Your Internal Magic

Liberating the Body

Chapter Six

YOUR INTERNAL MAGIC

THE PEAKS OF EXPERIENCE

When you allow your body to ‘play’ with possible movements and feelings; when you allow your emotions to flow and stretch themselves through their huge range; when you unleash your mind to soar and swoop amidst its immense territory of memory and experience; when you permit the unknown in you to move, recognise itself and cry out its song, you stand upon the very peaks of your experience. This is your wholeness knowing itself. This is the wonder of inner-directed movement. When these experiences come again and again, you will know them as the greatest moments in your life. They are moments that will add colour to all that comes afterwards.

Getting the Best Out Of Your Practise

The central secret of inner-directed movement is the open state of mind and body. In using this ‘piano key‘ feeling and waiting for your being to declare itself spontaneously there is a key that unlocks a fullness of experience otherwise missing.

The openness, the spontaneity, and the fullness of experience are intermeshed. Understanding this enables you to find the greatest satisfaction in yourself through inner-directed movement. Missing this point you may take another direction. If you miss this point you may experience creative movement, or improvisation dance, or movement to music – but you will not be experiencing inner-directed movement.

When you experience yourself as a seed growing, or as the element of water, or express yourself in the open approach, the end result is not just a pleasant period of physical movement. If it were, this book might just as well be called Movement to Music.

If you were only a body that might be enough. You are more than just a mass of chemical and biological processes. You have emotions, you have hopes and fears. You are an integral part of all you see around you as external. You are the wonder of life.

When you open to the totality of yourself and allow its expression you will experience excitement. You will know that more of yourself than usual is involved in what is happening to you. Much of what emerges will be unexpected, and creative.

If, having used the graded approaches described, you have not felt that excitement, not touched the unexpected, there is still more for you to discover. But if you have felt the magic, there is no end to it. It continues forever, creative and new, though you bathe in it a thousand times.

Using Your Ability to Relax

The power to reach into your unconscious resources takes more than determination. To achieve it the conscious mind needs to become quiet and receptive. I am not suggesting that the passive, receptive state of mind is superior to the dynamic, focused will. However, each is an aspect of our total range of mental function. Each accesses different possibilities or processes. Having one without the other is as incomplete as having an accelerator pedal without a brake on a car. Although these functions on a car are totally at odds with each other, they are both necessary. The ability to become passive and yielding is as vitally necessary as being active and resolute if we are to be whole.

The power of this state of mind has been observed by men and women in other cultures for thousands of years. Its importance has been recognised as so great that the yielding or quiet soul has been depicted as of supreme importance in seeking personal healing and enlightenment. This mental condition has frequently been symbolised as a holy virgin, the mother of God. In Christianity we see this represented by the Virgin Mary. Paraphrasing what she represents one can say that when the soul does not hold preconceptions, then it can conceive of and give birth to its own innate potentials – represented by Christ, the healing and regenerating process within human beings. In Buddhism a similar process is represented by Maya the virgin mother of Buddha.

Joseph Campbell says in his book Myths To Live By – Bantam – “There are myths and legends of the Virgin Birth, of Incarnations, Deaths and Resurrections; Second Comings, Judgements and the rest, in all the great traditions. And since such images stem from the psyche, they refer to the psyche. They tell us of its structure, its order, and its forces, in symbolic terms.”

If your experience of inner-directed movement is already spontaneous and creative, then you already know how to ‘wait’ or yield. If not, use the approach in which simulated yawning is allowed to lead into spontaneous yawns and movements until you feel at ease with the unwilled movements your body makes. Also try the experiment of pushing the arm against the wall and allowing it to rise by itself. Don’t discard whatever level of response you get in the practice. Carry on and enjoy it, letting a little more yielding enter it as you gain trust in yourself.

Remember that inner-directed movements do not usually start with a thunder clap of power that overrules your own will. They arise gently, almost imperceptibly. By allowing what are tiny urges to move, like the almost imperceptible impulse to breathe while your body is quiet, the movements get stronger and more power flows.

