I also recently read about Author Simon Singh who wrote a strong critique about chiropractic care.

I’ve been in depression before and out of it. I’ve dug into alternative care, and do quite a bit of yoga, meditation and self development reading. So here’s my two cents:

What both of these big ideas have in common is the question: are we using the right tool for the right issue?

The first bit: depression and chronic pain can often be related. When they are, dealing with depression can relieve the pain. If they are not related, then relieving the depression will not relieve the pain. Thus it’s not the medicine that relieves the pain, it’s the emotional coupling to pain that is lowered.

The second bit: regarding Singh’s article, I’m all for being honest with what you have to offer, and Singh points out a major problem in the alternative care fields - too many false and unsupported promises.

We have to think of the obvious level first: any form of practice or modality can make certain contributions. And that’s it. What is running for? What is physical therapy for? What is yoga for? In many fields of care, therapy and training, they talk about “scope of practice” and it’s terribly important to stay inside of it. Use a hammer for nails and other simple tasks and you’ll do fine. Use it for everything, and you’ll find yourself in trouble!

On this level of thinking, practicing emotional intelligence won’t make you run faster. Interval training won’t necessarily help you be a better presenter. Yoga won’t transform you if you think it’s just stretching.

As Singh points out, not every disease or illness is caused by the same form of problem - for example, displaced vertebrae. That’s like saying that every storm is caused by a butterfly, which would be a very silly thing to say.

On a bigger level, however, there is deep interconnection, and to say that no storm is ever caused by butterflies would be equally silly. At some point in our lives most people do acknowledge that running can transform emotional lives, that physical therapy needs to explore a person’s love and family relationships in order to heal shoulders, and that yoga is actually a body-mind-spiritual technology.

So the point is this: as I search for ways to heal my body, enhance my emotions, and live a fuller life, there are countless options out there in the world. Many offer solid benefit, yet many people claim more than they should. Any panacea is inherently limited, since not all issues have a common cause. Then what’s left to do?

Keep playing, seeking, healing and sharing, I remind myself, because the world is limitless. Enjoy the adventure.

I have taught a few yoga asana classes in the last few days, and have fueled them with UZAZU. I’ve offered specific dynamics to amplify certain yoga poses. The feedback has been wonderful. The experience powerful. Participants have thanked me afterwards for the richness of the experience.

Offer an out-of-the-ordinary gift to a yoga class requires three things:

1. Confidence in the effect and contribution of UZAZU dynamics, cultivated by much practice and personal exploration.
2. Taking a stand to offer participants a rich experience and the space to be curious.
3. Playfulness so the practice doesn’t get too serious (this is the big one I’m working on, as I tend to go deep, fast)

Do you do asana? Next time you do your downward dog, inhale and exhale U (oooooooo) to deepend the grounding effect. Notice the edges of your mat as your space to practice. Feel the vibration through your body. And…

Let me know how it goes.

I have learned so much during my intensive time with UZAZU that I cannot possibly contain it all in a post. Much has changed, become richer and deeper.

There will be a lot of changes in the coming months. New classes, new workshops, new ways to reach out to groups and organizations. One of my goals is to reach out to speaking groups and networking groups to present practical bodymind practices that take full advantage of the intuition+thinking we are capable of experiencing. Regarding leaders and teachers of all kings, I am finding that three key aspects will be important: presence, clarity, and imagination.

What do you think?

There’s much to unpack there, but perhaps you simply resonate with pieces of it. Ask me and I’ll gladly share more.

For now, I want you to know this: Much has happened in the last two weeks of my life. I’ve been away from my wife now longer than ever before. I’ve spent three weekends with my parents in a row, interspersed with deep self work filled with movements, sounds, teaching, writing, thinking, and lots of care. Two weeks of UZAZU down, one to go.

What has happened? I’ve experienced miracles in connection with others. After 32 years of life and enough stories about myself and everyone else to keep most people trapped deep in their own misery, I’ve reconnected with each of my parents in magical ways. I’ve decided I’m tired of giving up on myself. I’ve opened to feeling what it is to be cared for. I have no doubt anymore in, forgive me, the power of love.

