10 December 2003: Resistance

The 9 of Swords has now been added to the Tarot section. As you can probably tell, I'm finding my Tarot project quite addictive these days. It's good to get addicted to a creative project, because then the project actually gets worked on. Not necessarily finished, mind you, but worked on. I'm not sure that the Tarot project has an end to it; it's more of a long-term hobby. Obviously, if I keep making cards, there will be a point sometime in the future when I will have a complete 78-card Tarot deck. But that just means that I get to start writing and posting my commentaries on each card, which are already accumulating in my head.

Meanwhile, my final project for this semester falls due a week from tomorrow, so no more Tarot cards or other diversions for the next several days - just working away at the project until it's done. After I write this journal entry, of course.

Yesterday night was the fourth session of the Initiations lab, and the theme was resistance. We all seemed to have hit a big patch of it. As I mentioned last time, two of our number have bailed already. Two more didn’t make it to this session, though in one case it was due to a prior engagement that had been cleared with Sherpa before the lab started. A couple are wavering, trying to decide if they’re in or not. Zap is probably going to bail out; in the closing circle she looked like she was in shock. Salamander, though not one to be deterred by difficulty, said in the closing circle that this had been the single most excruciating lab session he’d ever done, and he’s been doing them for nigh on twenty years.

I could feel my resistance growing all day. I did not want to leave my cozy apartment and go to lab. Of course, that also excited me – I knew a highly charged session awaited; I knew something would happen. Where there’s resistance, there is power and potential. One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned from paratheatrical ritual work is how to use my own resistance as a power source – a powerful bit of sorcerous strategy that can be usefully applied in many different contexts. So now, when I’m feeling resistance mounting before a paratheatrical lab session or an aikido class or whatever, I think, “Cool, I’ve got something to work with.”

Walking to the dance studio through a light rain, I made up a little Resistance Song to sing to myself:

Oh Oh Oh
I don’t want to go
I don’t want to go to lab!

I already went on Sunday
And I’m tired and I’m old
And my feet are sore and blistered
And it’s rainy and it’s cold

And I don’t want to go
Oh I don’t want to go
I don’t want to go to lab!

I want to stay home
And do homework or cook
Or watch the South Park movie
Or read some comic books

But I don’t want to go
No I don’t want to go
No I don’t want to go to lab!

 

I found this song immensely helpful. All you aikido students who read this journal are free to appropriate it for your own use – just substitute “class” for “lab” and you’re good to go.

Sherpa, with his usual fine attunement to such things, picked up on the resistance-heavy vibe in the room and centered all of the night’s work on exploring and using resistance, leading to a very powerful session.

One of the first exercises we did was to move through the space allowing our bodies to give expression to the question “Why am I here?” This mutated into a jog around the room, expressing the same question, and then we added vocalization. Sherpa suggested that we allow our vocalizations to distill down into a single word, repeated mantra-like, which perhaps would suggest an answer to the question. The word I ended up with was “home,” which did indeed answer the question: the reason that, despite my resistance, I have never missed a single paratheatrical lab session in seven years of doing the work, is that I’m at home in ritual space, like I’m at home in good aikido dojos or Quaker meetings or Bone Councils. These spaces are home to me because they are spaces in which the Silent Void is sacred, and in the Silent Void I am always home.

A discovery during the Heat phase of the warmup: doing boring repetitive calisthenics (like jumping jacks) works quite well, and strips away the distraction and vanity of trying to move in a way that’s impressive and/or original.

The big ritual of the night was a three-phase one. We lined up on the edge of the space, in no-form. The stretch of floor immediately in front of us was designated as the realm of Resistance (specifically, the Resistance in ourselves); the middle third of the room was designated as the realm of Death (specifically, the Death in ourselves); the farthest third of the room was designated as the realm of Love (specifically, the Love in ourselves). The direction: one cycle, out of no-form, into Resistance, then into Death, then into Love, and then all the way back.

I didn’t get to explore Resistance very long, becaue my initial reaction to Resistance was a sort of reeling stagger, and in the course of it I stumbled over into the realm of Death.

In Death, I soon found myself writhing on the floor, and I began to emit one of the most nightmarish sounds I have ever heard. It was a long, drawn out, wailing/keening/moaning sound - but I was making it as I inhaled, filling my lungs slowly and completely and then exhaling quickly so that there was almost no break and the sound went on near-continuously, with various shifts in pitch, for much longer than such a sound should ever go on.

When I finally stopped making the sound and staggered to my feet, I discovered that the process of producing this sound had had some sort of bizarre de-armoring effect on my lungs and my heart chakra, the exact likes of which I’d never felt before. As soon as I stepped into the realm of Love, I experienced a sudden, massive opening of the heart chakra. Bright green light came pouring out of my chest, suffusing my body and emanating from my hands. “Wow,” I thought. “Whaddaya know? The Love in me is green.”

(Okay, now you know my secret: the reason I’m such an evil bastard is that my heart is actually the Loc-Nar, from the film Heavy Metal.)

I had a really enjoyable psychedelic experience with all that luminous green Love, and then I walked back into Death, where I experienced a long, epic, silent, and not-at-all-traumatic Death that I could easily spend many more paragraphs telling you about... but outside my window the sun is already going down behind the Golden Gate Bridge, and I’ve dishes to do and a class to teach later tonight. So good night, and much glowy green stuff to all of you.

"And that was only one of the many occassions on which I met my death, an experience which I don’t hesitate to strongly recommend."

– Baron Munchausen