July | 2013 | Karma Life Readings

Tags

Celtic bard, classical ballet, Dance, health, Japanese Butoh, journals, mandala, medicine, Mental Health, mundane, Qigong, sacred, spirituality, Tai Chi, Tibetan Buddhism, Yoga

A note to my friends:

Every morning, I wake to the refuge of this healing room. I stay in this room the largest part of the day. I stay propped up, working, reading, writing, doing pranayama (the science of the breath . . . I’m completely book-learned via B.K.S Iyengar’s Light on Pranayama). That morning alternate-nostril breathing followed by 40 or so minutes of single-pointed meditation, truly engage me in the day. I am the still center of a mandala.

I don’t like to waste time . . . I want my actions to be meaningful for the greater good. If I’m really lucky, I’ll have 39 more years in this life. And at 61, that is a lot of contemplation. Mainstream medical issues have been tossing me around since Dec. 5, 1994. True healing takes so long! I had never thought that at 61, I would have had 4 hip operations, hundreds of chiropractic adjustments, hundreds of Botox needles every 4 months for cervical dystonia (looks like Parkinson’s), and a whopping fibromyalgia with a cherry on top.

Then, each morning, I say Tibetan Buddhist preparatory prayers, have some coffee and try to listen to my Highest Self telling me what the best thing for me to do that day might be.

I think or call or e-mail a friend going through a tough time . . . I listen to podcasts on Buddhism and history and Islam and . . . . Podcasts are perfect for perennial students like me. I feel worthless if I’m not reading, yet something in me designs fiction as anathema, and so I read mostly non-fiction. I write too many poems.

I have 35 years of journals that I want to pull together . . . just like everyone else in the e-book era. Yet it is daunting to me because of the amount of work it would entail, but also because back I would go into the dark past, opening up unhealed wounds. I don’t know . . .

I want to dance again—in a radically different way from the way I had been trained (classical ballet, some modern and jazz)—because of my radically different philosophy of Buddhism . . . slowness was and is the key for Butoh and for every daily and nightly moment. Slow down, says the Universe.

Japanese Butoh, Tai Chi, Yoga and Qigong deeply interest me now—performance is secondary to this healing path. It is meditation in motion; its ultimate aim for me is to be transcendentally present in all actions, mundane and sacred. Of course, a good way to say it is NOW HERE THIS, and the door will open. Also, I heard from a Celtic bard, that there is a poetic tradition that once you are able to enunciate clearly the condition of your exile, the door will open.

What door?

What comes after the door?