Find some good headphones and a soft, quiet, comfortable place to receive this guided meditation. An invitation into the you within you, to the good friend of the essence self. It is our regular connection to this sacred inner terrain that feeds the fruit of a good life, and is the whole of a whole life. It is our connection to inner wholeness that allows our innate genius and original medicine to emerge. Let yourself rest inside this practice, breathing in the fertile union of ebb and flow, like silk in the breeze, filled, fueled, quiet, connected, & still. Stillness is what creates love, movement is what creates life. To be still and still moving, this is everything.

There are no pre-requisites for rest. You don’t have to be burnt out, you definitely don’t need permission. You don’t have to be sick, you don’t have to have been hauling ass for 7 years… before you deserve it. Rest is a basic human right. Practice can help to create the context, for factoring in more high quality restoration into our lives, so we aren’t procrastinating as a way of steeling rest. Practice is a multi-faced mirror, a remedy & a roadmap for when feeling lost. It is a space for making sense of what seems senseless… it is a nourishment at all kinds of levels. Every big beginning has its start is some kind of pause, some moment of stillness. Make space for this, for yourself, so to begin the growing of your deepest dreaming. The biggest hurdle is just starting. Even the most immaculate bloom has a dirty beginning, and the evidence of small beginnings are found in the big magic everywhere: in the oak trees, fallen leaves, new grass, in every hole in the ground, in the scent of skin, in healing herbs, in the rain & dust & moon, and in the magnificent majesty on the inside of each of us. Every moment is either a distraction or an inspiration and its your dedication that leads the way. So keep doing you, because there is no confirmation number in this process of awakening. Become an auteur of improbable victory. Everything is possible even if it hasn’t happened yet. Like the flying fish, defying what we believe to be possible. Keep taking one leap of faith at a time, and with each leap of faith, you are building a launching pad for what is next, as you beam for the future.

Turn your heart toward the mystery and meaning found in your warm breathing body, moving by its own law, soft and intimately connected through every atom, opening from cell to cell to cell, become a natural reservoir of grace. Inhaling the articulations of ancient templates and maps embedded in your ecosystem, in the legacy of your limbs, in the hieroglyphs of your hair and DNA. Let the practice be a Haiku, reviving your instincts, allowing emptiness, for every gesture a safe passage into an unapologetic, inimitable wildness that has everything to do with your subtle body intelligence, and the unique codes that make you – You. There is an an ecstatic dignity, an opportunity to belong, to the flow, to the breath, to the inside of the form and the outside of the form. Ultimately we use shape to find our shapelessness, to remove the tarnish of the mind, and to pass through the door, into infinite spaciousness. Uncomplicated, unimpeded, relevant, & poetic we are, particularly when we are alert and restful in our essence self while expressing. Fill the bellows of your lungs with energy, pour hope into the bones, harmonize the polarities, and transform your lead into gold. Marinate in your intrinsic biology, your unstructured anatomy, that pre-dates any of the stories or experiences that keep can keep a person identified with the so-called solid body. You are the stillness inside of all movement. You are the unchanging in all changefulness, emptiness is your natural state. Move so as to return to your own primordial lap, and to the great cosmic vault, where every original instruction is written, in the form of sublime sensations, upon the walls of your inner belly, and in the part of you that knows, without the mind. Happy inside yourself… let this truth sing from your bones.

We’ve all been traveling our whole life to get to this moment. This moment can be the moment, when the inner pilot light ignites. Yield to a dynamic urge that becomes an urgency that becomes a burning sense of emergency that allows a seeker to emerge, to activate around life, like our hair is on fire, and to cease in that same moment from being a seeker. In this moment we can say yes, to seeing without eyes, to knowing without mind, and to being without being occupied or preoccupied with what might come next. To catch flame with the fire for freedom, right now. This is not an anxious iteration of now, rather the now that remains when the personality disappears. It is the vastness that arises, filling one with an existential eros, a longing to go on as the blossom, and to not go back into the bud. To hear and to heal, and to use any sense of helplessness to become better helpers. To identify when we have gone fetal around something & to transfigure the tendency, so to find ourselves at the frontline of life. To pay the truth service, not just the lip service and to have the inner resources for transforming drama into dharma. Practice is a kind of titration that allows one to become a more accelerated and integrated truth pattern, breath by breath, day by day. Truth patterns that allow one to walk into a room, attuned, generous, & ready to help hold and make safe in this hot time in history. Use these tools to better follow the guardian angels that are your gut feelings and to go from having a monkey mind to having a monk’s mind. Develop your inclination toward restoration, and wake up the brain so you can stay creative while moving from unknown to unknown.

This session is a well balanced flow of dynamic meditations that segue into a deep mudra mantra set. The work of Integrative Practices invites us out of the claustrophobia caused by concept, & into an experience of the truth that lies within us all. Very often time, these practices are a fast track for cutting through the distortion of the mind, leading us straight into the energy of the heart. The generative friction, of that shift, strengthens the power of our concentration, stimulated gratefulness, and positions us to witness — as neither experiencer or experience. Use this set to get clear about the How & Why, in the Here & Now. Savor that feeling, of when the practice ‘really works.’ Steep in it, like leaves dancing in water that become the infusion that heals & transforms. Even just a few moment, of dissolving into the accommodating radiance, that allows all life to exist, will clear the channels, so you can keep yourself in a state of receptivity.

