I think in physics terms, quite often.  One of my favorite books is Art and Physics, but Leonard Shlain.  I like that the mechanics of life can be understood in simple terms. I suppose that’s what I find so wonderful about the human operating system and the phoenix program.  I’m not one of those people that likes to get lost in the ethereal mystery of things. I like things that are tangible, that I can touch, mold, digest.

So, I had this nice experience lately that cemented my understanding of momentum.  Three years ago, I went into private practice after two years working with acupunturists, chiropractors and in a health spa.  It was not the easiest of transitions and the first two years felt like a constant struggle.  I invested so much energy into marketing, networking and of course doing my best with each client that came into my office.  Exhausting.  Particularly exhausting when just as things were getting good, the economy tanked and my hard earned 14 clients a week dwindled down to 12, 10, 8, sometimes 7.  Sometimes there’d be good weeks, good months but not enough to counter the multiple bad months. My debt was mounting, my enthusiasm was ebb’ing and I was wondering how much longer I was going to be able to keep driving the business forward.

It was about that time that I was led to the HOS.  One of the first things I put on my wish list was having my practice be more self sustaining and drawing in more effortlessly the type of clients that I wanted to be working with.  I also wrote down a desire to mentor and to effect a larger number of people with my work.

Two weeks later, I saw a job posting for a part time teacher position at a masage school.  It was the massage school that I got certified from, so I was familiar with the curriculum and it seemed at the time like an ideal part time job where I could maintain my practice and have some steady financial support.

Long story short, I got the job and three weeks after starting, they offered me a full time(40 hour) position which involved teaching and mentoring a group of students.  Exactly what I wanted.Except that I now had the wonderful problem of not needing any new clients.  The 10-14 I was seeing a week was more than enough to keep me overworked.

So, I started to slowly back away from my practice.  I stopped networking, stopped marketing and reduced the hours that I was available to clients.  And yet, people kept calling to book and current clients stayed on.  To manage, I’ve had to put up more and more boundaries around my practice and for the first time, I now have a waitlist and can pick and choose who I want to work with… exactly what I wanted.

A couple things fascinate me about this.  One is  that just as Devon talks about, things seem to flow teleologically, I became open to exactly what I wanted and really self selected for those possibilities.  Thank you Mr.  White.

Secondly, I realized the law of momentum.  This law says that an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.  All the effort that I spent in the last few years, developing my skills, marketing, networking set into motion a practice that had now developed a steady velocity.  It had momentum behind it.  More importantly, because I was so immeshed in the practice and was putting all my force into it, I was not actually able to notice how fast it was moving.  It was only when I stopped and stood off to the side, that I could witness it moving all on its own.

so  now, taking time for my self, investing energy in the new project of teaching and this deeper project of the Phoenix, I’m comforted by the knowledge that the efforts I put in now will be enjoyed down the road.  Fuck, they’re being enjoyed already, so I imagine they’ll be enjoyed even more, down the road.  That’s all for now.  If you’re reading this, in what ways have you experienced momentum?

so the line on the wall said.  It is merely the absence of it.

Wise words for a graffiti artist in the mission.  But then again, a graffiti artist can appreciate this, the way sunlight or the absence of obscures, changes, illuminates their work of art.  Or the way a dark cloud or passing truck temporarily blocks the light, bringing darkness.

There’s an idea I read recently in physics about the known unknown.  That is, we can understand fully what happens only in the places that light can reach.  We can understand what happens on the borders, where light stops.  Furthermore, we know that there is something,theoretically, beyond the range where there is light but we cannot know what that something is. Light, vibrating waves or beaming photons(depending on how you look at it), is the thread of space and time. Without light, there is nothing.

