One of the most valuable things about bicycle riding is that it gives masses of personal choice.
The range of choice is vast.
I can decide how carefully I oil, clean and maintain my bike. I can decide what clothing and additional gear to use for the road and weather conditions.
When to begin, where to go, what speed or effort I input, how quick or slow, when to pause, or take a random detour, and where and when to end my ride. It’s all up to me, only me.
What most excites and occupies my attention, and hardly applies at all to everyday routine, is STAYING ALIVE.
When I am downed and I die playing a computer game, I regenerate and continue on carefree for as long as I like.
When out riding, I actively choose to live to ride another day.
Every metre of the way is the object of highly pleasurable, intense, tunnel vision concentration.
What is my wheel doing in relation to my chosen line of travel? What decisions do I need to make in various distance and time frames based on anticipatory riding? What are other highway users doing? More to the point, what are they likely to be doing up to and beyond normal expectations, which might affect what my bike and I are and will be doing?
My version of anticipatory riding imagines the scene of my own violent death every few metres. What I do right now involves my scanning all possible scenarios and strategies, from ordinary to extreme, to avoid getting snared in such a grisly disaster.
I will usually engage in this mental theatre of horrors before I saddle up. This is how I install and set up my personal life assurance policy for the trip ahead. Even if the weather is mild, I will wear something warm to help delay the onset of shock while lying in the road till help arrives.
Oh, and for life savers, I use my referee’s whistle dangling from my crash helmet. It clears traffic and pedestrians out of my path.
I remember to cast my Look Of Life. This vital head-turn reminds the driver behind that a person is in their controlled area.
And as I go, I paint on my face an expression that reads, “Heavily Armoured No Compromise”.
There is an indebtedness that arises in me from the recognition of successive blessings entering the arena of my life.
Any responsible and compassionate response to privileged heightened awareness of life in its very glory and in its quirky contrariness ought to be forged into a legacy for sharing.
My repayment of what I owe is on a simple table in the arena. It is covered by a pale cloth. It is set with humility. And the rich rare spices I am invited to choose when cooking the dish of gratitude taste as sharp as the coming in of death at my little life’s end.
In a foreign country in March, in the Year of my Life, 2013, I and my wife sat down to supper with a long lost friend for the first time in 47 years.
He and his wife had prepared for us a lavish welcome meal. Many years before, my father had arranged I stay with the family of my friend during my school holidays. His father, a decorative wrought iron blacksmith and Rabelasian larger-than-life character, and my father, a conference interpreter, met by chance after the war.
They quickly recognised their mutual admiration for their own idiosyncratic forms of ‘joie de vivre’. On that foundation, they were to become lifelong friends.
After we had toasted each other in a few glasses of fine local wine, my very dear friend began to tell me the Machiavellian story of his childless stepmother, the blacksmith’s second wife. I had known her only as a quiet capable motherly figure all those years ago. She braved out her husband’s alcohol-fuelled storms, she ignored his infidelities, mainly with wives of wealthy clients of his decorative wrought ironwork. She kept shop and did the accounts.
For me those summers were times of acceptance into the family, of joy and pleasure as a young teenager taking my first independent steps in the freedom of another country under the blazing August Sun.
As we enjoyed the meal, I listened with astonishment to hear how she had spent about 70 of the 99 years of her life scheming with great success to disinherit her stepson, almost ruining him and coming close to breaking his spirit, and, after I had come into her house as a guest and virtual second son, scheming to defraud my own father.
The welcome meal, a Cordon Blue affair, progressed with much joy. The setting was in a delightful spacious, three-story pinewood cabin, open fire crackling away, isolated high on the side of a valley with giant panoramic southerly views across a lake to a range of snow capped mountains – the Eiger to the east and Mont Blanc to the west.
My very dear friend advised me to prepare myself, saying all is not as pretty as it seems. Am I ready for a shock? With all this heart warming reconnection with a friend who had been like the elder brother I had never had, and with such fine wine and such food, I said yes. After all, what could disturb this now?
