The Bonny Black Hare

On the fourteenth of May at the dawn of the day

With my gun on my shoulder to the woods I did stray

In search of some game and if the weather proved fair

To see if I’d get a shot at the bonny black hare

Well I met a young girl with a face as the rose

And her skin was as fair as the lily that grows

I said my fair maiden why ramble you so

Can you tell me where the bonny black hare does go?

Oh, the answer she gave me, oh the answer was no

But it’s under me apron they say it to go

So if you’ll not deceive me I vow and declare

We’ll both go together to hunt the bonny black hare

Well I laid this girl down with her face to the sky

And I took out me powder and me bullets likewise

I said lock your legs ’round me dig in with your

   heels

For the closer we get, oh the better it feels

Oh, the birds they were singing in the bushes and trees

And the song that they sang was ‘she’s easy to please’

I felt her heart quiver and I knew what I’d done

Says I have you had enough of my old sporting gun?

Oh, the answer she gave me, oh, the answer was nay

It’s not often young sportsmen like you come this way

So if your powder’s not wasted and your bullets play

    fair

Why don’ you keep firing at the bonny black hare?

Oh, me powder is wasted and me bullets are gone

Me ramrod is limp and I can’t fire on

But I’ll be back in the morning and if you are still here

We’ll both go together to hunt the bonny black hare

(traditional)

Prayer of the Verdelet’

Jack in the Hedge, Robin in the Wood,

Grant thou guidance, Grand Verdelet,

By branching twig and writhing root,

Into the leaf-green dream.

By virid Oak and twisted Thorn,

Upon mossy ways I follow thee,

Green Master of the watchful thicket.

I am the Leaf-Masque of all Wyldeness,

Whose lips unfurl fronds of prophesy,

When the sap of the Soul-Tree riseth!

(Masks of Misrule, Nigel Jackson)

The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards, William J. Broad

http://www.amazon.com/The-Science-Yoga-Risks-Rewards/dp/1451641427/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1333042244&sr=1-1

In this extensively researched book William Broad, a life long yoga practitioner, and renowned journalist, delves into the current rapid rise of yoga and its attendant fallout. Overall, the book points to the benefits of yoga. However, what becomes exceedingly apparent is the lack of accountability within the large and diverse world of yoga. It requires more awareness of all its ramifications … both beneficial and dangerous.

“Yoga at the start was an obscure cult steeped in magic and eroticism. At the end, it fixated on health and fitness.

To my surprise, it turned out that science played an important role in the modernization. As investigators began to show how the ostensible wonders of yoga had natural explanations, the discipline worked hard to reinvent itself.”

“If science reveals that yoga can excel at emotional uplift, it also shows that the discipline has a downside. It can do great harm.”

“Injuries due to yoga turned out to range far beyond nerve damage and strokes. Waves of practitioners were showing up in emergency rooms. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, in monitoring the hazards of modern life, runs a little-known detective service know as the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. It samples hospital records in the United States and its territories. By 2002, its surveys showed that the number of admissions related to yoga, after years of slow increases, has begun to soar. The number of admissions went from thirteen in 2000 to twenty in 2001. Then, in 2002, they more than doubled to forty-six. By definition, all these episodes involved men and women (and is some cases children) who had hurt themselves badly enough to seek out emergency assistance.”

“The year 2002 marked a radical shift in the tenor of the reporting as the surge in documented injuries stirred public discussion on the issue of yoga safety. The seeming oxymoron of yoga damage had reached a critical mass in terms of size and social resonance that now made the issue impossible to ignore.”

“Yoga seems to hold out the promise of increasing not only our life spans but our health spans. It may be part of the answer to enhancing not just the quantity of life but its quality, to helping us remain healthy for a longer period of time, to making our last years more vital and productive.”

“The science of yoga has just begun. In my judgment, the topic has such depth and resonance that the voyage of discovery will go on for centuries, perhaps millennia. What started with Paul and studies of respiratory physiology will spread to investigations ever more central to life and living, to questions of insight and ecstasy, of being and consciousness. Ultimately, the social understanding that follows in the wake of scientific discovery will address issues of human evolution and what we decide to become as a species.”

