Month: October 2018

Birdie Transformation Program

Week Eight

Grounding, embodiment, shame and pleasure

This week’s investigations seem huge

1) Look it up – grounding:

Find out what people mean by grounding. The grounding that is referred to here is when you hear: ground down, usually associated with taking a deep breath, getting out of your head, getting into your body.

How do YOU ground yourself? How do YOU know if you are in your body or in your head?

There is a form of grounding used in healing that means to touch the earth/dirt with your skin, usually your feet, to allow for electron energy exchange. This is not what is meant.

2) Sense what is going on in your body:

Take time each day this week to sense yourself, your body or part of your body and give the sensation names, like tingly, hot, cold, full, pressure, tight, soft and so on. No labeling like angry jealous, irritated ….stick to the actual physical sensation.

The deeper background of this beginning exercise is the inhabiting of our bodies. The being intimately aware of the body’s sensations, this sensing of your physical vehicle. This getting to know your body and ultimately to actually fall in love with this vehicle we inhabit and are one with.

It is through our bodies that consciousness comes alive.

This process might bring up images or judgments of some things that we feel ashamed about.

3) Get acquainted with shame

Maybe you already are fully aware of the things you hide and would not want anyone to ever see or know. Maybe you have not really looked at it.

In this next exploration, be gentle with yourself! Take some time to think, or even write a list, of things you are ashamed of.

It is possible that you might even be of the opinion that there is nothing you are ashamed of in yourself.

Think about it this way then: what are the things about you and your life you don’t want to tell anyone?

Why is that?

The force, the life energy, the breath – the spirit that moves through all things and cells knows no shame. It is something we acquired from our human and societal environment.

Our essential self and our physical manifestation are intimately linked. We are the embodiment of our soul, our essential self. You will not ever live here with true freedom if some part of you has to remain hidden from you, and others.

4) Explore pleasure in movement

Watch this video of yoga movements.

Try out something similar. You might first notice tightness or pain or tension. Keep exploring. Notice when your physical movement feels pleasurable, when your body feels good. Just notice.

If you don’t speak enough English to understand what is said in this video, watch it anyway – open to the feeling of the movements. If you are male and can’t quite relate, try it anyway. There are masculine and feminine currents in each one of us, and while each individual has a centrum of gravity on the spectrum, we all have both energies and at times we all need to occupy the opposite pole. We want internal flexibility to do that.

https://youtu.be/soA-PHxcgbI

I am including this quote:

True change and advanced human adaptation are not made on the basis of any self-conscious resistance to old, degenerative, and subhuman habits. Change is not a matter of not doing something. It is a matter of doing something else — something that is inherently right, free, and pleasurable. Therefore, the key is insight and the freedom to feel and participate in ways of functioning that are right and new.

The tendencies and patterns of your earlier adaptations are not wrong. They were appropriate enough in their own moment of creation, and there is no need to feel guilt or despair about them. Likewise, efforts to oppose and change them are basically fruitless. Such efforts are forms of conflict, and they only reinforce the modes of egoic “self-possession”.

What is not used becomes obsolete, whereas what is opposed is kept before you. Therefore, the creative principle of change is the one of relaxed inspection and awareness of existing tendencies, and persistent, full feeling orientation to right, new, regenerative functional patterns.

Adi Da Samraj
from “The Secret of How To Change”
in The Enlightenment of the Whole Body (October, 1978)

Birdie Transformation Program

Week Seven – Play

This week, we explore play.

If you have a young child or a pet in your life, it will be a great help.

First, what is play, what is playing?

What is the difference between playing a game and “just” playing?

In the divine play of incarnation we are playing the earth-game, being a human. As humans, we are all playing one or more games here on planet Earth.

We are doing this program to play a certain game better, the game of evolution, the game of developing an harmonious human being, the game of living an inspired life, for which we need to investigate our internal structures, beliefs and conditioning so we can then choose to be empty, more free, to allow inspirational energy to flow through us.

But back to the task of the week.

Play. Take time to play this week.

How about playing in the beach sand, playing making a blanket fort, playing with paints, painting with fingers, or toes, playing with paper, rocks, wooden blocks or building an obstacle course and imagine going on an expedition, pretend being various animals?

Those are just some suggestions. It could be that you end up just sitting there for a while, maybe even getting bored.

In this play there is no goal to win or to be the best or to create something worthwhile selling or even keeping.

For this daily play, it is exploring and having fun, being curious, experimenting, alone or together with someone else.

Share with us what happened for you with this one.

Birdie Transformation Program week Six

Gratitude

Yes, there is always something to be grateful for.

Investigation: what IS gratitude? What is an attitude of gratitude?

Find information on how a focus on gratitude changes the brain/us. Share it with us.

Here are the two explorations/tasks for the week

One:

For this week, every evening, write down at least 10 things you are grateful for.

Include at least one item from that same day.

Go over the list and mark the ones you also FEEL grateful for.