I’ve rethought what I’m up to, which has always been about using the body to go deeper. I’ve phrased this as bodymind healing and transformation for the last few years, holding that general container with faith that I’d figure out the details.

Here’s a next step. What I’m taking a stand for is a future where people have the opportunity to integrate their body, minds, emotions and more. Of course, that’s not exactly revolutionary. And yet it changes everything.

I’ve been an excellent yoga, physical fitness, hand to hand combat, self defense, teacher and workshop designer. I’ve known for a long time that the world doesn’t need just yoga classes to go to and get new beliefs, but an authentic approach to owning your own bodymind practice. This means curiosity, experimentation, authorship are paramount. This is the future of our lives: living in integrity, knowing how to know ourselves, and giving ourselves the possibility of rich lives.

And yet we do need a map that is inclusive, not exclusive, of what it is possible to experience.

I’m on my path. We know the map continues to evolve. So do we. Where we’re going is a place where our heads meet our hearts and our feet hit the pavement.

It’s going to be a hell of a tearful, joyful, gut wrenching, fulfilling ride.

Are you with me?

You want to get something done or help someone, perhaps because they sought your help. They’re taking too long to get what you’re trying to communicate. You’re patient at first but you have to remember to be patient. Over the next few minutes or longer, it’s clear this person isn’t keeping pace with you or isn’t rising to the challenge. Instead, that person is withdrawing, looking more worn out, and perhaps gets closer to wanting to leave the situation. You get a little angry, annoyed, or judgement, or even a little of all. Geez, this person should just try harder and get with it, it’s easy! You might think.

And it’s downhill from there.

Does this sound familiar? This happens to me quite a lot, especially with my wife. Her energy drains away the more I try to help.

What’s happening and what can you do about it?

You’re in your yang relative to your friend’s yin. What that means is that you’re more interested in the what, the how, the interaction, the systems, the parts, the wholes. But that person cannot deal with ideas and forms and creating and understanding thoughts until he or she feels supported enough. The cool thing is this is a dynamic process, and it’s just necessary for the person to feel safe and supported, abundanct and connected, enough. With enough healthy yin in the moment, you can bring that person up to your yang.

So it’s a balance.

Now here’s a catch. You can’t ask that person what she needs. Because if she’s not able to interact and play with ideas, she’ll feel lost for words. Literally, her mind will be blank. What she needs at that moment is space and connection, resonance, feeling.

Don’t worry warriors, you don’t need to get all hippie on your friend. Just recognize that

Now let’s deal with your challenge, yangers. You’re naturally in your yang if you’re trying to help or fix anything, even if you’ve been asked for help. This naturally means you’re more prone to ideas and forms and systems thinking than you are to connecting. And if you’re not connecting and actively creating safe space for the other, you will also be judging.

Here’s the bottom line:

Yin needs space and safety and a feeling of abundance and connection to act, create, think, and learn. Otherwise she’ll collapse and drain away.

Yang wants to create, so to relate, must create a that feeling of safety, abundance and connection if he wants to co-operately get anything accomplished without seeming to be a brutish tyrant. In any moment where you’re more yang than the other, you’re creating more of the situation. If you’re annoyed or judging, you’re actively perhaps subconsciously creating separation and preventing communcation.

It really is up to you to lead the way. You must lead of course. That’s yang. You must come from, and create, yin.

I could go on.

But it’s your turn.

Can you relate?

Maybe it just starts with a smile. In Bali, Beth and I were blessed to visit with a special healer. His medicine was for me to smile. It worked its magic then, and I think it’s exactly the right time to bring some upturned lips back into my life.

This, then, is all about resonating or exuding the ability to receive. Don’t you think?
I mean, if Alex is just this good looking enthusiastic leader of a guy who is serious all the time, who wants to actually be around him?

Why so serious?

That’s what the healer asked me just moments into his assessment, and it hit me so square on the jaw that all I could do was smile with the recognition that he just got me down to my soul.

