Relaxing, flipping coins and listening

"You're too tense". It was third time she'd tried to catch the coin sitting on her elbow in her palm, and it was the third time it had hit the floor or cupboard. "Relax your shoulder".
She tried again, "you're tensing up your shoulder, relax and trust, don't try to catch it", swoop, chink, "YES! I did it".
"Woohoo!"
A couple more tries and she'd mastered it, "I'm going to try 5 coins now". They splattered all over the floor.
"You're trying too hard again, just relax". Bang.
"I did it, i did it", the excitement and enjoyment in her voice were infectious. Within 5 minutes she'd done 10, i felt so strangely proud of her, her ability to really listen and change what she was doing blew me away a little. Is it something that comes easier when you're 13 as opposed to 37?

It made me think. Sometimes you tell others exactly what you need to hear yourself, if only you'll listen. I just couldn't get the event and conversation out of mind... i'd been trying very hard at work over the last few weeks and i felt i was barely keeping my head above water, just getting done what i needed to get done. Just.

So before work i went for a coffee, and sat and thought about how i lose contact with my body, how the energy and thoughts go running madly around my head and i struggle to focus. So i sat for a while, wrote down all the things that i needed to do outside of work, and then set my intention to stay relaxed, in my body, and conscious.

I've had an incredibly productive couple of days. Interesting thing this human being gig.

Worlds Spinning

Does the world get dizzy from spinning so fast? Or does it feel still as the heavens hurtle past, looking out upon the majestic sweep of the galaxy as stars burst, comets collide and planets form? How does it feel the brief forming of a strange hard crust blistering upon it's surface, of being pricked and penetrated and pumped on it's outer skin? It would love the sun, keeping it warm. Maybe one day we'll design rotisserie deck chairs so we can enjoy an even sunning just like the earth. Of course we'd have to be careful of ice forming at our feet and head, and of sprouting strange little creatures from our pores that proceed to try and choke us to death. I suspect that after a few billion years of spinning everything would feel right somehow, that there would be a sense of deepest harmony amongst the chaos, of quiet amongst the noise, of everything having it's place.

Saving the world one report at a time

Report by report we think our way into the biggest hole we could possibly concieve, afraid to act as we are lullued by the comfortable waves of our own contentment, our own fear of doing anything fundamentally different. Our collective behaviour seems to so reflect the processes of our own egos, of our inner worlds. Inside our lives we build carefully, or not so carefully, a construct we call ourselves, and we then expend incredible amounts of energy protecting that self conception, ensuring that it stays in place, that it is justified, that it is validated. And we even tell ourselves, convince ourselves that we have no choice, that this is the only way it is, that this is how it has to be, that this is not what i want but just how i am. We disempower ourselves, and don't acknowledge the fundamental truth of how incredible, how powerful we are that we can shape reality, change our very perceptions of events, deny nature, stop our own evolution to maintain our own internal identity and the fictions we hold onto. Is this any different to what we do in the world? We have all the information at hand to transform our culture, society, economy and politics to tackle the challenges we face, yet we tread carefully, walking like a sleep walker while a tsunami rears on the horizon. And politicians and large corporations sit on our collective shoulders like demons telling us we can't change, that the econo0my will collapse, that we have to make change gradually, concerned only for their own existence and wealth not for our collective wellbeing. We research every step we take to death, like walking crouched down with a magnifying glass in hand inspecting every step we take. You could die on your way to the supermarket with an approach like that. Are our feet so delicate that the way must be paved with mountains of paper? Lit with a million pdfs?

Will the human race be remembered for the sheer number of reports that charted a different course, that told of a different story, but were ignored?

RIP Human Race: Wow, really nice reports

Weekend

Right now, i'm just holding out till i go away this weekend. Not the way i like to live my life, but common enough. It's all feeling a bit too much right now. I want hills, trees, fresh air, sleep. Mostly sleep....

Kung fu Panda

Today i saw Kung Fu Panda with Erin, Tim and Katherine. Great fun movie, had all the classic elements of a great martial arts movie with a big dash of humour. Awesome animation, the animators really made use of the kung fu genre to do some amazing movements with plenty of cinematic license.

These three kids are a part of my family. I have become aware over the weekend of how my reference to and feelings about my housemates can effect those seeking intimacy with me, and even i guess with my friends. But my home is, and always been, a place of family. It's what i seek to create in this space, what i value there. Being challenged on it has put me even more strongly in the place of valuing and i love that i do have, and do create, a family.

I create intimate connections around me. I value that. And, yes, run from it on a regular basis.

