Mystic Tech: Stuff they don’t teach in Sunday school, Temple, or PE
Body and Soul Initiation #1 How to Access Three States of Your Mystical Body and Learn What You Don’t Need to Integrate
Cynthia Winton-Henry, Mystic Tech www.cynthiawinton-henry.com
Mystics have been on the cosmic web forever. Visions, dreams, and sensory listening were once our nightly entertainment and the only means of travel. Elders often dreamt mighty dreams as the young were initiated into visionary realms. All people lived under the stars, in the meadows, and on shore-hugging mountains and knew themselves as part of this vast mysterious world. Humans today still seek awesome physical places to recharge their connection to the mighty web of life in and around us. We journey for days to taste the mystery of life when we can no longer sense surprise, awe, and wonder in our own lives. It’s ironic that the Great Web is more and more visible thanks to the Internet. Through technology we can again • connect to resources far beyond us. • use imagination to travel to virtual worlds. • extend our field of concern to the entire planet. • tune into multiple views of reality. • open to technologies (how to do things) as distinct from beliefs. • think, feel, and process information faster. • learn to manage and filter information. • empower visual, emotional, kinesthetic, & perception. 2
Humans are growing webbed feet, fingers and hearts. Some of us are turning into amphibious online web correspondents who teach others to navigate the web. Like Silicon Valley garage gurus we are in search of user friendly, elegant mechanisms to help people “hook up� to the mystic web. While I praise the Internet, the human body remains the best eye-Phone ever. We have more apps and cellular technologies than we know how to download and some of the same hardware problems. We crash, have trouble streaming too much rich data, and need to constantly update our systems. Still, I propose that bodies, not machines provide the best route to phenomenal living. You needn’t be beautiful, smart, healthy, rich, or have a lot of machines to go on the big ride! How? First of all, let life be a mystery! Knowing stuff is not the destination. Wonder is. And the best route to wonder? Start playing. Experiment.
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#1 How to Enter Your Mystical, Big Body You’ve probably experienced moments where you felt free, big, and as spacious as creation itself. When you opened up the sky seemed bluer. Think about that time. Now consider that around the world when people open their bodies they literally do open up.
What if by lifting up your arms you are hooking up to the BIG WEB of life. It’s like turning on your computer. Your body knows how to connect to a bigger, higher sense. Dancers, Artists, Singers, Kids, and Ecstatics know it. We can “open up” with our mind, but it takes more effort and isn’t as reliable. Include your guts, heart and will and WOWEE! You use more aps!
PUT YOUR FLAPS UP TO CONNECT YOUR BIG BODY! In humans three physical systems give us high speed, reliable connection: the sympathetic, parasympathetic, and enteric. The second brain in the gut is key to body wisdom. While many scientists, religious leaders, and academics focus on head and heart, Philip Shephard in New Self, New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-First Century reminds us that our gut, what the Japanese call hara, is foundational. Instead of listening to 4
the body with our mind, he encourages listening to the world with our body. When our kinesthetic sense is healthy and turned on, our psycho spiritual neurological circuitry will interplay. When we are embodied and aligned in body, mind, heart, and spirit, our soulfulness activates. One way to flip on your light switch is to put your
FLAPS UP! This is so doable it’s embarrassingly easy to forget. Just a century ago people put flaps up all the time. They prayed, played, and lived bigger physical lives. When singing, dancing, high play, and getting physical were our mainstay, creativity boosted us into higher states and changed our perspective.
Now we’re taught to act like machines: Produce, Produce, Produce and 5
feel shy and afraid of feeling nuts. If being down in the dumps feels too normal consider “cheering up.”
FLAPS UP! Have you ever felt a pinch between your shoulder blades like someone grabbed you by the wing? Ouch. You’re made to spread your wings if not fly. What if wing and back pain occur when your big spirited creativity is clamped down? What “holds you back?” Don’t just tell it off, shake it off!
FLAPS UP! Do you need some space? Indian Vedic wisdom names the five elements as earth, air, fire, water, and SPACE! You don’t have to go to Mumbai to know how precious space is. Space is needed everywhere. One way to get some breathing space is to take space.
