21 November 2019

A cheery wave

I have been posting here very little the last two months as family and work commitments have been intense. Today while I work I am listening to a BBC Radio 3 program recommended to me recently that T'ai Chi colleagues may find interesting, in a thread that you might like to explore, (I know some of you do already).
The Three Second Rule

A good program, yet still dispiriting how much people refer to themselves as machines, with programming, wiring, and so on. A hall of mirrors... with ego at the centre... but worth knowing about, so that we can offer and inhabit a creature-like resistance, an embodied response, a connected way in the world.

The common frequency of waves on the shore, 0.3hz, the same rate as the electrical activity of the relaxed brain. The pulse of the Short Form, when it feels just right?

Superb quote near the end of the piece, from the artist who made the program, Susan Aldworth: 'That idea of Descartes that the body and the soul were two separate things - I think he was profoundly wrong.'

Yes! So do I... So does Iain McGilchrist, so do most indigenous and traditional peoples... Yet the dichotomous view of 'haunted meat' (a great Charlie Brooker quote) is what is trashing the world today. How would we live if we knew that our embodied animal selves were not our 'inadequate vehicle' but instead our true means to great connection? The laying waste of the planet is the result of the hubris of joy-denying, left-hemisphere dominant people, forming a way of life that separates body and brain, people from other people, creatures and life-forms from each other, and puts the needs of the worst part of humans at the centre of the story.

What would it be to sit on the shore of our own lives, inner and outer, to watch the waves of our thoughts, feelings and desires come and go. To notice their rate, their quality. their roughness or timbre? The colour of the foam, the texture of the shingle. Sometimes there will be sharks, at other times turtles. Maybe it is full of waving fronds of kelp, or tickle by cormorant wings. I am not fighting the natural rate of my life-waves any more, or indeed its tides. Perhaps I would like the storms not to return, but that's just a preference, not a demand. And look, there're shells...

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I am working on softness, left side form, some weapons ideas.
Greetings from the river.

Classes in London with both myself and Mark continue until 18th December.
Aberdeenshire workshop will continue as planned, more info next week.

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