Anchoring Essence: Touchstones of Truth
April 22, 2021 § 7 Comments
“I contain multitudes.” ~ Walt Whitman
“In your soul are infinitely precious things that can not be taken from you.”~ Oscar Wild
“We have to get back into the inner jeweled realm and make ourselves at home there.” ~ Terence McKenna
“The soul is your temple.” ~ Chanakya
During times when fear and uncertainty run high, as now, it is essential to be grounded and connected to our own energy, or we will go as crazy as the world.
Nobody teaches us in school how to connect with the wisdom of our soul. The idea of a soul at all is often viewed as an antiquated or purely religious concept. This erasure leaves us viewing ourselves as a blank slate mind to be filled with memorized facts. We may be informed about the world, but we are set up to miss out on our greatest resource of all: inner wisdom, essence vision.
Words are placeholders for realities far more complex than the limited signifiers used to represent them. Whether or not you subscribe to the idea of a soul or spirit that exists beyond the body, we are unarguably a point of specific consciousness containing a unique collection of experiences, feelings, talents, perspectives and affinities.
Our point of view is a feeling signature unlike any other person’s—an imprint of presence that is our deepest self beyond the personality, beyond fears and projections. A core truth of self.
This core essence knows more than our conscious minds. It is tapped into the wealth of subconscious creative connections, as well as innumerable possibilities within the imaginal planes of collective consciousness and universal inspiration. We construct our personality as a form of self-protection to interface with the world. (See, “Authenticity & The False Self.”) But deep-diving beyond this construct yields a wealth of inner richness.
Essence is innate. The constructed egoic personality often throttles the pure expressions and impulses of this essential nature, trying to play by the rules, gain approval and “get it right” by applying logic. But there is a deeper guidance system of resonance available to us, one which is infinitely expansive. Transcendent, even.
We are not told about this inner wealth, or taught to access it.
Yet anchoring our essence—and accessing its wisdom—has never been more important, both individually and collectively. Traumatic experiences and distressing, stressful circumstances—like a global pandemic, a rapidly changing environment and massive civil unrest, for instance—create dissociation. We might be partially present, going through the motions, but we are half dislodged and not fully embodied.
This deeply uncomfortable, sometimes excruciating, experience—seen as soul loss by indigenous and neo pagan traditions—manifests as anxiety, depression, brain fog, feelings of dread, listlessness and disconnection.
I’d like to share with you a time-tested personal practice I use to connect to my own essence. Using this exercise as a morning practice has been my lifeline through the past year of lockdown. I’ve shared this exercise with several friends who tried it and gave glowing reports of better days and increased well-being.
Try it as a three day challenge and let us know how it goes!
I’ve found it to be a game-changing tone setter for the day, giving a significant elevation of mood every time. Obviously some days more than others, but I’m always glad I did it.
As one friend put it: “Instead of waiting to see the day through someone else’s filter, you get to YOU deeply.”
Essence Meditation
&
Soul Dictation
Needed: a notebook & pen within reach. A way to listen to music & a timer.
1.Set the timer for 5-10 minutes. Close your eyes while sitting or lying down somewhere comfortable.
2. Listen to calming, uplifting music—I find ambient or instrumental is best to free the mind & support elevation. (Youtube & Spotify have a vast array of healing/meditation music & soundscape options.)
3. Direct your focus inward, resting your awareness in the space surrounding your heart. Placing your palm over the heart center can help stimulate sensation of presence within this area. Feel your chest rise and fall with your breathing. Relax into your inner being. Soften and sink inward.
4. Feel into your own essence. By which I mean: internally, on a feeling level, using your attention like a spotlight scanning inwardly, do your best to locate the purest center of your “you-ness” at its most innocent and pure. Then feel into it, lean into it, feed it with your attention. Deep-dive your interior like a vast ocean. And while you are swimming there ask yourself:
What does my essence feel like? If I was a color pallet, what colors feel most like me? Most like home? Does being underwater feel soothing? Feel into that.
Follow what feels “warmer, warmer, warmer…” like that game we used to play as kids. Move towards what feels good. Allow yourself to dissolve slowly and pleasurably into the core of your own inner space, like trust falling into your own arms. This, in here, is your safe place. Your regeneration chamber. Your temple. A home base just for you. A source of infinite nourishment to drink from.