The Tree, John Fowles

http://www.amazon.com/The-Tree-John-Fowles/dp/0061997773/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1333042195&sr=1-1

This book was published back in ’79. It recently came to my attention as a meditation on nature and specifically forests or woods. As I live in a forest his inquiry, reverence, artistry and skepticism of our collective direction spoke volumes to me.

“There is something in the nature of nature, in its presentness, its seeming transience, its creative ferment and hidden potential, that corresponds very closely with the wild, or green man, in our psyches; and it is a something that disappears as soon as it is relegated to an automatic pastness, a status of merely classifiable thing, image taken then. ‘Thing’ and ‘then’ attract each other. If it is thing, it is then; if it was then it is thing. We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust only the reported back, the publicly framed, the edited, the thing set in the clearly artistic or clearly scientific angle of perspective. One of the deepest lessons we have to learn is that nature, of its nature resists this. It waits to be seen otherwise, in its individual presentness and from our individual presentness.”

“I come now near the heart of what seems to me to be the single greatest danger in the rich legacy left us by Linnaeus and the other founding fathers of all our sciences and scientific mores and methods––or more fairly, left us by our leaping evolutionary ingenuity in the invention of tools. All tools, from the simplest word to the most advanced space probe, are disturbers and rear-rangers of primordial nature and reality––are, in the dictionary definition, ‘mechanical implements for working upon something.’ What they have done, and I suspect in direct proportion to our ever-increasing dependence on them, is to addict us to purpose: both to looking for purpose in everything external to us and looking internally for purpose in everything we do––to seek explanation of the outside world by purpose to justify our seeking by purpose. This addiction to finding a reason, a function, a quantifiable yield, has now infiltrated all aspects of our lives––and become effectively synonymous with pleasure. The modern version of hell is purposelessness.

Nature suffers particularly in this, and our indifference and hostility to it is closely connected with the fact that its only purpose appears to be being and surviving. We may think that this comprehends all animate existence, including our own; and so it must ultimately; but we have long ceased to be content with so abstract a motive. A scientist would rightly say that al form and behaviour in nature is highly purposive, or strictly genetic, according to theory. But most of this functional purpose is hidden to the non-scientist, indecipherable; and the immense variety of nature appears to hide nothing, nothing but a green chaos at the core––which we brilliantly purposive apes can use and exploit as we please, with a free conscience.

A green chaos. Or a wood.”

“Perhaps because I was brought up without any orthodox faith, and remain without it, there was also, I suspect, some religious element in my feeling towards woods. Their mysterious atmospheres, their silences, the parallels––especially in beechwoods––with columned naves that Baudelaire seized on in his famous line about a temple of living pillars, all these must recall the man-made holy place.”

There is certainly something erotic in them, as there is in all places that isolate and hide; but woods are in any case highly sensuous things. They may not carry species than some other environments, but they are far richer and more dramatic in sensory impressions. Nowhere are the two great contemporary modes of reproducing reality, the word and the camera, more at a loss; less able to capture the sound (or soundlessness) and the scents, the temperatures and moods, the all-roundness, the different levels of being in the vertical ascent from ground to tree-top, in the range of different forms of life and the subtlety of their inter-relationships. In a way woods are like the sea sensorially far too various and immense for anything but surfaces or glimpses to be captured. They defeat view-finder, drawing paper, canvas, they cannot be framed; and words are as futile, hopelessly too laborious and used to capture the reality.”

Free Will, Sam Harris

http://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Sam-Harris/dp/1451683405/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1333053295&sr=1-1

This is a very short but brilliant meditation on the illusion of free will. How when we truly look for it, there is no there, there.

