Deepen Your Practice 10 - The Thread of Continuousness

My calling as an artist and teacher is to guide people into somatic and aesthetic experiences of body and nature. When we take the time to tune into what is alive both in our soma and in the natural world, new perspectives arise that can stimulate our creativity and enlarge our humanity. She has taught dance and performed professionally for over 30 years.

She also teaches classes in yoga, pilates, somatic restructuring and alignment.

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She is currently in private practice as a Movement Therapist using the body and movement to facilitate the therapy process. Our tissue is mostly water and its well-being is a function of the unblocked and unrestricted grace and flow of the overall fluid system. In most cases, our everyday survival imperatives result in a compression of tissue.

In order to function, we inadvertently maintain a fixed, often rigid structure that ultimately works against our well-being. A maladaptive closed system is perpetuated and strengthened as we move away from spontaneity, creativity and evolution. Using sound, breath, and micro-movement, MovingWholeness Continuum Inquiry works to revitalize the fluid system and enliven the tissue. Continuum is about change, which creates the opportunity for discovery, growth, and healing. MovingWholeness Continuum Inquiry Classes make use of sound, breath, micro movement and deep listening to enliven the fluid system within the participant.

This experience creates a time and space wherein we evolve, both physically and emotionally. The work catalyzes a connection with oneself and the possibility for higher consciousness. We open with a sound stream and then silently rest in spacious, sensory awareness.

Virtual Continuum Class Series! The types of people you can send metta to include: Give time together as a gift, an expression of caring, a practice of restraining habits or craving for other activities e. Keep offering your attention past your natural inclination e. Touch your partner mindfully. Try being with physical sensations without labels or stories. A mind unclouded with words.

Breath awareness and body scanning in each moment. Explore maintaining an open heart while building up the charge, the excitement of sexual activity. Reflect on any subtle or gross aspects of your sexuality that might harm yourself or your partner, such as fantasizing about other people, being perfunctory or false, using pornography, being demanding or dismissive , etc.

Consider taking up the practice of abandoning any aspect that you conclude is harmful. Go within the intensity of contractions as much as you can rather than do the more commonly prescribed visualizing. Try to have full body awareness: Maintain connection to that which is painful and hold it tenderly, with metta, and that which is not painful, holding it equally, doing equanimity practice with each single moment.

Even for just a minute or two. This is especially interesting when feeding or playing with the child. Practice presence without asking about the future, allowing this to be just as it is without any ability to know what the next moment will hold.

Don’t Deepen Your Practice – Matthew Remski

Being with the joy and sorrow of baby without holding on at all. Baby does not hold on and you do not need to, either. At each meal, take a minute to sense into the causes and conditions that led some part of your food to be on your plate. For example, consider the carrot and where it came from: Deepen your sense of interdependence and emptiness with each bite. Consider the four elements — earth, wind, fire, and water — present in each meal, and how your own body is comprised of those elements, and like the ones on your plate, will ultimately disperse. At each meal, move a small amount to the side or even on a separate dish and offer it to all beings.

One can also do this with the scraps at the end, but many feel it is more meaningful to offer the food first.

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May all beings be nourished. As I eat this food, may I use it for the cultivation of happiness on this planet. Food comes in one end and then goes out the other, a vivid and daily illustration of impermanence and emptiness — and often, suffering. Every flush of the toilet is an opportunity — another temple bell — to reflect on this fact. And, paradoxically, to find and feel the happiness available in recognizing this endless process of release.

When going to the bathroom; we tend to think of our human byproducts as gross, but in truth they always become nourishment to some beings somewhere. For example, when monks in Southeast Asia use the bathroom, they commonly kneel. When we use the bathroom, how about thinking of this as a noble offering to other beings, wishing them happiness and nourishment.

One can also use this understanding of the transformations of food to help with craving, clinging, greed, etc.

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Feel into how everyday activities are an expression of caring for others. Sense your connection with them, your interdependence, as you push the broom or fold the laundry. Explore accepting the moment of housework just as it is, without resisting it a form of aversion — one of the Three Poisons.

See if you can bring the wholehearted, peaceful, graciousness to it that you might bring to a similar activity while on retreat. Practice right speech in the workplace.

Reflect on right livelihood and intention in your work. Notice fear and greed in relationship to finances. Reflect on the interdependence of all beings and the web through which our actions affect one another. Ways to Deepen Householder Practice. Perspectives Good books or articles on householder practice: Take the refuges before beginning each meal. Working with a Teacher If it is possible, have a regular relationship with a teacher or a senior student.

Meditation Meditate every day, no matter what, even for a minute. Set a fixed period for meditation each day e. Do some lovingkindness practice daily, including for yourself. Study Read some dharma every day, even for just a minute. Consider these on-line resources for dharma study: Join a regular study group. Classes Do a one-day class every few months. Retreats Go on retreat at least once a year. Before Falling Asleep Briefly reflect on the day as practice: How did it go? Ritual Days Observe the full, new and quarter moon days — the uposatha days, in the monastic tradition — in whatever way is appropriate for you.

Chanting Chanting is a gateway into Right Speech! Choose one of the Brahmaviharas to develop in daily life over a specific period of time. Sila Take the five basic precepts: No killing No stealing No lying No use of intoxicants No sexual misconduct. If your meditation is focusing on the breathing, you need to generate deep interest for the breath, with a mind of curiosity, of love for the breath. You need to want to know your breath deeply, in detail and depth; to experience it in many levels, again and again.

Keeping the interest alive and intense, in the object of meditation, is the whole secret. You need to be more interested in exploring your breath than in rehearsing thoughts and memories in your mind. So when we say that we got a green dot, or a red dot, what it means is that for the majority of milliseconds of that dot, attention was green or red. But this is probably only relevant for more advanced meditators. For this reason, also, chose among the traditional types of meditation one that your mind is naturally attuned to.

That will help you keep your interest alive.

The Process of Meditation & How To Deepen Your Practice

As a metaphor that can help us get a better experience of this feeling of intensity of focus, imagine you are walking on a rope, suspended over a cliff. A single moment of distraction, and your body loses balance and you fall. Here is another image that conveys intense continuous focus in the task at hand. Both these guys have only one task in mind.

Don’t Deepen Your Practice

Get this intensity, minus the adrenaline and agitation, and you have the perfect attitude for deep meditation. Keep your focus on your breath second after second, as if something extraordinary is about to happen at any moment, and you cannot miss it for the world. If you have this attitude, your meditation will be deep and beautiful, and thoughts will subside. Having an idea of how intense meditation can be, and being able to actually go that deep, are different things. However, ultimately all we need to do is to simply give the best of ourselves at each step of the way. We must not give in to this type of thinking in meditation, but simply gently bring our attention back to our object of focus, as soon as we notice it has wandered.

Slowly increasing the number of greens, and decreasing the reds, is what we are looking for. If you have a natural tendency towards self-criticism, Loving-Kindness meditation might be something you want to try.