My old friend began to speak. Some four years after my life path diverged from my friend’s, and I had started out on my career teaching English as a Foreign Language in far away London, his step-mother was the first to hear of my failed suicide attempt at age 21. She saw her opportunity to turn the news to her advantage. To help cover up and protect her thieving ways from scrutiny, she made the choice to lie to her family that I had killed myself.
Silence now around the table. For me in that moment of the reveal of this true lie, I suffered a triple shock of pure visceral horror.
A cry escaped from my throat. It was the same animal outcry of bereavement when, 38 years before, I was shown by the black clad undertaker into the chapel of rest where my mother lay, with her blue eyes closed. I could not breathe. My wife, very alarmed, jumped up from the table to help me sit up and to comfort me. I said I was ready to hear more.
In that flash, with the pain that had extracted the yell from inside me, I felt for the very first time the intensity of the suffering my parents had endured when they were told while on a holiday abroad about my suicide attempt – an uncomplicated and somewhat half-baked cry for help it had been – at age 21. I had at long last begun my journey of compassion and shame for what I had done to them.
In that flash, I felt the grief and helpless pain my dear old friend must have endured for nearly five decades. My father had told me the news of his father’s fatal stroke in the late 70s.
After that, my own research to trace him for over 20 years had always drawn a blank. I had no way of knowing that he had decided to go ‘off grid’ to shelter from the sick pursuit of his stepmother.
A few days before my wife and I were to fly on holiday, by some miracle of the Internet, we had finally managed to connect. On an emotional long distance phone call, we agreed to rearrange our flights in order to have this extraordinary reunion celebration.
His stepmother had effected repeated attacks designed to ruin his professional career. Several times she had written to his employers, even tracking him to a well paid job in North Africa. She would falsely allege his dishonest, immoral, even depraved conduct. This may have been easy for her, acquainted as she was with casual depraved ways.
At this period, she took on the role of carer for his only daughter by his first marriage. And she devoted herself to fill the little child’s mind with toxic fear of her father. With money and psychological pressure, she gained the co-conspiratorial support of his first wife.
Thus the love and trust of his wife and mother of his only child was corroded away. His daughter, long since grown up, severed all ties with him. He engaged the equivalent of our Queen’s Counsel to fight to restore his reputation and his legal title to his father’s house, which had been constructed largely using my late Father’s funds, both with and without his knowledge and permission.
On hearing this, the woman sold the house at high speed well below market value. All its contents, including documents and photos from his life, we’re lost to him. Among these were photo albums and 8mm colour cine film containing records of my several consecutive blissfully happy summer holidays with the family.
He had gone ex-directory and off grid long ago for self-protection. That is why I had only chanced to trace him from his 1949 school photo. There he was, named and easy to recognise by his cheeky grin under his mop of dark curly hair, even though he was eleven years younger than when I first knew him.
I emailed my contacts to the school’s webmaster saying I had been seeking my lost friend. Then I powered down the PC and we took a bus into town. I got his call on my mobile at a coffee bar in Bournemouth. I was crying and laughing with happiness. I think I even blurted out my story to the barrista! In nearly half a century, he had once visited England. It was in 1979. It never occurred to him to try and look me up. Indeed, why would he? I was long since dead.
After that first phone call to me, it had been difficult for him, now age 80, to come to terms with the reality of my existence. So he had jumped at the chance to invite my wife and I to fly out and spend a few days as his guest. And, in that flash, I physically experienced the coldness and cruelty and above all the black darkness of the evil that his late stepmother had secretly carried and concealed for decades in her heart of hearts.
I have since learned there are some people who have suffered such violent emotional trauma, that their natural impulse to love is rechanneled into a perverted form of acquisition based on self-interest and hatred.
We all can find the right words to say, can’t we? Those socially accepted normal few words of respect and comfort we say, when we are told about a bereavement.
