Clearing the Moving Center
There are long term and short term strategies to clear the moving center.
Long term strategies call for developing a healthy and supple body; a body that can
tolerate high energies without unnecessary resistance. Diet, Experiment, breathing
techniques, and detoxification practices are ways to help the physical body develop a
clear moving center. We will talk more about these long term strategies for clearing
it; but before, we'll talk about some of the short term strategies you can try right
away. Keep in mind, however, that the long term strategies are necessary to
consolidate any gains you might obtain from the short term strategies.
Experiment 1
Dance as if no one is looking.
Love as if it's never going to hurt.
--drunkard paraphrase of a Sufi saying
In this Experiment, you will become more acquainted with the space around you by
walking around it, not in a circle, but as you wish. This is an excellent Experiment to
try with others. You will at the same time become acquainted with the music as guide and
the music as voyager.
Put (insert Black Note music here). Walk around the room. You can move in any
direction. The music starts to play as you move around. As you walk around, listen to the
instructions on the CD. As you are walking around the room, you will notice how the music
can take the form of the guide, and you can then listen to the music’s directions
telling you which direction to go, when to stop, when to move again, etc. The music can
sometimes take the form of the voyager, and you become in that case the guide. When the
music is the voyager, it needs the guide to guide by movement. You, sometimes as the guide
and sometimes as the voyager, are here free to relate to the music by being guided by it,
stopping and going, turning and moving according to the instructions the music itself
provides. You are also free to relate to the music by guiding it around the space.
At the end, ring a bell or manifest and discover the sound that represents this voyage
for you. This closing sound can be done by instrument, word or voice.
* * *
There is a tribe in South
America, the Yanonami, who seem to have figured out one of the simplest models of the rat
race and corporate ladder climbing. Once they construct a hut that will stand the
mild climate for years, they retire and do nothing the rest of their lives. They sit
around all day telling stories and shooting a hallucinogenic drug up their nose with a
bamboo stick.
The moving center in many
of us behaves in the same wise fashion. Once we learn how to walk and move about a
simple tridimensional space, we stop building on it. We learn a couple of postures,
adopt two or three ways of moving (one for lazing about, one for hurrying or working, and
one for impressing others). Then, some of the most industrious members of our
society somehow manage to combine these two or three manifestations in different ways to
create the illusion of energy, creativity, and beauty of movement.
As a child, I used to play
all kinds of games with my perception of the world. One of them was in the car,
while my dad was driving long distances. I used to hold my head up and straight, and
kept my body relaxed but alert and firm. The trees, roads, animals, and people
on the road seemed to be coming slowly at me first, and the suddenly would pick up speed
and go through me--merging with me. At this point, my sense of self was not confined
to the dimensions of my head or any other part of my body. The entire
field of vision was me. Also, I imagined that I was not moving. I was
just a screen, an etheric two dimensional being who was static here, in this part of
the universe. There was a whole world rushing at me, just like time rushes
into us when growing up. I did not move, the objects in the road did. They
came towards me and disappeared into me. I was not a boy; I was a consciousness
swallowing up beings that fell into me.
There is a variation of
this Experiment that produces a curious effect in our moving center. Walk
around the neighborhood. Take a route that is easy to follow and doesn't
require much of your attention. Walk around with the idea that you are not
moving at all. Pretend you are in a virtual reality program, standing firm on the
ground while the whole world moves around you. It appears to you
and disappears behind you.
Experiment 3
Think of someone you have seen doing a rain dance, a ritual movement, tai chi, an
invocational dance. You can also think of a puppet you’ve seen in the past, moving as
if it suddenly became infused with life. Hold the moving picture in your head for a
moment. It doesn’t matter if you remember how the movements went, just hold the
person in your imagination. Also, hold the feeling of the atmosphere or your own feelings
when you saw this. Ask the person in your imagination to teach you their moves. Ask him or
her to direct your moves for just a couple of minutes. Then move. If you can, videotape
this.
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