This moment is the revelation

Start from the assumption that this moment is the revelation.

That paradise is here and now,

Although you are not yet experiencing it,

And it might feel quite the opposite.

Get curious with your heart

As to what gifts are being presented.

The delight is in the unwrapping.

First Intimacy

First Intimacy

Cherishing myself,

Cherishing myself,

Cherishing

myself.

And only then,

only then

only

then

Reaching out

from where I am

to meet

you.

Bad boy

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

[Mary Oliver - Wild Geese]

I've realised recently that as a child I was made to feel ashamed for wanting what I wanted.

And I've realised that this shame has been at the core of a lot of my adult behaviour.  And it may be about time to let it go.

I've written a poem which talks about this and I'd like to share it with you.

~


Bad boy

No-one will love me if I ask for what I want.

That's what my mum told me, so it must be true.

And she loves me. 

She's only telling me because she loves me.

That's what my mum told me, 

So it must be true.

Because I ask for what I want, when it's not what she wants

I'm a “selfish boy”.

And no-one will love me if I'm a selfish boy.

A boy who wants what he wants.

My mum told me,

So it must be true.

So all I need to do

For mum to love me

And you to love me

Is for me not to want what I want.

And instead to want what she wants,

And to want what you want.

This is being a “good boy”.

That's what my mum told me,

So it must be true.

But the truth is,

The truth is,

I don't want what you want

I want what I want.

That means she won't love me.

That means you won't love me.

This means that no-one can love me.

I'm a bad boy.

That's what my mum told me,

So it must be true.

~

But to survive, I'll pretend

To want what she wants me to want

To want what you want me to want

I'll try to figure out who you want me to be.

In order for you to love me.

How do you want me to be in order for you to love me?

Like this?

Or maybe this?

No...that's not working

How about this?

If I try really hard to figure out who I need to be

Then I can be that good boy

And perhaps you'll love me.

You'll love me until you discover my deep dark secret.

That I do want want I want.

And not what you want.

That deep down, I'm a selfish,

Bad boy.

That if you knew what I was really like

You wouldn't love me

Couldn't love me.

That's what my mum said, 

So it must be true.

~

And what do I want?

I've almost forgotten.

And it's not worth remembering

Because I shouldn't want it.

And I'm not going to get it anyway.

That's what my mum said,

So it must be true.

~

But perhaps...

Just perhaps

What mummy said wasn't true after all.

Perhaps it's OK for me to want what I want

And it's OK for you to want what you want.

And I can love you in your wanting

And you can love me in mine.

And I'm not a bad boy, or a good boy.

I'm simply a boy who grew up to be a man.

A man who simply wants what he wants.

A man who sometimes gets it right and sometimes gets it wrong.

And who is loveable,

Regardless.

~

love

Daniel

Lay down your weapons

I'd like to talk about sex.  This isn't a cheap ploy to get your attention (though if it's had that effect, I'm quite happy to have it.)  It's more a way of saying that what follows is a little exploration of my relationship to some quite intense areas of human experience and I didn't want you to be taken completely by surprise...

Good. Hopefully we both feel ready now.  More accurately, I want to share with you about my relationship with attraction.

It's been dawning on me recently that I often find being attracted to someone quite difficult. I don't mean that it's hard for me to get turned on. That happens very regularly and quite easily. I mean that I then usually find myself in a state of confusion as to what happens next.

I know I'm in good company. Enough songs, books, plays, films and poems have been written on the madness that often happens when two humans like each other in that way to convince me I'm not alone. But it was only recently that I started to get an insight as to what's going on inside me, and the light that this sheds on my wider relationship with the world. And it's this that I'd like to share with you.

It was on the dancefloor last week that I finally realised that I often experience feeling attracted to someone as an attack.

I don't mean that I actually believe that the person I'm attracted to is attacking me, but my body often responds as if I do. There is contraction in the muscles along the front line of my chest, diaphragm and solar-plexus, a shot of adrenalin goes through my body, and an immediate sense of urgency arises within me.

I'm guessing that this has quite a bit to do with biology. The sympathetic nervous system, which governs this sort of activation is often referred to by teachers of anatomy as covering “the 3Fs”. (The first two Fs being “fight” and “flight” – the third F being one of the most usual conclusions of mutual attraction between adult humans).