But I bear witness to you reading this here, that I found no gentle words. And I found no safety net to stop me from falling suddenly from a great height when, without any preparation, I was given the news of my own death.
Again and again, it is at the point of contact with the extreme fragility of life that life itself reveals there is only one path of acceptance. I see it in the eyes of the hunted animal looking with a final glance at the hunter before dying. Life clothes us with humility. A humility such as a bride and groom may feel as they arrive at the altar.
The tap of humility opened by Awareness of Acceptance and Sufficiency is one of a set of tools by which to travel and measure and reflect on my life among other lives in a swarm of beings, every one of whom is their own representative of the peace and love of which we are constituent parts, from which we come, and back to which we are all walking or dancing each other home.
I am grateful for the years of my almost daily practise of framing my own existence against the concept of my no longer existing.
I am grateful for the period – almost all my life – when my focus has reverted to the relationship between the transcendent scale of the universe and my small place on Earth in it.
It is this length of time spent reflecting on the scale of infinity compared to my finite world that has clicked into place a realisation.
In my early years, I used the conflict and paradox of questioning my awareness of my living existence by contrast to what that awareness could possibly be “before” I was born and after I cease to be, for the purpose of broadening my experience of mysticism and wonder.
In later years, the idea of me as a dead person would spur me on to live and live well in greater acceptance of the fact of death. And this background meditation on death has brought about a sense of humility and gratitude for every continued moment of life.
Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m very much alive, and that is more often cause for self-coronation and smugness than for humility and gratitude.
Chipper or serene, I will die.
I see I have spent decades bringing my attention to what it is to die, what it means to be me not alive any more. I look at my companion human beings who have noted nothing with measurable precision on the subject of death.
So many abstract feelings, concepts and mysteries affect my life and with my best endeavours none of them stop me from repeatedly running into the brick wall fact of death. Try and try as I might, with all my might, beyond death I cannot reach.
I can think through and use my understanding to breach mystic mysteries and paradoxes of belief and faith.
I can deploy my powers of intuition under guidance of wise healers. Revealed to me are entry portals into the flow of the arrow of time. Where my life past blurs and melts into present moment. There where I assumed contact was futile, I stepped forward to embrace my previous selves for the healing of reconciliation and personal redemption!
I can suspend received belief, accepted standard practices, cast out socially accepted axioms, and I can travel in time, meet and greet my family members past, present, future, converse as I am engaging with you now, with the younger manifestations of myself.
And I can close my eyes, and open the eyes of my eyes, navigate, float at will here and there (without protective gear) to and through any place outside of Earth in Space-time.
By means of all of this, I can arrive in some shape or form to the other side and return bearing new gifts.
Here is where I discover intimations of the supernatural. Here is where floods of infinity and awe comfort and reassure me with adequate helpings of warming endorphines of epiphany and intimations of immortality.
But death, whenever it crops up, is a hard place, a place of no compromise, no colour, which says stentorian, ‘You shall not go past this point’.
Why?
Life and death are not hidden from each other. They are not secrets from anyone. Death with life are hand in hand everywhere. Together they are, from our points of reference, everything.
Why should death be more intractable, and so much less accessible to us humans than life?
One way of thinking about all of this is to change the start point, the reference point from which we see one another and the world we live and die in.
Where we are born, interact, live, love and die is face-to-face here on this our lovely planet.
We can think of ourselves as exotic life forms, five-pointed star creatures, air breathers who walk on a planet blanketed by an air layer. We share this same life-sustaining, planet-wide, breathable shell of air with every other breather on this Earth.
This Earth and all its magical magnificent sharing keeps our gaze fixed on each other here ‘down below’.
Dearly beloved Shakespeare says: “And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself — Yea, all which it inherit — shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.”
This Earth, our only home, is our stage on which we are liable to strut and fret and miss out on opportunities, all in plain view of ourselves and each other. Only let me change my viewing station. Let me seek to comprehend my little life from far above and from far beyond this Pale Blue Dot, this Earth.
