The Best Thing You Can Do for the Earth (or yourself) Is to Feel Good!

I could be wrong (That's how all beliefs should begin, I believe) but each of us is a Feeling generator. Feeling good is healthy. Feeling bad is unhealthy. For you and for the Earth. The more people in the world who are good-feeling generators, the more the Earth heals, and the more you heal.

You can control how you feel, and therefore what you generate out into the world - it just takes some practice. A lot of people think that feelings control them - "Good things happen, I feel good; bad things happen, I feel bad." This may be true for them but it is not true. You have the power to choose what you generate within yourself and therefore out into the world. There are many practices that teach this art - the best (I believe) is T'ai Chi because it is all about feeling your way to feeling good, not about thinking your way to feeling good.

As Peter Ralston says, there are two energies in the universe - expansion and contraction. For me, feeling good is expansion; feeling bad is contraction. Expansion heals. Contraction destroys.

T'ai Chi, in its highest form, is about feeling good. T'ai Chi is the practice of expansion; it is learning how to lessen the energy of resistance so that everything flows. It is about getting out of the way so that the essential goodness of the universe flows through you. By the way, when that happens it is not some sort of impersonal, 'O I am a conduit for the universe flowing through me.' It's more like, "WOW, OMFG, Holy $%^! Does that feel GREAAAAAAT!"

T'ai Chi is dancing with wild abandon, excitement, enthusiasm, and passion - on the inside. No matter how old you get you never feel any older than when you were a child. Even my mom at 99, when I asked her how she felt inside responded, "Like a girl of sixteen. I can't do what I could then, but I feel that way inside."

This is the beauty of T'ai Chi - on the inside you can do everything you ever could on the outside, (and more - did you ever fly?) no matter how old you get - truly. T'ai Chi teaches us how to make that real, not just a theory.

I promise to keep these (relatively) short (have you seen some blogs? Wow!), so I will end here. Stay tuned for more on this very topic.  I am on a roll and feel a lot of passion around it. Some how-to advice even.

Puleeeeeze feel free to 'follow' my blog and to share with friends - I love company:)

Visualize Whirled peas!

I'd rather wash dishes and sweep the floor in deep sensual union with the Divine than rule the world from a place of separation.

Given the choice I'd rather wash dishes and sweep the floor in deep  sensual union with the Divine than rule the world from a place of separation.

 Everything that exists, exists right now and is available to me, but only to the degree that I am available to it. And I am available to it only to the extent that I Allow it.

But, how to do it? What does it mean to make yourself available and what does it feel like? There is nothing you can do to make this happen. To put it another way; Learning to Do Nothing is what it takes.
Doing Nothing ("Wu Wei" in Chinese). Making yourself available to the Now is the practice of constantly letting go of everything we do that removes us from the realization that we are already here. It involves the practice of Zen Master Seung Sahn’s, "Don't Know Mind," the constant practice of making non-sense.
This Doing has nothing to do with thinking; it is a feeling practice.

What it feels like is sensual and 'melty' to the point of being erotic.

It is a melting into God, nature, and the universe. It's a deep and profound letting go, as if I were allowing myself to fall backwards off a towering cliff without the slightest concern for my safety, knowing that I will be caught and sensually enveloped by the very essence of Love; yet still feeling the thrill of the plunge.

It's better than sex, and sex is pretty damn good.... it is sex in the sense of that most satisfying of sexual encounters: a melting into and a true Union with the Other. Little wonder then, that once experienced, it becomes a lifelong pursuit. What else is there, especially when this is a state that can be applied to, and enhances the quality of, every other activity? 
This is what you have to look forward to by practicing T'ai Chi. It is the highest form of T'ai Chi practice; Melty Merging with Life. Yummmm!

Surviving Dying

I have restarted working on the journal of a 100 Day, 1 hour each day, standing meditation practice I undertook in 1996.  I offer this excerpt for free:

I am like a kid with a new toy whenever I discover new images and concepts from other fields that I can apply to T'ai Chi. They always deepen my own practice and help me teach T'ai Chi to others; but it isn’t all that often now that I come across something that moves me so profoundly to another level of awareness in my practice of the art.  Stephen Levine’s book, “Who Dies?” came into my life at the perfect time to understand it, in the middle of my 100 days.

