Tag: courage

Biodanza – a thank you

Love in your life

Biodanza – an invitation

Are you curious to bursting to know who you are? Are you willing to brush your reservations aside and go along with a new experience?

If you are saying yes, you are touching in to a highly valuable asset – the courage to give free rein to your curiosity.

Regular practice of Biodanza helps you become comfortable as never before with being acutely and sensitively aware of the presence of other people.

We all are colourful

On Tuesday, the day after my first Biodanza class in February 2013, I see in hindsight I must have been close to falling in love with living my life, for the first time.

I entered a shop to buy something. Ordinary words passed between me and the shop assistant. As we spoke in formal words, and as we held each other’s gaze, I saw the completeness of our mirrored reflections. I recognised my soul as a reflection of her soul in her eyes!

I will always remember the fresh delight of the shock of this new glimpse into the reality of a person who was, like me, living life fully alive. It was a beautiful realisation which included an involuntary falling away of my defensive self-image. I had abandoned the image of the socially conditioned person I routinely carried in front of me like a cardboard cut-out.

This effacement of self image is an act of humility in which I unconditionally open my heart to acknowledge the heart of the other being. This is an act of honest reverence for the wholesome integrity I am standing so close to. I can easily feel overcome, though not overwhelmed, by the intensity of the other presence.

Ultimately, a mirroring is occurring. Who I am is the “who” I am engaging with. If my self-love is healthy, we are healed by being in this space and time together. Our conjoined presence is similar to, but unlike that rare and unique bond between two lovers. However, here is no mutual exclusivity, no sworn allegiance. Here is a portal to the most precious of states, the unrestricted view of the sanctity of all living beings as seen in the mirror of one.

The validity of this vision of the presence in the round of another soul simply through eye-to-eye contact is a repeatable experience.

The more Biodanza I participated in, the more frequently I saw the living heart of myself reflected in all other hearts.

Creativity flows in dance

If you want love in your life and you want to know love as it exists in every person that you meet, bar none, let the regular practice of Biodanza be a part of your life.

My life changed for the better and forever from 2013! Thank you, Biodanza!

~ Love is present EveryNow

To my Muse

To my Muse


There is a current, a flow of power, which beckons, asks to be found.


From the earliest age of the dawning of reason, it asks to be heard.


On my own in a wild garden, small under trees, I, a little boy, caught the drift of it.


It came from a crystalline heart. It showed itself in my throat in the form of a tune voiced into my solitude. A solitude for the first time become great with meaning.


The melody is always the same. It is a grand, a grandiose orchestral pursuit. Cathedrals, temples, chambers of the heart can hardly contain its sacred theme.


The riff I sang matched the mood of this boy. Later, I went into our thatched cottage at the end of the mud track in the isolated hamlet and I sang it to my Mother. She made a motherly nice comment.


As a young man, I began to recognise themes of this homespun improvisation in the music of others, and this is how I knew myself to be one melody, a part in a common harmony – a pixel of humanity.


I never fully remember it. I never developed it into a memorisable form. I kept it private, I keep my ‘plaint’, my ‘keening’ as it is a forever balm unto my unknown, hurting, longing heart.


Today I sprout in these lonely lines this remembered memory of memory, and the flame of its flower is a visible wonder to me, father to myself.


Exactly like the passage of a rainbow, it beckons to the senses. It will never be captured.


The bass notes inflame, while the melody maddens like the sempiternel arch-old songs of the Sirens.


This is a Hiraeth, sacred music which can only be bashfully reflected in the performance of various forms – poetry, dance, painting, sculpture.


The more ephemeral is our way of mirroring the force of its current, the closer we come to tap into and draw purpose and courage from the strength of the Muse. It is all mystery and achingly longed-for strength.


The presence of strength; the strength of presence. This is a reflection of the power of the eternal present


~ Love is present EveryNow

a happy ripple in a continuum of life

My state is open and aware and quiet.

