Meditation is Continuous Transformation / Meditaatio on jatkuvaa muodonmuutosta

Photo Credit: Pixabay

Kevin McEvenue asked if I can be in contact with Eero Voutilainen, the Finnish Wholebody Focusing pioneer, and ask what meditation means to him.

The life of Eero Voutilainen is currently mainly focused on home due to mobility and balance problems. With the inspiring programs on TV he remembers different stages and turning points in his life that can more deeply open to his consciousness through meditation. These memories, Eero says, are often part of subconscious, in which there  are no words.

Eero has noticed that, at its best, meditation is an acceptance of a wordless space, the space beyond any words. According to Eero

“Meditation is airy, airy licking. It allows us to be free and liberated from our own self, own ego, that easily limits our own reality. In meditation our self is not anchored to anything, but it moves sparingly. It is in a continuous transformation process throughout our life, where the caterpillar re-emerges and becomes a butterfly, all over again. Our self, our ego, is in between the subconscious and superego, and in a continuous transformation process throughout our life. The subconscious is consciousness of something underneath that of which we cannot hold in consciousness. Meditation opens the world that we need to gently listen and receive. Superego is much clearer, each of us can recognize it.”

When I asked what kind of photo Eero would like to be attached to this blog, he answered: “A picture of autumn forest, of one leaf floating in air. All those leaves that are floating to the ground are like letters that, when falling find each others again, merging into words.” This was a memory of his visit at the meditation museum in Spain.

Kevin McEvenue kysyi, voisinko olla yhteydessä Eero Voutilaiseen, suomalaiseen Wholebody-fokusointipioneeriin, ja kysyä, mitä meditaatio on hänelle.

Continue reading Meditation is Continuous Transformation / Meditaatio on jatkuvaa muodonmuutosta

Breaking the Spell of Suffering

I am hard on myself and I need to break the spell of that.

When the overwhelm sets in, it takes over my body.

Before I know it I have lost myself, I am not solid.

I am like a leaf being blown around in a storm.

I am lost. I have no home base.

When I can break the spell of the panic, the overwhelm, the negative thoughts – I feel wider, softer.  I have freedom to move.

The reward from doing that is that I can hear the birdsong and the wind in the trees.

I am available to experiencing life in the here and now.

How I break it is to pause, to slow down, to remember to come back to myself, my surroundings, my breath, the beauty that is there for me as a solid support – 24 hours a day 7 days a week 52 weeks of every year.

Not as a technique that I have learned and must get right, must do a certain way. If I do that, I am going against the unique way my body knows and desires to be.

If I do that, then the trying hard sets in, the sense of failure, I don’t get it, can’t do it.

The words come in and beat me up.

I must pause and find some sense of solidity that is outside me.

I simply pause and wait for the right way for me that is coming from my own unique bodily knowing of how to be in this world.

Finally – I can trust me.

I can break the spell like that and then the magic of the birdsong will appear for me, and I can breathe out.

Because I can trust me and my body knowing of what it needs,

I can trust you and your body knowing.

I know you will find your own unique way that is just right for you.

Thank you Kevin.

Unsatisfied Can Feel so Heard!

A situation happened recently that felt so uncomfortable that I couldn’t leave it alone. I just had to address it and so I did. It was a very familiar event—having dinner with somebody or a group of people and walking away feeling so unsatisfied, hating every moment of it.

In fact, I realized I could kvetch for days and I would still remain unsatisfied. This time, I did something quite different. I paused and found a safe place to ask my body what was so unsatisfying here? And when I could pause like that, I could feel my body appreciating the question and it felt very present in a different way than the usual chatter of thinking about something I don’t like, and why!

This is what came, being with that kind of ‘background feeling’ at a dinner gathering where I came away feeling so very unsatisfied wondering why, again! What came was a real surprise and left me feeling in a very different place!

Join me here and see what comes for you in this kind of situation where you’re feeling either uncomfortable or more—unsatisfied.

Actually, they might feel slightly different. Feeling unsatisfied often points to the possibility of what it would feel like to feel fully satisfied. Feeling uncomfortable seems more like doing something, like making a list about what to do about it, but not necessarily point to something that could change the body experience, more like a quick fix to get rid of that feeling.

In this recording, I discover something very different as a possibility I never dreamed of.

Enjoy! Kevin

What Water Wants

I  caught myself wondering
what it is like
being water.
Not what it would be like.

And then I realized
I was explaining—
or something was,
and has been for a while—
explaining
what it is like being water.