So I’ll smile. Like right now, cool ain’t it?

You know, I never did get it why my latin dance partners back at Cornell, when I was learning to latin dance, would always ask me if I was having fun. Of course I was! Can’t you tell? Oh, I get it these days. I’ve been called earnest, serious, studious, functional, and other bad words. I think it’s time for some levity.

The truth is, fun for me has always been functional fun, learning, practicing. Real run has often eluded my grasp.

But times, they are a-changing…

“If you think you are enlightened,” Ram Dass said, “go spend a week with your parents.”

Even though sometimes still I spin into great depression when I’m about to, or am, visiting with them, the bottom line is I know my parents are great. Awesome. They rock. When they’re at their best my mom and dad are just awesome people to be around and have around. They’re both loyal, friendly, warm, caring, thoughtful and more. And they’ve given me so much, which I’m super grateful for.

That said, I’m always growing, and my relationship to each of them is always opening up. This last weekend was miraculous, again. I had dinner Saturday with my dad and spent much of Sunday daytime with my mom, connecting to each of them at new levels.

One thing I learned, as I listened to my own loving lectures to my mom, was something about respect.

I learned very concretely that we can’t respect someone we’re evaluating. If you do this, you get my respect. If you don’t, you don’t.

I saw in myself more clearly the tendency to respect someone when they go above and beyond what I expect, and that to do what I expect they should do does not earn my respect. That my unconscious expectations of them could run how well I connect to them, relate to them, and let them be adequate to their own experience rather than forcing them to fit to mine.

Wow. That’s a recipe for a whole lot of nada love.

I remember that as I grew up surfing in southern california that my friends would often say things like, ” I used to respect that dude, but now I can do what he can do and he’s no big deal.” Hmm. Does comparing lead to connection?

But I also know that there are people and things I love and respect that has nothing to do with evaluating how they’re meeting my expectations.

Going deeper still, I could feel it’s possible, and easy even, to deny someone else respect if I can’t respect my own results, effort and intentions.
This is HUGE. And this dysfunctional practice of respect is so much of the culture we swim in, isn’t it?

So let’s cut the crap. So what to do? Here’s what I’ve done and it rocks. The cool thing is that you’ll realize you already do this with people you genuinely respect, and don’t with people you think don’t deserve respect. I think the truth is this: no one sucks.

Better put…everyone rocks on their own terms.

Here’s the challenge:

Pick anyone in your life. (prepare yourself, you’ll find this harder with some people than others)

1. Find in yourself some respect for who they are, not what they do. That’s Joe…cool…
2. Acknowledge something they do do well, in their own terms and not your terms. Don’t stop at just one. Let it roll, the more, the better your day! Joe really cares about his job…that rocks for him…
3. Feel appreciation for your own efforts each day, and in theirs. I really love how I’m up to great things, and I love how Joe is too. Rock on!

Have fun! Let me know how it goes.

This is what I’m after when I say I want to get some clarity on what I’m really up to.

When I think about my own mortality and what it would be like to not get to give my deepest gifts to the world, I realize that it should be painful, wrenching, horrifying and tear jerking. But I’m not crystal clear on what that specifically is? I’m vaguely clear, and the clarity of my answer is that I’m deeply about embodiment and bodymind healing and transformation. That includes facilitation like Open Space Technologies, comprehensive formats like Epic Workout and Yoga Tune Up, and fundamentally profound ways of practicing like UZAZU.

It’s clear that this is a very yang, very active, very ego-driven mission. That’s cool.
The other half that I’m really clear on is, to fully love and support and cherish and be there for my wife. That’s inspiring!

The unanswered longing comes from wondering - but what am I really up to creating in the world?