Now you may think that all of this extra adrenalin and excitement is a Good Thing. And in many ways it is. But for me it often hasn't felt that way, and I'm now starting to realise why.

As a craniosacral therapist I've known for some time that too much of a good thing, is too much. If there is more input going into the body that it feels that it can take, the body treats this as a problem. In ordinary language we in the West have a word for it, it's called getting overwhelmed.

And when we get overwhelmed by strong feelings, the body usually does something like what your home electricity circuits do when there is too much current. The circuit breaker gets activated – and then the lights go out.

The body's equivalent of this is that we find ways of distancing ourselves from these strong feelings. For most people this involves some combination of clamping down their muscles in some way, freezing, or “spinning out” (going into a day-dreamy state in their head where they are not really able to feel their body and all the strong feelings happening there). An alternative is to go into thinking and analysing what's going on and getting really involved with these thoughts, which again is the body's way of metaphorically sticking it's fingers in its ears and saying to the strong feelings “la la la, I can't hear you!”.

The key realisation that I had the other evening standing in front of a beautiful woman at my dance class is that I usually experience attraction as a very strong feeling. So strong it goes past the “this is rather nice and rather exciting stage” and well into my body's red-zone of “Iceberg ahead! – Man the lifeboats, abandon ship!”

It was fairly obvious to me that this is not the ideal response to standing in front of someone I fancy, but it dawned on me that this is usually, in one form or another what I do. I've noticed that when this happens I find it difficult to look them in the eye, I get convinced that they will see how attracted I'm feeling and they won't be OK with this – so I try not to show it, or to hide it, or to at least tone it down. Or I end up saying something daft. And then I wonder why they have started to look at me funny!

What has occurred is that I've felt a very strong feeling, my system has gone into overwhelm, and one way or another I've left my body and left being in relationship with the person I'm standing in front of. Which, all in all, is pretty rubbish really.

But it wasn't all sobering reality - the second part of the realisation that came on the dancefloor the other night was that it doesn't have to be this way.

I'd received some pretty good preparation for this realisation. I'd just spent a week doing some amazing workshops with Joanna Watters, Colin Harrison and Paul Wolflight exploring what it is to live as a human being in a body and I'd picked up some pretty powerful insights along the way.

Something really unlocked for me during a workshop with Colin and Paul on anger, called Passion for Change. The revelation is around what we all usually do with strong feelings (anger being a good example). Most of us when we have a strong feeling – take anger, either express it “You bloody idiot! Look where you're going!” or repress it (which involves finding some way of squishing it down and pretending it's not happening).

Expressing it feels good, at least in the short term. We've thrown away this strong energy and it is no longer troubling us. The problem is that we've usually thrown it at someone and they are now feeling the consequences. And assuming that they are not happy about this, we'll soon feel the consequences. We've also probably turned that person into an object, made judgments about them, and this usually ends quite badly one way or another.

Repressing the feeling is even worse. We lose contact with our body and with what is really happening, we leave relationship with our environment or whoever we're with, and we squish down this uncomfortable energy, where it gets stored in our body like toxic waste, ready to leak out or explode at inopportune moments.

As you've probably guessed by now, there's a third way. And it doesn't involve anyone getting blasted or squished. It's called conducting.

Here comes the hard part for me. I'm going to do my best to describe something that is fairly new to me, and which can't easily be put into words. A bit like a person who has tasted 1 or 2 strawberries trying to describe the taste to someone who has never tasted one before. (Although I may be about to describe something that you know very well and that you do all the time. In which case, well done to you – I only wish you'd told me about it. A long time ago. It would have saved me a lot of heartache!)

Conducting is having the feeling. (Imagine an east-end London accent at this point) – really “ 'avin it!” - 'avin it large. It's really inhabiting the feeling, breathing the energy of it around your body. Perhaps even moving your body a little to allow the energy to circulate. Letting the feeling be what it really is, which is a felt sense of a particular flavour of energy in your body and enjoying and celebrating that energy (rather than getting bothered about where it came from or where it's going).

This is the opposite of catharsis, which is trying to throw away the energy. It's inhabiting the energy, letting your body hum with it, and then using it creatively or letting it simply pass through.

On the workshops I experienced consciously doing this with the strong energies of attraction, anger and hostility. It was really empowering to realise that I could feel these things – really feel them, without feeling that I needed to do anything about them. I didn't need to express or repress – I could conduct. And the great thing about conducting is that I was able to stay in my body and stay in relationship with myself, with my environment and with anyone I was with.

