Experience that.

As sensation.

As feeling.

As noticing your body shape, where are your arms and legs and spine.

As noticing what images are coming in your eyes.

As noticing what sound is coming in your ears.

As noticing where your breath is, coming in or out, or in a pause.

This you can always know. For certain.

Your own experience of the famous NOW.

Four: Be grateful

Tell someone some things you are grateful for, especially about them.

Five:

Be grateful for stuff you thought was really really bad news.

Recently , the wonderful woman who was my girlfriend and lover, and is my girlfriend and lover, decided to call it quits. Instantly and with no discussion.

This was supposedly a disaster.

Except that it threw me back on loving and enjoying myself, and discovering even more deeply the secrets of happiness. ( The toastmasters talk, was before we got back together)

And when we got back together, I was grateful for the way it went down, and our time apart and our getting together at a newer and higher level.

Six:

Be wrong.

There’s a good saying: “ You can be right, or you can be happy.”

We, this lover and girlfriend and I, got back together by having an almost enlightenment moment, when we got together after 57 days apart to slug it out. I realized instantly and she soon after, that there was no problem. That all our stories about how the other had been wrong were not worth getting into.

That was over. We were in the same room. The love was still there. We were wrong about the other having been wrong.

We were free.

From freedom love can flow easily.

Seven: Let it go.

That was what we did, though not systematically.

There is a deep and thorough way of letting things go, called the Work of ByronKatie.

And there’s a kind of Byron Katie lite method called the Sedona process.

Pick up a pencil. Grasp it tightly. Okay, you’re holding on.

Now loosen a little and let it roll around in your fingers. No you aren’t so stuck.

Now open your hand and what happens? It drops.

You’ve let it go.

Good.

Take some story about how someone else was wrong, or there is something wrong with you and ask these three questions:

Could I let this go?

Would I let this go?

When?

There are no right answers and usually yes, yes and now will get the story dropped.

Try it.

Now.

Eight: Laugh.

On purpose.

For ten minutes.

Just start laughing and keep it up.

You may feel foolish.

Good.

Nine:

Be silly.

Move around for ten or twenty minutes in silly, wrong, new, interesting, being present ways.

Or longer.

Eyes closed.

Goof and notice and enjoy and discover.

This is a hidden two part suggestion: Be silly. Move more.

Ten:

Be curious.

What four more suggestions could you add to this list?

What four more could I?

( I’ll go mine in private. You are welcome to write yours in as comments.

Cheers,

Chris.

if love

if love is our subject to
day
what to say

except the obvious
actually
love is the bloodstream of the universe
or something like that

and let's be more silly slash direct
love
is who we is
when we let go
of the need to be who
we aren't

(which was imposed on us by
the frightened beaten down
ones who had forgotten that they
were love
and wanted rules and regulations
to make the world safe
for the dullness and pain
of the love
less life

and that's what's called an aside)

back to love
is
who we
are
when we aren't who we
aren't

our essence
the flow flood frolic that dances
all the time in us
and comes out in
smiles
and dance
and giggles
and sweet touch
and happy slurp
and cheerful chirp
of bird man woman bee
or flower

for surely the petals
in the sun
blazing in all their easy might
are but a shimmering
ray
of the universe of
love

or
something like that


ciao
for
NOW

chris


ps, if you want more waterfalls and creeks
and wild geese in this poem,
please feel free to go back
and insert
anything and everything
that you love
in this ocean
bathtub
meadow
merry mishmash
of words
beneath which love
can lurk
wishes to lurk
probably is lurking

or
larking
(or giggling)

Cheng Man Ching's short/ shot form of Tai Chi, the half roots of me Feldenkrais/ Anat Baniel heritage

Cheng Man Ching
decided that he didn't want to do the "long" form, so he invented the
short form

Through some charming mistake somewhere along the way
this is called the "shot form."

Oh, well. If we watch this for a bit
(and in this day or Internet rush, rush, do we actually
have 7:41 minutes?
But surely we can hang in there for 3:33,
so let's see what we can see....
Be back in 3:33 (notice the simple minded rhyme scheme
creeping up on us.
Good, eh?)

Well, actually, he moves a bit fast for my taste,
kind of like I do on days I want to "get the form over."

However, he wasn't rushing, more like moving
seamlessly from one pose to the next
with no
"look at me, I'm here now"
feeling.

His weight shifted slowly and completely
like sand going from one foot to the other.

His hands seemed to float,
and knowing what I do of the form as taught
by his pupils, I'll guess that he had a great deal of
attention
in his hands

and feet

and spine

and feeling of soft arms

and knowing exactly where and how
his feet where.


Have you ever noticed that tai chi is a lot like walking,
weight on one foot and then weight on the next.

Unlike walking, but like some of the work we do in the Feldy/ Anat worlds,
his arms don't have a stable pattern vis a vis his legs.
In walking left leg forward pairs up with right arm forward.

In tai chi, many of the moves are like that:
in the punch (here right handed), the right fist is forward and the left foot

in brush knee, left foot and right hand and then right foot and left hand

However, many are right right and left left

the single whip is such a move

the kicks, which come later


and fair lady shuttles, again later, has same foot and same hand forward


early in the form here, the beginning,
pat the birds tail, or whatever it's called,
way at the start, coming to the front with the left foot and the left hand,


but hey:
don't watch him, too much,
don't listen to me


experiment on various moves that you make going more
or less perpendicular to the last direction,
change the weight of your feet,
and sometimes bring forward the opposite hand
of the foot forward


and sometimes the left left kind of pairing


it's pretty sweet


one, a tennis forehand
the other, the tennis backhand


...



And so it goes;
you/ one/ I could do worse than imitate Cheng Man Ching
for 30 seconds at a time, seeing if we can learn/ relearn the form,
bit by bit


(when I teach the form, I'll teach both ways, so everything can be done
equally to both sides,
and you can watch this video and do a mirroring version,
without having to "think"
of which foot is doing what


and that is good, too,
great actually
watching him not in mirror,
and seeing if you can translate translate translate 
right to your right, 
which looks "different" than his.


when I learned tai chi, the teacher turned his
back to solve this problem,
but it won't work on a video,
and I like the idea of facing my students 
as we learn along)

move slowly

put attention on gravity and both arms and both legs and spine

create variation in patterns of arms and legs




..............

It's a dance, don't you think?

And what's the other half of my roots for the Feldy/ Anat work.

Well, maybe I should have been dividing into thirds
with one third good old fashion NOW

and one third the Gurdjieff meditation of keeping attention
all day in both arms and both legs (plus light and sound)

Or maybe four:
add to Tai Chi
and Now
and Gurdjieff
a love of nature, and how natural can we get by being attentive to slow and novel and delicious movements
movements
learning
awaring
in the so called "body"

Waking us to Now.

Tai Chi can do that,
and it can be a "thing" we do.

So can reading.

So can writing.

It's all the dance: am I awake now,
and if so what is my experience.

Is that a good question for you?

I hope so.

Chris on Wednesday in Austin, where the cold was last week
and then it got warm and toasty this weekend
and now the cold is back.
Cold means 40s, sissy winter for most of the county,
and "too cold" for the spoiled Texans and all the immigrants.

In May I'll be back in the Northwest,
and in March visiting No. Cal.
If you are interested in connecting,
let me know.