Presence communicates in all that we teach

There are many points raised in Colin's message. (Posted in a previous blog post here)
One that is close to my heart is that whatever we are teaching (or apparently communicating) at the level of form - we are also communicating our presence.

A clear, open and relaxed presence communicates effortlessly,  because it is not self-consciously inhibited by doubt or division. Nor is it seeking to validate or become something more or less than serves the shared purpose of the situation. Such congruency of being will serve towards a mastery of the subject involved, not as a perfection of some personal state of achievement, but as a fluency and an at-oneness with all dimensions present. For we are always growing in our capacity to discern and embody the qualities of Life. In fact a willingness to learn and to receive, is the basis of inspired teaching because it listens, connects with and learns from those it serves, rather than identifying itself as a personal status that presumes others are there to validate.

A conflicted mind gives conflicting messages and communicates an energetic in which even simple things seem difficult to communicate - and attempt to control a fear of conflict rather than listen or feel a way through to a unified act or response sets up a culture of establishing unspoken rules by which to operate. Following such rules is fundamentally a strategic and defensive gesture and unconsciously communicates a dissonance regardless of what the outer forms teach. This can easily become  an energetic where the 'teacher' is unconsciously making emotional demand for support of their students - so as to avoid upset. Which is very different from a clearly communicated trust - or even an overt request for support amidst a potential difficulty or indeed willingness to take a risk together!

The idea of support is often targeted at (and also taken advantage by) those who present a sense of lack. But a true presence of support reaches through such appearances and communicates a sense of faith and worth that inspire more from the student than they knew they had in them to bring forth. This is transformational.
But only by embracing such a transformational process in ourselves  - as students of Life - can we serve as the extension of such an opportunity, to others.

To open to glimpses of an egolessness of being is the stirring of the desire to abide in it without the interference by which we 'lose' the connection.  To honour this desire is to accept a calling in life.

But if we make our identity upon the apparent fragility of our connection to such joy, then we perpetuate an unconscious passivity to a mentality of division - and our experience reflects this back to us ... and we believe it.

Joy is full-feeling; a direct abiding in Soul. The experience of anything wholly felt is an experience of our being because its meaning is directly discerned and not filtered through a mind of interpretation. And abiding in wholeness of being transmutes the perception of loss into true presence - as we are willing to accept.

For me these things have always been in the dance because my life had been previously touched by the glimpse of egolessness in a way that I haven't been able to successfully ignore. Indeed the dance came to me as a way of integrating and aligning with such direct experience, that brought it out from any personal sense of specialness into the willingness to share and to serve. As a culture for uncovering and expressing an already present truth rather than as a means of getting or becoming something in our own right.

Trying to articulate these matters in terms of ideas can seem very complex, particularly if meeting a vocabulary one is not accustomed to. Yet the nature of the experiential realisation and practice is simple and easily shared. But I have found that it is not enough simply to share an energetic presence amidst a culture of expectation and demand that identifies with the forms of things without embracing the aliveness that communicates its meaning through all of it.

But nor do I feel for spirituality - (for want of a better word) to be lost to a self-serious problem solving mentality. The ego-sense is a problem solving mentality that will extend its employment indefinitely, because it perpetuates an imposition upon life that renders it problematic. The more you feed it, the more it needs to eat. There is no fulfilment in it beyond a passing show, lost even as it is gotten. When is seems to come up is when a noticing allows a pause from reaction that allows a more honest movement of our being to register a shared integrity in place of a perception of lack of integrity in ourself or others.

There is an innocence in sharing music and dance that extends an invitation to be moved and to know oneself more fully in the movement itself. It is wordless and intimate to the dancer's own willingness and trust - and in the context of the qualities of the whole group. And yet whenever we allow ourselves to be undefended to the movement of our being we automatically communicate that presence into our world, because the armour falls away that also obscured our perception.

I am not indifferent to the forms and styles and background contexts for they are part of a sense of honouring a conscious intent - not as authorities in themselves but as they serve the expression of a living culture; wherever two or more join in a willingness to share or receive in an extension of trust. For our true authority in life is in the gift of our true presence, without intervention or constraint of dogma, but as an honouring and in gratitude for a gift of welcome extended.

The withholding of our presence - and the witholding of the extension of trust in a genuine attention, begets a poverty of Spirit (of unified conscious purpose).  Into the lack of which every kind of mask and presentation asserts for its own private or group advantage and resists anything but heavily managed change by which to maintain and adapt itself unchanged.

I feel the dance serves as a way of reclaiming a living inheritance in which we are moved as one rather than just being one moving among many. Such is transformative, because we see each other and the world in a new light, but to be more than a glimpse that is quickly lost to self protective reaction, we have to grow a culture of abiding in such being and letting it become in us. Holding connected silence can serve this - but only as it serves a true willingness to be joined - and not if it becomes merely the required thing or an empty ritual. So often do the forms that once expressed life become the forms that inhibit its expression.

It is also so, that when forms of expression fade or are diluted, become devoid of truly shared passion or presence and then even pass from serving as a currency of respectability or conformity, that they can be reclaimed or redeemed in an energetic sense of expression felt and known as truly shared. Whenever there is a perfection experienced, there is a tendency to want to hold on to it - and this is the shift from presence to form. that introduces a separation into an indivisibility. Noticing this in our own mind is the opportunity to become weaned from an identification of thought that deprives by trying to get, because unless we can also let it go, we cannot let it in. Gratitude is neither loss nor isolation and a sense of our life as a gift is a context in which to discern through even the most difficult, to a rejoining of the dance. I would not pretend that we do not meet the difficult, but that in opening to our presence, we uncover a practical wisdom in which we find something moving us and through us that we had forgot or thought lost.

Thankyou for your attention - even if you just skipped to the end!

In Peace

Brian