Three Exercises

© 2008 David Sparenberg
Please see also: http://dsofferings.blogspot.com

FLIGHT: A Shapeshifting, Movement Meditation

Mornings and evenings I will often do a warm up and stretch exercise combining movements from Shakespeare actor training, yoga poses, Indian Sacred Dance and Qi Gong. Usually I prefer this physical routine to my favorite chant-song by Krishna Das (the first tract from his Breath of the Heart CD). As I closed my eyes and released, letting myself go into it all one morning, what spontaneously happened is what is described in the prose segment of the visualization and movement meditation given below. This exercise is the record of an imaginative/imaginal shapeshifting, archetypal and ecosophic metamorphosis.

Since this first amazing and truly blissful experience, I have recurred to the exercise, not only with Krishna Das' accompaniment, but also with Sarah Brightman's rendition of the Gypsy King's song Tu quieres volver. What these two pieces have in common, making them equally workable in this application, is the slow, steady progression into a heightened (energy liberating) intensity, indeed, a felt-sense and consciousness altering, vibratory intensity.

For the practitioner: Once you have studied the words of this exercise, remember that the purpose is to allow yourself to shapeshift through the imagination and feel in your body some of the grace and wonder of what our winged relations experience in flight. Whether having a bird totem or guide helps in this, I cannot say; the Red Tailed Hawk has been showing up in my life with messages for years and more recently Raven is also talking! Such may not matter, however, but it certainly cannot hurt.

The repeated Zen-like poem at start and finish was originally independent and composed under the title Oracle. I have added it here as a welcoming and farewell to the shapeshift, specifically when used in workshop or group rehearsing for an enhanced aesthetic in performance. For this exercise can, indeed, be used as performance art, honed, polished, made breathtaking, ecstatic and euphoric.

The bird
is a circle.
It wants to fly.
It flies through the sky.

The bird
is a sky.
It flies
through itself.

It is a
storm bird.
It resurrects
the dead.

The bird
offers itself
to the volcano
of the sun.

The mothering
wind strokes
wingspan
and tail feathers.

The circle
crossing the horizon:
it is a bird.

The great bird emerges from the shell of human pride, progressively spreading its wings, more enthusiastically, more emphatically, more ecstatically, trance-like, expanding. The wing-arms stretch and move in rhythmic grace through rarefied energy of fields of air, overcoming the obstacle of gravity. A smile of joy uncovered; recovered from instinctual memory; paints its face in the mind. Eyes close... The heart is working. The chest of the great bird widens, the body carried aloft, with greater grace, greater beauty. More confident now, relaxed while intense, immersed—the dance of unimagined flight unfolds; unfurls like a sovereign flag of transformational, mortal, yet immortal, glory.

Until... until, breathing the very essence of what breathing is; breath! involuntary flow of life; the feathered arms that have mastered the love songs of the wind, in perfect circles, cycling hoops of dreams, gyrated into light, into life—the vision comes! The great bird, that began from a confine of calcified darkness, with sacrificial peace, enters the ball of the flaming golden and scarlet sun.

Beyond the beatitude of this event horizon, motion and stillness are indistinguishable: energy is one. The moment, holographic with eternity, is shared out, felt in the pliant density of roundness. There is no burning present, but there is fire. No flyer here, in this now, only flight!

The bird
is a circle.
It wants to fly.
It flies through the sky.

The bird
is a sky.
It flies
through itself.

It is a
storm bird.
It resurrects
the dead.

The bird
offers itself
to the volcano
of the sun.

The mothering
wind strokes
wingspan
and tail feathers.

The circle
crossing the horizon:
it is a bird.

Now, please, relax deeply, experience and enjoy. May the exercise bring as much of an inner smile onto your face—out from the depth of your profound beatitude, your eternal Eden, your dreamtime, your shaman-soul—as I have felt it giving to me.