We are in truth made of star dust. It is more than a noble concept. That we are made of extinct stars is integral to us, to all living sentient beings. This dust we are made from confirms our diplomatic identity as ordinary members of the citizenry of the universe.
During our span on Earth we are concerned with truths closer to our five senses, closer to our daily lives.
It is easier to be present with breakfast in front of us than to make full frontal contact with the origins of the atomic composition of the molecules which breakfast represents.
We are survivors on this Earth. We individually survive. We strain with our innate instinct for self-preservation, with our desire to propel our genetic image beyond our own generation. We strain against risk of death in every form it takes, medical, malice, self-harm, accident, fire, flood, famine. We help one another survive.
We are bound to Earth as walkers by gravity. Seldom are we inclined to look up. If we see the stars, we will shortly look down to the land at our feet. To keep our balance becomes risky if we walk looking up at the starry night sky.
The objects we see in the sky show us that the objects on our planetary home are outnumbered by orders of magnitude utterly beyond our grasp.
The clue is in that fact the visible stars we see at night with our naked eyes are just a few thousand. Whereas, in stark contrast, our eyes can’t see the billions in our home galaxy, our Milky Way, and the improbably huge numbers in the universe at large.
I was about 12. I read avidly about astronomy. I used to force feed my head with visualisations of infinity – our place in the vast cosmos.
At some point, like many other children, I conjured up a crude vision of the extraordinary inverse proportions of my surroundings on Earth compared to Universal space.
As the years passed, I continued to satisfy by reading my thirst for knowledge of astronomical discoveries, with the widely broadcast research into cosmology, astrophysics and quantum physics.
Cosmology was, and still is my passion. This completely out of this world perspective, together with my almost daily practice of entering into the concept of death, the view of myself not alive, either before or after my lifespan, have become the third party, the confirmatory reference, my rock of rational vision.
These two awarenesses, my death and infinity, still fears, bring security, as well as sanity and comfort when Earthly events fail to calm my pain or to satisfy my curiosity.
I read into this quotation from Teilhard de Chardin that he sees all matter as interconnected and so replete with interdependence as to render fruitless the inspection of dissected portions.
Our Human interactions on planet Earth, however they blossom and flower, are bound by history as well as by gravity on this place where all life as we know it began.
In the history of ideas, we have relatively recently created the tools to study and open up our perspective to view places in time zones we have never inhabited, we hitherto could with difficulty imperfectly imagine.
Today people still argue over notional lines on maps, notional labels handed down from ancestral eras. We many of us give our undeviating agreement about the old ways we are to treat our dearest, or manage our attitudes to our nearest kin.
We do not take into account that those elders of ancient days knew about the microcosm of human existence, and they knew little or nothing of the generations of humankind in relation to the macrocosm.
They had no scale, no time-line by which to compare our collective births, lives and deaths with the birth and death of stars, galaxies and of matter itself.
They had but an inkling of the scale of the growth and development of populations all over the globe. In fact, in the world communities of settled, literate, commercially active populations, it was not possible till recently to even be aware of populations who lived elsewhere, nor could they have knowledge or appreciation of others’ different relationships with their own ecosystems.
We agreed to live by the rules they gathered to themselves from their limited knowledge of the finite resources of this planet and their necessarily restricted understanding of the effects on it of their exploitation of these resources, both human and material.
It holds true under close scrutiny by my intuition, if only for the one reason that I no longer am puzzled, or anxious, or carrying the same old unanswerable paradoxes around with me for more than fifty years.
People invest in fighting and killing with the same ancient tribal fervour. People fight for tribal reasons from the perceptions of one group that prioritises their need for territory and resources over another.
They who fought, those who died, used to die and fight in tragic ignorance of one simple fact.
Every living thing on this Earth is connected to every other life form by intricately and delicately balanced webs of interrelated interconnections.