Discontinuity

Discontinuities in relationships always seem to hurt even when you know it's the right course of action. The heart doesn't like sharp turns in the road. Or is it just our inclination to adapt to what's going on as that feels the safest and to take the path of choice exposes us. The road goes ever on.

The point

So my blogging has been a little slack of late, so last night, while waiting for $10 to magically transform into yellow curry and rice, i wrote this this (and i'm going to try post retrospectively, i post on the written date date rather than the typed date. Oh yes, it's a very exciting day!):

The point really of blogging everyday is to write everyday. So blog or no blog, internet or no internet, here i write. Sitting in Thai Thani surrounded by uber craziness of clattering woks, frying meat and vegetables, sizzling sauces and thai flavoured accents... there is a particular intensity to the flurriness of activity here that in itself is a signature dish, it's got to be the loudest kitchen (and totally open to the restaurant) that i've ever experienced. And all the cooks wear baseball caps, which i really like for some reason. And the food is always plentiful and great.

My stomach is a flap with hunger. "is this mine yet?", "is this mine yet?"... it keeps going on, the smell of food infusing my every breath is getting almost unbearable, the juices of my st

And at that point my number was up and i eagerly grabbed my plastic containers of goodness and took off to eat.

The last thought

She walked smack bang into her last thought. No warning, no 'hi how you doing?', just wallop, last thought. It got stuck in her hair, just above the ear where she had hit it as she turned her head as she tried to avoid it. And when she brushed it out, it got stuck on her fingers, then when she wiped it off onto her pants it lurked there glowering at her, then she washed her pants but it held its breath (last thoughts can be incredibly tenacious like that) till the washing mashine emptied onto the garden where it promptly snuck up on to the leaf of her silverbeet where, the next morning, she had her last thought, looking suspiciously like a silverbeet leaf, on toast where it promtly got stuck in her throat and strangled her to death.

The life of the heart

Today has been bouncing around from a deep sinking heart ache, to anger, to love, to playfulness, to productiveness, to defeat, to fear... and in amongst it all i hunt for the truth. I've felt at times myself caught and skinned in my own cunning net, and at others the adventurer going deeper than i've gone before. I guess all this confusion means something good is going on, like when you've got the tail of a great big beast and you're getting thrashed around... if you don't get your brains bashed out on something you'll pull off some killer move and take the beasty down. Well, maybe not so great an analogy, but it's been a day like that.
Just trying to be true to whatever the hell i'm feeling has been a wild ride, and i hope, through it all, to refine my consciousness a little more, to understand myself a little more deeply. It seems to me more and more to be the main game. Consciousness, that is. It is the most incredible thing in the universe (or at least top 5), and our curious culture puts so little emphasis on it. If meditation is the technology of consciousness, then, from the way we marginalise this in our culture, we must be in some kind of stoneage.

How beautiful life is

Tired shattered but cracks
In the outer casing show the light shining beneath
Home beckons love and bed
My pillow my lover
Happy dogs and demanding cats
TV and beautiful children
Warm hugs and friends laughing
With something deep within me
That somehow they always see
And me bucking twisting running fighting then...
Stillness as i return
And looking out of the cracks
See how beautiful
Life is.

Will

Again, will. Yesterday i lapsed, i didn't write my blog as i'd set my will to do everyday for a month. A failure or a lesson? A lesson, a lesson to understand how better to apply my will, how better to focus it as a pure sharp light that the world responds to. A flicker, a missing frequency, a weakness, a gap of foresight, a desire to nurture a tired being at the end of the day... none of which matters, it is simply to be learnt from.

I am beautiful?

I expend so much energy making sure that i do not challenge one of my core self beliefs. That belief is that i'm not beautiful. That i am not a powerful amazing man. I can feel my reaction, my attempt to dissociate from these words even as i write them.

I feel i'm walking alone, and i think i walk alone because i believe i'm not lovable, i'm not beautiful, i'm not what's really wanted no matter what words are said. I work hard to ensure i don't invalidate this perception.

Just to live, to walk, to work, to play, requires a huge about of effort to build around and maintain this belief, as so much in the world is screaming at me: you are beautiful. To act requires heaving this huge edifice over the smallest of obstacles... i look forward and see mountains, i look back and i see rolling hills.

I see a day one day soon, that mountains or hills, i simply admire how beautiful is the journey.

Do we dare hunt down the storm?

Let me ask you this. Imagine, for a moment, that you are on your death bed. You look back at your life. You look back to now, and the choices before you.

What response do you have?

