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Body Alchemy

  
  

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slinkyvagabond
09:20 / 27.01.03
A body centred meditation:

much like your regular med. Sit in comfortable enough chair with your feet flat on the ground, your hands loosely folded in your lap and your back straight. Breathe deeply and regularly and focus on the sensation of breathing to put you into a meditative state. However, once you are there, focus on the feelings, tensions and relaxations, whatever, going on INSIDE your body. The idea is to try and feel the whole body at once, from the inside. I guess a lot of the time we experience our tactile bodies through external stimuli - personally, the only times I really feel my body is when I'm being touched in love or am in pain. But reconnecting with our inner bodies will also reconnect us with flows of chi (or whatever you want to call it). Plus this med. will make you feel so AT HOME in yourself, which is the idea I guess.

The other thing is being childish with our bodies, as FrootBroot suggests with the dancing. My 4 year old brother is so easy with himself and he just attracts cuddles. You can tell he's completely comfotable with his physicality and that makes everyone else comfortable with it too. Me, I like to run sometimes and climb trees, especially that. But I think we could say that exploring our bodies with our hands, in a non-orgasm focused manner, but pleasurably, is also a good example of behaving childishly with our bodies. It's really important for women. It makes me so sad when I hear about women who won't touch themselves but they let men fuck them. I think it all comes back to the way we elevate our minds but tend to see our bodies as this flesh vehicle - it's even embedded in our linguistic practices: when we say "me" we essentially mean our minds/spirits, but when we talk about our bodies we always use a possessive, it's just another item in our collection.

Illmatic - I totally believe that the body stores memory. I used to voice training. I had to sing certain songs for an exam so of course those songs were the ones I practised at like crazy. Now, even on days where my throat is nicotene-ruined ( I don't know why it is that so many singers have this self-destructive compulsion to smoke)those songs come out pretty much at they level they were for that exam, even though that was 3 years ago. Any muscian of any kind knows, as with the drumming, that it's exactly as BiP said, if you let your logical brain take over - "ok, the next note is C and then after this bar you change to 3/4 time" - you totally fuck up. Perhaps, then if you centre some magical rituals/practices on the body they would become unconciously remembered in the same way. Considering that being too concious about one's intentions fucks up magical work, it seems like this could be quite a sucessful practice. I guess it's like the 360 degree awareness that you get from your martial arts - as the song goes "I don't have to think, I only have to do it, the results are always perfect...."

Thanks for posting on this topic. It's so important on so many levels and really interesting with it. Bringing my focus back on my body and its energies (especially via that med.) healed my broken heart when all the analysis in the world could never have. You're definitely on to something - using your resources in a holistic way.
 
 
illmatic
10:11 / 27.01.03
Slinky - cheers for an excellent response. Well, in fact, cheers to everybody whose posted, there's an absolute ton of great material and ideas above, some fo which I will be trying 'specially the dancing. I fucking love dancing).

Didn't have anything to add - but I'll just note on interesting thing - the ecstasis that comes on whith Energised Mediatation (see the book above) - I've found it come on spontaneously in ritual a few times lately. Just open the circle or whatever - boof! - mood goes through the roof. I don't know if this would have happened without doing the Bodywork. If I were that way inclined I'd call it awakening of Kundalini or somesuch.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
14:07 / 27.01.03
Wow, slinky, I'm going to try that, sounds great.

And have been thinking along the lines of holistic responses to emotional pain, so it's really cheering to hear that you've found it useful for this.

Though I also find my counselling sessions really useful, in that I do find myself paying attention to my body and breathing, feeling the differences between body tensed and body relaxed, and having it directed there, (my couns. is a Gestalt/Person Centred, and it's a very Gestalt way of working) by my counsellor if I'm trying to stay in my head, to lock things down/control them.

Working against this tendency and listening to my body often releases huge waves of emotion, I can fine myself crying, really bawling, absolutely furiously angry... it's as if paying attention to my body allows it to take over, and flush out this stuff, get it outside itself...

and that's a really interesting point regarding 'me/my' 'mind/body'...

