1. Moving meditation – a timeless process whose time has come
Meditation which is deeply moving. Movements that truly meditate. The project of Moving Meditation is an exploration of this process of mystery and what can be done with it. It is also an effort to share it, and a collective dedicated to that.
MM is not so much of a school offering a stand-alone meditation program in competition with others. What we do offer is seminars, retreats and open evenings where we share practice forms, explorations and ideas into a growing contemporary culture of meditation, where most of our participants already have some knowledge and experience from other meditation schools. Other participants make their first solid meditation experiences with us, and we encourage them to go on and support and extend it through courses in daily practice systems with other teachers, when they are ready. We also have publications with guided meditation practices that participants can take home. Finally, some of our events have the character of mystery celebrations where teaching and training yield to spontaneous play and generosity of shared meditative space – something beautiful that can be invited and enjoyed but not learned or controlled, just like Apollo, Dionysus and the other divine guests at mystery celebrations of the ancients.
You are also invited. We invite you to see Moving Meditation as a process to be in, more than a thing to know or skill to have. It seems to be a process whose time has come, almost with its own initiative and drive. We didn’t invent it, we got entangled or invited.
MM is part of a general trend of “embodiment”, of re-connecting thought, culture and values with the body. This trend is also finding expressions in spirituality. A comprehensive paradigm of embodied-spirituality seems to be emerging, with new potentials of experience, selfhood and communication. More than many other enterprises, MM aims directly at the emerging space where meditation and movement are becoming available as one process. We throw a systematic, playful effort into exactly that space. We are fortunate to be able to do so standing on shoulders of people and schools with depths and insights in meditation – or movement – that we will probably never match (acknowledgements, 2.1.8). But we – the collective that you are part of if we gave you the link to this text – are still a bit special, in that we root our work in just exactly that space and that nexus of moving meditation – brand new and more ancient than ancient.
MM is work that can inspire and deepen existing meditation practice for those who have one. Many of our participants do, probably most of them. For those who don’t, MM can give the initial taste of deep meditative process – in some cases inspire or support the start on a regular practice. (We do very much encourage regular meditative practice, by the way. Having one is probably even a necessary background for MM facilitators. But at least for now, we don’t offer a program ourselves. We can recommend good schools and programs if participants ask, see sec 2.7 )
MM practices have also proven interesting and useful in small and light dosages, in contexts of other groups and projects – e.g. to improve communication in a professional team, to create a warm wild high for happy dancing evenings without drugs, to support dimensions of embodiment in mindfulness teacher education, or to help groups of overweight citizens find new, more enjoyable and playful ways of being with their bodies.
MM is becoming more and more of a collective effort. This is great. The project is not just about the wisdom of bodies moving in physical space, but also the wisdom of togetherness and group processes. Meditation in moving, creative collectives is the core and the goal. This manual is a tool for it – a first, clumsy version, we’re afraid, but with love.
2. Basic concepts
This chapter gives some backgrounds and concepts to frame, reflect and discuss moving meditation. You can take them lightly, perhaps just skim these sections and let them rest until their themes become relevant in some context. The points are not something you need to remember. They are not even something you need to agree with, in order to be in the processes and pass on the work that the points are pointers into.
A good concept is, as Deleuze said, a problem – not a solution. It opens spaces – kinds of meaning, striving, interest, depth, that could be involved or get involved in a field. Therefore, without good concepts, our approach to a field may become too flat, too shallow.
So, in this chapter we lay out what can be involved in some good basic concepts: meditation, awakening, movement, dancing, habits, silence, guidance and spontaneity. Their minimal spaces, you could say. If you can expand them to get more drive and traction, all the better.
Afterwards, in Chapter 3, we set these basic concepts in motion by looking at different kinds of dynamic in the practice – this will be like a list of main ingredients in our MM kitchen. Finally, in Chapter 4 you will find the list of the particular processes and exercises on our MM “menu”.
2.1 Meditation
Moving meditation has grown out of lifelong engagements in meditation, in a circle who shared a sense that meditation can be more moving than it often appears. We also had the clear sense that exploring the moving aspect is not a sidetrack or compromise. It was more as if our experimentation and development of Moving Meditation got us closer to grasping the full depth of what we had been learning about meditation from several great sources, and had been practicing for decades.
Meditation is rooted in ancient mysteries and systems of training. In the West we still tend to think of it in terms of the Eastern cultures and philosophies. Some of these have indeed been – and still are – incredibly rich in concepts, images and traditions shaped to support meditative practice and depth. But meditation is moving to the West, and the modern West may soon be one of the most meditative cultures ever. With the recent “mindfulness wave” meditation is becoming a household word and mass phenomenon, whereas in the East (and the old West) the actual practice of meditation was for small elites, even in times and places where everyone honored and supported it. Meditation seems to be making itself a new, beautiful, unseen and yet deeply familiar kind of home in our culture, not just growing in numbers but also in forms and connections.