This widespread and balanced planetary network of cause and effect has had a few thousand million years in which to become established. It is likely that such a type of stasis pre-exist in the universe at large, and it was a natural corollary to the formation of our Sun’s planetary system.
We have recently discovered that our human actions – we peoples of the Anthropocene – are the cause of such network disturbance as to threaten its stability. This is the stability necessary for Human Beings to continue to breathe, drink and sustain ourselves in the same way as we have been since we first struck two flints to make fire.
A very small number of men and women in this modern era – the Anthropocene – have had life-changing impressons of the three-hundred-and-sixty degree beauty of our Blue Planet.
They who have looked down at Earth from Earth orbit come back convinced that our ability to influence our long term fate is through the cross-border agreement and cooperation on the part of all inhabitants bar none.
The understanding of the scale of humanity in the universe is not some sort of amusing curiosity to lock up behind the walls of our museums. It is the stark reality of our common origins.
The early fables, myths and legends humans composed to understand and come to terms with the eternally unanswered questions about life on earth are today fabulous stories.
Yes, there are old ideas which may continue to cling to the newly expanded popularised astronomical imagery. Our place in the universe speaks its own message – oneness – a message so many more people today can find common ground with than in past eras.
I suggest all education, all media in all inhabited places be flooded with the discoveries of modern astronomy with the purpose of bringing humans into awareness of their third physical point of view: human-human-universe.
After I was exposed to the modern grasp of the full scale of the Cosmos, it will forever be entirely possible to reconcile my brief life as integrated into the fabric of the universe.
My friend was anxious to give adequate appropriate answers to her growing child’s ever more direct and specific questions about death, the end of life and the soul. My friend was anxious to give her child as much honest reassurance and wisdom as she feels he is capable of assimilating.
I said, “One thing that he will take from you and keep deep in his heart forever in these conversations are not the words you choose to reply with. What he will take is wordless. It is his perception of the light of joy that shines so bright from inside you, his Mother. It matters little how ‘accurate’ your replies, but how much love you show.”
We all die. We all question death. The way we put the great big questions to ourselves makes them insurmountable, unanswerable.
The big questions become reduced to manageable, comforting, comprehensible proportions when we replace with something far bigger the old, restricted, shrunken image of ourselves as individual units of temporary life, springing from uncountable unknown generations of exactly the same temporary units of living being.
Here is I, there were my parents, and there were my parents’ parents. On and on to a beginning so far back, all I have to keep is the idea of a beginning, and it is as remote from me as can be.
What else is there?
It might have been the sight of the trees growing, maturing, and disappearing in quick-time, fast forwards described dramatically in a scene from HG Wells amazing story, “The Time Machine”, which set me thinking about my own place in the landscape of existence.
The landscape of existence, when viewed from the perspective of a single observer over millions of seasons, becomes a metaphor for a new way of seeing death in terms of life, and life in terms of death.
I exist. Other sentient beings, like me, come and go. Who am I? What is my sentient existence, in an inevitable plurality of beings?
I see the continuum (only apparent to me for the duration of “me”) of the naturally occuring processes which constitute life in organisms great and small.
I see me as having been given/been infused with/been assumed into the life-force at my inception in the same manner as that blade of grass, this elephant, that newborn over there.
The unavoidable facts are that we arrive, we arise, we melt away. This precession of continuity has been the standard continuum of life for as long as organisms have been living. And dying.
These are facts I accept. I accept I am a manifestation of life’s continuum. My justification for writing such stuff as all this is that my acceptance of this concise description of what life and death is “works” for me.
I avoid varnishing my acceptance. As far as it is in my power, I will not ascribe meaning by labels to my condition of being alive, sharing life, while I am alive.
Like so many, I have wondered at my life of consciousness, which seems to be so centralised in me. My consciousness has its own Fool perched on my shoulder. It has an amygdala voice which says in my head, “You’re alive” or, more misleadingly, because it invites a dualistic bifurcated concept, “I’m alive”.