“Certain states of consciousness seem to arise automatically, beyond the sphere of our intentions. Others, seem self-generated, deliberative, and subject to our will. When I hear a leaf blower outside my window, it merely impinges upon my consciousness: I haven’t brought it into being, and I cannot stop it at will. I can try to put the sound out of my mind by focusing on something else––my writing, for instance––and this act of directing attention feels different from merely hearing a sound. I am doing it. Within certain limits, I seem to choose what I pay attention to. The sound of the leaf blower intrudes, but I can seize the spotlight of my attention in the next moment and aim it elsewhere. This difference between nonvolitional and volitional states of mind is reflected at the level of the brain––for they are governed by different systems. And the difference between them must, in part, produce the felt sense that there is a conscious self endowed with freedom of will.

As we have begun to see, however, this feeling of freedom arises from our moment-to-moment ignorance of the prior causes of our thoughts and actions. The phrase “free will” describes what it feels like to identify with certain mental states as they arise in consciousness.”

“Where people can change, we an demand that they do so. Where change is impossible, or unresponsive to demands, we can chart some other course. In improving ourselves and society, we are working directly with the forces of nature, for there is nothing but nature itself to work with.”

Some thoughts, poems, fragments of poems – old and new.

Embodied in knowledge and wisdom, to feel, to know … no consciousness, no lust, no love, no sensuality no arousal without the BODY!

“…at first Khaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Gaia, the ever-sure foundation of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympos, and dim Tartaros in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros, fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them.”

Hesiod, Theogony

Return often and take me,

beloved sensation, return and take me –

when the memory of the body awakens,

and old desire again runs through the blood;

when the lips and the skin remember,

and the hands feel as if they touch again.

Return often and take me at night,

when the lips and the skin remember…

Return, C. P. Cavafy

            Upon his hard thin bed.

He seemed all body, such

As normally you couldn’t touch,

Reckless and rough,

One of Boss Cupid’s red-

                                        haired errand boys

Who couldn’t get there fast enough.

Almost like fighting …

We forgot about the noise,

But feeling turned so self-delighting

That hurry soon gave way

To give-and-take,

Till each contested, for the other’s sake,

To end up not in winning and defeat

But in a draw

The Problem, Thom Gunn     

Things loll and loiter. Who condones the lost?

This joy outleaps the dog. Who cares? Who cares?

I gave her kisses back, and woke a ghost.

O what lewd music crept into our ears!

The body and the soul know how to play

In that dark world where gods have lost their way.

The Partners, Theodore Roethke

The realizations available from sex occur not through step-by-step programs but when you abandon programs altogether and give yourself to the experience, to the energy itself, when you have no idea what is supposed to happen or what will. Realizations come not when you have learned to control sex but when you’ve seen there is no controlling it.

There are no masters of sex. Sex is not mastered.

            In order to know the Way in perfect clarity, there is one essential point

            you must penetrate and not avoid: the red thread [of passion] between

            our legs that cannot be severed. Few face the problem, and it is not

            easy to settle. Attack it directly without hesitation or retreat, for how

            else can liberation come?  Sung-yuan

The Red Thread of Passion, David Guy

And – it is still – winter! Keep the body warm, know that this is the body’s time (your body) to return as nature does into its regenerative inner sanctum. Know too, that if there should be illness, this is also the body’s challenge for repair and revitalization. Winter is preparation for the coming season of growth (however that should manifest).

This winter, give yourself over to the pleasures of your body. Feel into it, listen for its message of healing and renewal. This is not about how you wish to ‘THINK’ of yourself. Certainly you cannot talk about most of what the body can tell you. Let the feeling of your body inform, in-form from the in-side – be informed by what it feels. Let it feel you into the present with new wisdom and vigor for the coming year.

When I was younger and occupied with the duties of stay-at-home dad-dom, I used to walk down the street from our flat in San Francisco with my 3-year-old son to our local coffee house, Tassajara Bakery. It would take us a long time to cover the two blocks as my son would get sidetracked often by his own body’s locomotion, by sticks and bugs and such. As we made our way down the street, one of our neighborhood luminaries would pass us on his way to the same café. We exchanged salutations with enough regularity that it became a joke between us: he always arrived before us. His name was Thom Gunn and he was an incredible poet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thom_Gunn

This poem by Thom Gunn speaks volumes to me about how one should address the seasons of the body, particularly a mature male body.

The Visible Man

            Now I can count on you.

