Hard to find adjectives

It is 14:14, the ideal time to start today’s blog as always, every Monday. Today I am a little vague in my head, yet I feel a clarity in my mind, and tiredness and desire in my body. Maybe vague is not really the best word to describe my present state of being. But I cannot think of another adjective: maybe loaded, confused, multi-layered, overwhelmed? It doesn’t make sense, does it? But we don’t always have to make sense, do we?

This last week has been so diverse in experiences, movement, actions and emotions, that it feels like 3 months. It is difficult to find the right adjectives that would describe what I feel.  I arrived from Istanbul yesterday after a very “rich”, deep, emotional and busy three days. This morning my walk with Gigi was sweet and long, because I hadn’t seen her for a week, and we missed our forest. There was amazing sunshine, which still is flirting with us through the branches right now, and we felt blessed with fresh winds, sunshine and a lot of mud!

We walked and as we walked my thoughts started to fly around in my head, I really needed to arrive at my usual walking rhythm. I always need time to arrive and land in the new reality. But this time is taking a while. And I would like to take this space here today to allow the writing to help me with the landing.

It may not directly be connected to my writing process of the so-called Manual, but somehow indirectly it is connected to the themes that I have been writing about in the past week. Oh yes! I have been writing every day, as promised, sometimes a paragraph, sometimes a phrase, sometimes just reading and sorting notes… but I have been writing, until the past three days of the week. Thinking and digesting was my main action.

I have a feeling that sometimes emotional states that are triggered by agents outside of our bodies, or by other people who are important to us, act as arms holding us back to land into ourselves. They form a kind of net, some buffer which doesn’t allow all of our being to land into the body… Something stays behind, above or next to ourselves floating in the nearby space.

I don’t know if you have ever felt this way… it is a kind of not really being in oneself kind of feeling. No one sees it, because you act normally, you do what you have to do, and your mind works at multiple levels and speeds, but you feel it: you are not really in yourself entirely.

This has been the state of being in which I have been and still am a little bit these days. 

I made a short break to the blog: the day has passed by writing the two weekly somatic newsletters one in Turkish and the other in English (not always the same) and then doing some preparation work for the classes of the Level 1 Embodiment Through Movement Course (in Turkish), and after I had some domestic chores and finally visited my mother-in-law in her elderly home, where she resides like a queen, gentle and sweet, and we talked about life and death as always, because she has been saying that she is leaving slowly… It’s been a year that she feels she will die, but still is the queen!

I don’t exactly know if all these activities have helped me to land into myself… my heart feels floating still and not so much at peace. But I will just have to stay in this mood patiently until it transforms.

And here, in this statement do I find the connection with what I am living and what I am doing in Somatic Dialogue. The principle of landing, landing into the body fully with the sensations, the thoughts, the emotions. Patiently moving (we call it prayers), patiently praying in movement and waiting for the mind to settle quietly into the body and follow it while we work.

After my experiences of the past three days, when I was accompanying, helping, caring, loving, listening, feeling and seeing, I somehow think that finding the life discipline to bring the mind closer to the body is of utmost importance. Let’s think logically, I am not a neurologist nor a brain surgeon, but from humbly working with movement and the body for more than 30 years now, I can say that the mind/ brain is in very close relationship with the body/action. It has a magical connection that is fuelled by love, attention, interest and care. 

The body of course works closely connected with the brain, otherwise we wouldn’t be healthy. But taking this for granted and just trusting it’ll work is not enough in my opinion. We have the ability to put our mind and body at work by bringing awareness to our perceptive systems, so that we can create paths of love, attention, interest and care in ourselves. Only then, and not only once, but regularly as a way of life, can we keep our brain and body in harmony, so that we prevent the brain from shrinking, the body from giving up. 

Of course the idea is not to live forever, and live long, or stay young… Death and ageing, deterioration are inevitable, however the way we experience the effects of time and life on ourselves can be worked on, so that we don’t lose one or the other, but we keep them closely in a love relationship until we die. Now, you may say but what if our genetic predisposition is not favourable? Well of course, we do not have control over our physical and genetic constitution, and the idea is also not to be in control. On the contrary, to be able to be in a surrendering flow consciously and willingly. Ageing and dying willingly, in harmony. Does this sound crazy or insane? Well, frankly not to me. I would love to be alive enough so that I can face death and die consciously, flowing through pain, physical and mental weakness, but have my emotions as my best friends, because I have lived fully to know them, so they cannot surprise me, and keeping love in my heart, so I never get weary of any information or anything I perceive. 

I would like to grow old back into my innocence after having lived a full life, so that I can be at peace with every wrinkle, with every new limit, as limits constantly move and change, because they are flexible. Maybe it sounds ambitious, but I believe it is worth trying. 

What else do I have to work for anyway? Of course money! Money can help a lot in life and is very important, but money without the magical inner life cannot help us facing death.

Oups! I got a little carried away, but I warned you that I am not really in myself today, and I guess I will need another night and another walk in the morning in order to really land back into myself after my travels last week.

But I hope that I have not been too pessimistic today… The past few days were not all bad at all, there were many moments, where a conscious loving touch brought back memories, where baby laughter made the old cry tears of happiness, where young and old looked into each other’s eyes and shared precious emotions, where questions stirred the heart, and unexpected encounters happened. 

Such were my past few days in Istanbul with my family. So precious!

As for the writing, I would actually quote a little paragraph made of many questions from the book. I shouldn’t really be doing this, but it is a tiny little paragraph, and it wouldn’t do any harm… So here it is: “How can I be with myself when I am invited to do so during a task or an exercise? How do I seize the moment and dive into the exercise, making the most of it? Surrendering to the moment, to the emotion, to the movement, the liberation, the resistance? Each time I surrender or not, each time I relate to a task or waste that time I have the chance of finding out something about myself. The ultimate aim is to bring awareness to how I relate, work, act and what I feel.”

I think it is time to end this blog today, as I believe it is time for dinner :) I haven’t been sharing music today, but I will treat you to today’s walk in the forest with a couple of more photos. It was a lovely day.

See you next week.

With love

B