“Miracles are the only thing that make sense.” This jumped out at me from a film I watched last week. I've been trying to make sense. To make sense, I mean really, wouldn't we need to engage all of the senses? What would that look like? Sound like? Taste like? Buddhism identifies mind as a sixth sense alongside sight, sound, smell, touch, taste. Surely there are others. Language is a sense… What about the speed of psoas? Or the key to masseter? It's tempting to create order by working sensation in around some murky presuppositions. And is that we are taking about - order?
a prayer
possible, impossible
While writing this note, in a tab in another browser I was scrolling through the movie to find the line again. I thought I remembered it precisely, the angle of the character's face, the energy with which it was said, the light. But I couldn't find it. It's like a dream. [The movie is 5 hours long and took 20 years to make so the material is dense. Also, it's title is ‘Until the End of the World’, you get the picture]
What about intuitive sense? A knowing which mysteriously includes that which can not be seen but is present. We feel it. We experience it. But we can't capture it. In trying to make sense of a world that is constantly in motion and seemingly so fragile that it might crumble into chaos, at once immediate/urgent and removed/at a distance [-life behind screens-] is there an invitation to make sense by Embodying our very own senses?
Despite our best efforts, our knowing isn't fixed but exists in a perpetual state of becoming; there is actually very little to hold on to. But before hurling ourselves into the abyss in an ecstasy of self abandonment, is there something closer to home? Simple but not spare.
Sensation is perception. It is awareness. And sense arrives as a collaboration, just as alignment in a posture is not stationary, but an active listening in. In Cranio we listen for midline - where purpose is clear, unmuffled, and identifies with itself as the source. It takes practice, a lifetime of practice. It is one of those very obvious miracles - something so ordinary that we forget to realize it's extraordinary. Something before we knew the word miracle.
There is a process then of tenderly nourishing an intimacy with something I do know ~ the question falls away inside a very particular connection to, as elusive and vital as desire, the desire for it all to be something else or for it to be just what it is, revealing both reality and imagination: sacred territory.
Inside Space, feeling latitude, thinking longitude, we reimagine, we reimagine what we think we know and realize a fiction: that we participate in reality with imagination. We make sense.
This spring (isn't that a welcome thought) I will be offering a series of yoga classes: Making Sense: Practice Notes which explore the movement of the present sense - presence of sensation. This is subtle work where we weave stillness and movement around the the static of anxiety, through galaxies of knees. And, of course, we continue our work on the table with Cranio sessions, now more than ever.
With love from the midline,
Molly