Do you wonder what might have happened if you had hunted the storm? Is there that feeling of deflated unlived possibility in your breast? Have you lived a safe life where you can die content that you haven't really actually changed much? Do you heave a sigh as you think about what could have been, as you wonder what might have happened?

Or

Do you smile with every cell of your body, feel the joy of the hunt in every cell of your body, an ecstatic tide of knowing what it is to surrender yourself completely to the hunt, and hunting with everything you have to find surrender. Do you know the intensity of being completely with everything that is present, a deep light illuminating every corner of your soul?

But what is hunting and what is resisting? Now that is a deep wisdom to have.

But what is more important is not what you do, not what you hunt, not what you surrender to, but how deeply you surrender to what comes up for you. The hunter seeks experience. The hunter seeks to loose an arrow at the very heart of existence and to eat that heart... or put another way, to become one with the very heart of existence, because of course the only thing the hunter can hunt are disowned aspects of him/herself, until at the last the only thing left for the hunter to hunt is the hunter. Key, is surrendering completely to the journey of the hunt, and to what is hunted: to be eaten when you eat, to be hunted when you hunt.

Nothing is invalid. The path even of no courage, of not hunting the storm, when hunted with every last bit of yourself is just as powerful a hunt as hunting the unknown, for in the end there is only you looking at you, arrow notched, bow bent, asking yourself 'do i have the courage to die?'

Evolution

My head is full of climate change at the moment. I was at a talk this morning put on by the Brotherhood of St Lawerence and the VLGA, Coming Together for Climate Change Equity. One of the speakers, from DSE, said that one of the difficulties of adapting to climate change was that human beings had evolved in a stable climate and so were not used to adapting, to coping with change.

I couldn't disagree more. It's factually and conceptually incorrect, even if the conclusion is near to the truth.

Human beings evolved in a highly variable climate, we came through an ice age or two (i really should research this) and adapted successfully to an incredible wide range of ecologies. In fact, the reason we have become such a dominant species is exactly because we are incredibly adaptable. It's why we have a large brain - we are able to assess and adapt to changes in our environment in a way that few other species can.

The problem is that we've adapted to a freak patch of stable weather that's been going on for a few thousand years now. Adapted incredibly well. And combined with our increasingly sophisticated ability to control and alter our local climate (ie buildings and air-con), hey presto we've become incredibly resistant to change. Our own brilliance is, in fact, threatening to trip us up.

We must learn to adapt to change again, rather than adapt to familiarity. The best preparation for the unknown is an openness and a courage to acknowledge and learn from what ever happens, and whatever it brings up for us.

Garnaut Report

I don't usually look forward to government reports. If what was needed was a nice hot cup of tea, they are usually more like having a tepid cuppa that you left lying around a bit too long and that you find a moth floating in when you clean out the pot. You just know it's not really going to do the job... and can make you feel a little bit ill afterwards as the moth lay crumpled up in the plug hole.

OK, that might have been a bit melodramatic, but you get the point. The Garnaut report is not, it would seem, the tepid mothy type. Ross Garnuat has just come out and said that we will probably lose the fight against climate change. Hooray for him, and from a mainstream report, commissioned by the federal government, not some radical who can be dismissed as crazy. It's frankly about time we started calling it like it is.

What exactly he means is a bit open to question, and is a fairly one dimensional way of looking at ecological catastrophe. After all, without a few ecological catastrophes in the earth's history, we wouldn't be in the position we're in... err the position of being able to create our very own ecological catastrophe.

I agree entirely with his findings and his premise so far. Check out the Garnaut Review, it's well worth it. And what i particularly like is how public Ross Garnaut is being, he is really going out of his way, it would seem, to make sure the report doesn't get watered down as it filters into the bureaucracy by being very public about his progress and findings.

However, what would be more interesting than saying 'we're probably going to lose the fight..' would be to say that we're most likely beyond the point of being able to stay the way we are: culturally, economically, spiritually, and even, perhaps, biologically. It turns a sense of impending doom into a sense of opportunity and possibility. Dangerous, possibly deadly opportunity, but opportunity nonetheless.

Ironic, really, that our desperate clinging to our identities, our feverish desire to control our environment, our deep desire to replicate the familiar, has in fact hastened our own evolutionary challenge.

New Moon

New moons are a powerful time to set an intention. And yes, it's the full moon. One of the wonderful ways in which technology has made me more aware of the natural world (rather than less) is through having a 'current moon phase' gadget on my igoogle page. I always know where the moon is at and i find myself looking for her and admiring her more than i used to. Of course, what i really need is a 'go and enjoy the sunshine' gadget that helps me to not while away some time in front of a screen and go and while away some time in the sun instead.