The roots in cultural traditions, schools and theories of meditation are important, and some knowledge of this is helpful background for teaching and facilitating Moving Meditation. But use with some loving lightness, we don’t to grow subtle or not-so-subtle fundamentalisms. Meditation is also something natural and immediate or even wild, and has a history of transcending technical and traditional frameworks. When we work with Moving Meditation we need to have both of these sides with us, ready to play – we sometimes plunge into practice with a group, very directly and “innocently” — and sometimes we explain, expand and give contexts. The words of this section are a framework for that. Not to be remembered and defended, just to be understood and played with in its overall meaning. By the way, the flexible, easy-going, serious framework one needs in order to guide others in meditation is not different from the framework needed to guide oneself. These are not two different processes.
2.1.1 Awake
Meditation is being awake in things as they are. If someone asks what meditation is, this can be a useful answer. Also if you ask yourself what you are doing on the pillow, as probably most of us do now and then.
– Be awake in things as they are
One great thing about this definition is that you can actually use it as a direct instruction.
You can try this for a moment, right now while reading this. No need to go anywhere or get anything, whatever you are in is the things as they are – just pause for a moment and be awake with it. Stay in it for a few breaths, let it sink in.
Being awake in things as they are may seem a strange thing to say, as a definition as well as an instruction, because it only asks for things that are already the case no matter what. Things are always already as they are, and of course you wouldn’t even be reading this if you weren’t awake.
In practice it makes sense anyway, because it resonates with an intuitive self-knowledge most people have: we know that we are usually not very aware, present and accepting – at least not at the same time. We may be aware but in a mode of not really accepting ourselves, our feelings, the situation, etc. Or we may be letting things be, but in a sleepy mode of not appreciating or caring.
Therefore, you may make an important difference, at least begin to make it, by merely pointing yourself or perhaps others in the direction of being awake in things as they are, if you are lucky to do so just at the right time and place.
Becoming awake is the beginning of meditation. It hardly makes sense to call any activity meditation if it does not start some degree of becoming present and awake. Becoming awake is also the end goal. In Buddhism the purpose is explicitly stated in terms of becoming a buddha, an awakened one. Ends and purposes of meditation in many non-Buddhist contexts, perhaps all contexts, can also be described in terms of some version of an insight, wisdom, etc. that was dormant but can wake up.
2.1.2 Remembering, reminding, rebodying
Even if the absolutely simple process of becoming awake is the essence of meditation, and even if it is possible to start meditation directly and innocently by simply inviting and invoking that (with yourself or with a group) you will usually need to support it in several ways, with other things that you add – instructions, activities, explanations, environments.
First, it may be helpful and often necessary to specify something that the “things as they are” could be – to point in some specific direction that one is invited to be aware of. This gently moves awareness out of half-sleeping habitual patterns and helps start the process of becoming-awake in different, hopefully clearer and steadier ways. Some classical ways of initial pointing, used in many traditions are:
- becoming aware of natural breathing
- resting awareness on a mantra or other specific meditation objects
- becoming aware of whatever is felt in the body right now
- noticing whatever comes up in the three fields of emotions, thoughts and sensations, paying attention to immediate sensory quality without the habitual labeling with concepts.
There are many other similar ways we may initiate or invite meditation processes through pointing to specific aspects – narrow as well as wide – of the field of experience. In Moving Meditation we use several of these classical styles of initial pointing, and also some similar ones that are shaped by our particular “moving” approach:
- Noticing micro-habits in the body (cf exercise 4.6)
- Becoming aware of a sense of movement or streaming in the embodied field of awareness (cf 4.2-4.4)
These pointers are really a kind of reminders to support the naked or totally open process of simple awareness in things as they are. Without this kind of reminder of what this enterprise of meditation is approximately about, we or our participants may feel lost and have no clue how to even get started on the session. Some Buddhist traditions distinguish between two subtypes of the initial balancing open awareness meditation (Shamata in Sanskrit): “Shamata with an object or support“ – which would be practice with one of the pointers mentioned here, or similar – and “Shamata without support” – which would be the same practice of wakefulness but in the open field without any preferred direction or format.
Another very important kind of reminding or remembering is the instructions for the situation of getting distracted, lost in thoughts, caught in emotions, overwhelmed by coughing, knee pains, etc It is extremely important to know how to handle this situation, because as everyone knows who has tried to meditate for more than a minute or two: these distractions happen, they are an inevitable part of the process.
The immediate, practical answer to this challenge is well known by all of you who have some practical experience with meditation:
- don’t fight the distraction, but become awake with it – and then return to the practice of awareness.
This has as many slightly different forms as the initial instruction. We will not enumerate them here but just point out that this is also a very important kind of remembering: remembering that we are in meditation, and remembering to be in it again, to open towards it again. Remembering that we are in meditation implies some kind of non-violent understanding of what is often called “non-judging attitude” – not resenting or trying to suppress or change what seems disturbing. Just being with it and returning to the process of being-awake, whether it has a particular focus in the particular practice form or not.
In fact, these two kinds of becoming-reminded of meditation – remembering how to get started, and becoming reminded that we are in the process and need to re-open it each time it gets lost – are so important that you could call them the backbone of meditation. Indeed, one of the most classical concepts of mindfulness or meditation in Buddhism is “sati” – which means something like recollecting, bearing in mind, remembering – rather than wakefulness in the present as one might have expected.
