A Sneak Peek Into My First Book–Chapter 1 & 2 of The Art of Strength

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The BodyLogos Philosophy: Now In Book/Video Form!

Whether you’re a visual, aural or verbal learner, you’ll discover how to

release tension and build strength.

Order your copy of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind, a pioneering book/3D video learning system today!

Where to start, where to start, where to start:

A Sneak Peek Into My First Book–Chapter 1 & 2 of The Art of Strength

That’s what was looping through my head as I sat down to begin the oh-so-exciting yet equally intimidating task of writing my first book about the BodyLogos philosophy and program.

AVAILABLE NOW!

My approach combines meditation and strength training, joins the best of Eastern and Western fitness, to help create real and lasting strength. It’s about integrating our emotional and spiritual selves into our workouts to become totally aligned. And therein was my answer…

The practice and, thus, my book start with a focus on how our minds and emotions intersect in the body. Its first chapter aims to set you on a path to recognize this intersection and connect you with your Spirit Self.

Tao thought says, your Spirit Self is a “pregnant void” needing only direction.

These pages help you intend a direction to create the life you desire and set you up to live that life from a place of true strength.

You see, a meditation practice properly informs your exercise practice. Perhaps surprisingly, the goal with each is not to focus on the end result, as our culture tells us to do—to see meditation as solely a way to de-stress or exercise as only a way to look good. (aka better than you do as you are.)

Rather, the secret is simply to focus on the journey itself; and meditation is the perfect tool to learn how to do just that. A BodyLogos workout gives both your mind and the emotions that are stored in your body a chance to take a timeout from self-criticism, and instead employ and embrace self-acknowledgment–the act of listening inwardly..

I call this focus on the journey “meditative fitness.”

Meditation is key to ensuring that your strength training does more than align your body, or your human self. When you learn to incorporate meditation into your exercise practice, you create the foundation for being your authentic, integrated, vulnerable, and bright Spirit Self in the world. If that isn’t the definition of strength, I don’t know what is!

In chapters 1 you’ll find:

  • Step-by-step instructions that guide you through a traditional Tao Active Meditation, that reorganizes the body, and BodyLogos Active Meditations, that neutralize your mind.
  • An introduction to the BodyLogos Psyche-Muscular Blueprint. Every muscle group corresponds to an aspect of your Self; when isolated in a strength-training workout, that emotion is stimulated.
  • An overview of posture analysis and ways to help you discern the meaning of your body’s messages.
  • Meditations on the five elements of Tao: fear, anger, joy, reflection, sorrow.
  • And much more, including links to video tutorials for guidance.

For centuries, Taoists have believed that our ability to listen to the body is as valuable as listening to the mind. As this chapter illustrates, they’re inextricably connected.

Using active meditation and the BodyLogos approach to posture, you can pinpoint the root cause of emotional tension in your body. Then, through precise mindful adjustments in skeletal alignment and muscular balance, you challenge your body to integrate those adjustments using strength-training exercises, which the book covers in great detail in later chapters.

BodyLogos helps you stretch away from what you think about yourself and toward what is less familiar in the world—it awakens your innate trust in the Universal Spirit.

Get started on your journey to strength and  well-being!

Get your copy of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind today!

Balboa Publishing
with a 5% gift to Safe Horizons

Amazon

Give Yourself the Gift of Strength

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Live in the sweet spot of your strength.

There are those who believe that pushing their strength to the absolute maximum is the requirement to be strong. Others believe that if they conserve their energy they’ll be strong. The truth is, strength lies right in the middle.

If your strength-training workout is so heavy that you feel yourself as weak, you’re building as much tension as strength. If your strength-training workout is so light that you feel yourself bored or unchallenged, you’re taxing your joints more than building muscle.

So how do you know when your workouts are just the right intensity?

When it comes to strength training there are two principle components to consider: bones and muscles.

  • Considering bones means maintaining your rightful posture, no matter the challenge; no excuses!
  • Considering muscles means balancing a contracting muscle with an equal and opposite releasing muscle.

