Ponderings, October 2025

Touching the Essence through Stillness...

resting

on a cushion

on the ground

in a body

in the vastness

breathing

behold! here's the Beloved

with me in this stillness

Often in our practice, of any kind, we come to the question: "What's supposed to be happening?"  And we find ourselves out of the river, out of the flow, searching for what doesn't seem to yet have appeared. Our attention now has become a filter. This is the way of things, the way of the mind and of being in the world.

"I felt in great need of a pilgrimage so I sat still for three days." - Hafiz

In sitting still, we become the observer. At first of the mind, the chatter, the narrator. The more we sit, the more we are able to see that for what it is. The noise from being too much with the world. Yet, when we slow down, breathe, and just sit some more, the noise begins to dissolve. The body softens; the mind quiets. Eventually, with any luck and grace, we even release being the observer. We become the Be-er.

"Within you there is a sanctuary and a stillness to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself." - Herman Hesse

Be yourself. That's what happens, what's supposed to happen. Yet it's easy to overlook, this very first essential step. The pause is the beginning of everything. To pause in Be-ing in our being. To settle there, rest back. To move inward, downward. Feel what it feels like to be feeling what you're feeling. Experience from a felt-sense orientation. There can be a sensation, a visceral awareness of "dropping in," of arriving somewhere deeper in the silence, of feeling more present in the stillness.

"Be in your body and be everywhere." - Fred LaMotte

In this space, in biodynamics: the field, receptivity, listening, waiting, we become located in the eternal. We are right here, in neutral, in some way becoming moved within. We touch the essence here. And perhaps the edges of things become more blurred, more permeable, easier to allow to merge with our sense of Self as separate or confined. And we're not speaking of the psychological identification of "me." We're in a more ancient, timeless place of the psyche, the Soul, Thyself. We've journeyed here with it (the I am), and we'll journey beyond here with it. This is the very thing that we, each and all of us, are so needing to be able to do in every moment: locate thyself. Know thyself. And continue to Be, as thyself.

"Where two or more are gathered..."

In biodynamic sessions, we explore this sacred work 1:1, with me sitting in as a practiced partner. In a group session, we navigate ourselves within a group field in which we begin to experience and move in tonal resonance with other thyselves who are willing to BE together, while doing nothing more than resting back and being still. There is the opportunity in this space to also experience the 1:1 at the table, with touch contact, rooted in my Touch of Presence studies. This space is one of all potential, beyond notions of what should be happening, and attuning, shifting our sensing into to what is happening. We become receptive to the generative forces of Life present with us. In this work we identify, speak to these moments as simply, something happened. It's a shift away from the explaining kind of knowing and into the realms of the unknown becoming knowable.

I'll end this writing here with where we begin in our Biodynamic Group Sessions:

"Rest in your wholeness, without using a technique to get there. The path is written in you at conception. This path is a gift to you, so you can get home. It appears when you are naturally neutral. There is a somatic sense of eternity. Rest and it will find you." - James Jealous

Biodynamic Group Session Info