Be playful. Be gentle. Have fun.
As one friend said of the exercise, “I found it very playful. An invitation to really savor the joy that I often shove down.”
What images, colors, places, activities or symbols conjure a deep, abiding sense of home and truth for you?
Does the sound of the wind in the trees give you an extra lift of excitement, reminding you of running free as a child, when you could still hear the secrets whispered between leaves? Feel into that energy.
Perhaps you have a favorite memory that conjures a feeling of home for you. Color combinations that give you a little spark of joy.
Does the way sunlight looks on water make you feel a special charge? Expand that sparkly visual in your mind’s eye—dive deep into the feeling of that liquid light.
Maybe you can access the feeling without needing to conjure images or words. Sink into that cozy sensation that feels like home.
With loving awareness, nurture the feeling the touchstone inspires inside you. Allow yourself to drift pleasurably inside the feeling.
What brings you alive? The answers will be the same things that bring you home to yourself.
What we love is part of who we are.
What are your touchstones of personal essence? This meditation will help you discover them, at which point they become a vital resource—instant access to anchored essence which increases well-being, flow state, confidence, clear thinking and creative connections.
Images and symbols, like words, are portals to the energies they represent. Make notes in your notebook when you find a touchstone that elevates your feeling state.
Once you have discovered your inner touchstones of essence, you can use them as a shortcut to access the feeling-state they inspire.
Remember, this isn’t shadow work. We aren’t going down the dark interior rabbit holes here. This is an exercise for nourishment, uplift and re-connection with the truest parts of being.
You are consciously creating a bubble of heavenly frequencies within and around yourself. Watering your inner garden, showing your truest, deepest, purest, most innocent and powerful self interest and love. Focus on joyful, uplifting sensations.
(This is not to advocate for spiritual bypassing. Facing fears, uncomfortable truths and healing inner wounds is an important part of coming home to yourself. For more on shadow work, “Navigating The Dark Night of the Soul,” and to work with wounded inner aspects, see “Soul-Retrieval.” That being said, in these dark times I truly think we need the fortification of going straight to the spirit for nourishment, vision, uplift, empowerment and regeneration.)
Essence Meditation is about elevating your inner atmosphere to connect with your most exalted aspects. Your multidimensional self.
5. Anchor essence. Once you’ve located the “warmer, warmer” feeling enough to evoke it, even slightly, at will—once you have fed your experience of your essence with your attention, grow it. Expand the sensation outward from your inner being to fill your body. Then keep expanding it to surround and encompass you like a loving atmosphere.
If you saw colors, visualize them around you. If you saw stars, surround yourself with starlight. Expand your inner world to form a protective energetic cocoon of your own essence around you. This is also a good strategy for creating energetic boundaries.
6. Soul Dictation.
When your timer goes off, open your notebook, raise your pen and ask your soul, your essence—this inner magical mystery you’ve just spent the last five or ten minutes communing with—“What do you have to tell me?”
Write down whatever comes. Even if it seems simple or obvious. Silly, cheesy, gibberish. Disjointed. Doesn’t matter. Withhold judgement. Allow yourself to be vulnerable with yourself. This is a process of getting comfortable with allowing a vaster, more intuitive, multidimensional aspect of self to speak—and be heard.
Just free-associate and write down whatever you hear internally as you listen for that true voice, whatever comes up. If you want, ask a question. Words, impressions, downloads will start to come. And the messages might surprise you.
Sometimes they feel very ordinary or generic while you’re scribing, but then you’ll read them later and they’ll suddenly light up. Profound truths are often simple. In the moment, it may seem like nothing. But later, it might be exactly what you need to hear. Just play, trust, explore. Sometimes I purposely let myself write messily so I can trick myself into thinking less and listening more. The idea is to get out of the way so you can hear the still, small voice.
As one friend who tried this exercise to great success related: “It’s a doorway to your own sacred heart.”
Going within for answers is a radical act in a society that conditions us to look for the truth from authority figures outside ourselves.
Ask your essence questions you don’t know the answer to…and watch an answer come.
*Please share your experiences in the comments if you try this exercise. I’d love to hear any thoughts you care to share, regardless. I love it when the comments becomes a shared pooling of notes.
