WELCOME
Feel Your Way into Being
To Investigate our Embodied Experience is to Investigate the Living Present
It is only when we go to the center of our souls that we enter the ‘eye of the storm’, the still-point of our existence. In the rush to get an education, to make a career, create a family, obtain material success, to hurry, to do, to survive, we often don’t realize that in the midst of this modern-chaotic life that we lead every day, there exists another life, an unseen life that moves like a silent river beneath a city. A place where time stands still and we experience a softly euphoric sense of awakening, the feeling of breathing and falling in love in harmony with the universe.
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ILLUSIONS OF ULTIMATE FULFILLMENT
The idea that happiness is in the next place, next job, next adventure, million dollar fortune, or even the next partner. Until we give up the idea that happiness is somewhere else, it will never be where we are.
Humans by their nature are unsatisfied, and consciousness—the ceaseless chatter within our heads—is the primary burden of humans. It’s a burden that animals, in their silent inner lives, do not have to carry. Humans cannot escape this burden, and the effort of struggling against it is in fact the cause of even greater suffering.
Sensual Awareness
“We have lost almost entirely the great and intricately developed sensual awareness, or sense-awareness, and sense-knowledge, of the ancients. It was a great depth of knowledge arrived at direct, by instinct and intuition, as we say, not by reason. Not until we can grasp a little of the working of the ancient mind can we appreciate the “magic” of the world they lived in. Men are far more fools today, for stripping themselves of their emotional and imaginative reactions, and feeling nothing. The price we pay is boredom and deadness. Our bald processes of thought no longer are life to us.”
— D.H. Lawrence
“The true horror of existence is not the fear of death, but the fear of life. It is the fear of waking up each day to face the same struggles, the same disappointments, the same pain. It is the fear that nothing will ever change, that you are trapped in a cycle of suffering that you cannot escape. And in that fear, there is a desperation, a longing for something, anything, to break the monotony, to bring meaning to the endless repetition of days.”
— Albert Camus, The Fall
Consider This, We Will Never Become Happy
We Can Only Ever BE Happy
“Our society is very result-oriented, that’s why we are so competitive. That’s why we are always stressed, because we are always looking at something in the distance. If you are always looking at the top of the mountain you are climbing, you cannot be aware of the grass and flowers growing at your feet.”
“We are always looking ahead, aren’t we? And then the actual thing, the actual living, passes us by. We are locked inside our brains, cut off from the present moment, always centered on something beyond our reach. We are imagining this mirage of happiness, satisfaction and fulfillment which will magically appear once this and this and this happens. But what’s happening right now is “it” and it’s the only “it” we have. The rest is just fabrication.”
“Peace can exist only in the present moment. It is ridiculous to say “Wait until I finish this, then I will be free to live in peace.” What is “this”? A diploma, a job, a house, the payment of a debt? If you think that way, peace will never come. There is always another “this” that will follow the present one. If you are not living in peace at this moment, you will never be able to. If you truly want to be at peace, you must be at peace right now. Otherwise, there is only “the hope of peace some day.”
Present Moment Experience
Being aware of our core can awaken a feeling of intimacy with all life. Present moment experience is physical and body-based, not intellectual or theoretical. If we are not in alignment with the moment, life is a struggle. It is only by grounding our awareness in the living sensation of our body that our true presence can awaken.
Reality exists in the here and now. This is the ultimate, complete and final truth of life. All beings exist in this present moment. When we lose connection with reality in the endless pursuit of “conditional/conceptual” happiness, we lose awareness of our inherent, primordial, natural state. Our mind wanders incessantly, but our body and senses are always in the present. To investigate our embodied experience is to investigate the living present.
The highest form of intimacy is truth. When we have nothing to hide, no one to impress, nothing to lose, no games left to play, no attachment to outcomes, real connection and intimacy happens.
“To be in love with what is now — that’s the way. That’s the only way. The rest is just the ego trying to survive.”
~ Adyashanti
“When you realize you don’t know who’s living your life, breathing your breath or thinking your thoughts, it’s a shocking moment.”
– Adyashanti
Familiarity is Our Comfort Zone
“As long as you are interested in your present way of living, you will not abandon it. Discovery cannot come as long as you cling to the familiar. It is only when you realize fully the immense sorrow of your life and revolt against it, that a way out can be found. As long as you have all sorts of ideas about yourself, you know yourself through the mist of these ideas; to know yourself as you are, give up all ideas. You cannot imagine the taste of pure water.
You can only discover it by abandoning all flavorings.”