Together these considerations allow you to connect to a challenge and create a change without compromising yourself. This is strength!

Next time you’re in the gym, let your enthusiasm inspire you to experience feeling strong, rather than chasing or saving strength.

To be strong is to live in it! Feel it in the moment of challenge; feel it in your relationship with resistance; feel it in the temperance to prove yourself.

Stop chasing strength and experience it with ease!

 

BODYLOGOS = The Body’s Divine Wisdom

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It is a Practice and a Lifestyle outlined in

The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind

Turn Your Anger Energy into Positive Energy:

The BodyLogos Purpose

by Donia Elizabeth Allen ~ BodyLogos Instructor

Shortly after completing my Bodylogos teacher training in 2015, my husband and I left New York City to relocate and things went, as they say, a bit sideways: I couldn’t rent my condo, which I was depending on for income, my in-laws suffered health crises so my husband had to leave me abruptly, and I was hit with a health crisis of my own. Completely unexpectedly, I found myself in need of a job fast in a new city where I had few contacts, and in a state of total despair.

In response to all, I did what I have done many times in the past in similarly overwhelming situations: I got really pissed! Why is this happening to me? This isn’t fair! It made sense that I’d be upset – who wouldn’t be by unexpected health and financial woes – but tantrums have their limits. I got angry, and then very quickly, I got stuck, which was the last thing I needed to be in order to cope with rapidly changing circumstances.

How did being angry and stuck manifest?

  • Mentally, my monkey mind kicked in and I started going over all the things I might have done differently to prevent our relocation from being so risky and turbulent. It was a worry-fueled, negative prayer loop.
  • Physically, I started overeating – eating my feelings – and immediately felt tired, achy, and began having trouble concentrating. Talk about not helpful!

After a few weeks of this understandable but regressive behavior, I turned to Bodylogos – to the intuitive connections the practice makes between muscle groups and their emotional components. I knew that beating up on myself was not sustainable or helpful, and that, as familiar as that may be, it was disempowering. I resolved to move my energy in a different direction.

The first few days of re-aligning with a healthy practice is not easy!

It’s amazing how quickly energy gets stuck, and then gets used to being stuck! At times, I felt like I was literally dragging myself around. But focusing on one muscle group at a time, and doing so from a curious meditative stance, rather than a judgmental panicky one, helped tremendously.

The Bodylogos technique helped me connect to my agency: to my breath, to my physical posture and mental alignment.

  • Could I control how often interested parties contacted my broker about renting my condo?

    No, but I could trust that doing abdominal crunches would give my whole spine a wonderful stretch, help release tension I was carrying, and quiet my mind enough to ask how I felt in that moment.

  • Could I predict the results of a thyroid biopsy?

    No, but I could do biceps curls, and ask myself what I wanted to bring into my life (happy test results!).

  • Could I take on all the challenges I was facing at once?

    No way! But I could focus my attention on strengthening my back muscles, the most protective muscle group shielding the vital organs, and ask myself what I could do to better support my efforts, to literally have my own back, rather than focus on all that seemed to be going wrong.

A few times, I stood in the gym and just shook everything out: wrists, ankles, elbows, quadriceps. I could feel that crazy anger I was carrying around release! Shaking things out physically had a mental impact: it created the relief and space I needed  to begin to visualize my life’s new direction.

Pretty quickly, I started to feel clearer about things and less overwhelmed. One of the most important things I got clear about was my ability to teach Bodylogos classes, which I began doing with a small but dedicated group.

Some of the situations I was dealing with had positive resolutions (no serious health diagnoses), others not-so-much (my marriage began to dissolve), but Bodylogos helped me cope with all in a way that was sustainable and loving in its approach. I was reminded during this period that a key component of a loving practice is one that encourages people to find their agency and sense of inner power no matter how chaotic their circumstances may be.

BodyLogos can help you connect to your breath and visualize the direction you want your life to go in as well!

Get your copy of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind today!

Balboa Publishing
with a 5% gift to Safe Horizons

Amazon

The BodyLogos Philosophy: Now In Book/Video Form!