Breaking The Movement Taboo: Reclaiming The Body’s Power Through Dance
August 6, 2017 § 4 Comments
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.
Several years ago, I attended an art opening. During the event, I noticed a woman in the crowd start to move in a way that caused her to stand out. Dressed in flowy black clothing, she slowly, with great poise, began to extend her arms, moving her fingers as though sculpting the air. Eyes slightly downcast, unfocused and internal.
People stopped looking at the art and began looking at the woman. What was happening? Was she drunk? Having a slow-motion meltdown? The air in the room became tense and thick.
Like underwater kelp, she allowed her body to gently sway back and forth, stepping forward to move ever-so-slowly across the room, all the while tenderly crafting the space around her with fluid fingertips. Her pace and reverence were reminiscent of Tai Chi, but more evocative. Each movement was graceful, flowing into the next.
And then . . . we understood.
She was a dancer, and part of her performance was to take us by surprise. One moment she was one of us, standing around, looking at the paintings on the walls—conforming to the confines of accepted physicality (sitting, standing, walking). The next, she was breaking the movement taboo. Neither sitting, standing, nor walking, but expressing, emoting through her body.
The movements themselves were simple enough, but they were affecting. They came from a deep, committed place within the dancer.
[Martha Graham by Yousuf Karsh, 1948]
I was struck, not only by the performance itself, but also by that string of moments when people were taken aback by the simple act of a woman moving authentically. You could see in their faces that until they could categorize what was happening, they mistrusted it. Until she was officially “a dancer” in their minds, she was potentially a loose cannon for daring to step outside the confines of acceptable movement.
As we watched her perform, I noticed how sharply her physical fluidity and emotiveness contrasted our own uniform rigidity. It was then that I realized there exists an invisible tyranny over movement. An unspoken, shame-based restriction so pervasive, we don’t often think to question or challenge it.
[“Birthing The New God,” By Paul Bond]
Dance has been an important part of human ritual, healing and celebration since before the birth of the earliest civilizations. Archeologists have discovered paintings in Indian and Egyptian tombs depicting dancing figures from as far back as 3300 B.C.
While in tribal scenarios we once danced together—and still do in some parts of the world and small pockets of society—as culture has evolved, a distinct division has occurred between professional dancers, who are in effect “socially sanctioned” to move expressively, and regular folk who make jokes about having “two left feet.”
Break dancing is one notable exception, in that self-taught dancers are celebrated. But even in this scenario, it’s the most exceptional, skilled and practiced performers that are given audience. There are still parameters. Technique is required. One couldn’t simply improvise and make up for a lack of skill with feeling.
Beyond perhaps shaking their hips at a dim, crowded club here and there, most people without a background in dance feel intimidated by the idea of engaging their body in expressive movement.
Most of us who are not professional dancers have at one time been shamed—or watched others be shamed—by peers when we step outside the box of acceptable movement. The shadow of social stigmatization looms large. We fear being a joke, Elaine, in the TV series Seinfeld, who famously loved to dance but moved with embarrassing seizure-like jerks, thumbs and knees akimbo, all the while thinking she was the life of the party.
This unspoken shame and fear surrounding expressive movement prevents most people from ever experiencing the immense therapeutic benefits of dance.
Swedish researchers have shown dance to improve mood and increase mental health. It builds cardiovascular, bone and muscle strength. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, dancing can decrease the onset of dementia, boosting immunity, memory and cognition. A Standford Study has found that movement to music creates new neural pathways by integrating several brain functions at once: kinesthetic, rational, musical and emotional.
The depth of skill required to perform any kind of classical or structured dance is undeniably impressive. But many people don’t realize there exists a genre of dance which specifically celebrates the authentic movement that springs from the untrained body.
Postmodern dance emerged in the late ’60s as a reaction against the compositional constraints of modern dance. In the same way, modern dance itself once rebelled against the rigid formalism of classical ballet. The Judson Dance Theater, a collection of Greenwich Village artists, dancers and composers, rejected formalism in favor of fostering the purity of ordinary movement.
They saw beauty and value in the freshness of instinctive human self-expression, often using untrained dancers in their performances. Postmodern dance is typified by natural movement—versus learned form.