Help If You Cannot Let Go

Sometimes a major tension, physical or attitudinal, gets in the way of being able to let spontaneous movement happen. Three special techniques might be useful. They are not to be used on the same day, but separately, and as you have need.

Help Method One

Give yourself up to half an hour for this – shorter or longer as your needs dictate.

1 –        If you are aware of tension in yourself, instead of trying to drop or relax the tension, allow it to become stronger. Be willing to experience it deeply.

2 –        Do this by standing in your ‘space’ as usual, with appropriate music playing. Then take time to let the tension really be felt and allowed to direct your body posture, feelings and any movements.

3 –        The tension may get worse as it is discharged, so be prepared for this. It is a natural way the body does its own housekeeping.

Help Method Two

Prepare your space with fairly active music. Plan to give up to an hour to this. Keep the music playing for that length of time.

1 –        Move, or dance, to the music in any way that you can. It doesn’t matter how awkward you feel, how stiff, how much resistance you have to this – do it! Keep going no matter what, until you can feel the blocks or tensions melting and easy spontaneous movement emerging.

2 –        You may need more than one session to break through the physical tensions, fears and emotions that imprison you.

In his book Black Butterfly, Richard Moss describes the experience of an elderly woman, dying of cancer, who was taking part in a spontaneous movement class he was leading. The woman was supposed to be dancing freely to the music, but was hardly moving. When he asked her why, she said it was because of her illness. He said to her, “You are not dead yet – move.” She did so and to her amazement the movements got easier and she experienced a shift of awareness in which she realised she was an unseparated part of an ocean of life. Her physical illness was totally healed.

Help Method Three

Instead of movement you can use your voice. Take about fifteen to thirty minutes for this. Use quiet background music as an aid to giving yourself permission to make sounds. But be careful of pushing your voice too far as you may become hoarse.

1 –        Stand with eyes closed. Become aware of your breathing rhythm. Slowly deepen it but do not speed it up. If anything make it slower and fuller.

2 –        When you feel at ease with this add a sound to the outbreath. It is easiest to use the aaaaahhhh sound at first.

3 –        Keep this going until you feel the sound flowing out easily and reasonably smoothly. Then move the sound around by changing the volume. Make it soft, make it loud. Try the different volumes of your voice and the different levels of power.

4 –        Next try shifting the feeling quality. Make different sounds to see what variety of feelings you can discover or express. If you hit a satisfying sound, something you can enjoy, move it to express laughter, change it into sadness, thoughtfulness, anger, hurt – in fact try it in all sorts of pitches and feeling qualities.

5 –        This can be very entertaining because the voice is an incredible instrument, so enjoy yourself with the instrument you have played since babyhood. If words find their way into what you are doing let them – but see what range of feelings you can express with them.

6 –        When you have finished playing the instrument of your voice, relax quietly on the floor for a minute or so. This quiet period after the voice exercise is often very healing. It can produce very real internal peace.

Some Results of Inner-Directed Movement

Some of the ways the body self-regulates are not comfortable. Some people do not like sneezing or vomiting. Yet these uncomfortable movements are necessary at times to help keep the balance in your being. Such cleansing, not only of the body, but also of the emotions, IS occasionally a part of inner-directed movement. An ‘emotional sneeze’ might rid you of an emotion such as guilt or grief that you are unconsciously holding onto and causing stress in your body – just as a physical sneeze gets rid of harmful dust or bacteria. In Seitai the Japanese approach, it is emphasised that at the beginning of the practice the body may discharge toxins that have been harboured for many years. Therefore the practitioner might perspire more heavily than usual. Sometimes masses of mucous is discharged from the nose during a practice. Noguchi also says that occasionally the person even sees something like a piece of glass come out of their body after having existed there for years from an injury. Quite rarely, but worth mentioning, as the effects of past shock or hurt are got rid of, an old scar or mark from long past might show on the body again for a short period. More commonly however, it is negative emotions and memories we are cleansed of during the practice.