So I kept on fruitlessly asking the big questions about “my” life in me, and how this related, or equated with the life in others, alive now, who used to be alive, or who would at some future time be in life.
Then came the concept of the swarm.
An individual among similar individuals, like a tree, a bird, a human, is no less unique as a singular conscious living entity as the collective life of the sum total of its own kind.
I arose, I flower, I am to melt away.
I have no need whatever for creeping vines of significance, or encrusting jewels of verbal decoration. “I arose, I flower, I am to melt away.”
How did I acquire, how was I given, how was I assumed into the conscious sentience from which I appear to be observing, commenting, influencing the world in which I move?
If I think of putting these questions in front of me, it is to enter pointlessness. It is as if I am disrespecting the very gifts of this life. Wasted time is always regrettable. To imagine swathes of human populations waste time on pointless mental challenges over huge timescales is tragic.
Waste no time asking questions of time.
No question; Answer is before
I accept, with all that I am, all of my gifts, whether they are naturally occurring, or come out of my own striving.
I accept my Acceptance above all.
I value and accept my Acceptance, because this Life, which is superabundance of Joy and Love, has found an acceptance in my identity, and has assumed a proportion of my identity without my volition and with an attachment that never did, nor ever will depend on my acceptance of it.
This life allows me to glimpse with understanding, humility, unending gratitude and awe the common condition of conscious sentience that I share with every particle, subatomic particle and energy wave that ever was, is and will be!
Miraculously, far away from crude casuistry or intense interrogatory, out of non-existence I am born.
Into the selfsame, unanswerable, miraculous non-existence I am to return.
This crucial instant in which the stasis of my sentience pivots, which never begins and never ends, sways and rocks me with tender reasurance, like I’m in a womb, suspended in bliss between my two non-existences.
Virtually undifferentiated and all but indistinguishable from the continuum, except for the mystery of life…
There never is any preparation for the fact of death. When the shock of it affects our loved ones, family, friends, friends of friends or acquaintances, or those with whose names and influences we have grown up, death immediately shakes us to our very molecules.
In a strange way, because death is so extreme, so absolute, death can be trusted. This is a certainty to be grateful for.
Death never hides. It never pretends or is ambiguous. It is subject to no interpretation or comprehension other than by reference to itself alone.
That is what sets the fact of death apart from regular human business. There are no arguments, no halfway compromises. There is nothing else to do but to meet the fact of death with compassion and acceptance.
The only preparation we can offer to ourselves is to explore our innate compassion, to undertake the lengthy process of cultivation of self-love, leading to the humility of Acceptance.
Long years of making a friend of Acceptance may lessen the chaos of the shock when death visits. We can bring to our awareness over time what our natural compassionate impulses mean to us, and we can examine with care and attentiveness the sources, the origins of compassion.
It may seem of practical help to reflect on how the origins of compassion derive both their beginning and ending in death. There is a continuous cyclic flow of energy conservation, whose non-competitive, symbiotic motive forces span the axes of death and living compassion.
Respect is due in equal measure to death’s inevitability and to our ability to deepen our acceptance of death with compassion
TUESDAY 25th SEPTEMBER was the monthly Breathwork session “From Breath to Love – Conscious Breathing Circle” held by Karolina Mikulicz here in our home town.
When I arrived, I was the only one attending! So we agreed to have a 1-2-1 session.
After what happened to me in the last fortnight, I was in a state of high sensitivity and receptivity. I may share in another piece of writing, when I feel to gather the story together. It’s enough to say I had begun to make preparations in the last few days in the light of reasonable cause to believe the days of my life were numbered. It transpires that I am in no such danger. This is relief that I compare to being hit by a ton of bricks.
Karolina is, to me, wise far beyond her young years. Knowing how she has assimilated the healthy therapeutic effects of her own daily Breathwork practice over many years, I have come to have complete confidence in her skills as guide and facilitator. We always reach deep when we work together.
