Walk in the Woods, with Reiki Meditation
Sunday 9/24, 10 am
We will meet beneath the giant arch at grand army plaza, prospect park, Brooklyn
Please join me for a walking meditation in prospect park. We will meet under the giant arch at grand army plaza at 10 am on Sunday 9/24 and walk/ forest bathe/ meditate for about an hour. There will be opportunity for reiki shares. This event is open to all levels reiki and also non-attuned is ok.
This walk is free/ by donation
To rsvp, go to facebook.com/reikidawa
Or, just show up
Thinking about ‘what is spirituality’?
I don’t post a lot, or often, but today seemed like a reasonable day to do so. There’ve been alot of things on my mind regarding religiosity vs spirituality and how everyone is sitting somewhere in some continuum of these intersecting concepts. And where these connect, converge, diverge and at what points they don’t touch- this is the texture of society. I know that society and culture consists of more than all this, or at least that we say it does. We say that the material things before us matter. And that they matter more. And there’s good argument that religion is just another material element. And there’s an equally good argument that most people’s attempts to reach a spiritual space are actually material manisfestations. I don’t make any great pretentions about myself and which spaces I occupy on any given occasion. And with that said, enter Gabor Mate who many people know for his work with addictions and other psychological states. If you click on his name, you’ll land at- http://theunboundedspirit.com/myth-of-normal/
Which contains a video of his thoughts on this matter. His thoughts, which prompted my thoughts today. So, thanks! And enjoy (if you like) or don’t (obviously ) 🙂
Heart, enjoy, first time/only time
I wanted to share this calligraphy. Yumiko Yoshioka presented it at a workshop I recently attended. Two weeks later, I still feel deeply effected by what I learned there.
The first calligraphy : Heart
The second: Enjoy
The third: First time, Only time
They are self explanatory. And worth meditating on. A good philosophy for living. With and through your heart. Invoke pleasure and enjoyment to your daily life, all of the things. As if the first time. As if the only time. It could be that. Sometimes it is.
Remembering Gary Shandling
Gary died a few days ago. He brought so much love and laughter into the world, so I wanted to take a minute to honor his contribution.
First with an interview from WTF that was reposted. It’s truly wonderful.
And then with a link to comedians in cars getting coffee. Another deep moment, if you care to see it.
Energy work
Back to the main focus of this blog. Energy healing. It’s extremely important to keep your own energy moving and clear. And there’s lots of ways to go about it.
Meet Donna Eden. She’s an energy healer.
From her website http://innersource.net/em/about/donna-eden.html
“For nearly four decades, Donna Eden has been teaching people how to work with the body’s energy systems to reclaim their health and natural vitality. Donna is among the world’s most sought, most joyous, and most authoritative spokespersons for Energy Medicine. Her abilities as a healer are legendary. She has taught more than 100,000 people worldwide, both laypeople and professionals, how to understand the body as an energy system. ”
I found her video to be very useful. She’s very new agey and totally exuberant. The exercises are variants of eft and yoga and chi gung. It’s easy to follow and well put together. A nice set of exercises to do every morning if you need some variation from your regular routine. Or it’s a nice simple routine to do if you don’t have a regular routine. Or sample from her video and do the exercises that work for you. I did them and definitely felt it’s a nice way to warm up and start the day. Maybe I’ll make a condensed version for this blog where all the exercises flow into each other in a simple choreography. But in the meantime:
Here’s the video:
http://youtu.be/Di5Ua44iuXc
Here’s the blog: http://blog.theshiftnetwork.com/blog/morning-energy-medicine-routine?
The Chi Master
Here’s an interesting article about a healer who uses the power of chi in his work. Well worth the read, as well as an excellent demonstration of chi.
The 2-Spirit Hoop Dancer
I found this video going around Facebook. It’s about a two-spirit hoop dancer. The thing which struck me the most, in addition to the cultural take on trangenderism, is that it opens up a discourse on the very nature of dance itself. What exactly is dance and who is it for, and for what, exactly? Why dance. What constitutes dance. Last year I went to an event celebrating the wonderful holiday, Holi. That’s the Indian celebration where everyone throws colors on each other and social barriers are temporarily broken. There’s a lot of social dancing and also this particular celebration had choreographed performances featuring various styles of contemporary and traditional Indian dance. At this event the organizers had also brought in Native American Hoop Dancers to perform. At the time I thought it was wonderful, evidencing an interesting way to approach, acknowledge, incorporate and celebrate the ‘other Indian’. Showing a multifaceted way of thinking, beyond binary, beyond continuums, beyond ‘appropriation’. But after watching the video I can see that it goes more deeper than that. The hoop dance is more than I understood ( of course, I understood nothing about the hoop dance, and still don’t). I’m really grateful to have learned this much.
I hope I’ve been doing it right!
A Bruce lee interview from 1972
This is wonderful interview is totally worth 20 minutes of your life. Bruce lee talks a lot about self integrity and total being, but with different words. And he has an interesting approach to life
http://bruceleetube.com/interviews/the-lost-interview/
1/1/16 .the 4 agreements.
I guess you could file this under New Years resolutions. Here’s to a happy healthy one! (With wisdom ever in sight and out of grasp -or is that just a form of American anti intellectualism? We don’t like to dwell on matters of the mind, or admit fallibility around those areas. Or boast. Never to boast. ) maybe it’s just ‘yoga’- fatigue, with all it’s desperate spiritualism and grasping that we wish to avoid? Or attachment to postmodern deconstruction- can we ever fully understand anything? If you are intimate with details of the elephant’s trunk, yet completely ignorant of it’s tail, can you profess knowledge all the same?
Don Miguel Ruiz can help us along this path, with his 4 agreements. Which are very helpful, because you’ll never know everything. But maybe you can learn a thing or two every day. This can help in that effort.
And also, just for fun, are the 5 reiki precepts for living well. (Sometimes ‘work diligently’ is translated as ‘work hard’, or ‘do your best’. And I think there’s a direct correlation to not taking things personally with not getting angry or being fearful.
And what’s missing in both, explicitly unstated, yet is abundantly implied, is courage and the act of being courageous, and the art of living courageously. It’s derived from the Latin word : cor – and it originally meant from the heart, or something like that. Nowadays people just say ‘from the heart’ or that someone ‘has a lot of heart’ or that they ‘put a lot of heart’ into what they do. Perhaps because courage came to mean valor, and be associated with fighting and war? Or because people courageously fight losing battles to inoperable diseases or amorphorous entities? Have we lost faith in courage, even as we value and treasure our hearts?
Here’s a nice bit about courage: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courage
reikidawa 