Niseema: Dynamic Balance Bodywork

LEONARD COHEN said his teacher once told him that, the older you get, the lonelier you become, and the deeper the love you need. This is because, as we go through life, we tend to over-identify with being the hero of our stories.
This hero isn’t exactly having fun: he’s getting kicked around, humiliated, and disgraced. But if we can let go of identifying with him, we can find our rightful place in the universe, and a love more satisfying than any we’ve ever known.
People constantly throw around the term “hero’s journey” without having any idea what it really means. Everyone from CEOs to wellness influencers thinks the hero’s journey means facing your fears, slaying a dragon, and gaining 25k followers on Instagram. But that’s not the real hero’s journey.
In the real hero’s journey, the dragon slays YOU. Much to your surprise, you couldn’t make that marriage work. Much to your surprise, you turned forty with no kids, no house, and no prospects. Much to your surprise, the world didn’t want the gifts you proudly offered it.
If you are foolish, this is where you will abort the journey and start another, and another, abusing your heart over and over for the brief illusion of winning. But if you are wise, you will let yourself be shattered, and return to the village, humbled, but with a newfound sense that you don’t have to identify with the part of you that needs to win, needs to be recognized, needs to know. This is where your transcendent life begins.
So embrace humility in everything. Life isn’t out to get you, nor are your struggles your fault. Every defeat is just an angel, tugging at your sleeve, telling you that you don’t have to keep banging your head against the wall. Leave that striver there, trapped in his lonely ambitions. Just walk away, and life in its vastness will embrace you.

~ as quoted by Paul Weinfield

“Keeping your body healthy is an expression of gratitude to the whole cosmos—the trees, the clouds, everything.”

―author and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh

Thank you to Rob Brezsny for the quote.

WE ARE HERE

We are here essentially, to risk ourselves in the world. We are a form of invitation to others and to otherness, we are meant to hazard ourselves for the right thing, for the right woman or the right man, for a son or a daughter, for the right work or for a gift given against all the odds. And in all this continual risking the most profound courage may be found in the greatest risk and the greatest vulnerability, and perhaps, the greatest prize of all, the simple willingness to allow ourselves to be happy along the way …

David Whyte

…

From ‘LONGING’
In CONSOLATIONS:
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning
of Everyday Words
Revised Edition © David Whyte
and Many Rivers Press 2022

…

Coming Down From Stoney Cove Pike
Photo © David Whyte June
Cumbria. July 2nd 2017
..

It is both fascinating and rewarding to approach happiness as a core practice and a choice: to rest deeply and calmly, even amidst the necessary losses of an individual human life, and find already lying within us, not a naive, forced generation of false positivity, but an attentive sense of continued extraordinary surprise at the preposterous, gifted, overwhelming and astonishing nature of every day existence. DW

Yesterday was World Polarity Therapy Day in honor of Dr. Randolph Stone DC, who was the creator of this profound healing modality. Learning Polarity Therapy 17 years ago gave me the foundational understanding of energy oriented bodywork and how to listen with ears, hands and heart. It informs and holds the work I do today. In deep gratitude to Dr. Stone and APTA for holding the space for this work to continue at a high level.

START CLOSE IN

Start close in,
don’t take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way to begin
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people’s questions,
don’t let them
smother something
simple.

To hear
another’s voice,
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes an
intimate
private ear
that can
really listen
to another.

Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own,
don’t follow
someone else’s
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don’t mistake
that other
for your own.

Start close in,
don’t take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

…

START CLOSE IN
David Whyte : Essentials
Many Rivers Press © David Whyte
….

A New Year’s poem, if ever there was one. Carrying that certain air of self-admonition we all need to go in the right direction, and do the right thing. This piece was inspired by my growing familiarity with Dante's 'Comedia', particularly the first lines, written in despair after being exiled from his beloved Florence. It reflects the difficult act we all experience, of trying to start again when everything has been taken away; the necessity of stepping bravely again, into what looks like a dark wood, when the outer world as we know it has disappeared, when the world can only be met and in some ways made again from no outer ground, but from the very center of our being. The temptation is to take the second or third step outer step, not the first inward one, to ignore the invitation into the center of our own body, often into the source of our grief and our reluctance: an attempt to finesse the raw vulnerability and the absolutely necessary understanding at the core of the pattern, to forgo the radical and almost miraculous simplification into which we are being invited. For a better, truer New Year - the invitation is always, always, always, to 'Start close In.'

…

Woman Walking
Yorkshire Dales
Photo © David Whyte
December 2015

And it can be a difficult yet precious reunion!