“Ultimately, the body is not about the body. The physical is not exclusively about itself, not for humans. The soul is the body’s final aim and purpose. There lies within us a metaphysical dimension that seems not to wither with time. To the contrary, the soul seems to mature, to evolve, to become ever more vital. And thus, the mismatch. Outside we are becoming stiff, inside more flexible, outside, weaker, inside, stronger, outside, ragged, inside, refined.
As we become older the body can do less, but can empathize more, and not just with people. The senses become mediums of communion. Boundaries blur. It’s as if we become a host for the world around us. We open our sensory doors and welcome the world in; we let everyone and everything fill us. The emptier we become, of ourselves, the more completely the world can enter and fill us, sometimes to the point of total identification with the world at large. No longer identified with ourselves, we’re overcome with a joyful neutrality. We’re free.”
The Culmination Of Character
by Bruce Fertman on October 6, 2014
"All age unmanaged, that's a natural community, human or other. The industry prizes the younger and middle-aged trees that keep their symmetry, keep their branches even of length and angle. But let there also be really old trees who can give up all sense of propriety and begin throwing their limbs out in extravagant gestures, dancelike poses, displaying their insouciance in the face of mortality, holding themselves available to whatever the world and the weather might propose. I look up to them, to have lived that long is to have permission to be eccentric, to be the poets and painters among trees, laughing, ragged, and fearless. They make me look forward to old age."
“Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking, brings us close to the actually existing world and its wholeness.”
I just wrote this to a very fine student of mine. I thought I would share it because, as I wrote the words, the words rang true to me.
"I am not a psychotherapist and do not work in that way. But I have found the body to be a doorway into the mind, heart, and soul. I don't care very much about a person's body. I like people to be comfortable and able to do what they want to do within reason. But what I care about for myself and others is what it feels like to be alive in this world, how to open to it, how to be grateful for it, how to love it. Nothing else really matters to me."
To My New Uruguay AT Friends, When I teach, whether in workshops or online, I follow up with notes. So here, I will finish giving you the li
Follow Up Notes to the Uruguay Workshop AT Teachers and Trainees.
To My New Uruguay AT Friends,
When I teach, whether in workshops or online, I follow up with notes. So here, I will finish giving you the list of AT principles I began at our workshop, the principles that have fascinated me for half a century.
Often, we think to ourselves in words. But sometimes, most of us also think in images. For me, directions, or messages, can be imagistic. With practice, we can get good at sending messages from our brains to parts of our body, or to our whole body, and sometimes even to the space around our body. Good images are full of information that can tap into our innate integration, that can energize our primary governance, or primary pattern, or primary movement. You want to find images that possess geometric power and beauty, that are three dimensional, that move beautifully or that are beautifully still, (like mountains). Fluid images can be particularly effective. (The octopus).
If they are to work, images need to be precisely located in the body and they must resonate with the body’s physiological design. Imagining a little baby sound asleep, laying upon your diaphragm, breathing, and you watching that baby as it sleeps and softly breathes can free your breathing in a way that trying to breathe correctly could never do. That image would not work for your feet, but imagining that you have huge, soft, furry bear feet does work for the feet.
Images can communicate, instantly, a large amount of information: size, shape, texture, timing, quality of movement, direction of movement, initiation and sequencing of movement, etc. It might take ten pages of words to express what we see and feel in one second when we see a great photo or painting. Images can also be positively emotive for people, that is, they sometimes communicate positive feelings which can help us feel peace and poise. The full moon over Mount Fuji. The mermaid swimming in the ocean. I mention just a few of the images we played with during our day together. I have hundreds of images that help people move well and feel well.
Yuri Klapouh (Ukrainian,b.1963) :: Autumn Palette, All Colors of the Rainbow, Summer Sun Day., 2018 :: oil on canvas
[Guillaume Gris]
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“…The orthodox presume to know, whereas the marginal person is trying to find out. …To accommodate the margin within the form, to allow the wilderness to thrive in domesticity, to accommodate diversity within unity – this graceful, practical generosity toward the possible and the unexpected… offers reconciliation by which we might escape the endless swinging between rigidity and revolt.”
Tonight, full moon and swirling clouds. Best to click on it and see it in closer detail. :: [Bruce Fertman]
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Under your pardon. You must note beside,
That we have tried the utmost of our friends,
Our legions are brim-full, our cause is ripe:
The enemy increaseth every day;
We, at the height, are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
David Michael Kennedy :: Thank you Bruce Fertman and El Rito Studio.
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"yUdjEhanAnô sô KAnAnô," Grounds remembers saying to the bison when he came face to face with them in Denver. It means "We, the Yuchi People, are still here." They, like the bison, survived colonial efforts to wipe them out, but were physically separated after being forced from their homelands in what is now the southeastern United States.
Richard Grounds quoted in an article by Kaitly Radde at NPR. After nearly 200 years, the Yuchi Tribe of Oklahoma reconnects with bison