Anyway, that said, i've been conducting an interesting experiment with myself that i spoke a little about in my first post that i'm hoping to find a little more committment to through using the newness of the moon-ness.

I've been asking myself, whenever i've felt stuck, or down, or held back, 'what would i do in this situation if i really beleived in myself?'

And something has really shifted for me, i can't entirely say what it is, but there's a renewed strength to my sense of self, to my confidence. It all makes sense really, i guess i'm just a little surprised it's been so easy to find results with such a simple practice. So my intention, now that my little experiment seems to be meeting with some success, is to set my new moon intention: to drop my self doubts, to continue my deepening awareness, and to believe in myself - and act as if i believe in myself.

Man-ness

So an experiment has it's next chapter. A small group of men quest for power: what does it mean to be powerful, compassionate, sexy, empowering men? And how do you avoid it turning into a crochet circle?

In fact, one of the primary motivations behind this gathering has been that our primary experience of so called 'mens groups' has been the crochet circle phenomena, which appears to come from a desire to emulate what women's groups do, and turns into self indulgent emotional wallowing that doesn't challenge, doesn't push our edge or have a will to change.

And we ask ourselves: what does it mean to be a man in this day and age? The answer we seem to be arriving at is that to be a man means to take full responsibility for our lives, our loves, our demons, our angels, our pain, our bliss, our nurturing... to hunt those things we most fear because they are exactly the food on which our souls thrive, and to bring the spoils back to enrich, feed and empower our community.

Why settle for a life of dull acceptance? We are men, we are hunters of dreams, loves, food, prosperity, security, fear, power, magic, mountains, ocean depths and consciousness. The kind of manhood being sold to us through mass media is either a pale shadow of a man or a hero who serves, ultimately, to highlight our perceived inadequacy by being superman rather than man.

The mind too easily goes to the obsessive culture we so idolise, of the man working himself to death in some corporate high-rise mausoleum, sacrificing family and health to be a success. It is not this i wish to find. We with to find a path, and tools to help others on the path, to be empowered to follow our deepest inspiration and yearnings, to work in a way the nurtures and empowers all those around us - that is true power, the power of we, not I.

I think, therefore i am; i feel, therefore we are; i intuit, therefore everything simply is.

Body image and bulge

I'm having an interesting struggle with my self image. I've got a wee bit of fat on my belly, and my sides bulge ever so slightly. Yes, ridicule my miniscule plumpening if you will, but this is new. I've never softly bulged about the belly before. Well, not since i can remember. My self image as an adolescent was poor, to say the least, and a big part of my growing has been an increasing happiness with my physical self, increasingly stronger, more agile, more able, more confident, feeling sexier and more self assured. And now this. Yes, my city edge lifestyle has left me more car bound, yes my tantra practice is less physically rigorous than my martial arts, yes i've been eating too much sugar. It's easy to be fine with body issues when you don't have to worry about them. I mean, i'm even fairly comfortable these days with the 'hole' in my chest. My reaction is perhaps more about the state of my fitness than about the actual body stuff, but i sit here feeling plump, bulgy, unfit. It's quite weird. Anyway, a fine motivation for getting back into more physical activity, and good to know that i'm quite attached to my body image - an interesting avenue to explore.

Fog

Fog settles on the city, a blanket damp and magical. An underwater wonderland (of very thin water mind you, or perhaps that's water with lots of really big air bubbles) where sounds and lights whisper of a realm of dream, a world only half seen. Sounds echo in a way that draws your attention to the silence between, lights hang suspended from droplets above the city.

A service station glows like an outpost floating in the mists, headlights slowly resolve from a faint blur to two burning eyes as the tail lights fade back into another world.

The rattle of trams far off coming and going along roads that weave between worlds, boom gates clang lonely in the mists, calling as their love speeds past, devoted, looking on as the train skirts between stations, between worlds disconnected by dreams.

Dreams floating in the mist, echoing the silence deep within our souls.

A day, a night

What is a day? A day is when i get up and when i go to bed.

I've been at a party, a party i nearly didn't go to as i was feeling tired, a bit shattered. But i'm so glad i went, lots of good people, good vibe, a backyard fires and funky tunes. It's amazing how getting out and talking to a bunch of great people can really shift your mind-state, can loosen you up and help you remember that life isn't all toil and work.. it's fun, and the exact reason i do the things i do is because there are all these wonderful people that i care about, that inspire me, and that matter.

Great friends make everything in life worthwhile.