You can do it with or without music. Music makes it easier. But I like the idea of zombie walking in the woods, just really getting into the flow and stumble of it, kind of trying to become so connected with the woods that it’s as if you’ve known it all your life or that you are an integral part of it.
No specific dancing. The idea is to get into a state people call “flow.” You move without being aware that you are causing the movement. It just happens. You are “one” with the forest. Your awareness has expanded so you can just about see things all around you. Certainly if feels as if you can feel them. I don’t know if we really feel things, but it feels like we can feel things outside of our area of visual awareness. Our kinetic senses are all engaged so it feels like we know things without really knowing how we came to know those things.
It’s about the feeling, not the reality. It’s about your sense of awareness and connection to what is around you. If you lose the thinking, most people will feel as if they gain a greater awareness of connection to that which is around them. Sometimes the connection extends much further away.
Meditation is another way to get at this feeling. Personally, I’m too impatient to work meditation. I need my body to be engaged or I need to be making music. Both these things kind of short-circuit my thinking processes and throw me into this other kind of awareness.
What is it like? Well, you got it right that there are no words to describe it. But I have taken that as my challenge. Can I say what can’t be said? It’s a folly, I’m sure, but I’ll try. This is all metaphor, of course. To know it, you have to experience it, and when you experience it, it’ll probably be different. So in the end, you get to decide if you have experienced it or not. No one else can confirm or disconfirm it. Which means there are no experts. In a way, it is your choice. But we can share stories, and it does help us when it sounds like are stories are somewhat similar.
When you feel it, you will probably realize it has been happening all your life. I remember when I first realized what “chi” was like. It happened during an acupuncture treatment. I fell electric zings and other things I call “rushes” up my spine and this reminded me of times in Concert Band when I was 16, and we’d get to certain passages and if felt like this rush of energy went shooting up my spine and out the roof of my head. It tingled and it felt so charged and I absolutely loved it!
So years later I find out that this is what chi is, and that I can make this feeling happen just by thinking about it (or by practicing yoga or Tai Chi), and I can send it into other parts of my body (I’m really good at hands and feet). What does it do? Well, supposedly you need free flow in your body, and if it doesn’t flow freely, you can get ill, or maybe illness stops the flow.
Chi means breath. But chi isn’t necessarily breath, itself. However, most practices on earth start by focusing on the breath, and you should do that in your zombie walking. In my practice, we start by lying down and breathing into various parts of our bodies. This is a metaphor. We don’t actually breathe through our feet, but we can make ourselves feel as if we are and that can start that tingling feeling that I know as chi in my feet.
By focusing on your breath you start to pay attention to the rhythm of your breath and more importantly, you come to understand how your breath moves your body. This is obvious, except mostly we never think about it or pay attention to it. Paying attention to how your breath moves you starts to get you into your body and out of your head.
In meditation, it’s more mental and more difficult. You focus on your breath but you count breaths and try to stay focused so you can stay counting. This is very difficult because the mind wants to pay attention to all kinds of shit. So it keeps wandering off, and then you forget to count. So you are supposed to gently remind yourself to count and you start counting over again. It’s hard.
With dance and movement, you don’t have to count. Rather you feel. Which is where you want to be, anyway. You feel the effect of your breath gently stimulating your muscles throughout your body. You can focus on your feet or hands or whatever. In my practice we move from one to the other until we have gone through the entire body in about five to ten minutes.
Then we start activating our bodies. You might see this as stretching, but we prefer to think of it as dance. Inside, we are paying attention to what our muscles want to do. So, using the breath to start things, we begin our stretching dance, first lying on the floor, and then sitting or kneeling, and eventually we work our way up onto our feet.
I like to keep my eyes closed during this process. Sometimes, I start to feel like I can see the dance floor even though my eyes are closed. I feel like I know where I am in relation to the band and the other dancers. But most importantly, keeping my eyes closed allows me to stay within my body without getting distracted by my relationship to the world around me.
I work into a flow where I am constantly working muscles, except really, the muscles are working me. They are guiding the movement. I am not deciding what to do. Rather, my attention is so focused on them that I can allow them to move me. This sounds kind of confusing—these words—to me.
I think that our mind is not just in our head. The whole nervous system is part of how we think. Impulses come from everywhere. The idea is to shut down the center enough that you can pay attention to these impulses from elsewhere in your body and allow them to move you. Of course, they are you, so you are still moving you, but it kind of feels like the impulses are coming from outside you—as if a god were moving you.
That’s where you’re headed. You want to feel as if you are being moved, even though you are moving yourself. This is what tells you that your thinking mind is no longer in control. You are letting other parts of you move you. These are the parts that are usually dampened down below our level of awareness. They are always there and they always have a say, but most people don’t become aware of them.
So sometimes when people have conflicting ideas about what to do, and then they do things they didn’t mean to do, it’s these other ideas that other parts of our minds have that are forcing themselves into control. These kinds of practices (dance, meditation, Tai Chi, etc) help us learn to be a little more out of control, so as to allow other parts of us to have greater input into our decisions and to do it in a more conscious way. The paradoxical nature of it is that in order to include more of ourselves in our consciousness, we have to learn how to be more unconscious.