The moment of realizing that one is “lost” and understanding how to come back into the practice is a golden one. As many mindfulness teachers have pointed out, this is not a fault or deficiency but the central opportunity, the point at which the ability of mindfulness is really trained and widened. One of the beautiful things about Moving Meditation is that we can shape the practice around this classical backbone of reminding, in a moving, embodied way. The “sati”, the keeping-open of meditative process, may have always been a rebodying as much as a reminding, but we can support this.
2.1.3 What is it that becomes awake?
“Becoming awake” is where MM starts, and where it is ultimately going. Beginning and end. It also says something essential about the middle, the path, the actual ongoing and sometimes very demanding process of meditation, and even says it in a way that can sometimes be turned directly into practice. But clearly it is not always enough just to say this one instruction. Otherwise, of course, this book could end right here.
Becoming-awake, or mindfulness, can be understood and practiced in several ways. Sometimes it is taken in a narrow and formal way as moment-by-moment observation in a neutral, detached mode – as a practice of the mind or consciousness only. But there are also notions of mindfulness and mindfulness training as a much more comprehensive process. Waking up as an entire living being and an entire engaged life so to speak – not just as an inner self.
The heart, the body, the social relations, and the ethical stance, are some of the aspects that are often brought up in this kind of discussion, either as a criticism or as additional meditation elements and styles to soften or expand a one-sided “mindfulness”.
A particularly influential effort to expand the scope of mindfulness is the family of Loving-Kindness (“Metta”) meditation that have grown strong in and around the mindfulness culture during the latest decade or so. Sharon Salzberg’s work of integrating the heart in mindfulness, in theory and practice, is particularly interesting and inspiring. If you are familiar with Sharon’s loving-kindness meditations, or perhaps the Tonglen meditations of Tibetan Buddhism, you can probably see the imprint of these methods on some of the MM methods in chp. 4, and you are welcome to find ways of weaving more of this kind of work into MM structures.
Our MM approach to meditative process includes a systematic curiosity and caring for embodiment in a broad sense. The wakeful human being we seek to nourish (and its cosmos, its surrounding “things as they are”) is conscious body, intelligent heart, mindful habits, etc. Not disembodied inner self. Talking about practice elements engaging the heart, the body, the group, etc., it may not be so important whether we frame them as facets of one coherent mindfulness meditation or as extra meditative elements that are sort of added in. But it is important that in practice the connection is alive and internal, that it doesn’t feel as if something arbitrary was just added to the practice for external reasons – entertainment, acceptability, copyrightability, whatever. All the embodied pair, group and dialogue processes in chp 4 are ways to light up, explore or train an engaging and kind dimension of human awareness. And indeed, of group awareness. Even in the basic exercises of moving meditation (the dancing meditations, 4.2 – 4.4) we systematically involve and befriend that side of meditative process which is not just neutrally observing but rather constantly overflowing into organic engagement – making wakefulness and involvement one – as in fact they always were.
There are traditional modes of meditation that highlight the consciousness side and feature elements of introspection, stillness and transcendence. We deeply value these and are inspired by them. But the impulse of Moving Meditation is to see and use them as part of a continuum of existence as a living being and participating organic collective. For instance, not uttering a word for a while is a great method and a great adventure for the habits of voice, language and company, and a way to allow them to get in touch with something deep in their origin – and to become awake rather than automatic. Especially when silence is not forced but curious, caring and explorative. We sometimes say we go to the place where speech, movement etc. originate in silence, or we may also – perhaps better – speak of wakefulness as the common nature of silence and movement. Wakeful creative movement and wakeful deep silence as one. If this doesn’t make sense as words, we trust it does in practice. Doing the downtempo dancing meditation may light up this philosophical point better than words alone.
– Transcendence and immanenceThis is a philosophical insert about being at home in the world and being beyond it.
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Seeing and doing meditation in this way – as a process of becoming-awake that is in principle immanent or working to become immanent in every aspect of being and acting – it is also obvious to include meditative practices that address or involve or grow root fibers into the world of everyday actions and relations, and the relationship with the cosmos inherent in the “values” of our actions.
– * Biophilia?Naomi**? some remarks on ethics and biophilia, perhaps a biophilia “blue box” – and would it make sense to add a specific MM biophilia practice or two to the catalog in chp.4? If you are familiar with the beautiful Tibetan practice of tonglen, give-and-take, it also fits in very well here. |
2.1.4 The duality of cultivating and letting-go
Being awake in things as they are lights up a classical two-sided character of meditation. On one hand, meditation is very much about spontaneity and letting the nature of things be or unfold (therefore, in practice, it is sometimes important for us to NOT guide, introduce or change anything but simply to leave space open) on the other hand it is very much something we need to practice, cultivate and approach in a hundred ways because we are involved moment by moment in a hundred ways of being awake in things as they are.
On the natural and spontaneous side, the process of meditation is as large as life, or at least could be as large as life, because it is nothing other than your life lived as it is. It also means that meditation is or can be a spontaneous progressive process: you meditate whenever you are in the process of letting wakefulness grow: letting your natural wakefulness open in more and more moments and aspects and engagements of your real life. The naturalness also ultimately means meditation is an omnipresent process – that it will not ultimately leave any part of life outside, as NOT included in itself. Or, as some Buddhist schools say, everything has Buddha nature. It is the nature of everything to be Buddha, we just need to let go of all the trying, all the ultimately impossible attempts to be something different from our nature. Nothing could be more ordinary than just being yourself.