So, to be brief, (a tricky skill for me!) an obscuring chunk of cliff face fell away… almost all resistance due to fear melted away as if under high intensity radiation.
In the course of this evening’s guided Breathwork I found my core being, I call it: my unchanging awareness. I found my unfractionated identity, I see it as a white transparency with no material substance yet having the form of a swan’s body and whose being is available in maximal energy to enfold with arms, protect without limit or condition, to imbue me with life-power while not at all concealing or covering me.
In 1977, I had come face-to-face with this core essence of my being with the common descriptor being a white-hot kernel. The image of a light concentrated into white heat had arrived then. During my awakening in 2013, and ever since, up till today, the vision of awareness of my own heart has been of an orange-gold glow in my heart space.
In summer 1977, I entered a period of pain and incomprehension, and an involuntary process began. One by one, layers of self identity fell away from me. I felt with great alarm that I was soon to lose my sanity. At length all that was left of this 31 year old man, of his certainty and his received assumptions about himself was reduced to a white-hot molten pool resting immobile at the bottom of a huge immovable crucible.
Today’s “Real”isation arrived as a direct effect of having been able to release all vestiges of fear of trying and seeking by walking in the bravery of trust and innocent belief in the total support of the earth under me and the clean oxygen I fill my lungs with.
Something changed tonight.
There was no upheaval and certainly no pain. Pain comes only as an equal and opposite reaction to resistance. Abandon of resistance and its replacement with the gentleness of compassion and a childlike humility is what characterised the session this time. Karolina threw at me unanswerable questions. She stayed, guided and was by my side. I responded from my truth.
Later, at the end, we talked. This is how I tried to make clear what had changed inside during the latter part of our working session. A sacred chant that I remember I had sung before, and whose Sanskrit words I had learned, had been playing in the background. I was not the listener with this music in my ears. The music was playing me and my hearing was the music playing. The music was playing in me. I was conscious of not being the listener. I had no involvement in the joining of the music with my hearing.
A blending took place that I was fully aware of as it happened. I have entered a fusion between my core original self and the sensory experience of the material World around me.
Here I can not go all the way with words to describe this. I was totally receptive to the music while not needing to make any conscious effort at distinguishing it as musical sounds to which I was paying attention. The effect was of music happening in the way my blood happens to circulate in my body. The music was involuntarily musical in me. This utterly new experience was welcome and most lovely. I felt with all my senses and all my awareness the freshness of it.
With this clearing, whatever happens next, my lack of fear of my own death has received a big boost.
Karolina suggested I write up about this session. My thanks to Karolina takes the form of this short description.
Crises shake me awake, so that I have little choice but to pay attention and attempt to understand the storms, conflicts and extremes of opposing emotion that roil and boil inside me.
I know that the stirrings in me which crises cause are like clear waters suddenly made muddy. I know the transparent calm where all was clear and simple to see is gone.
The plateau of my heart’s ease, where grass is green, and no wind ruffles, is a gift to be accepted.
The calm of uneventful days is like the sun that shines on a jet plane – I am to trust revolutions of power beyond my understanding and voluntary control are churning, burning, and keeping me safe on the inside.
I accept the days of ‘nothing doing’ in the same way I down the first drink of cool water in the morning. I absorb bright colourless refreshment certain it will reach into my darkest roots.
But I also know to stand back from insisting to myself that I must thrash out sense and meaning out of turbulent emotions. Death inside, or at the very least continuing ignorance, is the reward for panicky reactions where I am drawn in to fruitless fights with my own shadows.
I know that the swirl of sediment that now blinds my view of where I am going is composed of mysterious particles.
These are the smashed up, mashed up micro fragments of old certainties!
They are more valuable than gold dust, more alive than my own breath, because, unlike mud which petrifies into rock on settling, I know they will recrystalise into brand new beauty.
My road was secure. But now it is blazing into a lava flow. My tears explode where they fall!
My old road will rearrange and recrystallise to recreate – like resolidified titanium – my new spiritual bones.
