Sunday, July 28, 2013

But What Are You REALLY thinking?



That what I'm most interested in, is living a life not so much about helping people, but about being with myself and others, deeply, fully alive, awake, creatively. My experience is that the greatest help that people experience when we work together often comes from exactly that – being fully present with them and allowing them to be exactly as they are, with whatever experience they’re currently having. That when we're fully present to our experience, to the best of our capacity, no resistance, excuses, defenses, denial - then blockages dissolve, shifts happen organically, it’s the nature of living things, of life, to create and dissolve, again and again.

As a yoga teacher and Reiki practitioner, when I became a Network chiropractor, using the Reorganizational Healing techniques of Somato-Respiratory Integration and Network Spinal Analysis, my capacity to help people, as well as my outreach expanded. People, who might not take a yoga class to begin with, often do seek out assistance from some type of doctor or health care practitioner. Many of my practice members have benefited from the principles and practices gleaned from my yoga and Reiki training and practice that are integrated into my work as a Network chiropractor. Some of them have gone on to become yoga and Reiki practitioners themselves as well.

Before becoming a chiropractor, yoga teacher and Reiki practitioner, though, I studied and worked as a painter, an actress and performance artist, a director, and, more recently, a writer. I juggled and performed in mask on the streets of San Francisco, did theatre in NYC for a tour of homeless shelters, wrote articles about healing from Cystic Fibrosis and burying loved ones at home. Even as a child, there was never been a time that I can remember not thinking of myself as some kind of artist / creator. 

Recently I looked up the dictionary definition of art and found quite a few definitions. Here's one of my favorites:

"a skill at doing a specific thing, typically one acquired through practice."

Exactly.

Abhinavagupta, a Kashmir Shaivite guru who lived over a thousand years ago, taught and practiced artistic expression as a natural link to divine knowledge.

Being a practitioner of a "healing art", practicing health, from that point of view, is an ocean of possibility.  For those of us who believe, as I do, that our opportunity while we're here on earth has something to do with learning that we're not separate from one another, that we're all part of one teeming, oozing, mass of life, then how do we live into that more fully in our daily lives? 

"ViolinCello" Wood Engraving by Evan Charney
I also found this wonderful phrase in my search:

"art is long, life is short", with the explanation that - "there is so much knowledge (or skill) to acquire that a lifetime is not sufficient."

If living itself holds the potential to be our ultimate artistic endeavor, and I believe it does, then the life that we carve out of our time here is our most complex and sophisticated creation isn't it? 

Who's with me here?