There is another side, complementary to this, that realizes meditation is a very rare and special kind of human activity. What makes it special is that we are usually not very awake or mindful, because we are in the grip of more or less automatic, mindless habits. And similarly, with the other half of the sentence “things as they are”: we are usually not very much letting things be as they are, let alone embracing things as they are. Rather, we tend to be constantly engaged in trying to change the situation, in order to attain and hold on to things that we think we need in order to be happy, and in order to avoid things that we fear. So again, meditation is something extraordinary and special: the relaxing and letting-go into acceptance of life as it is. Easier than easy – easy enough to be astronomically difficult.
This notion of meditation as an antidote to an anxious, stressful, non-mindful, project-focused existence has been worked out in much more detail, in Buddhist as well as Western terms, but in order to point out what meditation is, we don’t need a lot of detail but just this simple idea that most people immediately agree on: we have a potential of being more lovingly awake and aware in things as they are. So this is where the practice of meditation comes in: the deliberate cultivation of a more mindful, accepting, fearless way of being.
2.1.5 Meditation as culture – and cultures of naturalness
Meditative cultivating practices come in very diverse forms, from various sources and schools. Some of them, such as Tibetan Buddhism, seem very complex, with rich systems of stages, methods, images and instructions. Others, such as Zen, are shaped by a minimalist style in instructions and aesthetics. Many kinds of practice are rooted in traditions, that are explicitly “spiritual” in the sense that they understand human life in terms of a higher meaning that the tradition’s rituals, images and concepts are meant to support. There are also modern schools that some would call less spiritual – translated perhaps from an original spiritual context to a modern “worldly” one and used for different purposes. Still, the new “worldly” purposes can be argued to be very much in accord with the ancient ambitions of e.g. Buddhist or Christian meditation, if they frame meditation as a way to relieve suffering in fellow beings.
In spite of all the differences many of the traditions clearly repeat this strong double-aspect nature of meditation. Nature and culture, spontaneous naturalness and deliberate cultivation. In Zen Buddhism there are schools and stories of gradual progress and immediate awakening. In classical Greek mysteries and sanctuaries there is Apollo representing the abstract cultivated order and Dionysus the embodied letting-go. Similar discipline-and-flow dyads can be found in many other contexts.
When doing and guiding Moving Meditation you will be dancing very directly with this classical paradox, so it is good to be intimate and confident with it – not just in theory but also in practice and experience.
In the wake of the great popular mindfulness wave, there is a contemporary discussion of how much culture means for meditation. In short, it is debated whether or how it makes sense to take a set of practices from one culture and “transplant” it to a another cultural environment with completely different values, cosmologies, expectations to life, ideas of what a human individual and its flourishing is, etc etc. Is the meditation practice still the same? Often this discussion is opened as a criticism of modern mindfulness schools for failing to understand or pass on a lot of contexts (of ethics, rituals, cultural values, worldviews etc etc) that may be essential to give meditation practices not only their meaning but also their transformatory effect in e.g. traditional Buddhist cultures in Tibet.
For us in MM, the underlying question of meditation and culture may be much more interesting than the answers often raised as strong opinions by competing schools, in these debates: In which sense is meditation becoming something new and unseen? Is unchanging tradition good in itself – or is innovation? Which purposes and ends are adequate? Do the meditator’s purposes and ends perhaps even tend to change spontaneously, when one has been meditating for a while? And how much of the biological, social, psychological and cultural embodiment of human existence is it possible to get involved in the becoming-awake process?
2.1.6 Being in the present and being in the rhythm
It is often said that meditation is about being in the present, experiencing the here and now instead of the mind wandering into all kinds of thoughts of the past and the future. This has much truth to it. It is definitely helpful in meditation to become aware of the wandering mind, and to become awake to what this wandering feels like and what it does right now and here, instead of being lost in its projections. Often with that kind of embracing open awareness, the wandering becomes more slow and soft and transparent by itself, sometimes it even leads to sublime silence. But that doesn’t have to happen, it doesn’t happen every time, and in a way it is not the point at all – the point is the awareness. As soon as it is there, the point of gravity is not in the ideas of past and future, whether they keep churning or not.
This “awakening” movement, coming back to the awareness of what is, is a classical structure in the practice of meditation of course, and exactly the same in silent and in moving meditation. In some ways moving meditation can make it more concrete and doable – as unfolded in sections 4.2 – 4.4
But what about this very “now” of experience? Does it exist in isolation? How much of a movement can one be aware of at the same time? And what about musical and moving rhythm – there seems to be more to it than awareness of any one beat can contain?
Again, this is a question that may be more interesting for the meditator or the guide than any answer to it. Not something that we need to have an MM philosophical opinion about – it is better to explore it in practice, with curiosity. We can dance philosophy.
**Naomi, did you want to add something here, about the ramifications of the present?
2.1.7 To guide or not to guide
Meditation – being awake in things as they are – is always already happening.