Around the turn of the last century, people like Isadora Duncan had developed a style they called “free dance”—a rejection of classical formality, which paved the way for a deepened expression of natural movement. Drawing on inspiration from classical Greek arts, folk dances, nature and natural forms, Duncan “followed [her] fantasy and improvised, teaching any pretty thing that came into [her] head.” (Barefoot Dancer: The Story of Isadora Duncan.)
Several years after my experience at the art opening, I found myself stretching on a studio floor with a dancer-friend of mine. A modern dance teacher, she had been kind enough to give me a crash course in movement. As we warmed our bodies up and felt into the space around us, she told me all about postmodern dance and the virtues of authentic movement. Hearing from a trained, professional performer that my natural, untrained physical impulses had value was nothing short of mind blowing to me.
As she stretched her hamstrings, my friend explained that, just like any art, the main purpose of contemporary dance was to develop one’s “authentic voice.” As a writer, I recognized this phrase and understood it. Authentic voice highlights the value of personality and uniqueness in making effective art. It denotes the pleasure provided by idiosyncrasy, honesty and sincerity.
To cultivate authentic voice takes experimentation, risk and practice—it’s a meditation on the power of vulnerability. Applying this idea to dance was a game-changer for me. Ultimately, developing one’s true voice in dance is not about technique, it’s about having the confidence to go deep, and to be vulnerable, allowing authenticity to shine through.
[Photo by Javier Vallhonrat]
I started in my living room. I began to play with what my body wanted to do. My dancer-friend had mentioned Bartenieff Fundamentals, a method she had studied which begins with a focus on breath, and evolves into one of the body’s extremities taking the lead in expressing itself.
It could start with a hand, a shoulder, a toe, the spine…I learned that if I waited and listened, with music playing, some part of my body always volunteered for the job. And after that, another part inevitably followed.
The goal, my friend said, was simply to become comfortable with my own patterns of authentic movement. And then to eventually build and expand upon those patterns. Modern dance pioneer Martha Graham’s concept of Contraction & Release (a contracting movement with each in-breath, an expansive one with each outbreath) was also a helpful touchstone to begin.
In flamenco, there is a word called, duende, the spirit of the dance. Flamenco dancers wait to start moving until they feel the duende move them. They will wait, poised while the music plays, for as long as it takes.
My first time experiencing being moved by the duende of dance was life-changing. I felt a natural rhythm take hold of me, propelling me. I wasn’t thinking at all, which felt delicious. As a writer who spends most of my creative time in my head, it felt amazing to move my focus to the body, to learn this new visceral language and communicate beyond words. My body rejoiced in its newfound freedom, and it had a lot to say. Stored emotions surfaced, flowing through me, released. It felt good to move expressively. In fact, it felt essential. I wondered how I had ever lived without it.
I started my dance practice while snowed in during the month of January, while fighting an immense depression. Without exaggeration, dance lifted me out of an epic funk and into a new exciting space of possibility. I had broken through the movement taboo and it was deeply liberating. I dare anyone to throw themselves into dancing to the full length of a song they enjoy and not feel a marked sense of uplift by the end. It’s an endorphin rush, athleticism meets creative catharsis.
Dance is a vital resource of physical health and emotional wellbeing. You don’t need to take a class to do it. Dance is for everyone. With the exception of the completely paralyzed, someone in a wheelchair can move their upper body expressively to music—there are whole dance companies created by the differently abled.
Deep, expressive movement works as emotional therapy, a physical boost and a cardiovascular workout that you won’t even know you’re doing—until the song ends and you feel how fast your heart is pounding in your chest. Even a slow song, if you work on consistent pacing and fluidity, is a major core workout.
This is an invitation to shed the shame, break the taboo, and reclaim your body’s natural joy in movement. All it takes is 5 minutes, some space, some music, and your willingness to open up to what your body wants to say.
*For some inspiration, follow my journey as an untrained dancer exploring free/postmodern dance & movement on Instagram, @taiwoodville. Special thanks to Alissa Hattman for her notes on this piece, and for Michele Ainza (my dancer-friend) for freely sharing her wisdom, knowledge and inspiration.