The overall action of inner-directed movement appears to be toward a reasonable level of wholeness. That is, the opposites of ones nature are allowed expression until they find balance. The healing processes in the body are made more efficient, and there is an attempt to do what I have called the backlog of ‘housework’. That is, old feelings we may have been holding onto to our detriment are discharged.

Once the physical and mental housework is done, then the process moves toward integrating and reviewing your life experience, to draw out of it what lessons, insights and creative ideas, you have gathered. Some of the Eastern practices see this as a spiritual change in which the person becomes more aware of their links with the rest of nature.

You Have Many Senses

When your mind, voice and emotions are expressing alongside your body movements, as occurs spontaneously during inner-directed movement, something very special happens. Old patterns of movement, behaviour, and emotions are played out in what arises during practice. Then gradually new or creative forms of expression arise. You break through the old patterns to discover a wider fuller you.

As you emerge from these restrictions, you will find your ability to see what is going on around you deepens. Your senses are not restricted to your sight, touch, hearing, taste and smell.

Very often the full range of our emotions have not opened. This is largely because muscular stiffness, physical tension, emotions injuries or hurt from the past, keep us from fully responding to each moment of experience. As ones body becomes more mobile; as emotional debris is cleared; as old rigid concepts are cleared from the mind, new levels of being able to sense other people arise.

When we are still cluttered with old hurts or rigid feelings, we may see the physical movements of people and animals; we may see the light reflected from their bodies, we might feel whether they are warm or cold, wet or dry, and experience their perfume – but we would fail altogether to see or understand what motivated, moved, impelled or disturbed them. We would not perceive their emotions. Their state of mind and body would not be visible us.

What You Can Gain

`Colin explains this from his own personal experience of inner-directed movement.

“To understand what a change came about in me you must realise that for all my teenage years I was painfully shy. I remember that even at fifteen when the whole school assembled each morning to sing a hymn, I found it painful to be visible in such a large group of people. I wasn’t standing in front of everyone. I was just mixed in with my class. Nevertheless it was agony.

“Inner-directed movement has helped me let go of some of those feelings that had haunted me since those years. Even though I didn’t use music as a background to the practice, I found myself doing a lot of stamping dances. To me it felt just as if I had been taught some Red Indian tribal dance. I was chanting to the movements too. And there was a lot of power in stamping. It made me feel strong physically and emotionally. I had never before in my life made those sort of movements or felt those feelings. Somehow they enlarged me, because beforehand I didn’t know I had it in me.

“At one time the dance movements were more African. I remember the pleasure that I felt when, like an African chief calling to the tribe, I roused them through my movements and chanting. The power in my voice was such that I boomed out feelings and commands with intense emotion. It was a wonderful experience to feel my body filled with strength and self assurance. It was almost as good as having lived it, so the feelings were ones I can now find in my everyday life. My son was still a baby at the time and I found I began to hold him differently. I felt my own body communicating strength and enjoyment of life to him – maybe even reverence of life. Sometimes during practice I had even felt what seemed to me the way I felt as a baby, and from this I was able to relate more fully to my small son.

“Other things I did during the practice had helped me experience the flow of love through me, and this has become a part of the way I relate to other people too. Not only do I feel it in myself, but from the experience of it I can see it operating in other people, even in animals. Sometimes I will see it pouring out of the eyes of a mother with her child, or in the face and posture of a couple. If they catch my eye a sort of instant recognition occurs. They know I have shared what they are experiencing and they smile.”

What Colin says is that until he had experienced certain emotions or feelings he could not see them in other people or in nature. Once his repertoire or range of experience had been enlarged, there was a lot more to see and connect with in the world.