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Whether you’re a visual, aural or verbal learner, you’ll discover how to release tension and build strength.

Order your copy of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind, a pioneering book/3D video learning system today!

A How-To for Targeting Tension and Standing Strong:

Introducing The Art of Strength

Flourished by Fire, a concert pianist with arthritis in both hands, broke her wrist and learned she had the beginnings of osteoporosis. Her doctor told her to start strength training to increase her bone density and improve her diagnoses, yet she couldn’t hold weights, since doing so would exacerbate the curled-in state of her wrists and hands. But she wasn’t just physically curled inward, she had long been emotionally curled inward, too, and these difficulties only made her retreat inside further. She wanted to reverse this multi-dimensional degenerative pattern.

Family Terrain was overseeing her aging mother’s open-heart surgery and subsequent move for rehabilitation—with little help and a lot of resistance from her siblings. She had six weeks to select the most treasured valuables from her mom’s home and downsize her living quarters from an entire house to a single room. For four months, she traveled six hours on the weekends and worked every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to support this family crisis. At the end of her mom’s transition, Family Terrain felt like a slave to, rather than a member of, her family. She returned to her regular life, feeling sad, taken for granted, and angry. She had a constant pain in her neck.

For Melted Motivation, the dread started with a pinch in his lower back that would progress into a searing pain that radiated down the back of his legs. He felt fragile, like he could break with each impending step—that a wrong move would render him socially and professionally crippled. So he crippled himself: Melted Motivation’s desire to take on greater challenges at work, his confidence in personal relationships, and his want to explore new experiences were replaced with isolation, solo ventures, and a deep need to control his environment. Melted Motivation wanted his zest for life back.

Do you see yourself in any of these stories? Maybe you’re going through a period of stress, and your mind and body are feeling and showing the effects? Maybe a lifetime of physically demanding work has left you with aches and you wonder, and worry, about what happens next? Or maybe you’re at a crossroads in your life, and tension is keeping you stopped at the intersection when what you really want to do is put your foot on the gas and drive into the sunset?

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Yes, I’m going to say that my BodyLogos approach to strength training can help. But it’s not the silver bullet, you are. BodyLogos shows you how to connect to your posture, energy, Spirit Self, and the Universe in new ways, but you make mind–body change happen.


Each of the three wonderful humans whose stories are shared here came to me to learn BodyLogos’ unique combination of strength training and Tao theory. Through subtle alignment changes and precise coaching to channel energy flow, which I am now sharing with you as at-home video sessions, they learned to use their bodies as self-healing compasses.

  • Flourished by Fire found her skeletal alignment and learned to channel her energy. She used wrist weights to get her physical strength and mental confidence back, and slowly her hands began to relax more and react less. “You’ll never amount to anything” was replaced with the realization that “I am a recognized and successful musician and woman.” Flourished by Fire used videos 6 and 12 to help surrender the excessive tension she held herself together with and channel her determination in a more empowering and effective way.
  • Family Terrain shifted her posture to allow her chest and heart to lift and open; she realized she was trying to be loved and instead started loving herself. This shift relieved her neck’s reactivity, and she was able to strength train without pain again. The exercises shared in videos 5 and 11 and chapter 2 of The Art of Strength helped Family Terrain successfully reveal the old holding pattern, and reset a new one, to move forward with a more positive and neutralized perspective; shift your perspective today!
  • Melted Motivation learned to maintain a neutral alignment, gradually easing the longstanding holding pattern in his back. He balanced relaxation and strength throughout his musculoskeletal system, and in so doing revealed insights around his need to be perfect. Self-awareness led him to less pain and more energy, which reinforced his connection with life and people. Through the exercises shared in videos 4, 11, and 15, Melted Motivation decompressed his posture and maintained it through peaceful and challenging times; I want the same for you, and hope you’ll read and follow along.

You, too, can develop a conscious relationship with your pain and find caring deliverance from its grip. But I recognize that not everyone lives in New York City and can visit me to get started on the healing path. That’s why I’ve written my brand-new book, The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind, a how-to learning system (accompanied by fifteen 3D-videos) for releasing the tension—whether physical, mental, emotional, or all of the above—that keeps you from connecting to your life’s purpose and standing, walking, and living in your strength.

