Bodies in space
Exploring 'the intelligence that's already in the system'
I love myself . . . What I mean is . . . I love you guys!
I’m feeling deeply nourished after a recent 4-day retreat with
and the Pop-Up School community at the beautiful Sky Meadow Retreat Center in Stannard, VT (stewarded by along with his wife, Erin).After one of many enlivening morning movement practices led by Aaron Justice Cantor, founder of Primal Practice, a fellow retreatant joyfully shared this spontaneous lyric couplet, first embracing herself, then grinning at us, eyes beaming.
Holly McFarland, a psychologist who tends a Texan ranch, beautifully captured the new frequencies between self, other and world that we were attuning to together.
We had given ourselves the grace of extra space, time and quiet to be in community, to enhance our sense of that same ‘causal wildness’ that lives both in our ‘inner’ natures and in the ‘outside world’ - that is none other than our very selves yet again.
Through exploring and feeling the resonance of our bodies in space, without anxious goal orientation, but with heightened curiosity, we listened for perceptual clues to the ‘intelligence that’s already in the system’, as Bonnie so often likes to say.
How might we feel if we could purge ourselves of the endless inner agonizing of modern human psyches and give our trust to the intelligence of our animal bodies?
We had previously met in June to recognize the natural state.
Here we were in August to obtain the natural state.
We will meet one last time this year, in October, to abide in the natural state.
Holly also gifted me a beautiful book, Rescuing the Light by Martin Prechtel, creator of Bolad’s Kitchen, a school for ‘hands-on village-style teaching’ of ‘forgotten things.’
“You can just open it to any page,” she said. “You don’t have to read start to finish.”
So far every page in this book further clarifies the idea of natural state.
Roberta Vogel-Leutung is the lead gardener of Halycon Yards at Hearthaven, a project that invites wild nature to bloom in the city.
In June she had hung signs on pillars throughout the main barn that hosted many retreat activities and also housed our dining area. These were signs she had also hung in her garden for visitors, to invite them to be playful with their perception.
At the August retreat, Bonnie invited us to sit in a circle outside to simply feel what wanted to come through the meadow and our bodies. Roberta said something I can’t quite remember now about the foregrounding and backgrounding of our perception.
When I feel into that incomplete memory, I have choices about how I do so.
I could close my eyes and ‘drop in’ to inner darkness as if this is surely where the truth lies. Or I could keep my eyes open, soft and wide, feeling the memory of that meadow out beyond my body.
Now I see what it was that Roberta was reminding us - that it’s our choice in every moment what to place in the foreground of our attention and what to fade.
Most of us have been ‘stuck’ inside for most of our lives. But our ‘insides’ are all around us. Several months of Still Hunting practice have made this clearer to me.
Bob Yu, a computer programmer, long-time martial artist and spiritual seeker, originally from Korea, had invited many of us into dialogue circles in June.
Something about those exchanges intrigued me - not what was said, but strange new appearances in my body and perception that made the space between us feel like a lively rippling pond of shared somatics.
What was that?!
Along with another computer programmer, an Austrian named Samuel Hobl, Bob and I kept experimenting with dialogue on Zoom between June and August. At the second retreat, Bonnie encouraged us to lead a practice for everyone.
It didn’t go that well. Except that . . . it did!
Authentic confusion, suspicion and annoyance were expressed - and welcomed.
For various reasons, many people present didn’t understand what was going on. So, of course, they were confused! Bob and I felt something different - but of course we did!
Everyone was having a genuine and authentic experience. That much was clear to me. I felt no need to try to tell others that they “ought to” be experiencing what I was experiencing. This was something I would not have known how to do in years past.
So this apparently ‘failed experiment’ opened new avenues of inquiry. Hunches were updated, new questions asked. We continue to meet online, developing new ideas.
While walking on the final day, with the farm feline, ShadowCat, fast on our heels, Bob offered me a beautiful practice for cultivating more peace of mind.
Having heard all kinds of existential questions I was asking, and with appreciation for my efforts, he gave me permission to sometimes be wrong, immoral, impulsive, maybe even . . . evil?! It all depends how you look at it - and that was his point.
“Sometimes you are just angry,” he said. “Don’t fight it. Greenlight it.”
This is what I have been doing - whenever an overly prude inner moralist tries to shame me for the inevitable imperfections and errors on my path of learning.
I shut up the inner critic in an instant.
By greenlighting it.
Which doesn’t mean I don’t keep trying to be a better human. It just means that I don’t have to pretend I’m any better than I actually am in this precise moment.
I don’t have to paint on another layer of psyche to lug around.
I can recognize when an energy simply wants to pass through. And allow it.
In June, we ‘did a thing’ called Windhorse Riders Qiqong after three days of rehearsal.
This time we spent a fair amount of time standing on one leg.
And we asked questions about how this posture illuminates body and mind:
Why does attending to a place deep beneath the ground of your standing leg improve balance?
How does the body’s asymmetry form a functional agreement between freedom and constraint?Why is it harder for him to press down her extended arm when she imagines it’s a mile long?
One of Bonnie’s questions about this balancing act was repeated in other contexts.
When you become grounded . . . what becomes free?
On the last night, we had a bonfire, told fire stories and sang fire songs.
Watch the fire. Ground into the fire. When you ground, what becomes free?
On the last morning, Aaron lined us up into two rows facing each other in the barn.
This side is ground.
That side is river.
Ground provides the steady pulse.
River can move and change in the moment.
Two partners dance together down the line.
Bonnie has lived on her farm, working with horses for more than thirty years. But she acknowledges that this kind of contact with Nature can’t happen for most people.
It’s simply too impractical to think that scaling that experience could “save the world.”
Yet some of us might learn to recognize, obtain, abide - and live - in the natural state.
You become
the kind of person
that people meet
and they feel like
they’ve encountered
Nature
Even in the
middle of the
city
Below the words in our heads and throats our animal bodies know much more than we think. Our bodies know how to lead. Our minds don’t yet know how to follow.
Bonnie also offered us a ‘leading and following’ game, where partners took turns leading and following as soft hands collaborated to move invisible balls of energy.
My right hand leads your left hand and my left hand follows your right hand. A functionally asymmetrical agreement in each body is shared symmetrically.
Bonnie filmed us, sitting in rows, co-leading each other, our hands like waves.
That evening we listened together to John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean, some in meditative postures, others lying on the ground, eyes closed, the windows of the barn thrown open to the rain storm outside, the wind whipping the curtains like sails.
I’m slowly learning that there are no perfect words to say. I’m starting to let go of looking for them, as if only saying or hearing them would somehow set me free.
On the final afternoon, I spent another hour in the meadow.
The flowers, the movement of the wind, a fuzzy, white caterpillar that shimmied up a single blade of grass with dozens of legs moving in flowing coordination . . . I was overcome by the overwhelming beauty of it all, the inexhaustibility of Nature’s wonder.
I could feel the tiniest tastes of long forgotten childhood memories - and a much stronger sense that I have been mostly unaware for nearly all my life of this Garden of Eden right here under my nose, right here under my feet.
My tears were unhurried, taking several minutes to form and hang suspended at the edge of my eyes before slowly caressing my cheeks. I felt like I could have spent forever in that meadow. Everything I needed was there.
Most of our minds these days are so filled with words that we can’t hear the musical beauty of the silence. But it’s always there, in infinite layers.
What helps is to make more space, time and quiet to be in community.
Until it starts to feel natural again.