In an article on inner-directed movement appearing in Harpers and Queen, ([1]) Leslie Kenton says:

“Often, as a result of trauma, life stress and social or family situations which are not naturally supportive of individual growth and development, we become separated from our own feeling sense or we tend to relegate it to the level of insignificance. When this happens ones life tends to become strongly habitual, mechanical, and eventually largely unsatisfying, no matter what kind of worldly success, excitement and glitter it may contain. For any real sense of joy, satisfaction or meaning can only come when the inner and outer being are linked up and when, what Crisp calls the feeling sense is allowed the freedom to regulate both physiological and psychological processes.”

Inner-directed movements help you develop an extended repertoire of physical expression. Because the body and personality are united, this means you have a greater range of responses to other people and events, and a greater awareness of what you see around you.

Sexuality

To give an idea of how inner-directed movement relates to sex, it is helpful to think of how a plant puts forth its sexuality – its flower. The flower is produced only at a certain point in the growth or cycle of the plant, and the flower is usually very different in shape and colour to the leaves or stem. The visual experience of watching a plant form a small bud that gradually grows and opens to a flower is exciting. The process is vulnerable though. If you think of something interfering with the flowering, inhibiting it at some level, then the flower exists, perhaps only as potential, but is not yet functioning fully.

The complex opening of human personality and sexuality has some kinship with this. Certain aspects of it can easily be inhibited in their flowering – perhaps the materials of experience are not yet sufficient – or the spontaneous instincts which usually inform and shape the maturing are withheld, suppressed, turned away from their task and full opening. Because inner-directed movement builds a link between your natural inner life and your conscious self, any aspects of your possible growth which have not emerged may be allowed. This is not an overnight thing, but it is a wonderful possibility. In fact few of us can reach maturity without some aspect of our nature, whether sexual, emotional or mental, being left behind, hurt or perhaps not given enough attention because other areas of activity were demanded by the needs of the time.

The action of inner-directed movement takes you away from the specific external needs which may have caused imbalancing tendencies in your nature. Because you let go of particular surface directions – because you do not set out to perform specific exercises, or work on particular issues, your internal self-regulating function can begin to express the areas of your nature that have been inhibited.

The Mind and Emotions

After some weeks of teaching a group of people in the small town of Porlock in Somerset, Julie, a woman in the group, told me something new had come into her life from what we had been practising. She said, “I never knew before that I have an inner life. This is such a wonderful thing for me.”

My understanding of what Julie was telling me was that she had never previously known what riches of experience and creativity, of insight and perception she already owned. She had thought of herself as just another housewife and mother, not unintelligent, but an unimportant person among billions of other unremarkable people living and dying.

The treasure Julie found that can be discovered through inner-directed movement is not to be mistaken with the realisation of intelligence or personal ability. A young and brilliant college student, Len, was recently describing to me his own realisation of his inner life through this practice. He said:

“I know this may sound strange, but the most powerful thing for me was that I realised I am alive. The realisation was accompanied by the sense of being life. I now know I am life and life is not just a chemical reaction or a set of biological drives or responses. As life I am always exploring, reaching out, becoming, learning what I am capable of and what I am. Just to exist is itself a great pleasure and miracle.”

As with Julie, Len’s realisation during inner-directed movement was not about his own intellectual ability or personal value. He had already proved his intellectual brilliance and ability in his scholastic performance. This had not given him the sense of being alive and liberated though. The contact with his own vital inner life enabled him to realise he was more than he thought he was. He learned through his own experience that the essential part of himself did not begin or end with his body, his emotions or his thoughts. From this arose a sense of freedom and liberation he had not known before.

Len’s changed experience of life was the result of just a few sessions of inner directed movement using the open approach. Previously he had been very reticent in relationships, yet often felt lonely. As he learned to let his own love shine out, he found it easier to make friends. He says:

“At first I found it difficult to let go enough for my body to freely express. When I did learn to do this my movements were very strong. At the time I was lying on my bed because my movements had started from quietness and stillness. They became so strong I fell off the bed at one point. My impression was that without realising it I had been holding back enormous amounts of my own energy. It was when I let the full current of my energy be expressed that I could achieve a new experience of myself. It is like having a dimmer switch on a light in an internal room, and all the time you have it just glimmering, and the room looks dark and dismal. Then one day you turn the power up and the whole room is transformed. All the colours glow, and features not seen before stand out.”