Stay tuned right here to my blog for the next six weeks to learn much more about what you’ll find inside The Art of Strength; each week, I’ll give you sneak peaks at what’s inside its pages.

PS: Want to know more about Flourished by Fire, Family Terrain, and Melted Motivation’s journeys? I tell their full stories in the book. Pre-order your copy today!

Order Your Copy Now!

Feeling the Pinch of the Holidays?

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Let It Direct Your New Year’s Resolution

The NYC craft fairs are an art-filled, outdoor, community experience that gets everyone in the holiday spirit. It is a unique and wonderful holiday shopping frenzy. I find myself dashing through them between clients, at the end of my work days, or over the weekend to get all my holiday needs in order. It’s all consuming and I love it!!

The holidays, however, can make us dizzy with fatigue, unsettled by the all-consuming whirlwind, and overwhelmed with what it will take to recover our best selves to kickstart 2019!

This mayhem is the perfect setting to recognize the root of our year-round triggers.
Yes, there is an intrinsic message in our tensions expression!

When overwhelm turns into physical pain our body is trying to tell us something.

The body uses location and pain as its sentence structure to communicate. While your brain remembers an event, it’s your body that harbors the emotions that accompanied an event. Emotional tension patterns settle in the areas of the body that animate the emotion. And it can carry these emotional tension patterns around indefinitely if you don’t listen to its cry.

Unresolved emotions create tension that distort your posture. That tension then gets triggered into reactive expressions when under pressure. The emotional outbursts, physical pain, even sickness that interferes with your joy for living is actually a low-grade drain that is always under the surface!

Locations of emotional expression commonly agitated over the holidays:

  • Shoulders form the widest part of your skeletal frame, their muscles shape your posture’s horizontal integrity. For this reason, shoulders carry emotions regarding your integrity––what you value, as well as, your sense of personal value.
  • Low back muscles protect the kidneys, which from an Eastern perspective carry your fear. Their muscles tighten and surrender to the same degree your fear rises and falls.
  • Hip flexors/Iliopsoas muscles balance your torso over your legs. Too often however, they are used to power your legs direction. This overuse of a relatively small muscle is over controlling the larger leg muscle groups. Control is carried in the iliopsoas muscles and its grip is felt in the fold or the center of the hip joints.

Emotional anguish around social pressures and family gatherings at holiday time are undeniable. It’s important to remember that the emotions that surface under pressure are always lying under our smiles of pleasantry. And their low-grade energy consumption can draw us further and further away from our smiles of truth.

Resolve your body’s cry in 2019! Correct your posture and consider your emotional misalignments.

  • For shoulder pain keep them physically positioned on the coronal plane––the plane between front and back planes of the body––and emotionally explore your relationship to your own value or the values you are surrounded by. Create a suitable active meditation, like: My value is always in my being.

  • For low back pain keep your low abdominal muscles supporting its physical curve and explore the emotions creating your fears. Create a suitable active meditation, like: My fears are not facts.

  • For iliopsoas pain keep your hip bones forward enough to rock your weight onto the balls of your feet and explore your emotional relationship with being controlling or controlled. Create a suitable active meditation, like: I can have control without being controlling.


High pressure holiday situations that escalate your tension into tantrum and spasm excavates the work that needs to be addressed in your life’s story. Recognize the root of your tension so you can weed them out in 2019.

Have a liberating new year!

The BodyLogos Practice helps you understand where specific emotions get trapped in your bodies’ soft tissue. Developed by me––Tammy Wise––B’way dancer turned Tao Minister. I use the emotional intelligence of posture to transform tension into strength.

In my new book/3D-video learning system, The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the mind. I walk you through mind-body techniques that will help you release tension and build strength simultaneously.

Learn more…

A Posture Quirk We All Share

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Rewire Your Core Strength

My life has been committed to dance, fitness and posture. And although everyone I have ever worked with has a unique tension template that presents a unique posture blueprint of his or her life story, there is a generic posture quirk that we all seem to share.