Certain situations tend to make this more of a living reality and bring it close to the surface, so that very little, or even nothing needs to be done or said from our side in order for situation to become deeply and strongly meditative. This is particularly true when a group has assembled with the intention of meditating – sometimes this is sufficient for meditation to be strongly present, so that the only thing you need to do as the facilitator is to “hold the space” – allowing it to happen.
Keeping silences and breaks a bit longer than you habitually would, is one of many great ways you can add space to the guidance situation.
Another really important one is to “speak from the space” yourself – that is, to be in the meditative process that you invite the group into. This is very possible, and very interesting – what really happens here is that it is the meditative process itself that speaks and listens. Please play a lot with that, and give it the space and care and curious courage that it needs.
We need to develop a musical sense and awareness of this, and to allow, make space, amplify, the spontaneous meditation process whenever possible.
At other times a bit more support is needed for this open space to come about, and we start talking or guiding, perhaps using things from this manual as specific structures, or perhaps just as principles. But still, as far as possible, “speaking from the space”. And using every opening to guide yourself back in there.
There are also interesting situations in between, where you may decide to openly share with the group that meditation is so very much here already that it is not really necessary to add anything – that your words can be taken more as a noticing of what is already happening than an instruction to bring it about, and are indeed just part of the total situation that is becoming awake in itself.
Meditative suggestions in the form of open questions are also an important tool. Again, this has far deeper impact if you can come from an open curious explorative space yourself – not asking questions to the group as a sort of rhetorical device to support the “correct” answer that you already know, but as a suggestive pointing into wonderful fields to become awake in – together. This is sometimes even better than for you to just stay quiet. The silence sometimes loves to be asked and invited to speak – and dance.
2.1.8 *Purposes, ends, intentions
2.1.9 Sources and inspirations of Moving Meditation
Moving Meditation is inspired by many great schools, authors and groups in meditation and other fields. A few meditation schools have contributed with significant innovations in embodied and group dynamical methods, particularly the creative spiritual field around Osho / Rajneesh in the 1960 – 80’s. Michael Barnett’s branch of this tree has been particularly influential in MM because he was – and is – Niels Viggo’s spiritual teacher, and also because of Michael’s inclusive, musical-intuitive style of teaching as a dance with the situation and the cosmos. Other contemporary enterprises in the direction of moving meditation also have roots in a more or less overlapping creative-experimentative-meditative cultural field of the 70’ies and 80’ies, notably “Authentic Movement” and Gabrielle Roth’s “Five Rhythms“ and its ramifications such as “Movement Medicine”. These enterprises have been more of an indirect inspiration in MM – we have met them through workshops and books and found them inspiring, but also sensed interesting possibilities of making meditation more deeply and systematically an integrated in work of this kind. A background in this same scene of experimentation and expression also gave Saki Santorinelli a platform for a number of elements of embodied meditation that were integrated in the original designs of some of the mindfulness courses and curricula that have later become very influential (MBSR, MBCT). Although MBSR and the mindfulness wave is close and dear “dharma” family, the embodied practices are relatively weak and have not influenced the form of MM so much except for inspiration to one specific exercise (4.8, slow and fast walk). A wave of “turn to embodiment” in philosophical and scientific thinking has been very inspiring for formulating principles and directing attention more sharply, particularly the great work of Fransisco Varela and many of the scientfic-contemplative exchanges in its wake, in the Mind and Life Institute. The Institute has also provided a great point of contact with practitioners, teachers and scientists with parallel interests – a couple of them have joined our MM inner circle collective. Finally, the living Tibetan Buddhist teaching and practice environment of Gomde, and its main teacher Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche, has been essential in many ways for the beginning of Moving Meditation. First of all, many of us met there, and although Gomde is itself very classical in its teaching and communication of dharma, and in no way involved in modern embodied experimentation, there is a spaciousness and inclusiveness (something we could perhaps call an immanent style, in the light of the blue box above) in the implicit dance of the practice, that makes MM still feel very much at home there. In particular we would like to mention the incomparable Erik Pema Kunsang, dharma teacher truly dancing with that which is – in the music of deep, loving orthodoxy and deep, creative innovation.
2.1.10 Note on maps, stages and basic typesIt is often said that the only difficult thing about meditation is that it is so easy. And that meditation is really so easy and simple that it is really only one thing – the wakeful openness in the present, without changing anything. But it is just as true that it is a detailed dynamics of training and natural progression of stages and ways of instructing / fertilizing / cultivating – beginning with the most “doing” oriented (where something or soneone does something to someone or something else – e.g. controls it, ignores it, looks away from it) and culminating in more “non-dual” moalities of letting-be, being-in, and even taking hindrances and adversities as the self and the path. In particular, some streams of Buddhism contain very comprehensive systems. A few main features from there may be helpful and inspiring for the navigation, also in our not-so-classical landscape with body, movement and groups. Relaxation with an “anchor” or “support” in e.g. the breating (Shamata with support) Opennes and letting-go without an anchor Clarity and insight (“Vipashyana”) Intrinsic awakeness without subject-object split (“non-dual” presence, “Mahamudra”) A third schematic map of the process that may sometimes be useful is the two aspects or phases contained in definitions such as “being awake in things as they are” or “resting, accepting alertness”
This dual structure can be turned into a dynamic fertile complementarity (“dialektic”) rather than a rigid polarity or split (“dualism”). What we work towards is full intensity on both sides, not a sleepy compromise. |
2.2 Moving
Can you imagine a world that is ultimately made of movements, not enduring things? What if no matter how deeply we look into something, we are not going to find something we can hold on to as ultimately steady? Can we make sense of the suggestion that everything may be in process, with no ultimately fixed structures — no rock bottom substance or even space anywhere, just movements and processes “all the way down”?
