Body | The Direction of Intention

Buy Terry A Beer

Posted on October 24, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

594. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Scuba diving is rife with life lessons. I learned to dive in Bali from an American ex-pat named Terry, a former surfer, drug runner, and underwater welder turned Buddhist. And, since I was the only person in the class, I had my own private life lesson delivered through the metaphor of diving. As Joyce would say, Terry was an old soul; he was comfortable anywhere in the world, above or below the water, in the west or the east; he’s one of the few people I’ve known who was truly at home in the world. I had to buy Terry a beer for every gaff I made on the way to ease in the water and I will go on record saying that there is not enough beer in the world to pay Terry what I owe him.

The primary skill for a diver to learn is neutral buoyancy. Regardless of depth, a diver wants to hover in the water, not sink or rise (unless he or she intends to change depth). Terry used to say, “Get neutral. Use the least amount of energy necessary. The skill is presence.” Re-reading that last sentence makes Terry sound old and wise and he was young and energetic, filled with crazy mischief and daring, so please insert your best brazen Hawaiian surfer gone rogue dialect into the previous sentence; my Yoda liked reggae and once said to me, “Let’s spin the ptomaine wheel!” as he strode into a smoky roadside eatery.

Neutral buoyancy is balance; it is the physical experience of perfect balance though you can’t achieve it without balancing your breathing as well, which balances your mind. When you become neutral, your breathing slows, you become efficient – and not the American puritan notion of efficient – as that implies work, sweat, hard pews and squeezing life out in a cubicle. This type of efficiency is the form that comes when you are most alive which means your mind is most quiet; there is no need to achieve or change or grow or do anything. Breathe, rest in balance, witness. No impulse to resist the present moment or to be elsewhere. In fact, when you relax into it, the colors suddenly heighten; there are amazing fish and creatures moving all around, and you can’t believe the shapes or the vibrancy of the world in which you find yourself. It is magic and you are magic (not separate from “it”). And, best of all, after a while it occurs to you that you don’t need to be underwater to practice being neutrally buoyant. It is a skill you can practice anytime, anywhere.

How much beer would you buy Terry to learn neutral buoyancy?

[to be continued]

Filed under: Awakening, Body, Transcendence, Truly Powerful People | 4 Comments »

Join The Dance

Posted on September 3, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

543. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

This is a love letter to movement. If you take the time, if you move slow enough, you begin to see and feel and sense the swirling of air, the dance of grass, flicker of light through leaves, the beat of your heart, the tide of the Sound, the woman walking her dog, the heron’s eyes looking for movement beneath the water’s surface.

Is there anything that is not in motion? The earth is turning on an axis as it rotates around the sun, not to mention the satellite moon tracing its orbit. They tell us that the universe is expanding until, someday in a distant future, it will contract. My hand opens and closes a thousand times each day. This afternoon I walked through a forest and saw pollens wafting in the beams of light streaming through the canopy; bees bobbed on ferns triggering an explosion of particles that caught an air current and whirled. Leaves, somehow knowing that the earth is turning, trade their viridian coats for ochre, scarlet, and brilliant yellow before releasing their branches for another kind of motion.

Sound is motion and I know that seems like an anemic revelation though I challenge you to go out into the world and feel the waves hit you. A few times in my life I have performed a story standing in front of an orchestra and I felt the tsunami of sound crash into and through me. The drums hit my belly and the violins pierced my heart. I told the conductor that his orchestra gave me the best massage I’ve ever had. “Moved to tears” is an incredibly apt expression.

I recognize that thought, too, is motion. I cannot lift a glass and take a drink without first instructing myself to do so. I suppose the thought is literally a squirt of chemicals moving through my brain that sets off a series of electrical impulses the cause my muscles to move, my fingers wrap around the glass. And, as a lover of paradox, I delight in the realization that to slow my mind I must first slow my body, to experience the miracle of motion in and around me, I must intend with my thought to slow my breath, to slow my gait, so that I might slow my thought. Only then am I capable of moving in the moment, not through it (both are forms of motion) and experiencing myself as a full participant in the dance.

Filed under: Awakening, Body, Seeing, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: motion, movement | Leave a comment »

Sense The Season

Posted on August 28, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

537. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

A few days ago on my morning walk I sensed a hint of autumn in the air. There was the slightest breeze, cooler than the day before, and the subtle smell of leaves turning. I savored the moment as I do every year. I look forward with great relish to the day each year that I catch on the breeze the first hint of fall.

My grandfather lived his entire life in the same small area in Iowa. One day, as a boy, I was visiting, and we went to the park on a beautiful hot sunny day. He was looking for treasure with his metal detector and I followed with an old coffee can to hold the bounty and a screwdriver to poke into the dirt when treasure was detected. Suddenly he stopped, looked into the sky, closed his eyes – and “sensed” a change in the air. After a moment he said, “We better go home, it’s going to storm soon.” I was baffled. I could not sense anything. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky yet an hour later an intense storm blew through dumping buckets of rain. He had senses available to him that I did not; he had a specific relationship with a place and felt the rhythms and changes in his body. He was connected.