We typically keep our weight back on our heels rather than on the balls of our feet.

The most notable change in the human evolutionary silhouette is how the pelvis has had to adjust forward for an upright posture and bipedality––two-legged walking­. I suspect our generic posture quirk is illustrating that we are still in the evolutionary arch of this metamorphosis.

When our weight lags behind like this it causes our pelvis to tip, hip joints to compress, and our spine loses its S-curve. The back muscles, iliopsoas and quadriceps muscles all have to overwork. The result is back pain, hip and leg tightness, and we literally shrink our height.

The support needed to achieve our uprightness lives in the buttock muscles. These powerhouse muscles are the strongest muscles we possess; yet, we wag them, tuck them, and sit on them more than we use them!

The way to access the buttock muscles for the purpose of standing upright, and owning your strength, is to adjust your hip bones forward. These are the two pointy bones in the front of each hip, not the central pubic bone.

To do this, simply rock your body’s weight onto the balls of your feet and you will feel your pelvis adjust under you. Once you permit the hip bones to be aligned, your buttock muscles naturally engage so you don’t fall on your face.

The moment the buttock muscles engage you experience their power supporting your torso’s weight, instead of your lower back muscles supporting you. Also, you immediately adjust your attention from experiencing what’s in front of you, to experiencing what’s above you.

  • This upward attention is with gravity, the universal force that is constantly beckoning you out of the status quo to embrace what is unique in you.
  • Upward attention also stops the forward momentum that distracts you from being present.
  • And finally, upward attention connects you with the Divine, both within and without.

Your buttock muscles power you through challenge and pad your bones to rest. From start to finish the buttocks keep you in relationship with your power and vulnerability, keeping you stable and content with whatever unfolds in each passing moment.

In the Tao te Ching it states:

True wisdom seems foolish…

The Master allows things to happen.

She shapes events as they come.

To allow your buttock muscles to support your uprightness by placing your hip bones properly forward you develop strength and evolve beyond survival; if you clench the buttock muscles forcing the pubic bone forward misalignment and rigidity are, not only introduced but, what becomes your familiar go to posture.

As a race we are always evolving: physically, mentally, and emotionally, to align with evolving circumstances and environments. Strength is mastered by realizing the necessity to be fluid, neutral and present. Strength is lived by stretching to the outermost limits of an action, thought, or emotion, so regularly that it becomes second nature to be your whole self.

Wake up your buttock muscles with proper bone placement and you will rewire your core strength!

 

To relax the tension that blocks your strength, check out this FREE Surrender Tension in 8-minutes video!

 

Inner Space––The New Frontier

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Carol Burnett as Miss. Wiggins

Empower the Space in your Pelvis  

 

Remember Carol Burnett’s secretary character, Wanda Wiggins, played opposite Tim Conway?

She was a constant distraction to her boss, Mr. Tudball. In addition to having an exceptionally low IQ, her blonde curls, fitted skirt, baby-doll sway back and turned in legs left Mr.Tudball persistently bewildered and distracted.

It was as if she never fully stood up from her chair before she would shuffle across the floor in her black pumps, cowishly chewing her gum, readying herself to take notations perched beside the bosses desk. We would all giggle at the obliviousness of her presence.

Her posture told her story. She clearly had no interest in asserting herself physically or mentally, and though she had a nice enough hair-do, manicure and outfit, she had no real objectives beyond that.

Perhaps we were all giggling at our own propensity to embody the same unexceptional disimpassioned attitude. Don’t we all fantasize about how much easier life would be if we just didn’t care so much about being outstanding?  

 

If you’re over forty, you can (occasionally) relate to Miss. Wiggins’ squatty posture when you try to stand up after sitting too long at your desk. In the last two inches of getting to your feet your body creaks in retaliation before allowing a fully upright stance. If you’re over fifty you may not even make it to fully upright!

It’s as if the space in your hips and lower back silently shrunk while you were busying yourself in your seat, right?