And standing in front of this very lovely dancer last Tuesday night this is just what I did. I felt the strong feelings running through my body and breathed into them – not being scared of them as I often am, but really allowed myself to have the feelings as mine. “This is my attraction, in response to you”. I felt amazingly energised and excited. I felt completely in my body and I felt comfortable with the feelings. I felt no need to hide them or make excuses for them. I felt no compulsion to act awkward or weird. I felt lit up like a torch – a beacon of attraction and I was beaming myself right at my dancing partner – loving being me, loving being me with her. It was beautiful. And it didn't mean anything anymore than an flower, a lion or a waterfall means anything. It was just what was happening, and I was loving it.

The dancer in question confided in me afterwards that this dance had been a particularly beautiful experience for her too and had really opened her to dropping into her body and her sexuality, which was amazingly touching for me to hear.

I realised that I had from time to time stumbled on this way of being in relationship with strong feelings by accident on quite a number of occasions in the past, but without being aware what I was doing. The difference is that this time I was able to make a conscious choice to feel what was happening and to love it. It tasted like freedom.

I recognised that I now have the possibility of doing this whenever I'm feeling strong feelings, whatever those strong feelings may be and to taste the freedom that comes with embracing my life.

And I recognise that the old patterns are still running. That my reflex reaction to feeling a strong feeling will often be to slip into “identification” (thinking that the feeling is part of me, and therefore not something that I can choose to feel). Once I'm in identification the strong feeling becomes a “problem”, the person or object that caused it becomes my oppressor and I become the victim. I become fixated on what's happening out there, instead of feeling what's happening in here. I then feel that I need to “do something” about the perceived problem. I feel unsafe. And I start trying.

And there is another way.

To conduct my feelings is to leave the victim identity behind, to stand in my power and to love my life, in relationship with the world.

My prayer is that I do that more. Lots more.

~

Lay down your weapons

You're not under attack,

Though it often seems that way.

Yes, there are big waves coming in.

Big feelings, huge sensations, gigantic emotions.

So massive they threaten to engulf you.

Big BIG waves.

And they are coming this way.

You know what to do with big waves.

Grab your board, jump on,

turn it around and start paddling.

Feel the Ocean under you as it grabs your board,

Stand up in your glory and ride,

Celebrate the turbulence and the froth,

The curves in the swell.

Revel in the conversation between you and the sea.

Ride the waves,

all the way back to the shore.

You can't fight the waves.

But you can surf them.

Lay down your weapons.

You're not under attack.

It's just the Ocean being the Ocean.

You and the Ocean are two parts

of the same whole.

Of the same love.

~

love

Daniel

Waking up

~



The most precious

The most precious,

is

The Union
between

what is happening
in my experience
right now

and

my capacity to
love it
completely -

to cherish it,

to prize it beyond

Anything else.

To value
my life.



~

No need to be lonely

“You are either free, up against it or hiding.”

is something one of my teachers said recently that really hit home.


My understanding of what he meant was something like: in any given moment in life we are either (a) touched by our experience, not feeling separate from it and flowing easily and naturally with it, (b)  fighting with life and suffering and often realising that we are doing this, or (c) so detatched from our experience that we don’t even realise that we are distant from it, alternatively knowingly putting our heads in the sand and trying to pretend it isn't happening.


I had a profound experience of the first two very clearly recently within a very short space of time, which I’d like to share with you.  The third is very familiar to me too, but this experience was mainly about the freedom and fighting.


I had recently given notice from a job that I’d held for 15 years, which I had fallen out of love with.  I’d decided to follow my heart and devote all of my time to building work based around heartfulness and presence.  To say that I felt excited and energised was a bit of an understatement.  I was stoked.


And then I went dancing.  I went to 5 Rhythms, which is a dance practice somewhere between clubbing and meditation.  We dance for the joy of dancing and we dance to come home to ourselves and to connect to others, to connect to life.


As well as being great fun and really joyous, it can also be a challenging place to be.  It certainly is for me, and others have told me the same.  In addition to the easy, openhearted bits, I often see myself playing out all of my life patterns on the dancefloor - feeling self-conscious, comparing myself to others, judging them, sometimes even fixating on them.  It’s not pretty.  But because it is a dancing meditation, we are encourged to notice what’s going on.   We see that we are suffering, and quite often we have haven’t got a clue what do to about it.  I often haven’t got a clue about what to do about it, if in fact there is anything that actually needs to be done.