People are restless and they move too much,

But you no longer have a young man’s heart

Hot for experience without review,

Pumping responses to the latest touch:

            We do not need to part.

             Yet nothing lasts, you know.

I tell you what, there is a place divides

The house’s structure, hidden at the center.

If I show you that crawl-space, you must show

The inmost secrets to me that skin hides.

            Here, I will help you enter.

I find great comfort in this poem as it asks me to realign the pleasures my body offers and to feel them (definitely feel them) before thinking on them. People are restless and move too much without feeling it! … “hot for experience without review, pumping responses to the latest touch”….  The house is the body. With touch-awareness comes the realization that there is a hidden center, a crawl-space, where the secrets that skin hides may be reintegrated.

I offer massage as a sublime avenue for delight and self-reflection, feeling the body’s lessons, reviewing through feeling. Touch affords the opportunity to rediscover your inner witness, the crawl-space that reunites mind and body.

One of the key elements of our bodies is the ability of our senses to take in vastly more information than our waking consciousness can actually ‘talk’ about. We have these incredibly abundant capabilities called mirror neurons that allow us to feel through someone else’s doing. Bodies (my body, your body) are able to respond in ways we cannot consciously think of or communicate through talking. Through massage I offer mutual participation in service of healing, literally remembering your body. 

The beauty of the language of the body is that it is universal. You don’t need to believe in any creed or philosophy to believe in your body. Your body is enough – it is perfectly in and of nature itself.

I offer my unique individual practice attending to you, focused on you, with personal attention to your pleasure and awakening … a remarkably different experience than businesses that are based on group work.

Take advantage of this regenerative time of year to focus inward and to re-unite mind and body in a language beyond words.

Here, I will help you enter.

Conversely, in modern Western culture, it is also that time of year to be overwhelmed by a juggernaut of holiday spending and celebrating. It’s an almost forced level of hurried activity.

At all times of the year, my focus is towards reinforcing body-centric practices and philosophies for myself and for the clients I work with. However, at this time of the year – the winter holiday season – it is paramount for us all to remember (literally re-member): being a body is primary.

What does that mean?

It means honoring your body and the seasons of your body. Honor your flesh in harmony with the restorative cycle in nature (winter in the Northern hemisphere). There are seasons of Eros. Eros is always with and in nature, never against or on top of nature.

This time of year it is especially critical to honor your own erotic body and spirit with mindful, physical attention. Eros takes many forms throughout the year, as does nature. Nature rests during this season. So following nature’s lead, bend your erotic spirits to soften any rigid goal-fixated, mechanical notions of your body. This is not a time to build 6-pack abs, lose weight, or frantically get in shape. This is a season for quiet organic bodily reflection, gentle restoration and slowly investigating your own flesh with ecstatic curiosity and enjoyment.

In this fallow season I encourage you to celebrate as nature does with restorative attention to your body. In this season explore your body’s warmth and textures; its strengths, its weaknesses; its fat and muscle; its rough spots and aches; its shivers and thrills, and most importantly its life-supporting erotic potential. Quite literally, feel your body – use your hands, feet, legs, face, chin and tongue to touch yourself. Reach around, stretch, bend, luxuriate – discover the primal aesthetic flesh of yourself. Don’t judge – just notice. Make the time. Take time.

Everything in nature takes an extended breath in winter. Temperatures drop, living things rest, all manner of dormant systems kick in quietly working in background (underground) preparing and restoring for growth to come. I encourage you to draw on the healing energy from your primal relationship with the earth, from nature. Acknowledge its regenerative powers through your attention and care for your own body.

Touch Comes

Touch comes when the white mind sleeps

and only then.

Touch comes slowly, if ever; it seeps

slowly up in the blood of men

and women.

Soft slow sympathy

of the blood in me, of the blood in thee

rises and flushes insidiously

over the conscious personality

of each of us, and covers us

with a soft one warmth, and a generous

kindled togetherness, so we go

into each other as tides flow

under a moon they do not know.

Personalities exist apart;

and personal intimacy has no heart.

Touch is of the blood

uncontaminated, the unmental flood.