This shortening of the iliopsoas muscle––which travels through the hip joints from inner thighs to lower back­­––can lead to the downward spiral of our fitness. Age and job demands can cause us to shadow Miss. Wiggins or it can be the agitant we need to lengthen the Iliopsoas into an upward spiral.

Sitting encourages tension in your iliopsoas muscles because the muscles become shortened, differing from its elongated standing state. The iliopsoas muscles also collect tension from their responsibility to direct your movement––physically, mentally or emotionally––and they become over-controlling when compressed inward for too long.

Balanced muscle use inspires purposeful alignment and attention.

Sitting tasks need standing time-outs to restore the space in your pelvis. When you fully elongate your iliopsoas muscles you place your torso precisely atop your pelvis. In that moment you are absolutely present in time and space––an opportunity for mental discernment and spiritual awakening. You are standing in your strength.

 

In the Tao te Ching it states:

The Master does his job and then stops.
He understands that the universe is forever out of control,
And that trying to dominate events
Goes against the current of things (Tao).

 

Many of us, unlike Miss. Wiggins, do pass through this aligned state, often unconsciously, and experience a sense of self and purpose in the world when doing so. To support this aligned state consciously unite the core trilogy of your physicality: abdominals, inner thighs and buttock muscles.

You may, or may not, meet tension in your iliopsoas muscles when standing up out of a chair (yet!). But by following these simple steps you will ward off thwarting their upstanding value. This is how you know your iliopsoas muscles are in their fully elongated uprightness:
·      Ground through your heels to stand up, lean your torso onto your abdominal muscles and keep it there as your pelvis travels forward.
·      To adjust your pelvis forward press your hip bones forward until you feel your buttock muscles naturally engage.
·      When your buttocks naturally engage stop the forward press, and gently rotate your inner thighs toward your central plumb line to replace the iliopsoas muscles’ compressed grip.

When your core trilogy is united experience the silence of the moment. Recognize the inner space you have created in your center and the renewed vitality you instantly possess. This space is the Creator in you––your Spirit Self.

 

The Tao te Ching continues:

Tao in the world is like a river flowing home to the sea.

 

Making decisions from this silent space is making choices from the inherent wisdom you were born with, combined with the gathered information you studied to possess. The intelligence that lives in your body and your mind are united for your greatest good. You are living in your strength.

 

To learn how to release tension in minutes check out this FREE video!

Relax the Need to Be Heard

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Find the Innocence of Listening

You know that sinking feeling you get when you have your hand up in a class or round table talk and the mediator isn’t calling on you? You have something relevant to say, but the powers that be silence you.

Typically for me, after recognizing that the dialogue was going to continue without my contribution, my hand would come down and I’d sit stoically stewing in, what felt like, their disregard. And this is where it would end.

More recently, rather than focusing on being disregarded, I started to deliberately take a step back and focus on regarding them. I’ve become curious about what IS being said. Does my point work with or against the conversation? Is there something I could learn from listening here rather than talking? Is my comment still relevant after they have finished discussing their perspective of the issue?

The outcome consistently surprises me. When the discussion slows down, the mediator addresses me and asks, “Did you have something to add Tammy?” With eager delight I speak my mind, I’m heard with genuine interest, and I feel honored.

When I let go of the need for others to respond to me, they became interested.

 

“Not needing to make things happen, one understands deeply.

Needing to make things happen, one learns about practical matters…”

Being disregarded is an old story in my life. It is not what is happening in my life now, but the old wound can easily be triggered. I have had to learn how to step back from this trigger––the need to feel heard and considered––to successfully develop in my career and relationships.

I suspect that I am not alone in this trigger!

Here’s what to do to unplug the trigger’s charge:

  •      First, take advantage of the stoic posture. Chin dropped and drawn inward shortening the throat, while the neck is elongated toward the sky like a swan, giving you the same alignment you would use if taking an actual step backward. Then rather than filling your neck and throat with stoic anger, open the crown of your head with innocence and wonder.
  •       Second, relax your eyes back in their eye sockets, remember that they are floating in water like when we float on a blow up raft in a pool, and listen from that receded and relaxed place.
  •      Lastly, recognize the added space between the eyebrows. This space focuses you to observe openly and you instantly enjoy receiving from the other(s).