Settings: Whenever this exercise is introduced into workshop or rehearsed for performance, I offer the following schematic selection. First there should be a lead or director. This person starts off having each participant show themselves mobile and work up a series of movements that will allow everyone to personalize and enter into the meditative exercise as unique presences fulfilling the set pattern. While these individualized movements are yet raw and rough but workable, the lead should next recite the poem Oracle, first time around, following which everyone moves into the Flight Meditation to the accompaniment of music. This gone through to satisfaction, the director recites the Flight prose, in turn followed by the resumption of music, and with all persons involved repeating their individual translations of the set-words into the movement vocabularies of their ensouled, differentiated while synergizing, bodies. This time through everyone should be releasing conscious control as much as possible and letting go into a mild ecstatic trance dance, morphing into imaginative flight. The result, felt and witnessed, will be intensified but diffuse, serene inner freedom and joy, and visible movement grace. (Recall how miraculously and easily a bird flies!) Once this flight process is completed, the lead repeats the Oracle poem, now to round out and conclude, adding physical expression and gesture, an actual sign language, to accompany the words and give them visual embodiment and direction. There is a spellbinding aesthetic potential here, so remember: repetition will result in refinement, enhanced subtlety, smoothness and mystery. This in turn will increase and make ambient health and well being, along with a genuinely metamorphic and uplifting show.

The effect, on both sides of experience—for doers and viewers alike—will be enchanting and beautiful, with many beneficial, residual affects on collective sensibilities, creating a holy space in the myriad theaters of memory. I can wishfully envision a time when the Flight Meditation and kindred shamanic/ecosophic exercise becomes popular in the way yoga classes now are in adoptive Western countries, or as are Qi Gong routines, which are widely attended in early morning parks in China. In practice, the psychological language here is archetypal and the experience it invites into is universal. It is, indeed, I would venture, part of a deep core memory language of a primitive sanity that is both mimetic and mythmaking, or perhaps more correctly said, is soul-making in a profound Earth healing and innocent, life balancing way. In as much as this assertion is true to experience, it may be one possible democratization of Heidegger’s concept of “dwelling poetically” on the Earth. This way of abiding in passage I like to call our Earth walk and there is no reason why this walk cannot include shared and soulful experiences of the freedom of flight.

So, with these ruminations given voice, once you have learned intimations of it, please, go and create a Spirit House in time and space to adventure and explore through, open up, shift some, play with the animal archetypes of swimming in the clouds, toward the sun, and let the flights begin! In this way, through this exercise, you may find again the childlike nexus of a radical amazement in experiencing the moment of fullness pierced and fertile with the presence of eternity. And if so, may it prove to be a portal for the re-discovery and recovery of an ecosophy of belonging in a partnership of being.

The two following exercises were originally published in THE TRUMPETER, A Journal of Ecosophy, out of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. For years THE TRUMPETER, named after the trumpeter swan or Canadian goose, was the leading deep ecology periodical in the English speaking world.

SACRED HOOPS: Peopling the Four Elements

Preparations

This is a visualization inspired by Caitlin Matthews and Ted Andrews.1 It is a good exercise for small groups; playful in a meaningful way.

What you will need to work with here is four sizable sheets of white or manila paper or poster board. With the flat side of an artist’s pastel, draw an outline of a magic ring, a circle, on each of the sheets. On one sheet, draw a green ring. Then on the next sheet, draw a white ring, followed by a blue ring, followed again by a red ring. The side of the pastel will give you a fuzzy line. Since this is desired, go the maximum fuzz! What you want to achieve is a visual effect similar to the paintings of Odilon Redon, thus providing yourself with four “soft and hazy” portals. Also, do not be concerned that the white ring is not so visible as the others. Having drawn it, you will know that it is there.

Next, you may wish to spray your colored rings with fixative, which keeps them from smearing and flaking. If you do this, be sure you spray in a well ventilated space.

When the papers are dry, arrange to stand up, glue or tape them on a a large, flat survace, such as a wall or black board, so that they are approximately at eye level if you are seated ten to twelve feet away.

Now, before each icon, place a votive candle in a transparent holder: one candle green, one white, one blue, one red; each color aligned with the corresponding ring.

You will, as well, want to provide either live or recorded mediation music. You can experiment with drum, rattle, flute or even Irish or Scottish harp. Whatever music is selected, however, it is important that it consist of a single instrument only. Sensory stimulation is desirable, over stimulation (sensory distraction) should be avoided. Our purpose is to awaken and focus the senses and spiritually activate the imagination, not bombard and dominate.

At this point, the obvious can be said. An advanced visionary could simply dispense with the pastel rings and image them instead, swirling and floating a foot above the lighted candles. Either one way or the other, the principle is the same: drawing the energy of an external sensory field into an interior point of creative-interactive focus.

When ready to begin the exercise, turn out all electric lights, ignite the candles, start the music, sit down, take a few deep breaths and relax. As you initiate your journey have your eyes open, but gradually shut them, holding the image you have been concentrating on in your imagination. Prior to closing your eyes, you should have chosen one of the colored rings to move through; that affinitive ring to which you are most powerfully drawn.