In fact this suggestion of a “wild” cosmos on the move (or of course, in our context, the obvious term must be the dancing cosmos) is made very seriously by two very dfifferent traditions: classical schools of meditative Buddhist philosophy, and a wide range of modern scientific developments.
The history of modern science over the last few centuries is very much a sequence of revolutionary discoveries of movements and processes going on inside or underneath or in the interactions of things that were thought to be part of a stable world order. Species evolve, continents drift, atoms and later elementary particles have been found to be ultimately unstable and — more like temporary resonance phenomena than like stable things. Quantum physics and relativity theory have very basically replaced “things” by “events” as the most importantaa nodes in their frameworks. And perhaps most radical of all, the wild notion of a “deep time” has been conceived and gradually generally accepted: the understanding that nature has a vast history of deep changes that have gradually led to the emergence of all kinds of present patterns including human bodies, cultures and minds. It is interesting to note that deep time was first conceived by contemplatives such as Leibniz, Goethe and Schelling, who saw the idea of embodied belonging to an evolving cosmos as expressing a deep spiritual impulse. Only later did it become part of an accepted scientific worldview which is paradoxically seen as a threat to spirituality by
In Buddhism, the notion of impermanence is used to point to the basic problem of clinging – that we try to hold on to things in the world and in ourselves, try to make them, or to experience them as, something they are basically not: enduring, dependable realities. In the Buddhist analysis, this lies at the core of the inability to be awake, and to be with things as they are, and it is also the core of suffering, greed, carelessness, etc. Therefore, coming to terms with impermanence is an essential element in the understanding of Buddhist meditation, and “letting go” is an essential element in its practice.
So in the ancient East as well as the modern West, there are strong ties between existence and movement, and understandings that we need to come to terms with the moving nature of things. Still, it is only a very small part of meditative practices that involve moving, and those that do tend to do so as fixed patterns – there is movement perhaps, but no movement of the movement.
But a field of moving meditation practices is emerging. The systematic use of dancing and other intuitive, spontaneous movements as the anchor, the site at which we repeatedly return to being awake with what is – in the same fashion that many types of sitting meditation use the natural breath or an “inner” movement such a mantra – has been rare if not entirely absent until the recent meeting of meditative culture with new western cultural streams of embodiment.
2.2.1 Embodiment – an emerging cultural paradigm
The emergence of contemporary embodied approaches in meditation is very much an expression of a broad cultural trend – ranging from scientific research traditions to popular culture: the discovery – or rediscovery perhaps – of our existence as living beings.
This is almost as paradoxical as the discovery of “wakefulness” discussed above. There can hardly be any fact more obvious than our embodied existence, and it is hard to make sense of the notion that this could be forgotten. Still, sometimes it is really as if we need to discover it – as if we have really been able to forget that life and body are not just things we have but something we are. Our organism is the most complex and interactive phenomenon that the known cosmos has ever come up with. In spite of this, we have often somehow managed to bracket out the “body” side of existence in an amplified, project-directed focus on other things in life, so that embodied life became more or less stiff, closed, tired. Or the opposite: over-exposed but as facade and accomplishment, something to succeed with, to be measured, bought, sold. As if bodies exist and can be spoken of and dealt with alright, but as objects only, not as value, meaning and subjectivity. Both of these opposite ways of “forgetting the body” lead back to various forms of mind-body or spirit-matter dualisms.
Our existence as living embodied beings has gradually come to light in several ways in modern “enlightened” culture. The renaissance, as the word says, was a “rebirth” in several ways, but one important way was the rediscovery of the classical Greek free, joyful care of the details of the human body in art. The centuries after that have seen a long sequence of scientific breakthroughs of biology and medicine, with more and more detailed understanding of mechanisms and parts – but also with it, a whole familiy of attempts at understanding and caring for the way we are, because we are wakeful bodies, not just observers and objects but participants in nature. On the scenes of science this kind of insight has been particularly strong around the emerging ideas of evolution in the 19th and early 20th C, and around ideas of embodied cognition in the late 20th and early 21th C. In the first case, the understanding that we have gradually emerged out of natural processes suggested a strong form of belonging to the biosphere that we will probably need another several centuries to fully grasp. In the second case, we are beginning to understand that knowledge, culture and experience are not based in “things” inside or outside us – much rather it is an intricate web of interactions through moved and moving bodies that create temporary insides and outsides that look like spaces and things for a while.
