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and variety of
the ways of getting
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ALMOST ENLIGHTENMENT:
Life is good. It could be better. We could be more awake.
From the miracle of life, we can each and every moment come to a realization that this is where and how we are right now.
Often we fail to do that.
It’s a lot of fun, and extremely useful to ourselves and others to be as aware and as present as possible in a whole batch of different combinations.
So, the following book in full of ways we can be more present in our movement, in our emotional level, in our thinking and in our soul.
Weirdly and wonderfully enough, all these activities also improve our functioning and ability to act with clarity and happiness and more ease, pleasure and skill.
The activities rotate between practices/ exercises/ meditations/ experiments in moving, thinking, emotions, and soul.
There is a lot of variety.
Hopefully, almost all the activities will stimulate you not only into the present, but into an improved and more delightful way of being and living in the world.
And will contribute to your become a happier, more awake and more useful person. Useful to yourself, to others and to the Earth. Enjoy:
ONE : MOVING
Standing and awaring gravity and feet:
Stand comfortably, in your bare feet or just socks. Close your eyes. Feel the weight of yourself into your feet. Shift, ever so slightly, your weight from your right foot to your left, and then back again, many times. Noticing with ease, pleasure and non-judgment: your breathing and your body and your feet and the world of gravity and awareness.
Rest.
Now, move the length of yourself, only at your ankles, like a stick, forward and back, so you sway a bit, and feel the weight going to your toes and then your heels.
Small is better than big.
Slow is better than fast.
Aware is better than “just doing it.”
Pleasure is better than “trying,” “straining,” or efforting.
Rest.
Now, lift up on your toes and fall easily onto your heels five or six times. Rest. Feel how you feel now. Do this again, maybe even twenty times. Or thirty. Slowly, slowly, pleasurably, pleasurably. Rest.
Take a little walk around the room or wherever you are. Feel your feet and your skeleton and your awaring in the world of up and down.
TWO: EMOTIONAL LEARNING
We are not alone
Think of two of three things you really like and enjoy about another person. Or several other people. See them doing or being the way the are.
Write down these traits you like in others.
Now, find, inside yourself, these same traits.
It might not be as much, but we all have traces of everything. So look and find this in yourself.
If you happened to pick admiring someone who can high jump eight feet or play concert violin, find the parallel in any level of ability you have, that can make the slightest jump or make the slightest music.
Or, give yourself a break and pick traits like friendliness and thoughtfulness that we all have, sometimes in small doses, and maybe even sometimes in grand and glorious abundance.
Think of traits you like in others, and find these in yourself.
Don’t be tough on yourself. Be open and embracing. We all have it all, the good and the bad. Let’s start by looking for the common good.
Allow a sense of unity and harmony, like-ness, to come from that.
THREE: THINKING
Getting a more alert and active brain.
A lot of improving and making more happy our thinking will, at least at first, involve the “body” as a way of increasing and sharpening our attention and intention and ability to notice and learn from differences.
A cool thing: the “side-effect” will be: feeling better in our bodies as well as being better and happier in our thinking.
So, be it.
To start: Turn your head easily right and left. Now just turn to the left. See how that feels.
Sitting “up” at the front edge of your chair, put your hands on top of the opposite shoulder, and turn to the left in this sequence: first your eyes go to the left, then your nose, then your shoulders. Go slowly, and notice each part moving, and notice how your range and ease increases.
Many times, with ease, pleasure and learning. Then rest.
Now, hands again on opposite shoulder, turn to the left in this sequence: shoulders first, then nose, then eyes. Then come back to the middle and do this many times. Notice ease, learning and improvement.
Enjoy. Many times. Rest.
Now turn right and left as in the beginning and notice differences.
FOUR: SOUL
The world of sky and “Outside” the walls.
Wherever you live, there is a door somewhere that leads “Outside.” Get whatever clothes you need for this, give yourself fifteen or twenty minutes of no cell phone, no chores, no hurry, no worry.
Walk out this door to the “Outside” and take a walk that lasts at least twenty minutes.
If this walk can take you to a nature area or park, so much the better. No matter what, the walk is just a walk from your door out into the world (no driving to a “nicer” area and then walking).
Just walk. Go out the door, see the sky, feel the ground under your feet, breathe “easily,” and walk “easily.” Feel sky above, Earth below, the smallness of a human form.
On this walk, with as few “words in your head” as possible, keep your attention on this moment. The present. Your experiencing of the present. Feel, smell, hear, look, sense: what are you experiencing now, as experience.
No words to describe the experience.
Just now: what is the experience, as you walk “Outside?”
FIVE: MOVING
Sitting and feeling our spine round as we fold forward.
Sit comfortably near the front edge of the chair so your back is free. Close your eyes and feel yourself in space and gravity. Notice the shape and length and weight and feeling of your two arms and your two legs. Notice e the shape of the middle of you, your spine and head and chest and ribs. Notice all of you, as much as you can.
Rest.
Put your hands on the side of your head, so that your elbows are pointing forward, with your thumbs pointing back, just under your ears (fingers just over). In this configuration, bend down, so your elbow come toward your knees. Then come back to the starting position. No farther. And then fold/ round/ bend forward with awareness and learning and pleasure. And come back to “neutral.” Do this “many times”, “easily.”
“Many times” equals at least twenty, better thirty. “Easily” means with such slowness and awaring and pleasure that each time feels a little better, and you learn a little more about yourself and how to move with ease and grace.
Rest. Do this again, “many times,” noticing at least five things: your breathing, your belly coming in, the shifting of weight in your pelvis, the folding forward in your spine, the coming forward of your head.
SIX: EMOTIONAL LEARNING
“Liking” in our life.