Here then is the content and wisdom of the visualization.

Exercise

You see before you four bright rings. Each ring is a sacred hoop of life, even as the awakened human sphere is potentially a sacred hoop once more, surrounded and penetrated by nature. The sacred hoops of the four rings are ways into the four quadrants of an immediate level of alternate reality. By entering and interacting with these quadrants you will learn and grow in deep, intuitive ways useful to your evolution, so that a part of you can play in helping to re-enchant and hallow human existence.

The four rings before you are the green ring of fertile earth, the white ring of breathing air, the blue ring of circulating water and the red ring of everlasting fire. Each ring is an opening to a world of imaginal Elementals: spirits of nature, primordial forms, and primitive, nature sages and subtle identities. Each and all of these clans or tribes, associated with the ancient, fundamental building blocks of creation, are known as the People of Peace. There is significance in this name.

The lives of the People of Peace are filled with ceremonial wisdom, beauty that is often uncanny, quiet but active grace. And it is within their power to bestow on you the title and the status of “a gifted person.”

Look now at the four rings: experience the soft light around them. Inhale the scents of the burning candles and understand. Through the green ring of earth are the folk called Earth Elementals and their way of life. Through the white ring of air are the folk called Air Elementals and their way of life. Through the blue ring of water are the folk called Water Elementals and their way of life. Through the red ring of fire are the folk called Fire Elementals and their way of life.

Beyond the hazy, inner rim of each colored circle are possibilities of experience highly charged with the potencies of nature and alchemy. Nature is a living sphere of amazing diversity, an interlaced composition of processional balances, sustained through constancy and intricate change. Alchemy is an art of transformation and essential discovery. It is one of the experiential disciplines of inner evolution and has its secret origins in incipient shamanism.

Now, concentrate on the ring of whichever element you are presently most powerfully drawn to. Mentally make a slow approach toward the selected circle, shut your eyes and pass through the hoop, thereby entering—with the eyes of the imagination—a unique plain of alternate reality.

Observe every movement and detail, and all changes, for everything in the space you have entered is alive and gifted with metamorphic magic.

Conclusion

You will want to spend seven to ten minutes in this exercise, observing, exploring, but not wearing out your welcome. Remember always to express gratitude before passing back from the “other world” to this. Once you are on the side of ordinary reality, take a few minutes to write down the content of your visualization (in the same manner that you would make a record of an impressive dream). Do not be surprised if you have carried back a poem or song lyric, a melody, personal ritual or a formula for creating a talisman or mandala. In most instances, however, such “presents” will only be given in a complete or ripe giving after three or more visits.

If others are journeying with you—as the same time and beginning in the same physical space—discuss your experiences together at the end of the exercise. Be freely expressive when doing so, using your notes for accuracy. The Elementals themselves are bound to all vows of honesty. Hence, a first lesson to be learned from their wisdom is to speak truthfully, with sincere feeling, warmth, dignity and integrity.

Moreover, you may wish to return to this exercise often, entering different sacred hoops as you need to align yourself with the strengths, beauty and meaning of the four basic elements of creation: earth, air, water, fire. These return visits will increase your joy and empower a further extension of your planetary identity. Are you an earth or water woman, an air or fire man? Are you a green warrior or alchemical troubadour? But remember, you must enter the hoops with a clean and shining face, free from the shadows of lies and the shifty manners of a thief. To know, to evolve and to receive: this is why honesty is imperative.

Variations

Finally, here is a way of using the sacred hoops visualization when you are journeying without partners.

As before, now too select your ring of power. Inscribe or imagine a circle with a four foot diameter on the ground or floor. Place the icon of your current ring of power at the center of this circle. After that, place one colored candle at each station of the four cardinal directions. Start with the red candle, placed to the east. Moving clockwise, the green candle follows at the south, the blue candle next at the west and the white candle last to the north. Light each candle, start your music and move into the exercise.

Once more, at the conclusion, write down what you have seen and heard. Now, however, since no other person is present, you have a power stone to tell your experience to. Do not be inhibited before this childlike play. A power stone is an ancient, symbolic witness to confessions, shamanic soul flights and the first rehearsals of sacred stories and ritual dramas. A power stone can be any stone you have found out in nature or that has been given to you by a mentor or special friend. It is also a stone to which you are unusually attracted.

The way to tell your power stone of your experience is to hold it or place your hands on it, and verbally “reintensify” your visualization. You can narrate silently or out loud. If you do exteriorize, speak quietly and intimately, and learn something new and wonderful about the musicality of your voice. The human voice is an instrument of many charms.