Brian McDonald opens his book, Invisible Ink, with this story: “An anthropologist was living among tribal people with little to no contact with the modern world. Wanting to share the marvels of technology with these isolated folks, the anthropologist took a photo of the chief and his wives. When the picture was processed and shown to the chief he was unable to recognize the blotches of black, white, and gray as an image of himself. He had never learned to translate two-dimensional images into recognizable three-dimensional shapes. That same chief, however, could look at a patch of grass and say what kind of animal had traversed it and how long ago with no more difficulty than you or I would have recognized ourselves in a photographic image.”

I look forward to that first hint of fall because I know it is a remnant of connection; it calls forward something in me, something deep and ancient. It is satisfying and evokes a kind of quiet affirmation that is rare in my urban indoor life. Catherine once told me that, “Nature yearns for us,” and I know that it is true. Often, when I am coaching or working with people and their creative blocks, deeply invested in their abstractions, I know that all they need do is go outside, recognize and reclaim their natural rhythm, and their capacity to sense the changes in the air. Just as nature yearns for us I know, like a long lost love, when we feel lost or blocked or void of meaning, we need only walk to shore, step into the woods, climb the ridge, close our eyes and receive the quiet touch that says, “Welcome home.”

Filed under: Awakening, Body, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: nature, sense | 1 Comment »

Ache If You Dare

Posted on July 22, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

500. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Have you ever loved so much that you ached? Once, I stood atop a mountain over 12,000 feet and the expansive world before me was so beautiful that it hurt. Last week I stood before a painting, an aboriginal dreamtime and I was suddenly weeping. It took my breath away. And in the absence of breath it gave me life and dreaming. It made me ache.

Once I was in an airplane that lost most of its power. We limped into the airport. Like my fellow passengers when I was again safely on the ground I had a complete and utter love and appreciation of my life. I ached with the magnificence of it all. I wanted to dance with the joy of being alive.

Each of us will have a moment when we have only a few breaths remaining, a few moments before we shut our eyes and bodies to this life. I imagine those moments will be filled with aching, with the understanding (if it has not come before) of how immense and precious this life is. I will remember holding a hand, blue eyes, mountaintops, umbrella’s in Bali, seawalls, late night pizza and beer, an aria sung just for me.

Long ago I decided not to wait until those last few moments to realize the enormity of it all. I intend to ache everyday with the utter intensity of being alive.

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Truly Powerful People (456)

Posted on June 8, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

456.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

I am hiding today. My heart is breaking for no particular reason. Some people call this, “getting up on the wrong side of the bed.” I think they must experience heartache as anger. They skip the heart part and go straight to throwing punches. To let your heart break often requires tears. Pushing back is less vulnerable. Break something else and perhaps the heart will remain intact, or so the theory goes.

I was tempted to blame this heartbreak on the weather: June is having an identity crisis and pretending it is January. I opened my eyes from sleep and heard the cold rain. In the Pacific Northwest there is a unique color grey that shrouds the time of day: 7am could be noon or 5pm. Timelessness. But, in truth, the heartache was with me before I opened my eyes. I felt it as I swam to the surface from my dreaming.

Once in Bali as I swam to the surface from sleep I heard the doves cooing and it was so beautiful that my heart broke. I lay in my bed with the sun streaming through the open screens and knew I was in heaven (it is not some other place). I learned in my Bali time that being fully alive requires a willingness to feel the full range of life’s emotions. To protect myself from heartbreak is akin to cutting red out of the color wheel. Comfort is nice but not very useful if you desire being fully alive.

Recently I saw a powerpoint presentation on what’s coming down the road in technology. One of the slides in education technology said, “Full Body Learning.” When with my aching heart I got up on the side of the bed I always get up on, I thought, “Ah, a day for Full Body Learning. Hello heartbreak.”

Filed under: Body, Love, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: alive, feel, heart, heartbreak | 7 Comments »

Truly Powerful People (400)

Posted on April 13, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

400.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

My morning work plan was trumped by the sound of the Sound. It was one of those rare spring mornings where the air is so still that is seems to magnify the sounds. The tide was in the magic in-between, not out and not quite fully in so the waves lapped the shore, pulling slowly on the rocks and pebbles like a lover’s fingers on your back. The pebbles became a rhythm instrument and I felt as if I was hearing the birth of music. The waves breaking, followed closely by the base drum of water thrumming on seawall, the pebbles long moan with a punctuation, a landing note made by the thump of driftwood butting together. Whoosh, thrum, mooooaaaan, thump (silence) Whooosh, thrum, mooooaaan, thump (silence). The birds joined the beat adding a chorus of notes hovering above the steady rhythm. I was enthralled. I wanted to dance it.

Many years ago I worked with an incredible musician. He spent his life traveling the world learning to play traditional instruments. He was incapable of unplugging from the rhythms around him, the beat was in his body and his body was the beat. We went to dinner when I was first getting to know him. We were sitting in a booth when suddenly he sighed, “ho, yeah,” and began tapping a beat from a source I could not hear. He smiled and told me to listen carefully. In the kitchen, across the room and behind swinging doors was an old refrigerator tapping a tune as it wheezed to keep the food cold. My friend helped me pick up the beat and then he said again, “Listen.” The swinging doors added a perfect compliment. We began running both sounds through our bodies. The ceiling fan began to play and my friend was catching them all in his toe tapping, finger drumming, and mouth popping. For just a moment I was in his world of music. He saw the elation on my face and said, “It’s always there if you have the ears to hear it and a body ready to play.”

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