Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

Finding Your Way in a Wild New World Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want Part 1 – The First Technology of Magic: Wordlessness Chapter 1: Quick Ways to Wayfinding (Stillness, Torment, and Delight) Martha Beck

How can a Shangaan tribe tracker, Richard is his English name, find two, tiny, silent, camouflaged, leopard cubs in the dense brush of Africa three miles from any road? This amazing and miraculous skill comes from a state of awareness Martha Beck refers to as Wordlessness The brain state of Wordlessness is the most important skill for any wayfinder in any culture and any situation  Choices can be made from two places o Verbal thought, which has limited effect o Wordlessness, which makes every thought and action much more powerful  When you can drop into Wordlessness, you will be so aware of your situation and your responses that you will go straight toward your best life, no matter how obscure it may seem or how many obstacles lie in the way  Wordlessness is a core aspect of your true nature o It connects your consciousness with the deep peace and presence that is the essential you o It eliminates virtually all fear, anger, or regret that bedevils most humans most of the time o It is taught by the wisdom traditions of every culture (but not our own)

Wordlessness gives us access to the whole brain, the 11,000,000 bits per second nonverbal part, in contrast with the 40 bits per second verbal region and lets us navigate better through our external as well as our internal worlds A Native American, Chief Mountain Lake, shared with Carl Jung that his people think with their hearts rather than their heads Menders of all times and places have taught that the basis of all healing is silencing the thoughts and opening to the experience of the body and emotions Verbal thinking obscures the directional cues of our physical and emotional experience

What are you feeling right now? Physically? Emotionally? When you think about your plans for today or tomorrow? When you think about a person in your life?

Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard neuroanatomist, describes her experience of losing the verbal part of her brain due to a massive stroke (Jill Bolte Taylor TED Talk: My Stroke of Insight, 18 minutes) https://www. ted .com/ talks / jill _ bolte _ taylor _s_powerful_stroke_of_insight? She described a state of euphoria and expansiveness in which she knew that we live in an interconnected universe and that we are perfect, whole, and beautiful We can restructure our brains through deep-practicing Wordlessness, i.e., aiming for a precise experience, initially getting only glimpses of it, and repeating the effort until we can practice the skill reliably You will know they are working when you:  Begin feeling flickers of peace, calm, and safety  Become more aware of subtle clues about your surroundings  Become more in tune with other people’s feelings and intentions  Replace thoughts with authentic sensations in the present moment  Let go of story-telling and experience emotions directly (90-second waves)

Paths of Stillness (pages 10-12)  Feeling the Insides of Your Hands (Eckhart Tolle): Close your eyes and hold out one hand; Ask: “How can I know my hand exists?”; Feel; Then both hands  Pulling Your Senses into “Open Focus” (Les Fehmi): Focus on an object; Broaden attention to everything; Alternate them as foreground and background; Also ask: “Can I imagine the space inside the distance between my eyes?”  Follow Your Own Bloodstream (Tom Brown Jr.): Full breaths; Exhale completely; Between breaths, feel the heart beating, then body/organs pulsing; Do while walking

Paths of Torment (pages 16-17) – Surrender resistance to physical suffering you can’t avoid  Fatigue: Surrender to the weariness  Relax and fall asleep  Hunger: Feel the body sensations as they arise  Exposure: Surrender the mind’s resistance as you work to improve the situation  Illness: Follow any guidance to getting better and also try the practices of Wordlessness to see how pain changes when the verbal thinking dissolves

Paths of Delight (pages 17-20) Hold full attention in the physical experience  Finding the Sweetness: Focus on something beautiful, the silence below sound, comfortable part of body, fragrant scents; Expand to focus on all at once  Sense-Drenching: Imagine/remember taste of favorite food: Add one by one favorite scent, tactile sensation, sound, specific sight  Sharing Happiness: Share a path of delight and focus on the experience of generosity and communion in addition to your sensory experience  Connecting with Nature: Take any opportunity you can to connect with the natural world; Let the mountains, seas, and forests bring you to no words

Suggests deep-practicing at least one of the exercises at least twice a day, for as little as five minutes each time Wordlessness will begin to subtly change your inner life and thereby your outer life Problem-solving happens more easily and spontaneously Concrete plans are byproducts of a deeper solution, reclaiming your calm, present, and vastly resourceful true nature

David Whyte: “What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make enough plans.” Rumi: “… close the language door and open the love window.” Finding Your Way in a Wild New World Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want Part 1 – The First Technology of Magic: Wordlessness Chapter 1: Quick Ways to Wayfinding (Stillness, Torment, and Delight) Martha Beck

What are you feeling right now? Physically? Emotionally? When you think about your plans for today or tomorrow? When you think about a person in your life?

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Paths of Stillness

Feeling the Insides of Your Hands ______

Pulling Your Senses into “Open Focus” ______

Follow Your Own Bloodstream ______

Paths of Torment

Fatigue ______

Hunger ______

Exposure ______

Illness ______

Paths of Delight

Finding the Sweetness ______

Sense-Drenching ______

Sharing Happiness ______

Connecting with Nature ______Finding Your Way in a Wild New World Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want Martha Beck

The First Technology of Magic: Wordlessness Chapter 2: Tiny Relatives and the Path of Sacred Play

Exercises:

Remember the evolution of play in your life from when you were a small child to this moment

Dropping into Wordlessness through the Paths of Sacred Play

Pages 31-33 – Paths of Sacred Play  The Path of Sacred Song  The Path of Sacred Dance  Paint Your Vision  Tell Sacred Stories

Works for Me: ______

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______David Whyte: “What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make enough plans.” Rumi: “… close the language door and open the love window.”

Add quote from DW The Summer Day Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean- the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

— Mary Oliver (1935- ), a Pulitzer Prize winning poet