When I was a child & teenager I got little touch or nurturing in my family. But what i did get from my mother was a dream of the spiritual, & from my father a love of sport. So I played sport of all types continually, & dreamed.
Spiritual practice began for me when I was 19. I was lucky to discover a spiritual martial art called Shintaido. in my usual inimitable way I got rather keen, & did 3 classes a week, 2 hours personal practice a day, & whatever else was on offer. 35 years later I’m still doing a something similar, my own bastardised version. I loosely call it movement practice. (Brilliant David!)
Shintaido was for me an extremely good spiritual practice, and a way to begin to learn touch, connection, to feel energy in different forms, and to let go of the tension & emotional conditioning that was imprinted in my body.
I learnt to physically stretch, soften, open & move strongly, dynamically, softly & with caring.
I learnt to move from my hara (spiritual centre of gravity), to open my chakras, to actually feel and move from a spacious awareness beyond thoughts.
I learnt how to be moved, & how to move another person with care and spacious awareness. I learnt to throw someone and be thrown.
I learnt to move softly and gently with someone, so that we merge and are one being.
I learnt that the dissolving of boundaries is real and easily do-able, not just for a moment, but for minutes then hours at a time, until it became a constant throughout the day.
The feeling of this place is home, the place i’d always searched for. In it i am truly connected with all around me, with nature. In this place questions of life and death dissolve with a smile.
I learnt to actually feel other people, their energy & energies. i learnt how to open, connect & move with their energy in a boundary-less place of total connection. where self and other disappears. I learnt to do this in a spacious mind of compassion, where there is no controlling, manipulation, or intrusiveness. This in our day & age is for me something truly special.
Imagine the place in your world where you most dissolve and connect with someone, & see if you can imagine having that for hours at a time, every day, whoever you’re with, where-ever you are, whatever you’re doing. Imagine getting it picking your nose, or sitting staring at a wall…
Connection through dissolving of boundaries is a wonderful feeling. It’s a feeling we all look for in being intimate with our partner, with our children, in being in nature, and in sport & extreme activities like surfing, mountain climbing etc.
I have climbed many 1000 foot rock faces, scuba dived, surfed, played sport etc. The movement practice I do is the only thing I have ever done that actually teaches me to get more of THAT feeling that we all know, and how to bring it more and more into my life, and with the people in my life.
What i do is literally waking up through movement. For me it has been gold dust!!!!
Maybe we can be more free than we realise….