1.THE ELEMENTS OF CELTIC TRADITION by Caitlin Matthews (Elements, Inc. 1991); ENCHANTMENT OF THE FAERY REALM by Ted Andrews (Llewellyn Publications, 1993).

SEEING GESTALT ECOSOPHY: Two Biocentic Meditations

Statement of Purpose

Everything we do with the imagination holds the potential for opening up the imaginal (alternate) reality. Everything we experience in and receive from the imaginal realm possesses a potency that we can translate into helpful and healing experience in the world of everyday consensual reality.

This transference; which begins with primitive reverence, passionate re-identification, and dialogical intention; leads on to the liberation and “soulful” ennobling of the senses, the emotions, and the languages and silences of feeling and thinking. Then, from that inwardness, the same energies can be moved toward the rehabilitation of the great ordinary, which is currently endangered by long term ideological misrepresentation and pervasive misuse.

Roundly: this connects with that and so on; one faculty or term of being stimulates the next; one dimension (world or body) penetrates another.

I. Winged Serpent: Symbol for the Primal Earth Warrior

The earth and all of her life forms are under siege, and the elemental spirits of nature are calling out the shaman-names of sundry gifted people, penetrating the mystic layers of personal identity with their still small whisperings and subtle languages. Empathizers, shapeshifters, protectors who are attuned and native Earth Walkers, are needed. In the movements of the wing; the breath of sky that hovers over and vivifies the earth (arousing the generative and cosmic life force), the name of your spiritual essence is sounded. Do you know this name? Can you recognize it when it reaches out toward, spirals deep into the interior where the archetypes interface with your existential identity?

Patiently, you have been listening, longing for this lamentational, but heroic, music. Now you hear the summons, the cry of despair, the call to rise up on phoenix wings from the wasteland ashes, and you respond.

See yourself sitting cross legged in the grass, absorbing the sorrowful communication, feeling a bonding with pain and anger (ecstasy and rage and even evolutionary transcendence). In the eyes of your imagination, you behold the primal effective cosmology of our species: a solid rock, unhewn, a living tree, unpruned, a source of fresh water, not dammed or polluted, as mirror, mystery and protean conveyance. You know that these presences are foundations of planetary life, habitat, and are teachers to human culture of the earth’s sustainable ways. You know the danger to even the most basic components of physical and spiritual sustaining. You shudder under the apprehension of this dread.

Still sitting, as the primal cosmology begins to fade from your inner vision, you next see a green snake coiled at the base of your own spine. The snake awakens and begins to ascend the length of your backbone. Its body is sinuous and mysterious. It is so very green that you feel and even smell the richness of its fertile color. And the serpent’s slender energy, slithering upward over bones and nerve endings is a sensual contrast to the rigidity of your back. The felt-sense tells you how the serpent movement wants to sway you, to make you too more undulant, undifferentiated and mysterious.

Here, as the green snake climbs, you are conscious of a thunderstorm generating at the top of your head. The dark clouds billow and rumble and a powerful bolt of brilliant white lightning flashes, stroking at the base of your skull, then shooting downward along your serpent-coiling spine. The energy of the lightning is amazingly exciting and mysterious.

Steadily the earth snake ascends; swiftly the sky bolt descends. The two living forces (two forms of creation’s inherent polarities) meet in a swirling explosion of verdant fire in the center, at your wounded heart. There the powers dance in a bold picture of ecstasy and struggling fusion, generating the new, composite image of a brindled dragon, a green and white-fire winged serpent.

You see the colored body and movements of this creature, alive inside the pumping chambers of your blood filled heart. The wings beat a heart-strong rhythm, the tail thrashes in excitation and the diamond eyes flash with electric fire.

The dragon you visualize is the symbol for your response to the summons of the elemental spirits. This winged serpent transforms the erosive acid of earth affliction, of sorrow, despair and mounting rage into a fighting spirit, a deep penetrating and protective fire.

Now, with the symbol of the green-bellied dragon imaged in your heart, you are empowered to become an earth warrior. An ancient and determined courage begins to sustain you. A righteous ferocity to protect the integral body (the alter stone) of primal ecosophy, to guard over the roots of the shamanic tree of life, and to watch over the source of processional waters (of initiation and metaphoric crossing-over), is pulsing within you, as free, abundant energy, as re-identification and redefinition, and as an action oriented purpose.