For many people this sort of release only occurs in times of crisis, high emotion, or if they are challenged by a public appearance and let themselves express at full power. At other times the dimming effect of social or intellectual conditioning anxieties, or not knowing how to let go, make us feel less than we really are. In fact you are more than you have ever believed.

Touching this vastness brings with it a sense of great wonder. In a recent letter to me Len describes what he feels when he touches what he calls ‘life’ through inner-directed movement.

“When I remember life and cry, as I am now, it is not sadness, it is everything. It is the beauty, the tragedy, the joy, the vastness, the thrill, the miracle, the mystery. It is a love from the depths of life of all creatures who have the courage to love, to embrace life in its vastness. From the firefly flashing its statement to the night, or the sparrow fetching worms for its young, to the dog running with joy toward me.”

Inner-directed movement gives you access to a new and vital experience of yourself outside the patterns of emotion and trains of thought from which you usually erect your self image. It leads to a discovery of your own unique inner life more fully than most forms of meditation or mental disciplines.


You Are Life – Live It

Apart from the sort of experience Len described, you already have a remarkable dimension of yourself you may be overlooking. It may not seem important, yet many people who use inner-directed movement learn to see it as a doorway of hope.

It can be explained by you imagining a scene in the long past. You are on a primeval river bed looking at the thick mud on the banks and gazing at the semi tropical plants and trees. As you watch, a small deer is pursued by a prehistoric human being. The ancient human hunter runs after the animal across the mud leaving evident footprints.

The day has passed, the mud has dried, another day has begun. The hunter comes back to the river bank. It is obvious he is there for water. With the caution necessary in this untamed environment he approaches the river and drinks. As he straightens and turns to go he notices the baked footprints. He follows their line with evident excitement. You sense he is reading the prints and feeling again the emotions written into the fluid movements now baked dry and preserved. He puts his feet into the prints and a look of strangeness comes onto his face. You share this magical moment with him as for the first time he realises his individual existence and feels with an almost painful emotion that he is looking back at himself in the footprints.

He looks down at his body, his hands, his feet, seeing them for the first time in this new light of self-awareness. Then he walks slowly to where there is still wet mud, left wet from the shrinking river after recent rains. Purposefully he places his foot in the mud, removes it and looks at the result, making a sound as an animal might as it declares its existence during mating. He again places his foot in the mud, and twice more, until the four prints make a cross, with the large toe of each print at the centre. He stands staring for a long time oblivious of his surroundings, in awe at what he has done.

This scene is not pure fantasy. Something like it must have occurred to a female or male human sometime in the dawn of history. It portrays the life of the instinctive animal, already on the verge of a new kind of awareness, crossing the threshold to self-awareness for the first time. Until that point all the actions, all the reactions, all the inner life of that creature arose out of instinctive drives or group information. All actions were performed in relationship to some real need such as hunger, mating, running from danger. The threshold crossed was the realisation that an action can be performed for no external need at all. It can be done for no reason other than curiosity, play, an exercise of mind. And so the first work of art arose – the first imprints in the mud that were not the result of the hunter chasing the animal, or running for safety, but just because!

Until that moment the human animal could only live within very marked boundaries. Beyond what was instinctively prompted; beyond what was feared; beyond what was lusted for; beyond what was the custom of the group – you could not go. The footprint in the mud stepped completely beyond those boundaries. It was freedom after millions of years of unconsciousness and instinctive behaviour. It was an open door to infinite variety of action and feeling. It was frightening and disturbing because freedom means no set rules, the unknown, the yet to be. It was stupendous.

It is impossible to describe all the implications of the ‘cross of footprints’. Without it we would be imprisoned within certain very restricted reactions – a small repertoire – to our environment. Our response would be limited to what we had inherited through our instincts and possibly learnt through painful experience. Human beings have a massive potential intelligence, but many of us are still extraordinarily limited in our repertoire of behavioural responses. We still haven’t quite taken in the fantastic meaning of art and music. We still haven’t really read the message left on the wall by the cave dweller who painted an outline of their hand, or fashioned the image of a bison, or who created symbols and ideas of gods and God, or pissed a pattern in the snow.