Giving Your Future Self Gifts
January 2, 2017 § 6 Comments
[“Twin Heart” by Christian Schloe]
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” ~Audre Lorde
A great many New Year’s resolutions revolve around exercising self-discipline, which may in the moment yield less pleasure, but will create a better outcome in the future.
Yet, 25% of New Year’s Resolutions are broken within the first week, and research at the University of Scranton suggests that only 8 % of people achieve their annual vows of self-improvement.
Recent research reveals that the part of the brain responsible for self-control is the same area that allows us to feel empathy.
[“Mirror LLL” by Tigran Tsitoghdzyan]
The human brain perceives the future self as if it were a stranger.
Tests reveal that when we think about ourselves in the present, parts of our prefrontal cortex light up that remain dim when we think about a stranger—or try to imagine our future self.
“Empathy depends on your ability to overcome your own perspective, appreciate someone else’s point of view, and step into their shoes,” remarks science writer Ed Yong.
“Self-control is essentially the same skill, except that those other shoes belong to your future self—a removed and hypothetical entity who might as well be a different person.” (“Self-Control Is Just Empathy For Your Future Self.”)
The English word empathy finds its root in the Ancient Greek “pathos,” which means “passion” or “suffering.”
In the early 20th century, German philosopher, Robert Vischer, adapted the word to create the German term Einfühlung—literally “feeling into”—which was then translated into English as empathy, defined as “the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within the other being’s frame of reference.”
[From Gregory Colbert “Ashes & Snow” exhibition.]
Research has uncovered the existence of “mirror neurons,” which react to emotions expressed by others and then reproduce them.
This is why we get caught up in the emotion of art & performance, as well as the reason we feel a twinge of discomfort when we witness someone else experiencing pain.
Some people—a case notably examined on the podcast “Invisibilia”-–have an overactive level of empathy, known as mirror-touch synesthesia, wherein they experience a debilitating level of physical empathy for any reaction witnessed in others.
“The capacity for empathy seems to be innate,”relates Jane E. Brodey, “and is evident even in other species — the adult elephant that tried to rescue a baby rhino stuck in the mud despite being charged by its mother, as recounted in “When Elephants Weep.”(“Empathy is Natural, But Nurturing it Helps.”)
Empathy is a skill that can be learned & developed. The more we practice imagining what it feels like to be in another person’s circumstance, the better we become at doing it—and at giving our future self gifts, not grief.
“Think of [it] as a kind of temporal selflessness,” notes Ed Yong. “It’s Present You taking a hit to help out Future You.”
But for all the buzz empathy is getting these days, it’s possible that its sister state, compassion, is the more constructive practice to cultivate.
Buddhist Monk & French writer, Matthieu Ricard-–known as “world’s happiest man”—reflects that while empathy can lead to emotional burnout, the mood of compassion for another being is nourishing, energizing & empowering.
[“The World’s Happiest Man Wishes You Wouldn’t Call Him That.’]
The French monk details:
“The cerebral networks activated by meditation on compassion were very different from those linked to empathy. In the previous studies, people who were not trained in meditation observed a person who was seated near the scanner and received painful electric shocks in the hand. These researchers noted that a part of the brain associated with pain is activated in subjects who observe someone suffering. They suffer when they see another’s suffering.
“When I engaged in meditation on altruistic love and compassion, [the researchers] noted that the network linked to negative emotions and distress was not activated, while certain cerebral areas traditionally associated with positive emotions, with the feeling of affiliation and maternal love, for instance, were.” (From Matthieu Ricard’s book, “Altrusim: The Power of Compassion To Change Yourself & The World.”)
Empathy fatigue can breed avoidance of the distressing emotions that can accompany resonating with another’s pain, but cultivating a focus on compassion is affirming & fortifying.
“When altruistic love encounters suffering it manifests as compassion,” Ricard tells us. “This transformation is triggered by empathy, which alerts us to the fact that the other is suffering. One may say that when altruistic love passes through the prism of empathy, it becomes compassion.”
French psychologist Christophe Andre writes, “We need the gentleness and the strength of compassion. The more lucid we are about the world, the more we accept seeing it as it really is, the easier it is to accept that we cannot face all the suffering that is encountered in the course of our lives unless we have this strength and this gentleness.”
We can apply this same philosophy to those “strangers” of our future selves.
PARALLAX: 