What are you like?
What is essential and deep and unique to you?
One way to approach what we are “like,” is to pay attention to what we “like.”
So please, find a pencil or pen and paper and go to the nicest spot you can easily reach on foot. Maybe a journal for this whole book of adventures would be nice, but somehow, don’t buy one. Don’t wait until you have one. Start and do this today.
Write a list of at least ten things you “like.” Maybe twenty. Maybe more --- it could be the ocean, or an animal, a book, a friend, a movie, an aspect of yourself, it could be lots and lots of things.
Then one by one, read each item on the list and feel and think and reflect on this aspect item thing whatever it is.
Feel how you feel, especially towards the middle, heart, chest area of yourself, when you contemplate the item.
Somehow this feeling of when you are “into” liking is a great clue to what you are really like.
SEVEN: THINKING
What are people “like?”
Think of various people you know.
What do they like? Come up with two or three things for any given person.
Then, mull over, without much reasoning and figuring, more at a kind of gut intuitive understanding level, how what these people “like” gives some sort of casual, or maybe very direct, hint as to what they are “really” “like” in their essential nature.
EIGHT: SOUL
Liking/ Loving in Nature.
Go to some natural spot. Doesn’t have to be far away. Best for Earth and your soul if you can walk or ride a bike there.
Find some aspect of Nature. The sky. A cloud in the sky.
A tree. A bird in a tree.
A flower.
A bee on a flower.
A blade of grass in a crack in a sidewalk.
A dog enjoying its walk.
A squirrel in a tree.
A bird on a telephone wire.
The sound of the breeze.
The sound of rain, or the ocean.
And so on.
Just hang out with this bit of nature, and see how quiet you can get inside, how much you can let this bit of Nature feed and nourish you.
Feel the liking in you.
Feel the calling and like-ness of that which you are liking/ loving.
Feel yourself alive, in Nature, and liking/ love aspects of this Life on Earth thing. That’s all. Just slow down, take in, enjoy.
NINE: MOVING
Sitting: arching and rounding
Sit, once again at the forward edge of your chair. Put your hands as you did in #5, on the side of your head, elbows forward, thumbs pointing back just below your ears. As per #5, fold forward, letting the elbows come down toward your knees, your belly coming in, your weight going back on your pelvis.
Then from this position “unfurl” as your elbows come toward the sky/ ceiling, your belly comes forward and out, your weight pushes forward on your pelvis and your back lengthens, as your head lifts. Feel the tallness and fullness in you and your spine.
Then slowly, fold and round and come into a bit of a ball again.
Back and forth aware of pelvis, ribs spine, sternum, head position breathing.
Slowly. For learning. For awaring. For meditation. For pleasure. For learning more about using all of you as you move.
This is one of the things I love to teach-- Neurological Upgrading. Arising from my learning and training in the Feldenkrais Method and the Anat Baniel Method, this Neurological Upgrading appears to be “body work,” and is really “Brain and Body and All of You” work.
TEN: EMOTIONAL LEARNING
Learning: differences, similarities. We aren’t alone, 2.
Think of a person for whom you have both “positive” and “negative” feelings.
Write down three traits of this person that evoke each attitude.
Noticing differences, sharpening our attention, bringing awareness closer and closer to NOW: these are all core to learning in general, and learning here, in this book.
Look from one list to the other. Notice inside yourself the “feelings” that the positive list evokes and the feelings the negative list brings up.
Now, take all six traits and find them in yourself.
Try to do this as if you were an outside observer, some sort of anthropologist taking notes on some exotic tribe. You and the person and from this exotic tribe. The anthropologist has no stake or judgment about any of these six traits. They are just interested, and very empathetic with both of you for being this way.
The anthologist knows humans are hugely similar.
See and feel the ways you and this person you have picked have a lot of similarity, how you are not alone.
ELEVEN: THINKING
How to be less a robot.
Habits aren’t “bad.” It’s nice to know how to drive a car and how to tie our shoes. Nevertheless, almost everything we do has become a habit, from the way we react to a certain song, or name, or food, to what we do when someone frowns at us or praises us, to how we get worked up or not about an interview coming up, to how we sit in a chair, how we eat our food, how we walk up stairs, how we get into and out of our cars, how we speak when someone talks to us in serious or questioning or playful and confused tone, how we get up from a chair, how we lie on a bed, how we brush our teeth, how we feel about politics or the world situation, how we feel about ourselves, how we hold our shoulders, how we breathe, how we sit in a car, how we stand or sit while talking on the phone, how we look at or don’t look at another person during a conversation, what words we use when talking, what words we use when writing.
Start to slow down, and play around with and mix up as many of the above habits, and any other habits you can discover. Try writing and using the fork with the other hand, hanging up clothes a new way, walking a different speed and different pace.
See how many delights, learnings, and freedoms this can create.
TWELVE: SOUL
Slow down, do a little or a lot of nothing.
Give yourself fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes to simply sit in a pleasant spot, preferably outdoors.
No cell phone.
No reading.
No “to do” list.
You can play around a little tiny bit with arching and folding to get happier and more connected to yourself as a body in gravity and awareness.
But the point is to just “chill,” as they say.
Breathe, which we will anyway.
And sometimes notice your breathing and sometimes not.
Think, which you will, but let that kind of “slide,” too. As much as possible find something more interesting than thoughts to put your attention on. Seeing: sunlight, sky, trees. Hearing: birds, wind. Sensing: where are your arms and legs and pelvis and breathing?
Smiling. Smiling at nothing.
See if you can slip in and out of a kind of vacationing joy in the simple reality of being alive.
Go ahead: indulge.
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