Someone invisible
has been coaching me.
I’ve been a good student
listening so carefully because
I need to know.
Something at my core
yearns for this.

Water wants me to know
what it is
and
that I am THAT too.

Look, it says
like a swimming coach
This is water.
This is what it is like
to be water.

Continue reading What Water Wants

When Rectangles Become Circles or Am I a stubborn person? / Olenko jääräpää?

Photo credit: Maria Hakasalo

I go out frequently to take pictures with a question in my mind: What wants my attention today?

Recently I went to the forest nearby. On the way I passed an area of an allotment garden. I saw a pile of boards on the ground.  Small rivets were bored through one of the boards. It felt stupid to take a photo of them, so I didn’t. Instead I continued walking. Next to the pile of boards I saw an icy grill on the grass. Even though I didn’t understand why I should take a picture of it, I did because it just felt right. Then, I returned back to the pile of boards and took a picture of it too because of a bodily felt sense that it was the right thing to do for some unknown reason.

I started to see circles everywhere around me. I took a picture of a hole in a stick, a tub which was upside down, a wheel of a wheelbarrow, to mention a few things I saw. All of them were frozen.

I took about 120 photos. As I was doing this, I realized that it was a way to invite certain quality in me to be more fully present. The part of me that is not immediately and strongly opinionated was pushing forward exactly the way it sees the world. It is the part of me that is willing to listen and even to bend in to new perspectives. This part of me has been frozen in certain areas of my life because I thought I should be immediately and completely sure about my own thoughts and opinions.

And suddenly, somehow the world was not as rectangular nor with such clear edges as it normally seems to me. It felt much more circular and soft. Somehow it is easier to live and be.

This body sense continued for a couple of days when I suddenly realized why it wasn’t easy to own that soft side of me. It related to my school experiences and how I always felt like I did  not fit into the group. I tried my best to be accepted—I even tried to change my way of being to be more like the others so that I wouldn’t appear so different. For example, the kind of bag they liked was the one I also must like, the color that was their favorite color must be mine too. For many decades I had difficulties knowing what I really like. What is “my taste?”

I hated the part of me that was waiting for the others to say their opinion first so that I could say the same, the part that wasn’t able to know and recognize what I really, deeply wanted and was just worried about what others would say about me being me.

All these circular things around me are now welcoming back this part of me that has its own point of view.

Maria Hakasalo

***

Lähden usein ulos kameran kanssa tietty kysymys mielessäni: Mikä haluaisi huomioni tänään?

Tällä kertaa lähdin kohti keskuspuistoa, jonne kuljen viljelypalsta-alueen halki vievää kävelytietä. Alueen laitamilla huomasin ensimmäisenä lautapinon, erityisesti yhdessä laudassa olevat pyöreät ”nappulat”. Tuntui hölmöltä ottaa kuva epämääräisestä lautakasasta, enkä ensin ottanutkaan vaan lähdin kävelemään eteenpäin. Lautojen vieressä näin jäisen pyöreän ritilän ruohikossa. Vaikka en ymmärtänyt, miksi ottaisin siitä kuvan, otin kuitenkin, koska se tuntui jotenkin oikealta. Palasin myös takaisin äsken ohittamieni lautojen luokse ja otin niistäkin kuvan.

Aloin nähdä pyöreää joka puolella. Otin kuvan viljapaalista, reiästä puussa, kumollaan olevasta saavista, kottikärryn renkaasta ja monesta muusta. Kaikki kylmän kohmettamia.

Otin noin 120 valokuvaa. Siinä kuvatessani oivalsin, että tällä tavoin kutsuin esiin sitä, minkä olin vähän aikaa sitten tiettyyn asiaan liittyen löytänyt, “pyöreyden” itsessäni. Sellaisen, joka ei välittömästi ja vahvasti heti tiedä, mitä mieltä on ja asetu jääräpäisesti ajamaan ko. asiaa juuri sellaisenaan kuin sen itse näkee. Sellaisen, joka kuuntelee, katsoo monelta näkökulmalta ja on valmis edelleen kuuntelemaan, jopa taipumaan uusien näkökulmien edessä. Tämä puoli oli jähmettyneenä minussa, koska luulin, että minun täytyisi aina olla täysin varma omista ajatuksistani ja mielipiteistäni.

Yhtäkkiä maailma ei ollutkaan enää niin suorakulmainen ja jyrkkä vaan pyöreä ja pehmeä. Jotenkin helpompi elää ja olla.