The self I call “I” is a flat calm transparent natural boundary. Clear water is deep down, air is deep up.

The surface is almost colourless, without ripple or feature. It extends without horizon, but never leaves my sight.

In such a state I can ride and stay in balance during the time I am presented in the here and now with thoughts, feelings, distractions and discomfort.

Here, from my surface I offer this.

It is through my extraordinary journey of unanticipated heart awakening, around the time I began the regular practice of Biodanza in February 2013, that I know I can fully access healing. That, together with other understandings related to identification of ancient hurts and the resolution of previously unrecognised confusions, have granted my awareness of myself the opportunity of expansion and room in which to expand.

As I become self-aware, aware of the sanctity of the gift of life being lived and experienced more and more abundantly, so in equal measure I value the gift of life in relation to other living sentient beings.

What comes from living in such a new and richly jewelled life is a greater gratitude than I have ever known. It has far reaching implications on my remaining days of life. It is the ever-growing understanding that my life is not a discrete occurrence only in me. I am a pixel of humanity, and life is living through all things and beings, sentient and not sentient.

I am a happy ripple in a continuum of life. Life lives me as I live life.

Here’s the thing… Nothing has changed! Everything is utterly different and constantly completely new! The newness is “EveryNow”.

I begin. My journey of exploration and discovery begins all over again from the very start every moment. Nothing existed in the previous instant of this awareness of existence to guide me to where I am. At any given moment, I look forward with barely containable excitement to the certainty of discoveries in the moment following.

I think of it like this. For the first fifty years I had been “Living to Love”, which is decorous, pretty, even beautiful, but it is an existence limited by inconsequential superficiality.

As my heart awakes and presents its face towards me to greet me, my heart starts “Loving to Live”.

This is the wholesome, plain and simple adoption of the richly textured reality of here and now, of “EveryNow”.

I am no longer secreted away in a place of safety of my own elaborate construction, but I go shining with gratitude and wonder at the mere fact of being vital and alive.

This is a state of being which is totally raw, exposed and vulnerable, but simultaneously full of living courage, and naked certainty.

Unencumbered by fear, my state of being can freely develop in its self-expression in the knowledge that it has its permanent residence in the secure environment of the heart’s pure and spectacular peace.

We are all capable of healing.

It’s about trusting love to come into close contact inside my most personal sacred space, and knowing that there, in that serene place of peace, I can heal.

We all just can

~ Love is present EveryNow

🔥 The way is lit âš¡

⛲ The way is lit 🌄

More than many years ago, I was on the very precipice of total loss of everything I cherished and of all I had strived for and had created throughout my entire life.
In utter desperation, breathlessly through my pain, I prayed one whole night long to find some way to save everything from collapse and from reversion to living like a shadow among the shadows at the bottom of the mountain.
I prayed and prayed, and at the lighting of dawn’s light I saw with silent horror that night had turned its back on me and would not shield me from view.
And so I understood my time had arrived.
I completely gave up the impossible battle with myself.
The pain stopped. It stopped like a drawn out shriek run out of breath.
Courage took hold and I dared to start over with no assumptions, no power of control.
The words and deeds I had been in such desperate need of found expression in my throat.
I found I could act on the deeds I had thought were utterly beyond my capacity.
Words don’t fail me now.
Words return from their long journey beyond the distant horizon where I know my soul extends, and they break in salty surf on the beach – faithful, compliant, rhythmic.
ALL SHALL BE WELL; AND ALL SHALL BE WELL; AND ALL MANNER OF THING SHALL BE WELL [Julian of Norwich]
I never look back since then.
I do nothing to light the way.
The way is lit.
The way is inexpressibly beautiful always.
I choose thoughts, because I can.
I choose long and hard, enough that I dwell on thoughts of love.
I choose to look out for the vocabulary of love.
I choose the means to make the mouth of the mind clear for loving.
I give no home in my mouth to words of fear or hate.
So choose!
Be bold enough to speak out loud about love, always and everywhere.
One fine day, you will pause, and you will see a beautiful person steps to meet you.
A beautiful figure treads a path that lights up all by itself with neither conscious nor unconscious volition.
This person is you
~ Love is present EveryNow ~

My Shamanic Healing

Since March 2014, out of curiosity more than from an acknowledged need, I started working with a wonderful shamanic healer.