I had a personal experience with this recently.  I took a course in Vipassana Meditation, a form of meditation where the goal is insight, deep wisdom about yourself and the world.  In this technique,the first focus of your wisdom is yourself.  To observe, objectively what is happening within your body.  You observe your body as if it were something external from you, arms legs, torse. “no me, no my”.  You observe and you observe and you observe curious things.  You observe areas or your body that feel somewhat nice, the subtle sensation of vibrations, tinglings, warmth, energy flowing like water passing over rocks in a river.  You observe areas where there is intense sensations like pain, burning, stabbing, a leg falling asleep, sharp tinglings where you want to itch and itch and itch.  You’re taught that these are distractions, the seeds of misery and suffering. To react would only multiply and further the suffering and misery.  So you sit and just observe.  and then you notice other areas where you feel…. nothing.  A whole section of your face, missing.  Some fingers, missing.  A whole foot, missing.  What a curious thing.  You saw yourself in the mirror earlier that day and were sure that you looked whole, complete.  There were no holes in your face, you ate breakfast with all your fingers, you walked on two feet.  But internally, there is nothing.

And this nothing is not the opposite of something, for that too would be something.  It’s not numbness I’m talking about, numbness is certainly something and for sure, there is numbness in places.  What you experience is the absence of something and what that absence leaves; nothing.

I wasn’t surprised by this. As a Hanna Somatic Educator, I’m very familiar with Sensory Motor Amnesia;a forgetfullness of how to voluntarily move and consciously feel an area of your body. My intellectual side was fascinated by this phenomenon of my nervous system.  What sensory motor amnesia means is that movement and sensation are linked together.  Meaning; as movement decreases, as an area of the body becomes rigid, sensation decreases as well.  When the flow of energy and movement no longer reaches certain muscle fiber, it’s as if they cease to exist.  You can feel the areas around them.  If they are rather superficial, lieing close to the surface, you can touch them with your hand.  But until sensation is recovered, voluntary movement cannot happen.  Until movement is returned, it’s as if they are gone.

and I see this quite often in my work with trauma recovery.  A person has been injured, suffered abuse, broken bones, surgery and in a protective reflex has blocked themselves from feeling certain parts of their body.  They do this instinctively by freezing the affected area.  If you touch a hot stove, immediately, your hand is drawn back into your center and will remain tucked into your side, frozen, until the pain is gone. A soldier, shot in the stomach will reflexively curl up, clutching the wound as they hobble off to safety.  A victim of sexual abuse will disconnect from their pelvis, tightening the muscles around their groin and lower abdomen.

In a normal, healthy world, these postures, these reflexes would only last as long as it took the person to get to safety and consciously feel that they are free from harm.  But in a world where we are constantly inundated with trauma, stress, sensory overload sometimes we forget to let go.  We keep holding on to our wounds, protecting them from further injury.

And in this way, our own bodies become the dark clouds that obscure light.  In this way, over time, the borders of where we exist start to draw back and darkness, the absence of light starts to creep towards us.

But also in this way, with understanding or natural process, we can proceed.  Venturing forward with the knowledge of what is and what isn’t, we can start to move with the light, knowing that all we have to do is bring light and the darkness will peel away. With the guidance of a Hanna Somatic Educator, trauma victims can recover pain-free movements in areas of their body and in this way recover their sense of fullness, of light shining throughout all parts of their inner universe.

And so back in my meditation I sat further and observed these borders of my inner darkness.  And bit by bit, little waves of sensation start to creep over the borders.  And bit by bit what did not exist springs into being with the vibrancy of a young flower breaking through ground cover.  Bit by bit,  light returned to what was once dark and there was knowledge and there was life and there was intense sensation and deep ache of old trauma, but at least there was not nothing.

And back on that Mural, the sun rises and a grafitti artist’s words spring into being, into action, into the mind of a writer, the research of a physicist and the reality of our universe.

Saw this article in the NYTimes and I thought, well duh. Don’t we know this? Don’t you feel that in your soul? Our bodies were meant to be moved, we are engineered to walk, to swing from trees, to swim in the oceans. Within all of us is our ancestors, the Savannah people of Africa. Within all of us is our ancestor, the Great Apes. Within all of us is our Ancestor, the reptiles who crawled out of the ocean. Within all of us is our Ancestors the fish. Within all of us is an organism that is one or two celled, dividing and uniting to form more and larger organisms.

