Tuesday, July 21, 2015

To Practice the Practice ....


To practice the practice, I have to write this right now.  I may not know what I am saying or agree with it later, but I must skim those thoughts off the surface and say what needs to be said before the moment passes and it escapes.  Yes, this urgency is present but there need not be stress.  Consider urgency to be a matter of speed rather than stress, experience need as desire and remember you are a witness to all.
Tonight as I lay/lie/laid on the floor, I did not control my mind.  I let it go where it wanted and realized that in my previous improvisational practice, I was controlling it.  I was trying to coax my mind into the sensation of my body.  I was not letting it be free.  I was not letting it do what it wanted and needed to do.  Was there a conflict in my teaching?  What do I really want to teach?  To be present?  Is control necessary for presence?  Am I creating a hierarchy and putting presence above freedom?  Must one choose?  What is presence?  As I remained in an extreme position while stretching, wasn't it necessary to let my mind go where it went?  Perhaps in order to release that part of my body, my mind needed to process the thoughts it was thinking?  Maybe I did not need to feel the weight of my body at that moment?  Maybe I needed to think of that "other" matter?  There were many moments during tonight's session that "other things" were on my mind.  Did that mean I was not present?  Or merely that I am able to be present to many things at one time?  Has my ability to be present expanded so that I may attend to the person moving next to me, while attending to the sensations in my body, while thinking about someone who is not present in the room?  Perhaps I need not judge how far my awareness expands.  As the years of my practicing presence and improvisation add up, as I live in this body, this brain, this consciousness, it makes sense that my ability to perceive, sense, attend to would change and expand.  As I understand that I am not my body and I am not my thoughts only, that I may be constantly surprised how my awareness expands.  Why limit it to the constraints that others may suggest?  Why should my experience and my approach match that of others?  I trust my experience.
From an external perspective, tonight I went to a "dance studio" and "danced".    My "dancing" was the least interesting part of my experience.  Touché.

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