My old favorite band’s song, Man with a Mission by Bad Religion, comes to mind:

rescue me when I get too deep,
talk to me; there’s nothing to tell.
everyone, is a hypocrite. look to me,
I’ll save your soul,
now somebody out there must be reading my mail,
‘cuz everybody knows,

follow me, when you give up,
work for me, it’ll serve you well,
everyone is a hypocrite,
come to me, I’ll save your soul
now somebody out there must be tappin’ my phone,
‘cuz everybody knows,

I’m a man with a mission,
I’m gonna fly you away,
high above the noise and competition,
I’m a man with a mission,
oh yeah

now somebody out there must be readin’ my mail
‘cuz everybody knows,
I’m a man with a mission,
passing through your town today,
I condemn you to fiery perdition,
I’m a man with a mission

You might remember Jerry Seinfeld remarking that most people feared public speaking more than death. He said:

“According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”

Fear of public speaking is also known as Glossophobia and does indeed rank more feared than Necrophobia, fear of death. Gloss has it’s roots inflame, glowing, to flame.

What if, then, our fear of public speaking had something to do with fearing to be the conscious light of a group? Thought of this way, we don’t need to fear the flame but to stoke it. What if, as the quote goes, “Our Greatest Fear is not that We Are Inadequate, but that We Are Powerful Beyond Measure?”

My experience in our first rapid round of speaking was to desire more structure. I speak and teach for a living and am not too bad at doing this. I sort of like being in front. My personal excuse for not wanting to do this exercise was that I didn’t know who the audience was, what exactly was being requested of me. Without those reference points, I felt all e without any i. All flow and choice and turmoil without a way to focus. Like a laser. Or a magnifying glass and the sun. Which has been known to start fires.

But those are just excuses

Pushing myself into the about-to-burn building, then, I went first in our group and spoke from heart. I let the sharing happen without trying. Five times in a row, each for two minutes without being interrupted by criticism constructive or otherwise.

On the whole, this was powerful for lighting my personal fire and burn through weeds and birth a new and organic story. I quickly refined my story and within the basis of my experience found the freedom to be more playful and spontaneous. I could create a new version of my tale for each new group, lighting their imagination with my words.

I rested in my strength in inviting my audience to have an experience where they would directly understand what I wanted to convey. I do tha well every day in yoga and movement and Epic classes. My edge is to share a story that is not a direct experience for them. You know, to tell a tale that mesmerizes and captivates and educates as well as transforms. Perhaps my edge comes from not trusting that most stories told from personal experiences will do all of that and more. The challenge to myself is to connect, share, and storytell in a meaningful way as a compliment to a shared experience.

Until next time,

Flame out.

“I have enough soul for you to feel. I want to feel your soul.”

This is neither a line from the Exorcist nor from any of Will Ferrell’s movies.

Instead this idea was the culmination of my intentions as we practiced resonance, and in particular, inhale ü and exhale o. I’d like to say I discovered it the way Indiana Jone’s enemy, the tribal leader, discovered hearts. The truth is simply simpler.

Our group’s first pass tonight at Resonance was with inhale o and exhale ü, the energies of nurturing ourselves and saying enough, respectively (to put it very simply). Though the movement and breath felt strong and subtle, and I was looking to say enough to prisons of the heart, cages of the mind, and armor of my chest, I still felt empty inside.

Our second pass, with inhale ü and exchale o, was a different story. When we partnered and worked to send these dynamics to and fro, I really, really wanted to break open and feel deeply. I thought, I want to touch her soul. No, I realized, that’s a yang idea and we’re working in pure yin. If this is going to work I can’t bang yin with a stick. So I need to feel. I need to feel. So I asked to feel soul.

Then with eye contact, the feeling deepened. I realized that with exhale o, the posture of abundance, I had enough soul to share. It was as if the lights brightened in the room to imagine I had enough soul to share. From then on, the experience was a sharing of souls and I was more lost inside those moments than during anything we had done other than Morphic Field Surfing (now my second favorite practice, which I think of as the Imaginarium). More about that later.

I’m in deep appreciation for this opportunity to practice deep connection. And this is day 5. I am optimistically scared to life of what will come as I go farther into resonance. I’m super eager to take all this depth home to my amazing wife, my community of friends and students and brighten up this earthly journey.

Thanks for following along. Are you ready for your question?

What inspires you about connecting deeply with others?