And on this particular evening for the first 30 minutes that just wasn’t happening.  My habitual patterns weren’t running.  I was simply in my experience and loving it.  I was free.


I was able to have a very conscious experience of what free felt like.  I loved my dance (though there was no ego attachment to it) there was just loving my dance.  I loved everyone else’s dances without exception.  I wasn’t judging them, I was loving them.  If I felt attraction for someone it felt simple and easy - I was able to celebrate it as my feeling of attraction and to share it with them without wanting or expecting anything back - and I could see from their response that they enjoyed receiving the simple gift of my appreciation without any of the usual strings attached.  Everything, but everything felt simple and easy.  I was flowing with life. 


It gave me a glimpse.  A glimpse of what’s possible, when I’m not run by my patterns and when I’m simply living as part of life.  As life.  Separate, but not separate.


And then, as predicted it happened.  After about 30 minutes of freedom, my patterns started to re-emerge.  I found myself feeling slightly dissatisfied with my dance, and judging and comparing others.  When I felt attraction for someone I could sometimes notice my attention becoming fixated on them, which didn’t feel nice.  (I’m guesing it didn’t feel nice for them either, but even inside me it didn’t feel too good).  Things no longer felt completely easy.  There was in fact a quiet but persistent sense that somewhere, just out of direct line of sight there was an (as yet undefined) problem.  I knew that this was something that I was doing to reality - but I didn’t know how to set myself free.  Damn! I was “up against it”.


And it was a wonderful contrast.  To be able to experience both so clearly and so fully within a 1 hour period was a great gift and allowed me to see certain things much more clearly.


After about half an hour of this general grumpiness, I was reminded of my recent insights and I started to get curious.  Were there feelings in my body that wanted to be felt and that I wasn’t feeling?  I checked.  Yup.  There they were.  I couldn’t fully feel them but I could just about see where they were hanging out.  Why couldn’t I feel them?  Most of my attention was outside on the others, liking them, disliking them, making up stories about them, obsessing over them and generally fixating on them.  Very little of my attention was on my own body.  I’d left home.  I’d abandoned myself - at least temporarily.  It felt painful and a little lonely.


I resolved just for that moment to bring all of my attention in.  To ignore everyone else and to carry on dancing but to feel the feelings.  Could I do it?  Yes.  Was it difficult?  No, not really, once I’d noticed that I needed to do it and made a firm decision that that’s what I was going to do for a bit.  


And so I did.  I carried on dancing and felt the feelings.  I let the feelings become part of my physical expression and danced the feelings.  All of them.  I danced my sadness and frustration, my anger and my joy, my grief and my delight.


In the mix there were some strong so-called “negative” feelings - sadness, anger, grief.  But there was nothing happening in my life that I felt these things about.  Where did these strong “negative” feelings come from?  My sense is/was that they are old stuff - old “stories” stored in my body, from days gone by when strong experiences happened that I wasn’t able to process, and so my body has buried them.  (A bit like the way that we currently bury radioactive waste, becuase we don’t know how to process it and make it safe).  And by not paying attention to these strong buried feelings they were leaking out all over the place, making my life and that of those around me a less pleasant place to be.


So, I just felt them these feelings.  I gave myself to it and them 100% for a little while.  And the effect was amazing.  The feelings didn’t go away, but I came home.


There I was, in my body, dancing and feeling, just dancing and feeling, eyes half closed, having my experience, no separation - once again, free.


But this was a slightly different free from earlier that evening.  Earlier it had been free with no painful feelings.  Now it was free with painful feelings.  The first one didn’t seem to take any practice to do.  The second was a little bit more challenging, because my usual pattern when there are painful feelings to be felt is not to feel them.  


And yet in some ways I noticed that it was the same free.  All I needed to do was to feel what I was feeling, to embrace my experience and life became easy again, the sense of dissatisfaction and problem disappeared and I was able to celebrate - everything.  Even though I was not in contact with others, I noticed I didn’t feel lonely, not a bit.  I felt...loved.