I know I will give myself the gift of time, waiting in faith and trust. I am 100% calm, because I have confidence that the primordial roots of my origins are active, though I have not the least intimation of their motion, intention or direction.
This is how trees await Spring, how birds the Sunrise, and it is how “old earth is new earth in the dark seed’s eye”.
I will have stood aside and observed the swirls of pain in my chest. I will have felt them retch up my throat. I will have committed to memory the dried tears I see on my own face.
And, at the end of all of this, I will see walking towards me, with the magical mutual smiles of recognition spreading over both our faces, myself and I, as we fall into an embrace for the first time.
For those who regularly practice Biodanza – and I am one of some few hundred thousand every week in dozens of different countries – there is a sense of coming home attaching to the word Mindfulness.
From way back, when I began to reflect on the big questions, up to today, I will almost daily catapult my mind into the Now by reference to the notion of my own death. It is a cleansing act which sharpens my gratitude and my wonder for being me being alive in this moment – right here now.
It’s with my regular practice of Biodanza that I am becoming accustomed to the practice – not only the idea – of living my daily life more and more ‘in the Moment’.
That’s to say I am going about the business of my days without tripping up over selfconscious self-referential thoughts. Less and less do I feel the need to question my motives, still less do I bother to direct my thoughts in at myself, where there’s a treadmill for thoughts with nothing better to do than trudge around and around.
What takes my mind away from mental closed circuits today is my gratitude for the pleasures of inclusive warm comradeship I feel from my fellow Biodancers.
Yes, I might still be lonely in my days and nights, but my friends in the Dance of Life have reflected my natural inner joy back to me from their integrity and respect and trust.
In Biodanza, something as simple as feeling joyful can be revealed as depending on nobody around me. I can see that the joy in the eyes of a partner in the dance spells out happiness all by itself. His or her joy doesn’t depend on me. It arises between us in the shared act of dance. We recognise it is our naked flame of humanity which each has made possible to reveal to the other in the unguarded intimacy of our moments of communion.
Biodanza to me is a spritual reawakening and a growth in potential of the whole person through wordless self expressive freestyle movement, mediated through music, under expert guidance and in the companionship of others whose integrity and trust is strong, explicit and bonding.
I have not dared to hope that Biodanza will always continue to reveal more subtleties of innerscape, more outward expanses of conscious joy, more awareness of the same upward spiralling awakening in those all around me.
I had not dared to hope until I asked Natasha, who has some eight years’ Biodanza. She says it’s perfectly clear that the beneficial effect goes on getting higher, deeper, broader both on the inside and out, and it will never end.
I’m reminded of the illusion of those lonely parallel tracks. In the experience of Busy-busy living, when I think I am alone on the path, I blink, look around and see others on parallel paths. As we face the horizon, all our different divergent paths converge, merge and blaze together in a revitalising sunrise. Or sunset.
I am 100% certain of my own death. I am ignorant of the time when I will die.
So now what choices are left to me?
Quietly stated, I can choose to open my heart to love my fellow journeyers and to honour the life flame which expresses itself as the one I call me.
I can turn to face up to myself, and sharpen and hone my acute awareness of my body and my mind with every breath and heartbeat.
I can close my inner eye and in the dark I can feel the hearts beat of all my loved ones – family, friends, of every single one whose path has crossed and touched mine.
My ancestors make themselves known to me in the living, working. expressions of my body, and in the inheritance of my capacity for thought.
I can give thanks for choices without end.
Principally, I have the ability to bend towards all who have made reality of my existence.
My gratitude is in the immediacy of every instant my blood and my flesh support my survival. My bloodline is a small drop in a chartless oceanic journey of blood lines.
Love is the bed of our moving blood ocean.
I am at peace in a storm of fiery life!
I am overflowing with gifts none of which I created, but all of which arise from the mystery of peace from which my compassionate heart flames into life.
The View at 72+ 