Cross-Training Body Mind Emotions Spirit | Rachael R. Resch

Eternity

He  who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy.
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.

— William Blake
(1757-1827) 

Red Brocade

The Arabs used to say,
When a stranger appears at your door,
feed him for three days
before asking who he is,
where he’s come from,
where he’s headed.
That way, he’ll have strength
enough to answer.
Or, by then you’ll be
such good friends
you don’t care.

Let’s go back to that.
Rice?  Pine nuts?
Here, take the red brocade pillow.
My child will serve water
to your horse.

No, I was not busy when you came!
I was not preparing to be busy.
That’s the armor everyone put on
to pretend they had a purpose
in the world.

I refuse to be claimed.
Your plate is waiting.
We will snip fresh mint
into your tea.

— Naomi Shihab Nye

The class focus on Saturday, chosen at random from the basket of focii, was “Daily Connection With the Earth.”

What is the sensation in your body when you hear and feel these words?

My teacher, Robert Bly, taught me how to spontaneously tweak the language in a poem I am reading according to the promise of the moment, much like how in Nia, we tweak our movements according to our body’s way to find Joy. 

Here’s the poem as I read it in Saturday’s class:

When my daily connection with the Earth
is away from me, I am depressed;
nothing in the daylight delights me,
sleep at night gives no rest,
who can I tell about this?

The night is dark and long . . . hours go by . . .
because I am alone, I sit up suddenly,
fear goes through me . . .

Kabir says: Listen, my friend,
there is one thing in the world that satisfies, 
and that is a meeting with the Holy.

— Kabir

translated by Robert Bly,
The Kabir Book
(Beacon Press) 
version by Rachael R. Resch 

And here’s Robert’s original version:

When my friend is away from me, I am depressed;
nothing in the daylight delights me,
sleep at night gives no rest,
who can I tell about this?

The night is dark and long . . . hours go by . . .
because I am alone, I sit up suddenly,
fear goes through me . . .

Kabir says: Listen, my friend,
there is one thing in the world that satisfies, 
and that is a meeting with the Holy.

— Kabir

translated by Robert Bly,
The Kabir Book
(Beacon Press) 

Just as it says in the song from “Hair,” at dawn on February 14, the moon was in the seventh house and Jupiter aligned with Mars — all in the sign of Aquarius.  In honor of that planetary configuration and in honor of the play “Hair,” we danced to the entire original soundtrack of the Broadway musical.

Interestingly, a number of songs in “Hair” borrow from Shakespeare, the master eloquencer and metabolizer of grief into beauty.

Most well known is the stunningly beautiful and heartbreaking song, “What A Piece of Work Is Man,” sung by Ronnie Dyson and Walter Michael Harris, composed by Galt McDermott.  

It comes entirely from Hamlet’s speech to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (although the order of his speech is changed slightly in the song), when Hamlet realizes these two “excellent good friends” are actually spies.  

During this sing, according to “Hair” historian Doris J. Brook, the company lies dead on the ground following the war scene that occurs during the song, “3-5-0-0” (a song which borrows from the great contemporary poet, Allen Ginsberg’s “Wicheta Vortex Sutra”), and the two singers step over and around all the bodies.

Here is Hamlet’s speech:

I have of late — but wherefore I know not — lost all my mirth . . .
this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory;
this most excellent canopy, the air, look you,
this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof
fretted with golden fire, why it appears no other thing to
me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel! 
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals!

— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark  Act II, Scene II

Both the speech and the song go straight to the heart of the tragic dialectical grief of the human situation:  the beauty, intelligence and great creativity of humans on one hand, and our cultural and individual dissociation from the great tapestry we call life on Earth, of which we are intrinsically a part, both biologically and spiritually.  

The grief, as Martín Prechtel teaches, that precisely because of our profound interconnectedness, the mere fact of living, even in a subsistence  economy, is a continual sacrifice of all our relations: the foods we eat, the waters and fires we enslave, the earth we mine, not to mention the wars we wage.

This grief emerges again in the final song in “Hair, “The Flesh Failures/Let The Sunshine In.”  The hero, Claude, according to Ms. Brook, stands behind the company in his army uniform, shorn of his hair.  They can’t see him.  (He also may be dead; some believe that he is a Christ figure.)  When he then sings slowly, “Manchester, England, England,” the group responds by singing Romeo’s words, ending with, “The rest is silence” from Hamlet, which is the last thing Hamlet says as he is dying.

Here’s Romeo’s speech to the apparently dead Juliet.  

Eyes, look your last!
Arms, take your last! embrace! and, lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss.