~ Nisargdatta Maharaj
Intimacy With All Things
“There is a place in the heart where everything meets. Go there if you want to find me.
Mind, senses, soul, eternity, all are there. Are you there? Enter the bowl of vastness that is the heart. Give yourself to it with total abandon . . .Once you know the way the nature of attention will call you to return, again and again, and be saturated with knowing, ‘I belong here, I am at home here.”
~ Vijnaan Bhairav Tantra.
‘ Beauty is simply Reality.
Seen with the eyes of love.’ ~ Rabindranath Tagore
Your Natural State
“Happiness is our natural state. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture. To acquire happiness you don’t have to do anything, because happiness cannot be acquired. Does anybody know why? Because we have it already. How can you acquire what you already have? Then why don’t you experience it?
Because you’ve got to drop something. You’ve got to drop illusions. You don’t have to add anything in order to be happy; you’ve got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It’s only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings. Do you know where these things come from? From having identified with all kinds of labels!”
~ Anthony de Mello, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality
Nonconceptual Awareness
“The state of not knowing is the most important state you can be in, because that opens you up to the deeper dimensions”
~Eckhart Tolle
“As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.” – Shunryu Suzuki
Self Discovery
Bodhi is a Sanskrit word meaning “awakening”. Bodhi Body is not a path, philosophy or belief system. It is a body-based gathering together of the “highest truth” for the recognition and penetration of pure Being.
One of the good things about the pleasure of inhabiting the body — how we feel the body from within, what we now call proprioception, our sense of the body as we feel it from inside — is that it’s an inherent pleasure that doesn’t have many stories at all. If you do not disturb the basic process of life within you, joy is the natural outcome. Prior to seeking pleasure or fulfilling a need. Joy is not an achievement; joy is our natural state.
Being & Doing
Being must be felt not thought.
“We have a tendency to think in terms of doing and not in terms of being. We think that when we are not doing anything, we are wasting our time. But that is not true. Our time is first of all for us to be. To be what? To be alive, to be peaceful, to be joyful, to be loving. And that is what the world needs most.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
“All houses are dark until the Mother wakes up.”
~ Khalil Gibran
A Dimension Deeper than Thought
When you have a deep profound sense of being, you’re not worried about the meaning of your life.
― Adyashanti
Aligning w/ Gravity – Earth & Sky
Integrating Body & Spirit
The Tetrahedral Star can be said to represent the complete equilibrium and unity of the two poles of nature – spirit and matter, masculine and feminine, heaven and earth. It is a geometric and energetic representation of the human body. It is believed that all life and all of creation is based on this equilibrium.
Embodied alignment is the integration of gross physical and subtle energetic forces of manifest existence. An inner “line” expressed within the constant relational field of earth’s gravity and infinite space of sky. Our mind is the function of masculine energy and our heart is the function of feminine energy.
“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The Tetrahedral Star represents the energy body of the human being, the blending of Heaven and Earth, Masculine and Feminine. The two tetrahedrons contained within each other represent the two poles of creation in complete balance – Spirit and matter. All creation is based on this Divine Balance. Hidden within this body is the Higher, Divine Self, the Eternal Being. Within and from ourselves, we are the link between the world of Spirit and that of matter.
“Most human beings are living their whole lives from the pairs of opposites because it’s the only way they know. But when you discover that there is within you this place that is beyond the pairs of opposites, and that place, that state of awareness, is actually what you are, you start to realize you can live from that place.”
― Adyashanti
Integration of Head & Heart
Head and heart means the integration of masculine & feminine energies within oneself.
“Myriad things, backed by yin and embracing yang; Achieve harmony by integrating their energy.”
– Lao Tzu
“The knowledge of the heart is in no book and is not to be found in the mouth of any teacher, but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth.”
— Carl Jung
Warrior & Yogi
Within each of us exists a warrior and a yogi. A warrior who will push through and overcome, who is determined, who will achieve, and a yogi, who is the most tenderhearted and compassionate being. The one that can let go, that can flow with what is. But it is the combination of these two that makes us uniquely human. We have the opportunity at any given moment, to select the behavior that is appropriate: a call for action, or a call for surrender.
The ideal is to integrate this dual nature into one, complete being.
Bodhi Body sessions are based on Rolfing ® Structural Integration, the work of Dr. Ida Rolf and influenced by the Craniosacral work of Dr. Andrew Still, and Polarity Therapy, the conscious health building system of Dr. Randolph Stone. Bodhi Body Biodynamic Structural Integration can create openings on emotional, physical and spiritual layers, depending on your intention; to support you with what is emerging for transformation.
