fellow questers…

i just returned from sea ranch in northern california… while at sea ranch… i had the great fortune of studying somatic expression (body movement as personal expression) under jamie mchugh…

below are a few conceptual nuggets i experienced…

* being a naturalist (a source-toucher) means more than learning  taxonomies of plants, animals, and elements…. it involves understanding the impressions natural relationships leave on (and in) our body/psyche…

… and when impressed upon… to dwell in natural attractions… let the earth move you… going deeper and deeper… so deep that linguistic-induced boundaries between us and nature dissolve and lo! aliveness grips us…

*breathing is a natural process we can and can’t control… can’t in the sense that if we stop breathing… we end up as compost…

yet how we breath speaks to how we live… if we are always taking short breaths.. we are locked into ‘fight’ breathing.. while great if a tiger is chasing us… it’s a shot in the gut if endured long-term…

…. as the exterior world cultivates a consciousness of fear and anxiety… the breath becomes a safe haven… a place to reconcile inner being with outside world…

* understanding evolutionary development is fundamental to exploring pre-identity being… yes.. we once lived without brands… no ‘i am this’ or ‘i am  that’…

when primal… identity exists in motion… in body.. not in a non self-referential symbolic systems like today…

today’s disembodied existence explains why we are so fearful when culture’s clothes are ripped from our mortal bodies…

existentially naked but not without good fortune… since out of culturally naked bodies comes the ‘wild self’..

two aspects of evolutionary development are of particular importance… physical movement and sound expression…

first… the continuum of physical movement… from crawling on the ground to walking on all fours to getting up on two feet like a child for the first time (think of zombie walking) to walking as we do today…

second… the development of sound as expression… we didn’t always spit out verbs and nouns or construct declarative sentences… we (as evolving animals) went through an extended period of time exploring our voice and sound vibrations…

knowing is doing… so in some form or another we turned conceptual learning into experiential learning–the kind that sticks to the bones…

within the coastal confines of sea ranch… we played with the developmental tools… for instance… if you were walking by… you might have seen us primal lovers walking on all four (two hands… two feet) exploring personal sound vibrations…

taken altogether.. these tools open pathways for us to turn inward… into a primal meditation… toward our ‘wild self’… so that in the midst of interaction between body and culture… we are moved by what matters… by what attracts us…. this space of consciousness is the gift of our inheritance…

btw… you get a great look of ‘awe…i wish i can do that’ from most passerby..

alive,

gino

*the picture above is us (i am standing to the left… jaime in the middle pointing… heather and claudia to the right) walking back from the beach where we spent three hours physically engaged in primal activities…