Tämä tarina jatkui parin päivän päästä, kun yhtäkkiä ymmärsin, miksi minun oli niin vaikea hyväksyä tätä pehmeää puolta itsessäni. Se liittyi koulumuistoihini, siihen, miten en koskaan oikein tuntunut kuuluvani joukkoon. Yritin parhaani, että minut hyväksyttäisiin. Yritin jopa sopeuttaa omaa makuani toisten makuun. Laukun, josta toiset pitivät, piti olla se, josta minäkin pidän, toisten lempivärin kuului olla minunkin lempivärini. Vuosikymmenten ajan minun oli vaikea tietää, mistä minä pidän. Mikä on minun “makuni”.

Inhosin sitä osaa minussa, joka odotti toisten ensin sanovan, mistä he pitivät, että voisi sitten sanoa saman, sitä, joka ei tiennyt eikä tunnistanut, mitä itse syvimmiltäni halusin ja joka oli vain huolissaan siitä, mitä toiset sanoisivat, jos olisinkin se, mitä olin.

Kaikki nämä pyöreät esineet ja asiat toivottavat tämänkin osan, jolla on nyt ihan uusi näkökulma, tervetulleeksi kotiin.

 

Upon Gazing Out a Train Window

My eyes
my whole Being
a live camera
with no film
to record or to remember
the thousands of trees
the vast dirt fields
the stubble
the long-ago-fallen trees.
Sunlight sprinkles itself
over the surfaces of
winding waterways.

No film to show
only my Body
recording
the land
the furrows of
the fields the gray
clouds
The platinum
glow of our sun.

My eyes
approve.
My Body
has it.

Elizabeth Morana

This Hurts!

Photo Credit: AdobeStock

The Wholebody Focusing  Blog  seems to have expanded and has become more inclusive as it awakens the stories of other participants who share experiences of themselves so powerfully. Several stories have touched me deeply as they further validate my own story of myself. In fact, there have been surprising expanded new directions and new possibilities for me to be open to! (Look for another posting about what feels so unsatisfying at another date!)

One was a story of a generational trauma passed on from one family to the next, based on faulty belief systems that have been so destructive to healthy living for generations.

Another explores the power of the ‘Pause’ as a way to stop and fully appreciate what is there and to give it the space it needs to expand and complete itself more fully. 

In my own story in this recording, I explore the experience of pain. The reality of the moment is that it hurts. It is as simple as that and yet my tendency is to try to understand it or do something with it. Anything but actually open up to and accept it. In fact, I block it.  I seem to want to cut off the experience itself and go to a place to try to do something about it rather than let it do something in its own bodily wisdom! 

In this recording, I am sharing a very concrete moment of an event in me that hurts! I suspect everyone has those moments and could say simply, this hurts!  But we often don’t.  We don’t just stop there, and pause, and give it the space it needs to be aware of itself. We seem to need to react! Why?

I invite you to hear my story and see if it resonates with something that is familiar to you, both as a story of a painful situation and the habit that comes right there as a way of “dealing” with it. Before I can even ask myself how it is—I react!! The experience itself has been denied and I have moved on to that part of me that is essentially reactive!

My story of This Hurts may open up new possibilities that offer something else for you to ponder. Please make room for what comes in you and mark it and maybe even share that.

Kevin

Do You Not See Them?

tilting trees
Photo Credit: Elizabeth Morana

There is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits: that world is round us, for it is everywhere; and those spirits watch us, for they are commissioned to guard us; and if we were dying in pain and shame, if scorn smote us on all sides, and hatred crushed us, angels see our tortures, recognize our innocence.  — Charlotte Bronte

There is a kingdom of spirits that protects you.  Do you not see them?   –Charlotte Bronte

I wish I could see them—the spirits, the angels that surround us, waiting, longing to help us. I believe—with my mind—that there are such things; it’s consistent with the great saying God is Love which, I’m told, can be found in the gospel of John.  I’m not a big follower of the bible, and I’m not a believer in the creeds of the world’s great religions.  But I do believe in Divine Love—that It’s all around us, and available to us.

I can’t see the ‘angels’ that could easily be around me—around each of us—waiting to help us in our struggles, or perhaps wave some of that fairy dust off their wings onto our aching hearts—at least, most of the time I can’t see them.  I’ll admit that sometimes I do have a sense of the Love around me.  It’s just that it disappears so easily.

Continue reading Do You Not See Them?