When again in us

the soft blood softly flows together

towards touch, then this delirious

day of the mental welter and blether

will be passing away, we shall cease to fuss.

- D. H. Lawrence

As a special gift to my readers and clients:

In this challenging season,

to encourage and support self-care, I’m extending

A LIMITED SPECIAL

30% off all In Deer Park offerings

purchased between Dec 25 and Dec 31, 2011

(to be used within one year)

I’ve heard this message clearly and have pared down my practice and offerings to address these needs.

I’ve had years of practice and a great deal of training. I’ve trained in organizational development and transformation. I’ve trained in somatic systems. I’ve trained in yoga and with “masters” of tantra. I have benefited from this work and respect these traditions and their wisdoms. Now it’s time for me to embrace my practice from my own synthesis, with fresh perspective imbued by my understanding and life wisdom of Eros … focused, Body First.

I find that the ubiquitous mysticism, religiosity and new agey-ness of many bodywork practices don’t do justice to what I’m practicing. Or to what my audience is seeking. I attempt to be free of diagnosis, spiritual or otherwise. My work is focused deeply on the feeling of what happens in the body (which is the seat and foundation of all mind).

I wish all to have the freedom to believe what they need and don’t denigrate anyone’s belief system. In that light, however, my practice is totally focused on Eros and the action of the body in concert with nature.

The imagery of the horned man works for me in two ways. One, it goes to the early primal metaphor for men in harmony with nature. Two, it focuses attention on sexuality as a valid and important way of knowing the whole of existence, both personally and as a culture and society.

These thoughts will further unfold over the next months as I explore the core of my practice framed in this new way.

A poem by the Native American, author Linda Hogan reveals in sublime and elegantly simple terms the direction of my work…

The Way In

Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body.

Sometimes the way in is a song.

But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding,

and beauty.

To enter stone, be water.

To rise through hard earth, be plant

desiring sunlight, believing in water.

To enter fire, be dry.

To enter life, be food.

It’s already October. Somehow October arrived before I even noticed that September had gone. So goes my slippery awareness of time and space. The changing seasons influence my awareness and energy levels (like troughs and crests of waves) even without my expressed perception. This shift from Summer to Fall heightens my awareness of the timeless shifts and play of polarities. They are recorded in the stories and myths our ancestors. Stories of light and dark, abundance and scarcity, pleasure and pain, feminine and masculine, sustainability and nourishment, Eros and Thanatos. Through the seeming magic of genetics and culture these stories and myths are as much a part of me as my awareness and energy.

This year’s Autumnal season seems to have arrived abruptly and my feelings quickly shifted from endless summer thoughts to being focused on exploring for my own life what sustainability and nourishment looks like. I’ve found myself dwelling on how our human ancestors developed traditions around harvests and stores for the coming months of fallowness. Their metaphors are powerful in reminding me of my need for personal practice. Autumn, known as a season of maturity verging on decline, is ripe with the metaphor of the dance of life and death, feminine and masculine. The ancients had plentiful stories of the deaths and resurrections of their metaphorical mother and her consort (the way cycling seasons affect food and shelter). The stories mirrored their relationship with the earth and with their constant pursuit of sustainability and nourishment. This season I find myself returning to the words of author M.F.K. Fisher as a guide with a lesson plan for personal practice:

“I cannot count the good people I know who, to my mind, would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers. There are too many of us, otherwise in proper focus, who feel an impatience for the demands of our bodies, and who try throughout our whole lives, none too successfully, to deafen ourselves to the voices of our various hungers. Some stuff the wax of religious solace in our ears. Others practice a Spartan if somewhat pretentious disinterest in the pleasures of the flesh, or pretend that if we do not admit our sensual delight in a ripe nectarine we are not guilty … of even that tiny lust! I believe that one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert and then reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war’s fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy, and ever-increasing enjoyment. And with our gastronomical growth will come, inevitably, knowledge and perception of a hundred other things, but mainly of ourselves.  Then Fate, even tangled as it is with cold wars as well as hot, cannot harm us.”