Biodynamic Structural Integration
Dr. Ida Rolf had a vision of human potential that went beyond effective symptomatic pain relief and “good posture”. Better alignment was not an end in itself but a means of coming into a more personal and profound relationship with earth, spirit, self and other. Integrated as One, Complete, Human Being.
Journey of the Heart
“Passion is the spark of excitement we feel when we stand on the edge of the unknown. It arrives on the boundary where two different worlds rub up against each other — male and female, self and other, inner and outer, familiar patterns and unchartered possibilities.
So in following our passions all the way, we arrive at the boundary of life and death; here we feel the insignificance of our small self as we enter into the mystery from which we come and to which we must return.”
~ John Welwood, Journey of the Heart
The unknown, the mind of not “knowing”, is the true mind. It is not a blank, vacant or dull state, it is alive with the vividness and depth of Presence and Being fully here/now.
Truth is Where You Stand
No Where Else
If you are unable to find the Truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?
“Wherever you are, enlightenment is there. And if you stand upright where you are, that is enlightenment. It means ‘accepting things as it is’, accepting yourself as you are.”
-Shunryu Suzuki
“I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.”
~ Henry David Thoreau
Mother Earth & Father Sky
Man is an event on a line, connecting Heaven and Earth. Man organizes himself around the line so that he can be a more fully functioning Human Being.
When the body comes into alignment with gravity, it spontaneously heals itself.
~ Dr. Ida P. Rolf
Feel Your Way into Being
Stress, it’s not in our head, it’s in our myofascial nervous system. Sympathetic/Parasympathetic nervous system homeostasis is our natural state. Feel your way into being by releasing stress patterning within your human form. The great wisdom dwells in the body, fully away from all thought. It is only by grounding our awareness in the living sensation of our body that our true presence can awaken.
Being Must Be Felt Not Thought
“We have lost almost entirely the great and intricately developed sensual awareness, or sense-awareness, and sense-knowledge, of the ancients. It was a great depth of knowledge arrived at directly, by instinct and intuition, as we say, not by reason.
Not until we can grasp a little of the working of the ancient mind can we appreciate the “magic” of the world they lived in.
Men are far more fools today, for stripping themselves of their emotional and imaginative reactions, and feeling nothing. The price we pay is boredom and deadness. Our bald processes of thought no longer are life to us.”
~ D.H. Lawrence
Feel the Mystery
“As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. …
That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life… Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.”
~ Anthony de Mello, Awareness Quotes
Awakening the Intelligence of the Body
“The intelligence of the body attunes to wholeness. It resonates to the world around it. That is its true nature. Just as it is our true nature.
Our longing for embodiment, then, is a longing to grow into our fullest reality: to put to rest our divisions and liberate our stifled energies and to finally feel the self and the world in the wholeness of the moment. What we long for is a homecoming – coming home to the self, coming home to the present. And it’s crucial in our head-centric culture to understand that you can’t achieve that homecoming by grasping any idea; it is a tangible, physical journey that drops your thinking out of the head and lets it come to rest deep in your body.
When that happens, the energy of your being achieves coherence and attunes to the life of the present. You feel yourself embedded in an intelligence that guides and informs and clarifies – an intelligence that sings through your body not in a language of words, but in a language of sensational, borderless awareness.”
~ Philip Shepherd, Radical Wholeness
Joy is Our Natural State
NATURAL PRIMORDIAL PERFECTION
Sahaja is one of the four keywords of the Nath sampradaya along with Svecchachara, Sama, and Samarasa. Sahaja meditation and worship was prevalent in Tantric traditions common to Hinduism and Buddhism in Bengal as early as the 8th–9th centuries. The British Nath teacher Mahendranath wrote:
Man is born with an instinct for naturalness. He has never forgotten the days of his primordial perfection, except insomuch as the memory became buried under the artificial superstructure of civilization and its artificial concepts. Sahaja means natural… The tree grows according to Sahaja, natural and spontaneous in complete conformity with the Natural Law of the Universe. Nobody tells it what to do or how to grow. It has no swadharma or rules, duties and obligations incurred by birth. It has only svabhava – its own inborn self or essence – to guide it. Sahaja is that nature which, when established in oneself, brings the state of absolute freedom and peace.
The Last Achievement of Thought
“Take my soul to that place, where I may speak without words.”
Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (جلالالدین محمد رومی)