— Romeo and Juliet  Act 5, Scene 3

Our grief is our love.  And love is our hope.  The music of “Hair” is a phenomenal example of, as Martín Prechtel teaches, turning the inherent grief of the situation — be it Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan or our own precious lives — into beauty in order to metabolize it and offer something to feed not only our own spirits but the Holy.

A Love Letter

Within a circle of one meter
You sit, pray and sing.

Within a shelter ten meters large
You sleep well, rain sounds a lullaby.

Within a field a hundred meters large
Raise rice and goats.

Within a valley a thousand meters large
Gather firewood, water, wild vegetables and Amanitas.

Within a forest ten kilometers large
Play with raccoons, hawks, 
Poison snakes and butterflies.

Mountainous country Shinano
A hundred kilometers  large
Where someone lives leisurely, they say.

Within a circle ten thousand kilometers large
Go to see the southern coral reef in summer
Or winter drifting ices in the sea of Okhotsk.

Within a circle ten thousand kilometers large
Swimming in the sea of shooting stars.

Within a circle a million kilometers large 
Upon the spaced-out yellow mustard blossoms
The moon in the east, the sun west.

Within a circle ten billion kilometers large
Pop far out of the solar system mandala.

Within a circle ten thousand light years large
Andromeda is melting away into snowing cherry flowers.

Now within a circle ten billion light years large
All thoughts of time, space are burnt away.
There again you sit pray and sing
You sit, pray and sing.

— Nanao Sakaki

from Break The Mirror
(North Point Press) 

Lost

Stand still.  The trees ahead and the bushes behind you
Are not lost.  Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes.  Listen.  It answers,
I have made this place around you. 
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost.  Stand still.  The forest knows
Where you are.  You must let it find you.

— David Wagoner

from Good Poems,
edited by Garrison Keillor 
(Penguin Books)

Her Longing

Before this longing,
I lived serene as a fish,
At one with the plants in the pond,
 The mare’s tail, the floating frogbit,
Among my eight-legged friends,
Open like a pool, a lesser parsnip,
Like a leech, looping myself along,
A bug-eyed edible one,
A mouth like a stickleback, —
A thing quiescent! 

But now —
The wild stream, the sea itself cannot contain me:
I dive with the black hag, the cormorant,
Or walk the pebbly shore with the humpbacked heron,
Shaking out my catch in the morning sunlight,
Or rise with the gar-eagle, the great-winged condor,
Floating over the mountains,
Pitting my breast against the rushing air,
A phoenix, sure of my body,
Perpetually rising out of myself,
My wings hovering over the shorebirds,
Or beating against the black clouds of storm,
Protecting the sea-cliffs.

— Theodore Roethke

From News of the Universe,
edited by Robert Bly
(Sierra Club Books) 

Here I am in 2oo5, at my Nia Brown Belt training with Nia co-creators Debbie Carlos and Carlos Rosas.

Just as every Nia class has a focus, so every Nia teacher training has a focus. Brown Belt focuses on energy.  (For an overview see The Nia Belt System.)

In Brown Belt, we start, as always, with Nia’s foundation, White Belt Principle #1, The Joy of Movement.  Then we expand the sensation of The Joy of Movement to include the sensation of energy.  We study and practice the somatics of energy as it moves, and is moved by, the body, mind, emotions and spirit, both individually and collectively. 

As in the practice of acupuncture, Nia as a practice also opens up energy pathways.  Nia movement is specifically designed  to stimulate the flow of chi or energy in the body.

Although Nia is only 25 years old, working with energy to get fit and heal is not.  Nia’s foundation in the martial arts rests in a lineage of energetics that goes back thousands of years.  (Click here to learn about all of Nia’s nine movement forms.)

In 1996, when I first began taking Nia classes and was so very ill, I believe it was this aspect of Nia — the movement of chi in the body,  mind, emotions and spirit — which provided me a path of profound and lasting healing.

In Nia, a fit energy field means we can move to the edge of chaos and then self-organize back into order.  FreeDance is one way Nia supports going to the edge of chaos.  When we can move in and out of form and freedom, we develop energetic fluidity, strength, flexibility, creativity and empowerment.

Please enjoy these glimpses into the experience of Brown Belt 2005.

Photographs by Jeff Stewart, Nia Technique, Inc.
Brown Belt 2005, Nia Headquarters, Portland, Oregon, USA.

I Live My life

I live my life in growing orbits,
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, 
and I have been circling for a thousand years. 
And I still don’t know if I am a falcon,
Or a storm, or a great song.

–Rainer Maria Rilke 

from Book for the Hours of Prayer, 1899
translated by Robert Bly in News of The Universe

www.robertbly.com
greatmotherconference

A Ritual To Read To Each Other

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

—William Stafford

Born January 17, 1914, Hutchinson, Kansas; 
died August 28, 1993, Lake Oswego, Oregon. 

http://williamstafford.org/