Many moons ago, I wrote a list of 12 Prin­ci­ples that were the basis of my under­stand­ing, both of my life and of my coun­selling prac­tice. I’ve been think­ing about pulling them together into a small book that I could give to new clients.

12. You are all of you—body, mind, spirit, and energy. In a sense, this is your “known uni­verse.” Through coun­selling, med­i­ta­tion, breath and body­work, you learn to empower your­self, free your blocked ener­gies and thoughts, and expe­ri­ence the free­dom that a full release (a “non-holding”) brings.

Our approach to both liv­ing and ther­apy is quite holis­tic. By that I mean that my goal in my life is to be fully engaged with all of me. And this is what I teach clients, and write about here. This approach intends to drive home the point I’m end­lessly making—the only real­ity you can ever understand—or get your hands on—is your own.

This is key to what we teach our clients.

A descrip­tion of being

The essence of Zen is zazen, the act of sim­ply sit­ting. Now, many peo­ple want to make a “thing” out of sit­ting. They do this to accom­plish some­thing else—for exam­ple, to get relaxed, to recover from an ill­ness, to be “spir­i­tual.” I remem­ber hear­ing a woman attempt this process of judge­ment as opposed to “just sit­ting” at a Zen Cen­tre Dar and I attend.

“I have med­i­tated for years, with many, many teach­ers, and I have never found what I am search­ing for.”
When asked what the miss­ing ingre­di­ent was, she said, “Peace of mind, and mys­ti­cal visions.”

I would say, “The point of sit­ting is to sit.”

The point of breath­ing is to breathe. The point of body­work is to feel “what’s up” in the body—to expe­ri­ence directly the tight­ness, the sore­ness, the block­ages, and the armour­ing. The point of free­ing blocked energy is to feel your energy. The point of free­ing your thoughts is to expe­ri­ence the thought process with­out attach­ing to it.

Finally, the point of liv­ing is to live.

Most peo­ple I know are engaged in a des­per­ate search for the mean­ing of life—for the rea­sons behind pain, or ten­sion, or armour­ing. Most peo­ple do not fully engage with anything—they think what­ever they are doing is the intro­duc­tion, the pre­lude, to some­thing else.

In a sense, most are not present for their actual life because they are too busy plan­ning for the imag­i­nary one.

I’ve quoted Fritz Perls’ line, “Go out of your mind, and come to your senses” before.

This is short­hand for what I believe to be so. There is no way to stop our­selves from think­ing, plot­ting, eval­u­at­ing, judg­ing, blam­ing. The nature of mind is to think.

How­ever, noth­ing demands that we take any of it seriously.

“Go out of your mind” has two con­no­ta­tions.
1) to go, or be crazy, and
2) to leave (to step out of) your mind. I sus­pect a lit­tle of both is a good thing.

1) One def­i­n­i­tion of crazy-thinking is think­ing com­pletely out­side of the box of “nor­mal.” So, for exam­ple, when Coper­ni­cus declared that the earth orbited around the sun, this was crazy-thinking, as every­one knew that the earth was the cen­ter of the uni­verse. When Pas­teur described microbes as caus­ing dis­ease, he was ridiculed. Peo­ple want the secu­rity of the known, want assur­ances that “(some ver­sion of) god is in charge, and all is right with the world.”

Crazy-thinking is this: I have totally and com­pletely cre­ated the uni­verse I live in, ini­ti­ated and devel­oped all of the sto­ries I have regard­ing my expe­ri­ences, and choose every­thing that goes on inside of me. Crazy, and also true.

2) Step­ping out of your mind is sort of like leav­ing a room and then turn­ing around and look­ing back in. You can see what’s going on, but that’s all you can do. You can’t change any­thing in there, because you are on the out­side, sim­ply observ­ing. Sim­i­larly, you can have thoughts with­out engag­ing with them. In this per­spec­tive, thoughts arise and drift across your mind like clouds across the sky.

Another anal­ogy: pic­ture a clear, still moun­tain lake. In the lake is reflected the vis­i­ble sky, and the clouds appear to move across the face of the lake. It seems that the lake con­tains the sky and the clouds, but it sim­ply reflects them.

What is reflected there seems real, and yet it’s all an illu­sion. As it is with what we think.

We teach a stance of “is-ness,” as in “This is as it is, right now.” Spend­ing time try­ing to process “now” is pre­cisely the cause of being non-present. Part of “now” is the thought I think, but the thought is just as fleet­ing as the rest of our expe­ri­ence. So, we see and hear, feel and emote, with­out try­ing to hold on to any of it.

Since we basi­cally hold on with our minds, we loosen our grip there, and “go out of our minds.”

We then come to our senses.

Again, two mean­ings:
1) to wake up, smarten up, wise up, and
2) to enter fully into the felt-sense of liv­ing, breath­ing, and being.

Wast­ing our lives play­ing guilt games, blame games, hurt­ing our­selves over past, per­ceived slights, fear­ing the future, doubt­ing ourselves—all of these are “senseless” activ­i­ties. They are not mindless, as the mind is the field for all of them.

When we exit our mind, we “come to our senses,” which metaphor­i­cally exists from our necks down.

Despite the West­ern fas­ci­na­tion with the mind, with facts, with know­ing, we are mostly body. Sen­sory data comes in and is acted upon, in many cases with­out our inter­ven­tion. Just ask a run­ner how her body “does” running—oxygen exchange, pro­cess­ing of waste, place­ment of feet, etc. Data in, body does its thing.

The realm of the body is where the juice is, lit­er­ally and metaphorically.

Most peo­ple think about their bod­ies, as opposed to feel­ing them. We use breath and body­work to teach clients to engage with their body directly.

As you “come to your senses,” you begin to feel the vast­ness that is you. Your breath deep­ens, and sounds start emerg­ing, seem­ingly from nowhere. You expe­ri­ence a push on one part of your body, and another part seems to move all on its own. (Work­ing on the jaw releases the pelvis, and vice versa, for example.)

You sud­denly find your­self swim­ming in a sea of sense–ations, some pleas­ant, some scary, some deep, some super­fi­cial, some chargy, some painful.

You are expe­ri­enc­ing you, at your most fun­da­men­tal level.

Here, expla­na­tions get in the way (lead­ing you back into your head), so you return to the sea of sen­sa­tion with each breath. More sound, more vibra­tion, more sense–ual data. You find your­self danc­ing with your own energy, and in the process releas­ing decades of blocked, tight­ened down non–sense.

And you begin to sense, to feel, to expe­ri­ence, the river of energy that flows in the chan­nels of your body. You are sub­merged in your-self, and who you really are rises to the sur­face, and begins to unwrap itself from its self-imposed tight­ness. The energy rises, and you can feel your con­nec­tion to everything—to the energy of the earth, to the energy of the uni­verse. There is a sense of one-ness, of oceanic depth and peace.

And you may think, “This is it! Wow! Do I ever get this!”

Oops. Back in your head again. Go out of your mind, come to your senses. Again and again.

Sit, and just sit. Breathe, and just breathe. Be present, in the moment. As you think about it, let go and do it all again.

This is the rhythm of life we are here to expe­ri­ence. Gen­tly and with­out judgement.

Every­thing else is just the set dec­o­ra­tion. Non-sense? I think not!