Ostensibly about dying, the book is really about living, and more specifically it is about expanding, expanding in a sense absolutely tailor-made for application to T'ai Chi principles. Levine writes about not contracting around the pain one feels in the body; that when we contract we narrow our focus and therefore our sense of identity to that which we are focusing on (i.e. we become our pain). When we expand we consequently widen our sense of ‘Self.’ The body and what it is experiencing are still a part of that wider self, but it no longer becomes the totality of who we are.

My experience with standing meditation speaks to the truth of what Levine says; it is a joyously liberating feeling to crack the mold of body-identity and to experience being a 'bigger' You. In terms of ‘dying’ It’s kind of like not putting all your eggs in the one basket of ‘body.’ Diversify and when something screws up one of your investments, your identity doesn’t take anywhere near as big a ‘hit’ as it would have were all your money in that one stock!

That’s the meaning of the bible verse about not laying up your treasure where thieves can break in and steal. The treasure is your sense of Self, what you identify with as ‘You.’ If you are your body or your job, your car or your clothes, your bank account or your social standing, or anything else perishable, then whenever those things perish, so will ‘you.’ It’s much better to diversify identity, and even better to identify ‘you’ with something that is eternal (Seek ye first the kingdom of God).

An "AHA" moment is.........

An "AHA" moment is not an "Aha" moment because I am discovering something new. It is an "Aha" moment because I knew it all the time, and  I am stunned by the sudden realization that I just hadn't been paying attention to it.

To put it another way: I did not 'Know' it consciously until something happened that lifted the lid off the Not-Knowing and allowed Knowing to bubble up.

Most of the time the thing that keeps the lid on not knowing something is the constant effort to Know; the dislike of, the not allowing of 'Not-Knowing.' We don't really like not knowing what we want to know or feel like we should know. 

I am perfectly OK with not knowing how to program a computer, or not knowing anything that I do not care to know. I am talking here about the things you care about knowing.  (Read Peter Ralston's amazing, "The Book of Not Knowing")

One of the things we all, as human beings, want to know is: What is Life? Why are we here? What's it all about Alfie?

And most of the time I am so concerned with trying to know what I do not know, that I forget to enjoy/allow the not-knowing.

I think that the Not-Knowing is something to be done away with, to be fixed, to be eradicated by coming to know, one by one, the things that I do not Know... until gradually all that Not-Knowing will be replaced by Knowing.

And, in my ignore-ance, I think that happiness lies in knowing things. Until I allow myself to not-know, to REALLY not-know; to Not-Know as a state of being; like being hungry or sad or happy or tired ......... AND it is the most meltingly, WONDER-FULL, WOWNDER-FULL  experience.  I have experienced a LOT of highs, both man-made and natural in my 62 years; Deep Not-Knowing is the real deal.

And, unlike man-made substances, it is available all the time.

Over and over again I wonder, after coming out of the Not-Knowing state, why we humans seem to be afraid of not-knowing what we want to know; why a large part of our energy is spent trying to appear knowing-full and avoiding looking like we don't know something. I see it alllllll the time in the corporate work I do. People rarely get promoted for not knowing things and consequently spend a lot of time pretending that they know a lot more than they actually know.

If you are pretending to know something that you do not know, then you are not being who you are.  You are actually pretending to be who you are not (Like the Emperor's New Clothes).  Being who you are is the key to 'getting' Life; to melting into God. A couple of quotes illustrating that point:

1) Luther D. Price said, "Be what you IS, not what you ain't. 'Cuz if you ain't what you IS, then you is what you ain't."

2) Shakespeare: This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

One last thing, because I dislike overly long blog posts,,,,

When I truly 'Don't Know' what Life is, Life reveals itself to me and I get a pass backstage.

This I have known.