Perhaps its 'cause it's a much newer awareness, but I find it much easier to willingly relinquish control, allow things to be directed from elsewhere when I'm working with my body, I haven't been able to find an 'expert' position/end point. I love this about this new work. And this is feeding back into my much older/more controlled mental processes, I'm beginning to see and experience allowing myself to 'fall' mentally/intellectually....

Perhaps I feel that my body is much less mine than my mind, and am easier about allowing the power to shift elsewhere...

And was going to bring up playing instruments as well, I totally know what you mean about the flow, rather than thinking 'right, here's where I shift to a 6/8 time'...

Used to play the violin, and absolutely believe, because of this, in body memory. Hardly play anymore, and have to think consciously about what to do next, don't have the fluency or confidence to let it flow, but even so, just by picking up the instrument, my body takes charge and knows what to do, how to stand.

Eg, i *can* play sitting on the floor, but my body almost refuses to let me, as it knows what's best in terms of posture for my playing...
 
 
Rev. Wright
14:58 / 27.01.03
Evolution?
  
 
slinkyvagabond
12:58 / 28.01.03
I just wanted to give credit where it's due - it was a counsellor - a "body-centered therapist" - who taught me that meditation, so it's been sanctioned by someone far wiser than me, I think you can trust the intent (my intent too!). BiP, your experiences with emotional outpouring - kind of as if stimulating or focusing on certain parts of the body releases the feelings trapped there. Apparently this happens a lot in shiatsu massage too. I hope it helps you in your healing/reconnecting.
 
 
cusm
21:14 / 31.01.03
My most recent physical awareness is my reptilian tail. I have been gaining familiarity with the ancestoral appendage through dancing. Conjuring the sensation of it, using it to guide the flow of my hips and fluidity of motion. Has anyone else had any experience with this part of their spinal cord?

Not much with the tail, though I've worked with wings a lot in much the same way. I'll have to give tails a try, that sounds interesting.
 
 
slinkyvagabond
20:24 / 05.02.03
aha, energy through dancing.
here's another one. especially pertinent with anyone familiar with any practice concerned with energy flow in the body, including healing hands/auric work/reiki.


It's best to do this to a fast, bass-influenced music: drum n bass, breakbeat, funky stuff, some heavy techno
1. get off yer arse and dance
2. After enjoying a bit of a dance, hold your hands, palms facing each other, about ten inches apart.
3. Keep dancing as you do this.
4. Imagine an energy circuit that flows from in from your crown chakra (top of your head, bit where the skull isn't fully formed until you're a few months old) down along your arms and through the centre of your palms. I usually imagine it as gold or white light.
5. You will start to feel a point of heat on both palms. If you bring your hands closer the heat gets stronger. Experiment as you dance with moving your hands closer together and further apart.
6. When you feel as though the band of energy/light between your plams is very strong, move your hands however you like. Move the line of light/ energy through your body, focus it towards the ground or to the ceiling/air, make shapes with it, focus it through your other chakras and so on.
7. Keep dancing. I've combined this energy thingy with hard and fast, sweaty-type dancing (sober and unmediated by pills, though it's fun on them too but perhaps less meaningful) and it's very possible to achieve moments of complete transport, while feeling like a huge matrix of light/energy strands emmanating from you and immanating into you simultaneously. It's fucking great
 
 
gravitybitch
06:05 / 06.02.03
Very cool... I'm not much for dancing, though - have gotten great results by rubbing my hands together and being very aware of the sensations - "charging" them - and using this to generate heat and a sensation of stuff between my hands that I can bounce, compress, stretch, and otherwise manipulate. Does anybody else do this regularly?
 
 
Papess
10:50 / 06.02.03
Funny you should ask as I was strolling by here...hehe

I do something very similar to what Slinky mentioned. I do it everyday, no matter what. The only difference would be when I visualize the energy, I see it as blue fire.