The message reads – I have found a new freedom. I have become more than I was. I am the creator.

Perhaps because we have developed a cultural attitude that splits things up, that separates the body and mind, the spirit and the flesh, we find it difficult at first to believe that such freedom, such realisation, can come about by allowing the body to move and express freely. Life is not a series of compartments. Our being is an integrated whole. If you allow your body freedom of movement, if you allow your body to go beyond what it has done before, then you are allowing your mind and emotions to do the same. You have gone beyond yourself. You have transcended what you were.

Of course the footprints in the mud story is just an example. But whatever it was that allowed human beings to paint, to imagine, to behave in ways that were outside of the necessary survival behaviour, opened the door to music, to variety, to drama, freedom of the senses and rigid roles. It means that a person with a broken body need not have a broken soul. They are limited only by their ability to imagine and experience. We are no longer limited by being born a certain sex, or by our own or other peoples ideas.

You are an integral part of a whole. Life is not trying to control or destroy you. You can take your place within the scheme of things if you wish. Your connection with the whole is through your own intuitive response to life. You can find this by allowing the spontaneous in you to emerge and declare itself. Then you will see for yourself that from the cosmic viewpoint the opposites of life and death do not have the same importance you attach to them while you only see life through your physical senses and culturally split viewpoint.

The Spirit

The film ET. captures our heart and imagination because it depicts our own longing to find a connection with life beyond our physical limitations. If our feelings are not dead, ET. speaks to us through them. The story of ET. depicts being trapped and dying in an environment other than the one our whole being can thrive in. ET. elicits longings in us to share the life of something beyond Earth.

This lost creature from a wider life, a more inclusive life, a more powerful life, a more connected life, is lost, trapped and injured here on Earth. It is the story of the human spirit and it’s desire to express its innate wonder again. It is the drama of how humans long for a connection with life that transcends time, space and death. It is a desire for wholeness.

People frequently describe the essence of what they find through inner-directed movement as touching life itself, as the life-force, as something which enables them to be free of things that shackled them, or that healed them of major illness. If this wonderful fount is given the name spirit, then in meeting your spirit you always find more of yourself.

The overall action of inner-directed movement is toward greater freedom from bonds; toward liberation from the monsters of self doubt, dependence on a partner or a social role, or guilt and rigid rules and beliefs. It opens you to the transforming influence of the spirit as defined above. It allows you to be touched by a power to heal sickness. If anything, this freedom, this move toward independence, this healing, is the real spiritual jewel to be found as your being liberates itself.

The movements you allow and the energy of your life – life itself – that express through those movements all reveal your innate freedom. There is no goal in this practice, and that in itself is a freedom. The moment your body gives expression to its own needs, you have cast off one of the great bonds – social pressure to conform. There is level after level of freedom beyond that, each with its own reward and difficulty. For freedom has responsibility, and it means losing chains that may have become precious in some way. The loss of beliefs previously cherished; the falling away of opinions that gave strength of purpose; the removal of walls of defence against meeting people and your own fuller experience, all have to be met and adjusted to. There is a way of experiencing life which only unveils itself to you if you dare to unrobe your mind and heart; if you chance the adventure of freedom from your own fears, and if your only reward sought is that of liberation from your self imposed limitations.

Daring To Live Your Best

Two years ago I watched a young man leave college showing obvious signs of anxiety about his own abilities. His offhandedness about authority also suggested he feared from the outset he would not meet helpfulness from any organisation. Despite having many gifts, and being highly intelligent and imaginative he nevertheless suffered a great deal of despondency about himself and how inadequate he felt. The world around him appeared to cause a degree of anxiety that paralysed him.