Alongside and inspired by these developments of embodied paradigms in art, science and philosophy, forms of psychotherapy, pedagogy and coaching are increasingly trying to meet people as mind-body dynamic wholes. This is easier said than done. The dualisms still run deep in our culture, and sometimes reinstall themselves strongly in things named non-dual, post-cartesian, etc. The name is no guarantee, but as a rule of thumb there is a greater chance of finding interesting wakeful contributions to embodied culture if a person or movement is not just saying what they are NOT (cartesian, split, dualistic, instrumentalist, etc.) but also stress positive ideas or metaphors of interconnecting dynamics (evolution, process, self-organizating systems, ecology, enactment, etc.).
And then there is music. The rising wave of embodied culture owes much to Africa. Music and rhythm are a very direct way of sharing participatory embodied existence – not just expressing, describing or receiving, but very fundamentally moving together. We may not understand for another century or two how much our sense of body and selfhood has been changed and expanded from the inside by the embodied grooves and feels of African music – but try to imagine a world without that.
Finally, of course a great new healthy culture of embodiment is not just automatically arriving and growing – it is constantly challenged by new ways of reducing embodied co-existence to products, mechanisms, sects and instruments of control optimization.
The addition of meditation – the systematic care for the wakeful aspect of our existence – is important for exactly this reason: for avoiding the reinstallation of dualisms in hidden cornes and backgrounds.
2.2.2 “Matching”: co-awareness, embodied compassion, co-creative response
A strong, concrete description of processes of wakeful embodiment in practice is given by Elizabeth Behnke in a small 1988 text, “Matching”, where she describes a feature of caring for bodies that many may recognize – a careful listening-into the body and listening-forth a “matching” response. In both of these kinds of listening – which may in fact occur as one inseparable process – it is crucial to cultivate presence, patience, acceptance and a kind of easy-going yet totally dedicated articulation that may perhaps be best described as musicality.
This feature is crucial for embodied culture to grow into something more than just new fields of power, control and accomplishment.
Cultivating matching and matching-based communication must be a main purpose of Moving Meditation.
2.2.3 Moving and emotion
“Emotion” literally means “moving out”, the idea that a person – or a crowd – can be in exited states whose character lead to specific kinds of bodily behavior – unless perhaps a layer of civilization and self-control would attenuate or stop it. The term motivate points in the same direction.
But could this be a half truth only? Could it be that a sense of what moves in the body is the source of our sense of having a feeling, just as much as the reverse?
2.3 Dancing with whatever is
| A participant called a couple of hours before an MM retreat and told us she needed to cancel because she was so devastated by a breakup in a love relationship that there was no way she could come and be extrovert and happily dancing, as she thought she ought to. She was sure she would be ruining the high meditative spirit for everyone else by being so emotional and out of balance. First, I told her I was glad she called instead of just feeling she didn’t qualify. Then I realized that she was really asking an important question: can one qualify for moving meditation? Does one have to feel happy and flowing? A question can be so right on spot that the answer is really contained in it – it came over my lips before I had any chance to think about it: We dance with whatever is there.
The whole point of moving meditation is to dance with no matter what. Just like me, she immediately saw this. So she came, and she danced with exactly what was boiling in her life at that point. This is the real power of moving meditation – that it is possible, moment by moment, to dance with anything. Doing this meditatively, and with the body, is a great help in grasping with your whole system that you can allow and be awake with it – and that it is already changing. |
A poem by Rumi makes this point In great depth – you may want to read it to groups sometimes:This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Even if they are a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. he may be clearing you out for some new delight. Meet them at the door laughing and invite them in. Because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. Rumi Translation by Coleman Barks, Quoted from www.gratefulness.org |
This is one of the many insights about the individual process of meditation that applies just as much to processes of guiding and facilitating meditative events. The more open, caring and awake you can be, to whatever moves in the room, the better. Welcome it, as Rumi says, and dance with it.
2.4 Why silent and dynamic forms?
There is a great advantage in being able to train in “the entire spectrum” – not just the ecstatically wild and the sublimely still, but also in the intermediate – the slow, wakeful movement.
Some of the seemingly solidified and unconscious “stuff” that we use meditation to open up gives itself more easily and spontaneously in silence – with other parts movement is more helpful. The multiple approach makes us able to get in touch with more dimensions of “stuff” and get them truly moving. It it also helpful in avoiding that any new openness does not sort of stay in its own compartment – so that e.g. there would be certain feelings that you would only be in touch with when you are silent – or wild – and otherwise not. Training in the entire spectrum, in a connected way, helps the emerging wakefulness to become truly integrated.
This is not just true for integration of emotional experience. We also train sensitivity and expressivity in the body – and again it is great to do it in the entire spectrum from mild to wild, they support one another.
2.5 Habits and their release
We are our habits. According to a certain, very useful Buddhist interpretation, the Self is nothing but a system of habits which is more or less permanently struggling to keep up “itself” and “its own” even though there is really nothing but a living stream in which nothing can really be held or kept or owned or been. It may look like it for a little while but not for long, the very act of act of grasping and holding is already undermining itself – it is already on the move, already changing into something else.