Sustained, awakened by the power of these pulsations, can you next recollect the secret, beautiful language of the winged serpent? Sitting cross legged, you continue to look and listen, opening to learn more of the alchemical creature’s deep wisdom. You are luminous with heroic fervor as you understand that the green and white dragon, in sleep, in dream, in flight and in battle, is a born creator of natural gestaltin: an earth chosen defender of vegetative, mineral and atmospheric circles.

II. Floating The Tree: A Shamanic-Kabbalsitic Visualization

Sit or lie down in a relaxed, comfortable position. Now, close your eyes. Picture a tree in full leaf. The trust is reddish brown and sepia and the bough is spellbindingly vivid green. The green is large and around it is a circle, a ring of brilliant, medium blue, like a flowing color painted on the air.

As you begin envisioning, you see only tree and surrounding blue ring. At the initial level, the interior (enclosed) space between tree and blue circle begins to pulsate and reveal a web, sparkling on your inner eyes with the fluctuations and colors of a holographic image.

When you have successfully established each of these elements—the great, green tree, the bright blue circle, with the many colored web radiating out, before and behind tree and encompassing ring—you may begin to engage in spontaneous, meditative prayer, freeing your body, imagination and mind of frees, worried, constricting habits; freeing your dreambody.

Once you are truly unburdened of experiential pain and distractions, allow yourself to enter the visionary mandala and float in the luminous air above the holy tree. This is accomplished by releasing yourself, as your now liberated dreambody, into archaic, ecstatic buoyancy, and identifying with the light, even as you concentrate on the verse of sacred intention: “I will meditate on your wonders” (Psalm 119;27).

Now, as you float the tree, the web in the intimate ambience is wondrously transformed into a soft, multi-colored wind, swirling around you, breathing colors of warmth, energy and compassion into your life. In this same other dimensional time and space, you can feel and absorb the aroma and vitality, the unity and mystery, of green life, and of the aliveness of all colors, reflected here from a deep supra-conscious, cosmic source, which is the same to you as an everlasting spiritual fire (in the fire of the soul) and an eye of several polychromatic irises (in the eyes of the soul). And you know that this perception and understanding is the medicine wheel of healing.

Thus, as you are free to float and soar with wind and light, breath and wonderment, your eyes and heart may open and commune with the multiple forms of power inhabiting the leafy branches, trunk and roots of the abundant tree. These visionary forms can range from categories of angels, such as maggidim, ofanim, cherubim or seraphim, to winged and four legged peoples of the earth, swimmers of the waters, or to gifted representatives of different races and tribes, from humanity’s ancient ancestry; or even to elemental spirits or holy (imaginal, magical, mythological and alchemical) creatures.

Having seen, return now to your normal body and your ego-integrating consciousness, remembering to give thanks for the journey just taken. Remain grateful through ensuing behavior that the presences you have communicated with are accessible in both our natural and alternate realities. Know, in all ways, that the ongoing democratization and normalization of non-ordinary experience, of alterity, leads toward the restoration of creation and the energy reinvestment of the great ordinary with sufficiency for personal renaissance and planetary renewal. This is again expressed in the beauty of the Psalms (77;8): “ I mediate with my heart and my spirit seeks.” And the truth of this is not complex, or based on intellectual debate or argument, or hard to grasp: What we see defines how we think. What we say sets limits to our thinking. What we see, speak and think determines how we act.

*These exercises are from the forthcoming volume FLIGHT: A Book Of Winged Words – parables, prose poems, reflections & visualizations – by David Sparenberg. For permission to use any or all of these exercises, please contact the author at EarthArtsTurtleIsland@yahoo.com.

ATTENTION WRITERS & LITERARY ASPIRANTS

If you have a book in progress or literary project; have gone as far with it as you can solo; and are in need of some editing, co-authoring or research assistance, I have an editing service to offer. What I am offering is spiritually sensitive, profession, writer friendly and affordable. If your project is serious, together we can bring it to full fruition and empowerment, providing you with the optimal possibility for future publication. If you are serious and interested, please contact David Sparenberg, Path Finding Editing Services at EarthArtsTurtleIsland@yahoo.com.

During much of 2006 I was in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Part of that time had me involved with editing and revising LEAPING INTO THE UNKNOWN, the autobiography of Florchita Bautista. Shortly before her book was published, the author asked me to write a synopsis, which she finally used as a published preface. You can read this Preface as a work sample and sharing of sensibilities on a blog where it was recently posted: http://SparenbergBautistaPreface.blogspot.com .