I hope my explanations allow me to get away with that statement. I guess I’m talking about two different kinds of consciousness, or maybe two aspects of consciousness. The problem with terminology is that we don’t define these things very clearly. I think in terms of mind-mind and body-mind. Or linguistic mind and non-linguistic mind. Or thinking-mind and non-thinking mind.
These dualities may or may not be helpful. I’m not enough of a brain scientist to be up on the current theory. My study is basically studying myself and trying to be aware of how I interpret and act out these ideas I hear from others. I am careful not to claim that the thoughts come from outside me even though they feel as if they do. I think that the fact that many people report experiences that seem to be similar means that we are talking about something semi-reproducible.
However I am also careful not to go so far as to claim universal reality for these things. I am very uncomfortable with this notion that these things actually could come from outside the body. Many people claim they do. Many people will claim that “god” spoke to them or handed them the music or the words or made their bodies do things they can’t do.
Personally, I don’t think it’s necessary to go outside the body to find explanations for these experiences. I believe people are generally telling the truth about what they experience. I really don’t even want to get into a discussion of how or why it happens if we have to bring in something outside the body. I just want to hear what people experience.
This gets back to the notion that you can’t explain it. There are no words for these experiences. Literally. My theory is that this is because they don’t occur in the thinking or linguistic mind. They are wordless experiences. Thus, it is very difficult to talk about them. Like dreams, we have to translate them into words, and that never seems satisfactory. Something seems to be missing.
Now it is very tempting to say that what is missing is something magical. It is tempting to label that magic with a word everyone knows: god. The explanation that conveniently fakes us into overlooking that it is not an explanation. When we say “god” made this for us, it is like punting in American football. You punt when you don’t know what else to do. It is not an answer.
When we say god did it, it feels like an answer, but it isn’t an answer. God is a black box. We have no idea what goes on inside it, yet most people are willing to stop asking questions at this point. They know they can’t understand God. That’s the definition of God. So therefore, god is the final answer. Can’t go any further.
I have a theory that we have evolved to ask questions. I think one mechanism of this is the anxiety we feel when we don’t know the answer. If something is important, we feel more anxiety, but we also feel anxiety when we don’t know the answers to non-urgent questions. Like where did this feeling of knowing the woods come from? Of being one with the woods?
It makes us anxious to have such questions hanging out there, and the anxiety can be debilitating. So I think we invented god as the answer that ends all questions as a way to keep from being so anxious. I think that being able to constantly ask more questions and to learn more enhances our ability to survive. But I think that being able to stop the questions when they become fruitless is also important. So I see God as a clever mechanism that helps us cope with not knowing.
Of course, different people have different levels of tolerance of non-knowing, and so we can get into passionate disagreements about all kinds of issues related to the end of knowledge. Some people claim special insight into the end of knowledge and retrieve answers others disagree with about all the stuff we find in religious disagreements.
Personally, I find that I am ok with not knowing. I want to know. I want to find answers, but I am unwilling to go to that place where I must fool myself that I know something I don’t really know, or that I have an answer that really isn’t an answer.
So I dance. I make music. These things are therapeutic in addition to being creative. The state of awareness I attain actually heals my anxious and depressive thoughts. My body mind seems to know how to smooth over my thinking-mind. My body mind knows how to connect with other people and with the environment around me. It prefers a natural environment. Boxes and rooms are not easy to generate flow in.
I wasn’t expecting to range so far in this answer, but I figure you, at least, will be interested. It is good to be able to connect some of the different aspects of this theory. I tend to use the word “spiritual” to describe the feeling I get from this method. For me, spiritual means the sense of connection to things outside myself. That is what these practices are about, on some level. Although they also have the health and creative aspects, too. But since the general aesthetic seems to be about oneness and connection, it seems a little like cheating to talk about the different threads of it.
On the other hand, we are trying to translate from the “oneness” mind to the “separate strands” mind. The thinking mind is all about taking things apart to see how they work. The body mind is about connecting things to see how they work. We need both, I think. We are well served if we can place ourselves right in the middle, where we can use both minds at will, and not privilege one way of thinking above the other.
I think Western society has really focused on the thinking mind. And no wonder. Science is an incredible method for generating useful knowledge. It has allowed us to improve our standard of living like crazy. So science sucks us in because of its utility.
As a result, we have generated a suspicion, I think, culturally speaking, of the other parts of our mind that generate knowledge in other ways. I think we are doubly suspicious because some people make claims for mysticism that science has shown can not be supported with any evidence.
But people get excited. The things we learn from our non-linguistic minds are emotionally powerful. They feel good. We want to make claims for them out of our excitement, I believe. Thus the battle and the separation get exaggerated. Feelings get hurt. People get angry. And we learn to suspect our emotions and feelings and non-linguistic thinking as if they are alien (which also contributes to the notion of magic and god).
I think it is possible to hold these different methods of thinking and awareness together without conflict if we don’t make claims based on our emotions. I think we can just feel what we feel, and let it be. We can describe it dispassionately and as accurately as we can without saying it is real. It is an experience. We don’t have to say if the experience is “real” or not. We just accept the person’s description of it.
If we leave it at that, I think there is much more to learn. If we resist the urge to interpret or label these experiences, I think we get more out of it. Naming it “god” or “spirit” or whatever causes us to lose information. Let’s deal with the data, not the interpretation.
And that, my dear @Symbeline, is how it is done! LOL!
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