For the rest of the week, you can play exploring the difference of being grateful for something and feeling grateful for something – what is the difference for you?

As you go about your day, notice when you are or feel grateful.

To give you an example: a while back I used to wake up in a lot of pain. It went on for a couple of years. A hot morning shower felt so incredibly good and helped with that pain a lot. I felt – and still feel it every single day – so grateful to live in a place where there is hot running water. Thank you!!!

Two:

This is easily done when already in bed and before going to sleep, but you can do it any time.

Think of, sense or touch areas or organs of your body and thank them for having been with you all this life, worked for you, served you, protected you, …and so on.

Imagine your body’s cells or organ’s responses when appreciated and cared for or when complained about, blamed or neglected. Imagine how it would be if all the cells of your body were accepted and welcomed as they are. How might that feel?

Whether or not you have found evidence of benefit in appreciating your physical body and it’s varying parts, for better or worse, together your body as a whole and its specific organs and various
parts, have gotten you this far.

Another example: there was a time I really really thanked my heart for having had to feel so much and yet, there it was still beating.

Sometimes the gratitude for certain events can’t be understood and felt till years later.

A long time ago a friend wrote this at the end of an e-mail:

Always remember gratitude.

Birdie Transformation Program

Week 005 – Moving like a Baby

This week we will get in touch with our body in a new way. We begin to move. Maybe it would be better to say, we will begin again to move like we used to. I know, you already know how to move. You have moved all your life and your muscles, tendons and bones are in a particular habit. Maybe you even power through some exercises every day, because you know it is beneficial, or you like it or it makes you feel better. That is all okay.

We start at the beginning again, learning to move again with a different attention. Things might slow down quite a bit.

We will pretend to be a baby, with no agenda, no demands, just there, just following the impulses of our bodies.

If you have a 4-6 month old baby in your life, observe how it moves. Or, watch the video below.

Explore moving like a baby who does not know how to crawl yet, does not walk, does not yet stand.

It can look around, bring the hands together, arch, tilt its head back and to the side, move the legs, turn and push itself up, maybe get on all fours, maybe scoot forward, but not crawl yet.

Lie down on a surface comfortable for you. If you have a yoga mat, that works also. You can put on some gentle music, or not.

Lie down, feel where your body touches the ground, then – just lay there.

Maybe nothing more wants to happen for a long time.

Or, at some point, maybe you feel like looking around, or look at your hands or do little movements as they want to occur. Play with it, feel your legs, your back, your arms, your head, your neck. Maybe a stretch wants to happen, or a start of a turn, or maybe hardly anything at all. Start listening and let your body tell you where to stretch, what to move and where to open. Let the impulse come and follow it. And remember, babies do not judge how they move. They also burp, fart, sneeze, hick-up, sigh, whimper, cry, smile, frown and laugh as it comes.

Do this every day for as long as you want.

“Everything we feel and everything that happens to us is in the body.” – Angela Farmer

To live an inspired life, there needs to be internal space for energy to flow. The clearer the vessel, the more freely the energy flows. It we are tight, full of held stress, full of unconscious frozen energy blocks, energy can’t move and we are stuck and chronically stressed out. Anything more that happens can stress us out enough to explode, just to relieve pressure.

We need to feel to heal, we need to be able to feel our bodies.

Enjoy the exercise of this week.

Video.

https://youtu.be/D9Ko7U1pLlg

addendum

For those who would like to go further on sensing and listening within, you have a few options: one is the financially cheapest: practice listening to your body’s impulses, your sensations, your body’s way of saying yes or no, its way of telling you there is danger, or to relax, despite what your head is telling you.

If you have intuition, this sense or curiosity to go further with a trained professional, below are listed three method’s good to research, and if you have a good practitioner available in your area, give it a try.

Somatic Experiencing, which focuses on one’s perceived body sensations (or somatic experiences). It was created by trauma therapist Peter A. Levine. Very good for any kind of past trauma and chronic pain still held in the body.

Hakomi. The Hakomi Method of Experiential Psychotherapy is a body-centered approach to therapy developed by Ron Kurtz. I combines somatic awareness with experiential techniques to promote psychological growth and transformation.

The Feldenkrais method, invention of Israeli physicist Moshe Feldenkrais, is a way of retraining the body. There are two modes of this retraining. The first is group classes called Awareness Through Movement or ATMs, group classes where the instructor simply stays where he/she is, not touching the participant or doing demonstrations.. The second mode, Functional Integration or FI , is more capable of causing dramatic improvements. They are done with a trained practitioner. In one-on-one sessions. You remain fully clothed on a low table and the practitioner gently moves or presses your body in different directions to make you aware of a subconscious tension and holding patterns that make your movement less efficient, and can help you learn more efficient ways of coordinating your body.

Are there other methods to help with developing this kind of body awareness, discovering pattens and beliefs held in the body? There are, but I don’t know enough about those to be able to recommend them.