You can see this in our brain. As Carl Sagan writes about in Dragons of Eden, we have the reptilian brain, the mammalian brain and most recently the neocortex: Consciousnes is thought to be a result of the neocortex. But the neocortex is on top of the other two levels of brain which developed first and which in all of us develops first. In fetal development we all go through stages where we are first a single cell, later a fish, later a mammal and finally human. All of these stages are necessary to go through to develop into a whole functioning human. Similarly all of the stages in evolution were necessary for the Human species to come around. The Universe had been around already for billions of years before humans came around. You can not rush something as magnificient as us, you can not skip steps and you cannot cheat biology.

All of our ancestors are creatures of motion, just as we are creatures of motion. It’s wonderful that we have developed elaborate cultures, arts, architecture. We have used our immense capacity for imagination, creativity and problem solving to build and change and inspire future generations. But never foroget what we are and how we got here. Never stop moving. The moment you stop moving is the moment you begin to die.

Stay mobiles, completely mobile. Stay fluid like water, stay flexible like a blade of grass, swing like a monkey, swim like a fish, run like a hunter. Exercise like your life depends on it, because it does.

Woah, I’m a 29 year old male, raised in a fairly traditional fully modernized western culture.  I’ve been agnostic my whole life.  One of those”show me evidence, I’ll believe it when I see it” types of people.  But recently, I’m starting to believe that there is magic in the world.  I’m writing to you from  four legged chair on a standard mac laptop at a stone, wood and glass cafe, completely sober(decaf coffee), and I feel like I’m floating in a breeze.

I don’t know how else to explain the sunset I saw last night, the three hour sunset over clouds that rolled like the ocean as my return flight followed the rotation of the sun.  I don’t know how else to explain the stranger who crossed my path and I followed for ten minutes while he thrashed his harmonica, walking and blowing at a ferocious pace.  I don’t know how else to explain the simple beauty and connection that I see in my lovers eyes even when she’s telling me that this can’t work out, we’re too different, there’s too much hurt to trust.

I like the idea of teleology, but I also think that in a sense, what we’re doing here is just freeing ourselves from the bullshit.  Freeing ourselves from a culture that wants to limit, that wants to repress and tell us not to be grand, not to think we have a mission, not to explore our gift to the world.  When I wrote my list, was that a cognitive process, or do my true desires flow from my soul?  If that is the case, and I’m thinking more and more that it is, then connecting to the default serves the purposes of accessing that gift, accessing our soul.  Asking the questions, what is it that I was put here to do and letting ourselves be swept up by the torrent of energy that propels us without effort in that direction.

I used to think that I was too old to believe in magic, but now I think, I’m too old to deny it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about change lately.  1 because I just started this HOS program and 2 because Obama showed us “yes we can” and all other indicators, global warming, financial shakeup, rising health/addiction problems seem to say “Please, We Need To!!”

And it seems that I continually run up with this idea that people are fundamentally lazy and don’t change unless there’s a figurative or literral gun pointed at their head.  From this standpoint, we seem to only want to remove ourselves from what is painful, fearful, and seek an alleviation to the problem.  But with that mindset, we’re not going to get very far.  We’ll only change enough to avoid the thing we’re afraid of.

On the other hand, what I see happening with the Human Operating System and in various ways throughout my life and larger global history is people changing because they want to, because they are excited to, because in all honesty, positive change in exciting!

Devon talks about a default state, a place of activation where we are at our best.  In the somatic field that I come from, we talk about potency and authenticity.  This place of potency or authenticity is a place of excitement, enthusiasm, potimal health and has an inherant drive towards success.  The whole idea of evolution in a sense seems to point to this drive, the natural unnending forward movement of the universe, the species, and us as individuals.  Because, just as you don’t need to tell a tree to lean towards the sun, you don’t have to teach a human how to suceed, all you need to do is teach them how to be authentic, potent, activate their default…  The success is inevitable.

It’s really thrilling to me that there are others out there who understand this, are teaching and living this.  Are leaping, knowing that the net will appear because it has to, it is in our DNA.

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