She wrote this as an addendum to her seminal work, How to Cook a Wolf. This was written in a time of major turbulence in our collective culture and society (1942). I’ve come to keep these words as a lesson for my personal practice; to truly re-member and cherish those moments of genuine humanity where I can emphatically know myself to be intentionally, mindfully indulging in the dignity and mutuality of nourishment. Her words remind me that we are all creatures of the flesh that need nourishments; not only those gastronomical nourishments but also nourishments of the eyes, the ears and the heart. In our current turbulent times to bend our collective spirits towards the study of our various hungers is probably more important than ever before. And this Autumn (Fall) represents a return to the season of sustainable nourishment in preparation for the coming winter season of scarcity. I’m grateful and thoughtful of what it means to practice nourishment in a dignified way.

I wonder what can I do to locate this semblance of sustainability and nourishment? Shall I look with curiosity, acceptance and compassion fully into my desires? Desire is elemental to our species around the globe. I believe to truly understand sustainability and nourishment we as a species need to find ways to embody these notions. Exploring embodiment is exploring desire and,  as M. F. K. Fisher suggested, is to get to know our hungers. This nourishment of our hungers is in my mind the best hope for our collective survival.

I’m also indebted to the teacher and author Paula Gunn Allen who I believe has described perfectly what is at the core of practice in the realms of embodiment, sustainability and nourishment. She describes the universality of the Great Mother metaphor in a way that is at once pragmatic and sublime. And when I read her words as a gender identified male of our species I’m reminded that I have an X chromosome too … that the nourishment of my body and our collective species is in dire need of more feminine balance in all our sustainability practices.

“What can we do, rejoicing and honoring, to show our respect? We can heal. We can cherish our bodies and honor them, sing Heya-hey to our flesh. We can cherish our being – our petulances and rages, our anguishes and griefs, our disabilities and strengths, our desires and passions, our pleasures and delights. We can, willingly and recognizing the fullness of her abundance, which includes scarcity and muchness, enter inside ourselves to seek and find her, who is our own dear body, our own dear flesh. For the body is not the dwelling place of the spirit – it is the spirit. It is not a tomb, it is life itself. And even as it withers and dies, it is born; even as it is renewed and reborn, it dies.

Think: How many times each day do you habitually deny and deprive her in your flesh, in your physicality? How often do you willfully prevent her from moving or resting, from eating or drinking what she requests, from eliminating wastes or taking breath? How many times do you order your body to produce enzymes and hormones to further your social image, your “identity,” your emotional comfort, regardless of your actual situation and hers? How many of her gifts do you spurn; how much of her abundance do you deny? How often do you interpret disease as wrong, suffering as abnormal, physical imperatives as troublesome, cravings as failures, deprivation and denial of appetite as the right thing to do? In how many ways do you refuse to experience your vulnerability, your frailty, your mortality? How often do you refuse these expressions of the life force of the Mother in your lovers, your friends, your society? How often do you find yourself interpreting sickness, weakness, aging, fatness, physical differences as pitiful, contemptible, avoidable, a violation of social norm and spiritual accomplishment? How much of your life is devoted to avoiding any and/or all of these? How much of her life is devoted to avoiding any and all of these?

The mortal body is a tree; it is holy in whatever condition; it is truth and myth because it has so many potential conditions; because of its possibilities, it is sacred and profane; most of all, it is your most precious talisman, your own connection to her. Healing the self means honoring and recognizing the body, accepting rather than denying all the turmoil its existence brings, welcoming the woes and anguish flesh is subject to, cherishing its multitudinous forms and seasons, its unfailing ability to know and be, to grow and wither, to live and die, to mutate, to change. Healing the self means committing ourselves to a wholehearted willingness to be what and how we are – beings frail and fragile, strong and passionate, neurotic and balanced, diseased and whole, partial and complete, stingy and generous, safe and dangerous, twisted and straight, storm-tossed and quiescent, bound and free.”

The Woman I Love Is a Planet; the Planet I Love Is a Tree,

Paula Gunn Allen

Reweaving the World: the Emergence of Ecofeminism. ed., Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990: 52-58Sa