3 January 2004: Nourishing

Well here I am, at home being sick.

Ick ick ick, I hate being sick. On the other hand, I really do need some downtime, time to write and process and rest and absorb and transition, and I wouldn’t be taking that much-needed downtime right now if I wasn’t sick, as God well knows.

So many breakthroughs in the past week. Most were joyous, some were subtle, some were easy, some were hard-won. Yep, time to lie back and let it sink in. Tomorrow morning I’ve got to go teach my first aikido class of the new year; I’m expecting a whole lot of beginners and I’ve got some new ideas on how to teach them. And tomorrow night is lab again. I’m usually sick once during the course of a lab, and it’s usually good for me. Makes me pay attention on a more subtle level. I teach aikido well when I’m sick, too, for the same reason. I can’t show off, I can’t muscle my way through it. I don’t have as much energy for vanity when I’m sick; I’ve got to stick to what’s essential.

So, going back to Tuesday night and the tenth session of the Initiations lab...

All 15 lab participants were present this time – 16 if you count Sherpa, who again participated for the first half and stepped out to facilitate for the second. It is indeed a great group. Sherpa feels that it’s likely that our work will develop well enough in the remaining sessions to merit some of us continuing to meet in February and March to develop the work into a public ritual performance piece of some sort.
This was a great session for me, a breakthrough session, one of the best I’ve ever had.

My first goal this session was to implement Sherpa’s suggestion from last time, to experiment with moving my center of gravity around between my hara, heart, and head. I experimented with this during my initial exploration of the space, and once I’d loosened things up that way, the shifts of my center happened naturally whenever they needed to throughout the session, without my having to think about it. It did indeed result in my accessing a much broader bandwidth of movement and experience.

My personal polarity ritual this time was Vanity/Fun, and it was rich and highly charged and, yes, fun. I’m finding myself increasingly able to give expression to my sources through my whole body and voice.

My continued in-depth exploration of Vanity in this lab is proving to be extraordinarily productive and valuable. That whole Inanna-in-the-Underworld myth that I tapped into early on – relinquishing vanities as a way of opening to initiatic experience – has remained relevant and continues to work for me, both in the lab sessions and outside of them in every aspect of my life.

The joyous breakthroughs I’ve had in my life and relationships over the past week were the result of my being less bound by vanity. The harder breakthroughs were the result of my running headlong into big chunks of vanity that I hadn’t yet discovered and relinquished, and which, now that I have the necessary tools and understanding to deal with them, were suddenly moved forward, like God advancing a chess piece, to a position in which I had to deal with them right away before they did irreparable damage to very important relationships in my life. The real meaning of God’s promise of “Ask and ye shall recieve”: commit to working on a given aspect of one’s karma, and suddenly that work becomes inescapable.

Three group rituals this time. The first, a simple group polarity: Creation/Destruction. The second, a group trinity: trine altars of Creation, Destruction, and Nourishing.

The first two rituals were preparation for the final ritual of the night, which took the Creation/Destruction/Nourishing trinity into interaction, much like the interactive Four Elements ritual in the seventh session. We all started out in no-form in the middle of the room, each facing whichever corner was dedicated to the source (Creation, Destruction, or Nourishing) that we felt had the most to teach us. From no-form, we moved into the corner we were facing. Once we’d established our own connection with the source we’d chosen, we began interacting with the others in our corner, forming a supportive “family,” so that there was a Family of Creation, a Family of Destruction, and a Family of Nourishing. After that, we moved out into the middle of the floor to interact.

As it turned out, 2 of us opted for Creation, 3 for Destruction, and 10 (including me) for Nourishing. Being a part of the Family of Nourishing was even more happy than it sounds. I danced around nourishing the Creators, the Destroyers, and my fellow Nourishers, and being nourished in turn. The energy in the room was so nourishing that I didn’t get tired; I was surprised, when the ritual ended, to realize how hard I was sweating and how ready I was to sleep. And it did indeed have a great deal to teach me. I learned how very nourishing I’m capable of being, and I learned ways to open to nourishing contact such that a very little goes a long way, and I learned that it’s an important part of my work right now to not only be nourishing toward those who approach me, but also to initiate nourishing contact – something my shyness has usually interfered with in the past, but it’s time to drop that; shyness is just another facet of vanity.

My experience in that ritual had a strong and most excellent influence on how I related to people in Bone Council and at the party, and I plan to continue to pursue that direction in the coming year. The ritual also generated my one New Year’s resolution this year, which I formulated right after the lab session and articulated in Bone Council: touch people more.