When I was thirteen, my girlfriend and I made a name for the energy we saw (flying on acid, no less). WE called it, WACKY MO-MO. Damn I miss that girl!
 
 
cusm
14:08 / 06.02.03
Does anybody else do this regularly?

Yes, for medicinal reasons, as described above. If I do something with the current, it doesn't go all wonkey with my subsystems and make me twitchy. Holding hands left palm up below naval chackra and right palm down above works well for me as a quick center, as does giving it a light spin from that position by sliding the hands apart from there or the opposite position (right under, left over), depending on in which direction the spin is needed.
 
 
cusm
14:15 / 06.02.03
By the way, as for color, Peter Caroll describes Octarine as the color that each of us perceive magick as. Or more appropriately, the color you see the psi ball as when you work with things described in this thread. You can apply color correspondences as in aura reading et all to this for a quick psychoanalysis, as the color you work with naturally says a lot about you.

I use Gold a lot, and I've been told by the chemicly enhanced that they see this color a lot when I'm working on them. So, there's something to that.
 
 
Quantum
14:55 / 06.02.03
I discovered that when dancing as above, focusing energy (wacky mo-mo) through your hands, if you hold your hands very close, not quite touching, you get a very intense 'field' (which I call an aura- or wacky mo-mo from now on). If you look through it at other people you can often then see their auras too. This is possibly the most successful way I have discovered to show somebody a) they have an aura and b) they can see other peoples. Also there is something wonderful about the expression on someone's face; after a few minutes of concentrating hard on their hands (and energy!) and absorbed in close up detail, draw their attention to the dancefloor full of others also clothed in light- the microcosm reflecting the macrocosm. But I digress-
Has anybody tried Castaneda's 'Tensegrity' series? It is a form of body meditation similar to Yoga or T'ai Chi, one of the last books he published. I was a huge Don Juan fan, but was totally unconvinced by it and disregarded it as one of Carlos's coyote-like tricks. It is allegedly based on the Yaqui sorcerors techniques, expanded by Castaneda, and is apparently essential to a 'man of knowledge'. I am attempting to start some form of exercise and am trying to decide between five rythm dancing (detailed above, practiced by Tim Booth of James), Capoeira (Brazilian fighting dance) or Tensegrity- I recently saw it advertised as a class locally and was flabbergasted. Perhaps I dismissed it all too quickly...
Anybody who has tried it please let me know- does it work or is it pants? (NB I see wacky mo-mo like a coloured heat haze or a force field, differing in colour according to intensity/resonance. Like seeing the invisible...)
 
 
slinkyvagabond
15:19 / 06.02.03
hey Cusm, your spin with your hands is a perfect movement to repeat while *ravin*. The line of light kind of loops around itself to form a ball of sort of interwoven threads at your navel (like a 3d spirograph drawing! God, I AM a child of the '80s....). Then you can focus it in on yourself and it gives a well good rush. You can probably focus it on other people too. Oh and I'm so gonna try the looking at people's aura thing - thanks a mil for the tip, Quantum.
 
 
c0nstant
22:24 / 18.02.06
although I don't practise teh majicqs seriously as yet ( dabbling with the I ching and a little meditation is as far as I've got), I've always had an interest in muscle memory. i taught myself to juggle when i was 12, I hadn't done it for a good eight years though, but when I picked it up again a few monnths a go I found that my skill hadn't dropped very far at all.

I also love to dance. last night I went clubbing with a friend and after relatively few beers (certainly much less than I would normally drink) I found myself just letting go entirely. At one point it was just me and my friend on the dancefloor and I didn't feel self-concious in the slightest, which is very unusual for me. Also the sense of euphoria that I felt after we left teh clubwas simply incredible, we couldn't stop giggling for at least an hour!

I hadn't really considered utilising dancing as a magical practise, but after reading this thread I shall certainly look into it.
 
  

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