A Word from Wayne

“You’re doing that why?”

Yay! I just got a call from my printer, and the book that goes with the DVD for pain man­age­ment through med­i­ta­tion, Qi Gong, etc. just got fin­ished, just in time for tomorrow’s work­shop! (It’s Fri­day…) I was wor­ried that the books might not show up.

I hope that next week there’s enough time to build a web page for this new DVD — book set, as I think a lot of you will find it interesting.

Stay tuned!

A New Series—The Body Speaks

(In the first in this series of arti­cles, I pro­vided you with a handy lit­tle chart that pro­vides the loca­tion, descrip­tion, and char­ac­ter­is­tics of the Chakras. Use the link if you want to refer to it.)

Today, we turn to the Throat (5^th) Chakra zone

The Fifth Chakra is typ­i­cally called the Throat Chakra. Nat­u­rally, this Chakra has a zone, which runs from below the eyes down to the tops of the shoul­ders, includ­ing the lit­tle pocket that you can feel if you push “down and in” in the hol­low above each clav­i­cle. The zone includes the semi–infamous jaw points, as well as the back of the neck and the occip­i­tal indents.

“I knew I shouldn’t have given you that set of mark­ers for your birthday!”

In other words, lots of picky lit­tle points, most of which hurt when you push on them.

This Chakra is about expression.

This Chakra is where you enact what you have learned of your­self from the first Four Chakras.

As we’ve end­lessly men­tioned, the process of human devel­op­ment, at its best, (which hap­pens for pre­cious few peo­ple, because of the work involved…) is con­tained in Ken Wilber’s famous con­cept, “tran­scend and include.”

What this means is, at each step along the way, we have some­thing to learn that we must also take with us.

To put it baldly, the goal is not to fig­ure out we have a body, only to “give it up,” and become all spir­i­tual.
It’s about accept­ing our­selves exactly and pre­cisely as we are. And then, find­ing a way, or mul­ti­ple ways, to be the total­ity of who we are.

I’m always read­ing books by Osho, and I’m still work­ing my way through “The Book of Secrets,” Osho’s book on Tantra. He men­tions that he read some­where that Freud thought all peo­ple were neu­rotic — and were born that way. Osho disagrees.

Osho says that we are all born nat­ural, and are turned neu­rotic by our upbringing.

What do you mean you’re look­ing at my eyes!

This is some­thing we write about all the time. The neu­ro­sis comes as our cul­tures force us to split our­selves into pieces.

Osho uses the same exam­ple I typ­i­cally use — par­ents get­ting their infants to stop cry­ing. This is really the first split — split­ting off the body (feel­ings) from the mind (thinking.)

What the child learns is that if she cries she cre­ates a dis­tur­bance for oth­ers, and is “rejected.” Now, clearly, the par­ent is dis­turb­ing him­self — the child really has noth­ing to do with it.

I was speak­ing with a friend yes­ter­day, and she men­tioned that she had been babysit­ting a cou­ple of girls. The girls fight a lot, and my friend described being torn between walk­ing out of the room and stop­ping the fights.

Now, notice that the judg­ment in place is this: fight­ing is a dis­tur­bance. (Or bet­ter put, my friend dis­turbs her­self when wit­ness­ing fight­ing.) So, she cre­ated two options for her­self. Walk­ing away, or stop­ping the fighting.

I sug­gested that she could cre­ate a third option, which is to sit there and sim­ply wit­ness the girls fight­ing, (while main­tain­ing a “no hit­ting, no hurt­ing” pos­ture) until they finished.

If she tried this, and if she stayed fully aware, she’d notice how she is upset­ting her­self over her imag­in­ings about how “bad” fight­ing is.

Her ten­dency, as it is with most of us, is to either

• run away from things we bother our­selves over, or
• try to get oth­ers to stop doing what we bother our­selves over.

Being a sim­ple Zen guy, it seems to me eas­ier to stop both­er­ing myself.

Any­way, the first “split off” for most of us is how we split off our body and emo­tions. Most peo­ple see them­selves “catch­ing their emo­tions from oth­ers,” rather than sim­ply hav­ing them. “He makes me so angry” is how this world­view is stated. The mature, adult view we are pro­mot­ing is this: “I am mak­ing myself angry, and here is how I am going to choose to express it in a safe and ele­gant way.”

This lat­ter approach is what begins the heal­ing process — join­ing together the parts of our­selves into a coher­ent whole. And here’s the weird piece — We rec­og­nize, as all good Zen prac­ti­tion­ers know, that not only are we whole, but that the only place we exist is in the here and now. We also know that, in a very real sense, each of us is the total­ity of the uni­verse itself.

More on this when we make it to Chakra seven.

Most peo­ple think of expres­sion as end­lessly flap­ping their lips and expect­ing the world to give a damn.

The quiet des­per­a­tion most peo­ple live through is the des­per­a­tion of try­ing to bend oth­ers and the world to their will — and end­lessly fail­ing.
Or, on the other hand, try­ing to fig­ure out what other peo­ple want, and end­lessly giv­ing it to them, in the vain hope that this will some­how make every­one happy, healthy, and dis­as­ter proof.

The alter­na­tive, the scary, scary alter­na­tive, is to, in the title of the old song, “Express Yourself.”

Instead of tight­en­ing down and repress­ing your­self, you take the risk to open up and be fully human.

Now, notice that I did not say be yourself. Your “self” is what gets you into trou­ble in the first place.

As hard as this is to ini­tially accept, your “self” is a men­tal con­struct, and a series of habits. No mat­ter what you believe, the only per­son you are is the per­son you are right now. And now. And now.