I had no inkling I had endured ‘that childhood’ until it appeared clearly in front of me.
These traumatic strata, though buried and covered by scar tissue, I know now from my own experiences, can be identified, visualized in an adult context, lifted out of ancient hiding and, when seen in the bright light of my adult recognition, taken in both hands and dissolved forever.
This is hard work. It demands courage and determination to confront emotions which are painful and at first not easy to identify or understand.
Some who are shaken by the rise to the surface of fears and sadness, long forgotten or long since buried out of conscious sight, may not be ready to continue the work of bringing them into the open.
Their life journey has not yet reached those stations where the refreshments of friends and family have bolstered their understanding. Some may never, in their whole life, begin or accomplish the work of healing.
The work sometimes summons up nameless distress from within myself, like a child’s nightmare.
I carry my child inside me, but the difference is that it is I myself who has to show myself compassion. I have to be the one to cup my own distressed heart in my own healing hands and guide myself out into the openness of ever-present light.
At the time I began this work, the presence of “EveryNow” was becoming more familiar to me by the day. EveryNow fills me with the absence of longing, because it is a state which contains all sufficiency and all fulfilment. My way of characterising this is in my phrase, “No question; Answer is before”.
I recognised that the state of EveryNow represented the place of sanctuary, the changeless place of ultimate trust and reconciliation.
Had I not already gained an understanding of the over-arching and underlying principle that all existence is a reality not objective but encompassing both itself and me as the experiencer, I could not have successfully continued this Shamanic work.
With my Shaman close to me and questioning and inviting me to place myself in close touch – literally – with my previous selves all through the years of my life, I use a combination of two skills to power myself on with this work.
I exercise my curiosity to discover more about where I have hidden my painful past, and why, and with what ‘devices’ my former self so deliberately interred the pain.
With my intellectual reason I try to find out how effectively I can use my analytical skills to make valid connections between my adult autonomous self and my younger, unformed dependent self.
I seek out and befriend again the little person I was, who constructed all kinds of protective defences in the face of major hurt of which I as a child could have had no objective understanding and over which I had no control.
I can do all of this seeking, confronting, refriending and healing of myself because I can trust and completely rely on my guide, my Shaman, to be at my side every fraction of an inch of the way.
I continue with this work for the simple reason that it works. It is swift, effective, and the major immediate result is that it gives me is of lightness of heart.
I begin see my way of developing survival techniques to negotiate unknown fears is not unique to me and my life journey. I see clearly and with great relief that none of my difficulties, not one of my traumas is unique to me. I am not alone, not stuck on some lonely summit, or wandering in dark places. Suddenly, very suddenly, I am able to look around at last, and I see we are all beautiful doves in a flock of humanity.
One valuable certainty I have discovered from this guided work is that my body holds all the answers. If I want to know the answer, I directly address this physical repository of wisdom.
It is easier to enter and explore the body’s frames of reference while hearing the steady, quiet rhythmic beat of the Shamanic spirit drum.
There are two extremes our bodies are not naturally made to tolerate. One is to be afflicted by violence. While the other is to be afflicted by loneliness.
The strict limitations on the reach of my self healing are imposed by the needs I have as a human for other meaningful loving human contact, because my survival is all bound up with my gregarious, even tribal nature.
I willingly acknowledge with gratitude that it takes a person of rare quality to show such love as to dedicate a life to becoming a Healer in this way.
Shamanic Healing has been and continues to prove to be for me a uniquely valid and valuable vehicle for releasing and empowering a life of more abundance every day.