FLAPS UP! This feeling is too beautiful to be left to kids and performers. Those who do yoga, dance, or InterPlay literally expand consciousness and open up to a world, an energy, and a power greater than the self.
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Once you know how to open up big and wide you won’t always have to walk around with your flaps up to explore mystical experiences of bodyspirit. Try this. • Reach out your limbs and open your heart. • Maintain this physical awareness. • Now lower your arms. • Enjoy this “flaps up feeling” inside of you with your arms down. Some of us are unconsciously wide-open. We over-extend much of the time. 7
I had a tendency to hang out in a big visionary state until I learned that this “flaps up” state needs to be a choice, not a demand or default. This was hard to shift since it’s delightfully addictive to feel big. It required that I learn the joys of being little. Do you tend to operate with your sensory flaps up or down? Do you open up with your mind and/or body? What if you could regulate that?
Step Two: Embrace Your Little Body We’re not designed to operate with Flaps Up all the time. Our everyday, ordinary body is as humble as an orange, yummy and sweet. How beautiful. Why not drop your flaps, hang out, be little and be sweet?
FLAPS DOWN! Little you is not a big know it all, saint, or wiz. You are designed to be simple and loveable, to lovingly create, play, rest, and be with each other. What makes this fun for you? Notice where you are right now. What might you enjoy about this place? When mystics talk about be here now, they invite us to consider the greatest adventure of all, actually living life on planet Earth just as it is, full of glory, beauty, depth, light, creativity and danger. In my living room the early morning sun streams in like no other 8
time of day! The rust colored couch feels soft and my coffee is hot. My dog, sits with his head tilted, resting on the back of the sofa, charming me. From my vantage point I delight in five of art that I made. Appreciating the world around us offers the way of contemplative wonder. Some spiritual teachings and activists seem to ask humans to be better, smarter, bigger, bolder and more out there. If humans were designed to be saints wouldn’t it be easier to accomplish? What does the Body Want?
FLAPS DOWN! We feel smug when celebrities, politicians, and wise people can’t maintain their big, idealized personas, or when the “high-minded” or just plain “high” people have to resort to substances and crazy behaviors to stay up. They develop intense shadows at that height! What if we are not supposed to be big all the time? What if we we’re not required to hook up all the time? Could being big and little coexist? Are we supposed to merge these states? How might we embrace both our Big Body and Little Body? How would this work? Studying wisdom attributed to indigenous shamans I learned that medicine people speak of two selves, what I’ve come to call the little self and the big self. (See Arne Mindell, The Shaman’s Body). They use a technology called twoness, the Twin, the Double, and the Other. Shamans don’t seem to need to integrate these two selves. They access “higher, visionary powers” through strong, full connection to divine support and 9
they also seem content to live as humorous, hungry, if strange humans. In a lot of ways they can live with more honesty, humility, and irreverent ease since they don’t expect to become great or godly. In Robert Wolff’s encounters with first peoples of Malaysia in his book Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing he learns that the groups primary healerdreamer turns out to be a seemingly average, observant fellow who only steps into his mystical role when necessary. As a dancer, performer, and minister I’ve explored the ups and downs of various physical states. Requiring myself to “stay up” in these states is impossible. Coming down likens to depression. Yet great spiritual teachers always acclaim the ordinary and invite disciples down off various sensory mountains. Disciples are encouraged to “chop wood, carry water,” live with eyes wide open, “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God,” basically enjoy life and learn to suffer well. We are invited to bring big body spirited eyes to our little lives. I’m struck by Gandhi’s and Mother Teresa’s struggle with ordinary life and the presenter who said, “I never met a person in the green room who walked their talk.” I note the glee we take in “reality” TV shows and art that display humans at their worst and best. Do religious leaders find relief by reaching up in mind and heart, and then believing this to be the path forward, ask followers to shove their little 10
embodied self up into an unsustainable higher state? I see this as harmful and unsustainable on the body level. Why not enjoy both our visionary, higher self and relaxed earthy self? Why not dance and explore life on earth as human creatures full of both flight and the joy of ordinary life? This is difficult when teachers put our body last in the line up. How can we play between the big and little bodyspirit?