During my attempt to understand what held him back and what his possibilities were my intuition presented me with the image of a young bird on the verge of leaving the nest. What struck me when I considered the idea was that the bird had in fact never flown before. It had no experience of flying. There was no way of practising before it took that amazing leap into the literal unknown. It could not stand on the ground and run around flapping its wings taking little jumps until it could leap further and further through the air.

The small, unskilled, inexperienced bird takes the leap, dares death, opens its wings and flies – because a greater older bird, a wiser experienced creature stands within the small one. Perhaps you would give it the name instinct. Whatever you call it the unequipped immature bird, by its very leap, calls upon the experience of flight lying dormant in itself. The Great Bird, the ancient experience, would never come to the small juvenile bird if it had not made the leap. If you don’t take to the air you will never learn to fly. If you never plunge in the water you will never learn to swim.

In humans this wiser, more experienced self is our dormant potential. Dr. Clair King accepted the reality of this potential when he was confronted by a child with an injured eye. Five year old Robert Kasner was taken to him for an emergency eye operation. His cornea had been slashed by a piece of flying glass, allowing the liquid in the eye to drain out. The operation was performed at Aultman Hospital, and a flap of conjunctiva pulled to patch the wound. After twelve days the dressing was removed, only to reveal that the patch had not held. The iris was protruding again. Robert needed another operation. An appointment was made for three days later.

When Dr. King examined Robert prior to the operation after three days he could not believe what he saw. The eye was completely healed. He was astonished, even embarrassed. On asking the parents how this was possible, they told him simply that, “We took Robert to a Kathryn Kuhlman service. Prayers were offered for his healing.” (Kathryn Kuhlman’s book God Can Do It Again, published by Oliphants.) Dr. King Later joined the Order of St. Luke the Physician.

You have the power to access healing changes. You have a reservoir of potential from which you bring treasures to your everyday life. If you are ill, there is the possibility of reaching into this unconscious storehouse and finding healing change. If you are empty of pleasure you can be filled. If you are dead inside, you can come to life. I know that even if you do not trust enough to let-go fully and find a fast miracle, you can certainly allow a slow miracle to take place.

Using Your Intuition

The unconscious often reveals intuitive knowledge. The relationship between the young, inexperienced bird and the Great Bird that informs it can certainly be thought of as intuitive. The word ‘intuition’ is defined as knowledge not gained by reasoning and intelligence. It can also be seen as the gaining of information or perception without the use of the senses. Information has not been received from an objective source. We each have enormous powers of intuition if we accept the above definitions. Much of the learning of language is intuitive, in that we did not reason about, we were not informed, what the rules were.

Intuition is not a function one often hears acclaimed in the work-a-day world as a practical and useful ability. Perhaps if you are in a life situation or work which is routine and unchallenging, then intuition may have no real use for you. But if you are involved in the uncertainties of life and work; if you are faced by previously unmet situations with your relationships, your children, your projects, you need every resource you can access to bring to the creative act of living.

Betty describes an experience of this everyday side of intuition.

“Daniel, my son, was in the middle of studying for his ‘A’ levels and was facing a lot of uncertainty. The amount of effort and commitment needed was very great, but also he was having to make decisions about what direction to take in his studies that he realised would influence the rest of his life. He kept asking himself and me whether he was making the right decisions. We had talked around the subject a lot, exploring the various possibilities. So it wasn’t that we hadn’t given time and thought to the subject that was maintaining the question for Daniel.

One evening we were sitting in his bedroom and again the question arose. I said to him, ‘Look, we’ve talked over this lots, and going over the same things again aren’t going to give us anything new. I would like to talk to you from another part of myself just to see if it is any more helpful. Daniel knew I used inner-directed movement, and I explained to him that I had found it often gave me unexpected and useful new views of things – did he want to hear what might arise from that source? He said he did.