The only place you have ever been is here.
And at the same time, you’ve never been here before.

The key to this week’s arti­cle, and per­haps the key to your entire exis­tence is this:

This is it.

Now think about it. How much time, money, and effort have you expended try­ing to have what is called a peak expe­ri­ence — a “once-in-a-lifetime,” earth and self shak­ing moment?

You might even remem­ber, up there in your twisted lit­tle mind, a cou­ple of events that you so clas­sify. So, you try, and try, and try, and think, think, think, hop­ing for “the big­gie,” the killer “once-in-a-lifetime event.

Well, the joke’s on you.

Every sin­gle moment of every sin­gle life is, and only is, and can only be, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

You’re end­lessly liv­ing through, with­out notic­ing, what you think you’re wait­ing for!

Please, under­stand. This is not seman­tics. This is the way it is.

We waste our lives, our moment by moment moments, think­ing about past moments, and dream­ing about future moments.

“Yeah, but that moment was bet­ter than this moment, and the next moment will be bet­ter than the moment I had a moment ago. Don’t you know anything?”

And some­how, this idiocy never quite works out. (You think??)

And have you noticed your mind’s habit, in the midst of a peak expe­ri­ence? You’re say­ing to your­self, “Boy, is this ever great! And the next time will be even bet­ter!” And boom, you’ve gone up into your head again.

The Fifth Chakra calls us into being, just being.

• It calls me into know­ing who I am, in this moment, expe­ri­enc­ing my expe­ri­ences. When think­ing, say, “I am think­ing,” or bet­ter, “Thinking.”
• I am tuned into my body, to its aches, to pain, to plea­sure, to the joy of sim­ply being alive. Moment by moment.
• If I notice that I am resist­ing act­ing, out of fear of get­ting it wrong, I rec­og­nize that not act­ing is act­ing. Rather than do noth­ing, I choose a path and take a step.

Mask? What mask?

Another way to think of this is to locate these two points on your face.

They are still part of the Fifth Chakra’s zone — and are called, poet­i­cally, the anchor points for the social mask.

This, in other words, from a Body­work per­spec­tive, is where we anchor our act.

This is the pres­sure release point for all of the rules and roles soci­ety has stuffed down your throat, and which you so will­ingly swal­lowed. It’s the home of labels — like father, mother, son, daugh­ter, hus­band, wife, child, par­ent, — each of which comes with a spe­cific set of socially approved behaviors.

You may have strained against the tight bind­ings of these set behav­iors, per­haps uncon­sciously.
But strain you must, because you never have been, you are not now, and never will be, a role.

We do spend a fair amount of time, in Body­work, work­ing with the entire Fifth Chakra zone.

It’s a tough area to work with, because it gets really sore, really quickly.

It’s nor­mal, in both Body­work and Breath­work, to apply pres­sure to the jaw points. Most peo­ple have really tight jaws, as they spent their entire lives repress­ing the expres­sion of their true natures.

We are all whole, healthy, alive, and juicy, and we’ve been per­suaded that shar­ing this is the dumb­est thing we could do. So we clamp down, tighten up, hurt our­selves, and find our­selves inca­pable of real, deep, inti­mate contact.

It’s no coin­ci­dence, but for a lot of peo­ple, pres­sure on the jaw points leads to free move­ment of the pelvis.

Many peo­ple, the day after a Body­work ses­sion, report what they call a base of the skull headache. The occip­i­tal indents are another really sore place for peo­ple, and I think it’s the height of irony that those lit­tle dents are exactly and pre­cisely thumb-shaped.

It’s almost as if we were designed to have some­one shov­ing their thumbs into our occip­i­tal indents.

If those areas are tight and sore, I sug­gest that it’s because that per­son over–thinks and under–lives.

This was per­fectly cap­tured a few weeks ago after a Body­work ses­sion. My client got a lot of her emo­tions out, and by the end of the ses­sion was relaxed, sweat­ing, and drained. She sat up slowly. And then said, in a far-off voice, “Wow, you’ve sure given me a lot to think about.” Man, I hope not.

I would rather, (more than you can imag­ine,) hope that she expe­ri­ence, moment by moment, the result of let­ting go, of drop­ping the think­ing, of sim­ply being.

And yet, we have been so con­di­tioned to attribute mean­ing to everything.

It’s what our brains do best. Used effi­ciently, it’s a great thing. No one wants to have to learn from repeated expe­ri­ence not to step out in front of a bus.

But liv­ing our lives in our heads, end­lessly plan­ning, plot­ting, wish­ing, and hop­ing, gets us a life lived in our heads. This is not to judge that as bad.

It’s just to repeat that liv­ing your life in your head

is not the same as liv­ing your life.

This all seems so log­i­cal, and I’m sure most of you are totally agree­ing with me. Most of you want to spend some time (like my client) think­ing about what I’ve said. And there you go again.

Bye-bye — off into your lit­tle head.

It’s sad, really — I’ll miss you.

I know that you know that the only place we can hang out is right here, right now. And, in actu­al­ity, the only thing I can do right now is to be totally present as I write this. You’re going to do what you’re going to do.

But if I were sit­ting oppo­site you, I’d be say­ing the following,

“I’m here with you, and you’re here with me, and all that exists, for you and for me, is this space, this time, and you, and me.”

I may be able to intel­lec­tu­al­ize, in that moment, that I have this amaz­ing life part­ner named Dar­bella, but unless she hap­pens to be in the room with us, she really does not exist in that space, in that time, in that moment. To think about what is not, is to lose con­tact with what is.