I noticed that along with feeling the pain, I was suddenly able to feel joy too.  Gradually I was able to open my eyes and see the others and include them.  I wasn’t judging them anymore, I was able to see them, just see them and appreciate them for who they were, as they were.  Gradually, being careful to “stay at home” with myself and my feelings I was able to make eye contact.  It was a bit vulnerable at first, because I was allowing them to see my how I was, with all of my feelings, but also felt simple and easy.  Nothing to hide.  Hello you, this is me.  I’m like this right now.  Ah, you’re like that.  Nice to meet you.


I had some exquisite dances from that place, of meeting people including all the feelings that were happening in me and by doing that being able to include them too.  I was so touched to be sharing myself with them and to be able to appreciate them as they appreciated me and I appreciated myself.  I felt such gratitude.  Gratitude to myself, gratitude to my partners, gratitude to life.  


And this was a deeper glimpse.  A glimpse of how I could be free in the world when things inside didn’t feel easy.  How I didn’t need to zone out or withdraw, but how I could completely include myself and from there relate with the world.  I didn’t need to wait for the moment that all of my “stuff” would be resolved.  I could do this in any moment.  In any moment when I was able to notice that I’d left home and when I was willing to come home, face the music and feel the feelings.


And the simple insight that I gained from this experience was I can now see the suffering and fixation as a reminder - a reminder that I’ve “left home”.


Whenever I notice my attention is out - that I’m judging others or myself - that I’m wondering whether they like me or what they are thinking, when there feels like there is a problem with life - its a sure sign that there’s something closer to home that is crying out to be felt.


All I need to do is to come in, and just for a little while give in all my attention, before being able to open out my attention and include the rest of the world.


How do I know if I’m actually feeling the feeling?  It’s not as obvious as I originally thought.


I had a craniosacral session the other day and told my craniosacral therapist that I was feeling tired.  I thought that’s what I was feeling.  And to some extent it was true.  But then she said “can you sink into the tiredness and feel what’s there?”.  I realised that I had been hovering above the tiredness, not really feeling it, somehow resisting it (and yes, that background sense of “problem” was there too).  When I sank into the tiredness and let myself feel it I contacted something else, a sense of deep sadness/grief.  And with it came a sense of relief, a sense of coming home.  It was touching.


I found myself writing the following words this morning:


*If I am getting externally fixated it’s because there’s a feeling that want’s to be felt and I’m not at home to feel it.


* If there is a sense of tiredness/contraction/resistance - I’m probably floating just above the feeling...almost feeling it but not quite.


Can I melt into the tiredness/resistance?  What is there that I’m not yet fully feeling?


* Feeling the feelings doesn’t have a scratchy resistant quality to it (that quality indicates to that I’m not quite in the place of my experience).


That resistance is probably the “self contraction” that keeps me seperate from life/oneness/unity.


Feeling the feelings has a relieving - coming home quality.


Even if it is accompanied by sadness/anger/grief.


It is touching.


(Because it is touching experience).


If there feels like there is a problem ask:


Am I touched by my experience right now?


Can I melt into my experience and let it have me, let it touch me.


If the answer is no, then can I be touched by that?


By my feeling of separation from life and the loneliness that accompanies it.


Keep gently enquiring.


Stay with yourself - not trying, but not abandoning yourself either.


You’re just up against it, that’s all.


Until you are touched by your experience.


Until you are home.
Free.


Home.


~


love


Daniel

Rules of Being Human

I didn't write this and I can't quite discover who did.  I found it at the end of a great book on Craniosacral Therapy by Rollin Becker called The Stillness of Life.  I think it's rather fab.

Rules of Being Human

1.  You will receive a body.  You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period this time around.

2.  You will learn lessons.  You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called life.  Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons.  You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant or stupid.

3.  There are no mistakes, only lessons.  Growth is a process of trial and error experimentation.  The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately "works".

4.  A lesson is repeated until it is learned.  A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it.  When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.

5.  Learning lessons does not end.  There is no part of life that does not contain lessons.  If you are alive then there are lessons to be learned.

6.  "There" is no better than "here".  When your "there" has become a "here", you will simply obtain another "there" that will, again, look better than "here".

7.  Others are merely mirrors of you.  You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.

8.  What you make of your life is up to you.  You have all of the tools and resources you need.  What you do with them is up to you.  The choice is yours.

9.  Your answers lie inside you.  The answers to life's questions lie inside you.  All you need to do is look, listen and trust.

10.  You will forget all this.

~ 


Daniel Kingsley - Cranio - on Facebook
www.reconnectohealth.co.uk