When speaking we make things happen––yang––when listening we allow things to happen––yin. On one side we are giving, on the other side we are receiving, both are essential for a dialogue. Needing one over the other brings an imbalance to the dialogue that can turn the communication spout off or cause defensive responses.

 

“… Core and surface are parts of the same whole.

It is in being open and innocent that the

Possibility of understanding arises.”

Tao Te Ching

This became apparent in my daily life when I started to address my newly adopted parrot, whom has shown signs of mishandling, with receded soft eyes rather than gregarious let’s-be-friends eyes, she instantly started purring. She clearly felt more comfortable when I was in a listening posture. I believe she felt no expectations to be or do something she didn’t want when I was listening. It was a breakthrough in our relationship.

If listening is what creates trust in a relationship, perhaps we could all learn to soften our gaze and open our crown to the wonder of innocence.

 

Be guided to Surrender Tension in 8-Minutes with this FREE video.

Peaceful Duck

THE UNIVERSAL LAW OF PAUSE

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Peaceful Duck

When We Stop Chasing It––We Experience It.

Allowing myself to sleep in past 6AM, a gesture that I don’t often make to myself, I listened to my two cats scampering about in a determined crazy-cat frenzy. If you’re a cat owner, you know that untamed state that possesses our sweet kitties and then mutates them into wild beasts?

I indulged in a mattress belly flop, half awake and half asleep, in that magical subconscious paradigm.

“Do that which is not done by doing.
Make that which is not made by making.
Taste that which cannot be distinguished by taste.
Hold the same regard for the few and the many.
Requite the unkind with kindness…”

As I listened to their industrious pitter-patter for a long luxurious moment, I handed over my current labor-intensive chase to create my perfect world, to their obvious commitment to do the same. At this particular time in my life the culmination of life altering events were coming to fruition at once.

I was involved in the last days of the last editorial read of my first book’s deadline. I had just adopted an Amazon Parrot to join my already befriended Conure of 18 years. Both had been in the works for years.

The pressure to finesse the perfect book and the perfect birdhouse were both rooted in creating alignment in the world. The book’s focus being alignment between mind and body, the bird focus being alignment between adversaries––cats and birds.

When I finally decided to get up and face my day’s demands, what I found gave me pause.
I had created my dream! It had arrived!

A tiny sparrow was motionless on my kitchen floor. One of the cats had clearly captured it and brought it in from the terrace. I know this because, though I sleep with the terrace door open the curtain is closed, so the bird did not fly in.

Startled, of course, I tried to access the situation. Was the bird hurt?

I had heard that handling the bird would ostracise the sparrow from its’ flock. For that reason I placed a clean dish towel over it, swiped it up from the floor, and brought it to a pot of dirt back out on the terrace to offer a safe and familiar resting place.

As my towel was raised from the sparrow, it quickly flew away. All was well in the world. In fact, it was perfect.

All that ruckus I had listened to in my hesitancy to get up and start my daily dream chase, was the innocent witnessing of my dream being realized.

My cats had plenty of time to annihilate the bird, (I know this because they’re great mousers) but they didn’t. They choose to play with the sparrow (it was that sparrows lucky day!). Much like their mama—me—plays with the parrots.

When I reflected back on my mattress belly flop I recalled how open my pelvis was to the bed and how my quadriceps extended in a relaxed surrender away from the determination that fuels my gut’s passion. I was in a state of what Tao calls “non-doing” receptivity. I allowed the cats to be at the helm of the household’s direction.

“… Thus, one of integral virtue desires what is not connected with desire,
Sets no value on the rare goods of the world,
Learns what is not learned through learning,
And induces people to return to that which they have overlooked.”
Tao te Ching

It was a moment of trust.

So accustomed to using my quadriceps to drive my passions forward, this incident reminded me that, yes my quadriceps’ actions produce my future forward, but my quadriceps’ release recognizes that yesterday’s future is now.