In the struggle to hold on to my habitual self and my habitual world, the ancient Buddhist texts identify three basic kinds of habitual attitude, called the “three poisons of the mind”. They give a beautifully logical, almost mathematical analysis of all the ways that it is possible for such a habit-dependent self to struggle for the impossible comfort of permanently “having things my way”:
- Holding-on-to, greed, addiction – solidified attraction. This is sometimes translated and discussed under the term “desire”, but that is not necessarily precise or complete. Desire is basically something much more natural and healthy than the problematic attitude discussed here, there is nothing wrong with lively zest and attraction. What is identified as the first poison is something very different, it is the basic attitude that the world has to be in a particular way, needs to go on meeting my criteria, in order for me to be happy – my partner needs to behave in a certain way, I need to earn more money than the neighbour, etc.
- Fear, indignation, rejection – solidified repulsion. Again some terms that are often used, “anger” and “hatred” do not capture the vast variation of this poison which has a lot in common with no 1 – it is the same with reversed sign, so to speak. Often of course they go together – we hold on to one kind of experience or situation in order to avoid its negation (satiety-hunger, company-loneliness, etc). The second poison is defined as the ongoing, active struggle to get something out of the way that I “cannot live with”.
- Indifference – sometimes termed “stupidity” but again what is meant is really a vast class of attitudes. Probably this poison is the most extensive of the three: all of those things in life that do not play a positive or negative role in my ongoing struggle to construct and hold and bear the “me” and “mine”, I ignore. I look away from them. Can’t be bothered.I have more important stuff to deal with. Maybe it is 90% of our life that falls in this category of the weird and irrelevant stuff on the side that we close our eyes and minds on.
This three-fold habitual stuckness is interesting to reflect on, as a background for many kinds of meditation – because a real full-fledged meditative process is really a loving deconstruction or release of these forms of habitual narrowing of reality and freedom. Real meditation should dissolve our habitual limitations of what we dare or care to face or deal with. It should make a difference to how much we treat it as alive, or as dead.
This understanding of habitual limitations is helpful in meditation practice when unexpected experiences turn up – beautiful, repulsive or weird. You don’t need to get caught up in holding on, pushing away or becoming numb or indifferent – you can simply be with it, dance with it. In moving meditation we can become aware of these closing types of habits as attitudes in the body, and allow them to soften. It is particularly interesting to dance with the third “poison” – to begin to experience all the weird, unfitting, nameless ongoings and sensations in the body that have no part in the projects we are usually occupied by. Just as John Lennon sang, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” So, moving meditation is more “life” – living relation to more and more of existence, in ways that are not dictated by addiction, aversion and indifference.
How are we, if we are not doing any of the three? Is there an alternative? Of course there is. Do you want to name it? What is the fourth option, beyond the poisons of addiction, aversion and indifference?
A final note on habits: it is not the goal of meditation to get away with them. We don’t attempt to dissolve all habitual structures. Life is full of habits, and pretty much all of them are useful, they all have something good and lively and caring at their core. We couldn’t walk, eat, speak or play music without habits. Probably we couldn’t dance either – dancing has a rhythmical as well as a open-ended changing aspect.
The point is not to get rid of pattern – when we are fighting patterns in our life we are really just repeating the second poison – but to make it awake and alive. To dance with it. Once we can that, we can really be in a changing, transformative process with our habits.
This is the true full sense of “moving meditation” and “dancing meditation” – we train in dancing with our habits.
By the way – our suggestion for the name of the fourth option is care and love.
2.6 Why detailed instructions when it is all natural? The idea of “movement alphabets”.
Meditation always has the paradoxical character we have touched a few times – it is basically about being in things, awake, honest, deeply allowing them to be as they are – but meditation also necessarily starts from a place where we are fully involved in projects of changing things and is itself initiated as such a project. If one just decides to sit down and be meditative, as one’s next project and accomplishment, then very often (unless one has the good fortunate to be lured or stumble into great openness) one will just sit there and be closed in some new way instead.
Similarly in moving practices. If we are just asked to “move freely”, what we take to be “freedom” may be really be held back and restricted to a narrow alphabet of habitual choices. Therefore it may be helpful to “warm up” by working through some other alphabets – sequences of movements that have other directions, combinations and rhythms than we are used to, showing us larger spaces we can inhabit as moving bodies.
This is a bit like the process of learning a language. It gives structure which, on the face of it, restricts the abstract freedom of putting any funny sound after another, but in reality creates much larger spaces of freedom and expression.
In practice we use this principle when sometimes we warm up to an MM session with exercises that have specific instructions to make sure the moving body wakes up in all directions, or at least more directions than it was before. This principle and form of work – opening larger spaces of freedom and going beyond patterns and limitations we weren’t aware of – also works for mental patterns and spaces. We sometimes share a visualization, a poetic vision or a formulation of deep intention, to clear the ground for an open meditation. The really important thing is not the visualization or the poem itself but the space – the greater degrees of freedom when the meditating awareness lets it go, lets it dissolve. This principle is also a good reason to have variation in the music we use in order to support different fields of grooves, keys and moods – not for their own sake but in order to expand space.
Humor is a strong ally in transcending rigid patterns, so it is good to make space for humor if it emerges while you introduce movement alphabets or any other structured exercise. Spontaneous humor is much better than if you attempt to repeat a “humorous” form, of course. If playfulness trumps the “correct” style of a movement alphabet or other MM exercises, so much the better.
2.7: * Spontaneous experience and systematic practice