I had discovered that if I gave myself permission to be moved from within, words and images poured up into consciousness without me having to think about them. So I sat with my eyes closed in this way and asked the question of what would be the most useful direction for Daniel. Within moments I started speaking – and you have to understand that I didn’t know what I was going to come out, so I felt some tension as to what I might say to Dan; would it be stupid or banal? What I said was something like this. ‘There is a story about a young man. He was setting out on a journey by himself. He hoped to reach a town some miles away. He had only walked a few miles when he came across a fork in the road. He hadn’t realised when he had started that he might not know the way. He knew where he wanted to get, but he didn’t know now which road would be the right one. There were no signposts to say, and he must decide without help. He stood there a long time struggling with the problem. But try as he might, he could find no clues as to which road would lead him to the town. If he took the wrong one he might go so far from his destination much time would be lost. So he was unable to move. What he didn’t know was that it didn’t matter what road he took. Further on the two roads linked again so both led to his destination’.

I was amazed that I could make up a story about Dan’s situation without any conscious effort at all. But also, that I could so unhesitatingly tell him the story. The important thing for me was the effect hearing it had on him. It appeared to bring alive a truth he already knew in himself. The change was very quick. He never needed to talk about choices again. That was some years back, and he still talks about decisions in a way telling me the story is now a part of the way he thinks.”

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Let your time of inner-directed movement be an opening to the wisdom you have within yourself. Do not limit yourself. You, nor anyone else yet know what the limits are of human ability and experience. There is nothing in this practice apart from the discover of who and what you are. If you live in doubts or limited views about yourself that may seem little to gain. Those who have made the journey encourage you to open to the discovery of the many dimensions of yourself still left to find. Becoming yourself in fullness is the greatest adventure left in the world.



[1] – The article was called Rituals Of Beauty – Awake In A Dream. Harper’s & Queen, September 1984.

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SUBTITLE – Movements That Awaken Your Inner Self

BLURB – AUTHOR DETAILS

Most physical movements, and particularly those we perform to keep fit – tend to be disconnected from the psyche. By contrast, LIBERATING THE BODY describes a form of movement which arises spontaneously in response to ones own unique needs, allowing free expression of one’s innermost self and releasing subtle emotions and intuitions.

In one of the most innovative and original approaches to wholeness and health ever published, Tony Crisp describes this unique process, its astounding potential, and its links with ancient traditions.

By liberating your body you can liberate the mind. This book opens up the way to lasting health, joy and vitality.


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Tony Crisp is an international author and teacher who has been researching natural health and the body-mind connection for 30 years. He is also a dream therapist/consultant for LBC, and has written regular features on dreams for THE MAIL, SHE and other magazines. He is author of several books on dreams and related subjects, including DREAM DICTIONARY (Macdonald 1990, and by: USA – Dell; Sweden – Viva; Japan – Dobutsu Sha; Holland – Spectrum) and MIND AND MOVEMENT (Daniel 1987).

LEARN EXERCISES that allow your innate spontaneity to express as physical movements which tone your body, release tensions, and stimulate overall health.

LET THE NATURAL WISDOM IN YOU communicate through subtle feelings and body impulses. This balanced interaction between the facets of your being, never manage by most exercise systems, is a remarkable feature of Liberating the Body.

YOUR UNBELIEVABLE CREATIVITY is locked in the unconscious processes of your own body and mind. By liberating your body you can liberate your mind and discover the treasures of your own experience.


Here is a whole rich new area to experience. Fritjof Capra has said that in today’s world, “Retreating into our minds, we have forgotten how to ‘think’ with our bodies, how to use them as agents of knowing.” Crisp explains how to “think” with your body. Here is a way to let your body and emotions discover their liberated joyousness and splendid creative exuberance and health. Like the practitioners mentioned in this book, if you liberate your body, for the first time in your life you might realise you are vitally alive, and know you are more than you ever previously believed yourself to be.

The result is a growing sense of wholeness and joy. The natural regulating process of your being always attempts to promote a balanced expression and growth not only of your body, but also of your sexuality, emotions and mind.

Link to Chapter List

Copyright © 1999-2010 Tony Crisp | All rights reserved