Balance giving and receiving to move forward tirelessly.

 

Learn to release tension on purpose and find pause in your life with this FREE Release Tension in 8-minutes Video!

Loneliness is a Gift!

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Embrace the Self-Acceptance of Solitude

 

Pushing something away has enough fear, anger or purpose in it to fuel the separation. Letting-go has only the loss of what was.

Pushing away or refraining from the things you love, like too much chocolate cake or too many martinis; or to stop an activity you enjoy so an injury can heal, has an immediate reward—a svelte healthy body.

When asked to step back from something or someone you care about, like a lover or friend, or a job position or opportunity, what is the reward?

While some exit quietly out of respect, others believe they can change the circumstances and win back their favor; some become enraged so that they can reject the rejecter, while others blame innocent bystanders as not to condemn the dead. Neither respect, positive thinking, nor outrage or blame can fill the void of losing something or someone you want and love.

What in letting-go makes it worth the sacrifice of your wants and needs? What will ease the emptiness left in its wake?

Loneliness. That’s right, be lonely. Loneliness is worthy.

The solitude of loneliness brings the gift of self-acceptance, as long as you don’t consider loneliness as weak, feeble or pathetic.

This passage from the Tao te Ching explains it well:

Mold clay into a vessel;

It is the emptiness within that creates the usefulness of the vessel.

Cut out doors and windows in a house;

It is the empty space inside that creates the usefulness of the house.

Thus, what we have may be something substantial,

But its usefulness lies in the unoccupied, empty space.

The substance of your body is enlivened

By maintaining the part of you that is unoccupied.

Lao Tzu

Empty space within enlivens your mind and body because connecting with it is an acknowledgment of all that you are.

Loneliness guides you inwardly to recognize the vastness of you, the depth of your heart and the Divine wisdom that guides your material self. Emptiness realized awakens what is real, so you can step beyond what is known.

The Danger of Loneliness

The deep dive of loneliness can conjure up all that you think you should have done and all that you think you are, with an opinion that is harsh and often not your own. This level of experiencing unveils beliefs that you have adopted from past experiences and can lead to depression and motivate unsolicited reactivity.

But this level of experiencing is not the emptiness within. You are experiencing the unresolved holding patterns, held as tension, in your physical body.

To drop deeper into the empty space within, allow the maze of feelings that you are judging to exist just as they are. Separate what you are feeling from what you are thinking. Simply, be a witness to your feelings presence. When you feel a judgment come in, breathe it away and continue allowing your feelings to exist with curiosity.

Allowing yourself to feel is an action that requires practice.

You know when you are in the empty space within when you feel calm. Self-appreciation emanates through your solitude.

How To Transform Loneliness into Solitude

The triceps muscles are responsible for pushing undesirables away, challenging them helps you rise above persistent self-defamation. Triceps exercises also ask that you lift your chest upward, while simultaneously pushing resistance downward. At once you push a force away and lift your heart above.

Whether you are a fitness enthusiast or not, you can use your triceps to guide your attention. Any movement that asks you to push through your hands and extend your arms from the elbows uses your triceps:

  • Chopping vegetables
  • Writing
  • Pushing a stroller
  • Wiping dishes clean
  • Even the light pressure on a steering wheel when driving

Combine the physical act of engaging the triceps with the mental discipline to allow emotion without judgment or ill fate. With each breath visit your loneliness, not the subject of your loss or judgment of your feelings, you may be surprised how quickly the body starts to trust you and give you passage into what lies beneath your surface. Guide your mind and body into the spirited empty space beneath what is familiar.

You are exercising the mind and body as a united team that is for you, not against you. You are also believing that there is more than what you know, offering hope and possibility to your circumstances.

Remember Karate Kid, “wax on, wax off?” Practice pushing your attention to a neutral place to embrace the self-acceptance of solitude.

To let go is to let loss live, but to extinguish the meanings we place on it.

 

Be guided to Surrender Tension in 8-Minutes with this FREE video.