Engage the martial art of listening, to the low drone of the blood moving within, as it nourishes your deep Yin nature. Really give yourself permission to feel again, to emerge from illusion and integrate with the you within you. Your practice is between you and you, you and your body, and you and your breath, so all you need is your willingness. In this first Qigong Gathering of Spring, we hold the majesty of the Fiddle Head Fern as our somatic muse. Open yourself to the wisdom of the invisible, to where all life begins. Reconnect with primal truths and patterns of wisdom, along the contours and within the core. Have a conversation with your human nature, harvest messages from your edge, and witness how your creativity liberates. Find your particular verve of freedom and flow in the foundation of structure, in the geometry, symmetry, and fractility of every form, and enjoy moving into a parallel universe where thought is less necessary and the art of no mind is primary. The practice is like a haiku, simple, judicious, uncomplicated, and always a sweet absolution from the chronic mental cramps that are so familiar. Let the breakthroughs you have from this session align you with a curriculum of soul that, is uniquely yours.

Utilize this choreography of Integrative Practices to notice the many dexterous nuances of your own aliveness, while getting into the space between stimulus and response. Actively engage in the endeavor of dissolution. Expose the myth of the ego, & open your eyes to sublime liminality. Introduce your mind to your heart, and feel the invitation into freedom, so your emanations can become evermore altruistic, and therefore useful. These practices create a safe space for the struggles we ceaselessly carry, they create a formality for forgiveness, and weave us back into what really matters most, so with each passing day, we trust ourselves more, in our relationship with ourself, with each other, and with the way we are spending our visit here on earth. Let every breath be a poem, for love is your oxygen, and freedom is your natural state of non-searching. Whatever can be describes is not who you are, so drop every worry, well wrapped in riddles, abandon your cleverness, and return to your natural affinities, 100 fold. Be the criss-cross of the Tao, simple, primal, sublime, sophisticated, and go on… ripening in the whirlwind.

Develop your ability to take action, to uplift out of overwhelm, & to come home into a rarified field of qi. Cleanse fear out of the psycho-anatomy, release the pressure in the subconscious mind, get into the blood chemistry, and the circuitry of your pranic body. The pulse of our path is to learn, practice, & repeat. Attuning daily, communing with the multitudes, and uplinking primal truths & patterns of wisdom into the mandala of the mind. The only real elegance is in the mind, and once this is created, all else flows forth from there. Creativity Liberates.

Engage the intelligence of interconnection, and plunge into deeper freedom. By moving and breathing, you give yourself back to yourself, and cultivate a biochemical capacity to process the overload of information that is coming your way every day. When you have a relationship with your intrinsic state of calm & ease, you can know sanity in times of chaos. Through an alphabet of exquisitely refined movements, you will introduce your mind to your heart, and come into a direct, sustained recognition of your essential nature. This is an embodiment process of tapping state changes that yield to trait changes. Within the container of practice, we continuously rehearse the journey, through conscious dissolution, sublime liminality, altruistic emanation, and devotion to the next right action. An IP session a day, keeps insanity at bay. Reach for the universe and it will reach back – and the very gesture of reaching is a resiliency booster.

Once change comes, it often comes in multiples, ranging from easily handled small changes, to the great ones that can become unwieldy. When this happens it can scatter our forces, making it harder to achieve order & staying power. There is, however, a calm center to everything. Even a tornado swirls around a calm eye. Most calm places are very small, but even a small cell of tranquility can become a seed for greater peace. Utilize this choreography, to find the still point that revolves with you, wherever you go, & in doing so, turn toward wonder, & the quiet formation of contentment. Explore the way you move when you are woven into the web of being. Measure out as much balance, as you can, for yourself, by caring for the qi you have inherited, and qi you are consciously accumulating through the practice of clean living. Thich Nhat Hahn spoke about the human manic tendency to avoid the painful places in our lives. We avoid, avoid, avoid, and if we can toggle into the polarity, which is embrace, embrace, embrace, then we can hold space for the healing and transformation, that is housed in the practice, and embedded in the terrain of daily life. The holding of this inner space, is what allows us to know grace, even when things are immensely imponderable. In the movement from personhood to presence, we get to the truth of who we really are. Through somatic inquiry & investigation, an alloy is developed in the spine, malleability of mind becomes available, & a deep feline-like quality of contentment is embodied. These techniques are expanders, that create a coherence between head, heart, hand, and Hara. When these connections are alive, then victory is your creation, and joyful living is your reality. Get to the why, under the dance. Use your practice to get very clear about what you must fulfill, before you leave this life, so you can then behave accordingly. Thank you for being part of this community of practice, wherein our aloneness becomes at-oneness… we are remembering together. There are very few things that will give us such abundant returns, as to take this daily time, to tune into the body, to iron out the irregularities of mind, and to continuously create anew.