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#3 Interplaying between Big and Little Bodyspirit The mystic body works best as a resource to the little self. It is not meant to be a dominatrix queen or king of the hill.
The role of our higher power and self is to reassure, bless, and enable us to create and serve, play, and rest. Spiritual teachings say, “Blessed are the meek” and “The first shall be last,” not blessed are the mighty, the puffed up, and the powerful, and whoever is first takes the cake. Putting flaps up we can 1) Notice how well we are doing, like taking a spiritual temperature. 2) Adventure in other realms 3) Seek direction 12
4) Bring wisdom and mercy back to the little self Thankfully throughout the day we can go to the bigger bodyspirit for refreshment and wisdom. But we are not designed to make a permanent home there. That turns us into little gods and goddesses. The good news? The little ordinary self needn’t be integrated with the higher self. We are meant to interplay between the little and big body. Awareness and appreciation for these states is a practice. If your little body is in pain, it is understandable to want to “get out” of it, to want to get high and to try to intellectually, emotionally, physically, and spiritually stay up. Plus it’s fun to “fly.” Unfortunately, “staying up” wreaks havoc on ordinary bodies. If you are grumpy and unhappy with ordinary, family life, feel like you’ve lost your everyday mojo, are burnt out, or are trying to maintain a lifestyle that is simply unsustainable, you may be forcing yourself to stay up too much. Your body will demand that you COME DOWN! Ask, "How am I doing in my “little life?” Am I having fun? Do I know how to play? What am I making? What interests me? Am I creating beauty and health as an offering in gratitude for the resources I use? If you want to make the world a better place but your body and relationships are ill at ease, you can tap your “higher self” using creativity and big-bodiedness to ask for guidance on how to create ease and beauty, here and now. Do you need to stop trying so hard to make everything better. Do you need to play more? 13
Our mystic body is hooked upon the web. We dance between our big and little selves:
When you feel wide open what information do you receive? When you are closer to your skin what information do you receive? Notice thought, sensation, ideas. This is your body data. Take note. With awareness you can notice and make wise choices for your own good and the good of others.
Self-Regulation As a sensitive bodyspirit it can be difficult to shift states. Being in my big body comes easy so I practice staying accountable to my family to help me to self-regulate. I listen when they say that they miss me or that I’m not being present enough. When I focus on being high and mighty my life gets harder. Does your big or little body draw you most? What calls you back into balance and ease? What might you practice? If you hang out too much in the in-between, it could help to play in the everyday. Then get your FLAPS UP in a big way through creativity and meditation. You may gain more psychic space if you experience your fuller scale.
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When one person connects with the web it makes it easier for others to access it. When you open to wisdom, I benefit. I’ll share more about this in the next Mystic Tech installment, “Body to Body and Soul to Soul: Listening with your Incredible Mirror Neurons.” It’s an exciting time for flapping, webbing, dancing around and being part of great love. You lift my flaps. That’s why I love this African song“I’m gonna lift my brother up he’s not heavy. I’m gonna lift my sister up she’s not heavy. I’m gonna lift my people up they’re not heavy. If I don’t lift them up...they will fall down.”
I hope you will connect with and draw down mystery. Feed you cells and heart for this is Wonderful. This is Mercy! 15
Peace, Cynthia ********************************************************************** Mystic Tech is a launch pad to research body wisdom technologies that support our deepest and most mysterious listening. It’s a place to honor unique wisdom coming to us through dreams, images, sensations, the arts, premonitions or whatever. Are you tuning in for spiritual solutions? Do you think somatic wisdom has a role to play? If so, Mystic Tech’s Hidden Monastery offers opportunities to share, receive companionship, and learn about embodiment and ensoulment on retreats, in online classes, through a growing library of resources, and meeting one to one.
Cynthiawinton-henry.com 510-814-9584 Cynthia@interplay.org Mystic Tech Facebook Page
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