what is not given is lost

2007 december, lighting up at the torchlight procession, edinburgh

The desolation, the aching heart, the beaten self and the victory of failure are the barren deserts in which one walks through in hunger and thirst to search for an oasis of refuge.  And so this is the mystery of spirituality.  Without an ego, one is brought down to their bare hands and knees, shown their poverty which will spark the eternal flame of light within themselves to shine brighter through their whole being.

The only way to find solitude is by hunger and thirst and sorrow and poverty and desire, and the man who has found solitude is empty, as if he had been emptied by death.

He has advanced beyond all horizons.  There are no directions left in which he can travel…You do not find it by traveling but by standing still.

Yet it is this loneliness that the deepest activities begin.  It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity. – Thomas Merton.

2008 january, zurich

Eight days ago, I massaged my grandmother’s ears and feet as she laid unconscious at the hospital with my mother. The three women of the house, one laying in the middle and the other two touching her left and right ears, our individual yet mutual identities bounced in reflection between us. In this cherished moment, we saw ourselves in each other as we endured and grew together for the 28 years.

and as we touch, so are we touched

Seven days ago, the cardiac machine that was monitoring her stopped its punctuated beeps and became one very long and endless note. I stood at her bedside watching her faint breaths until this single note played. Before the warmth of her body turned cold by the exit of her soul and her still unbeating heart, I kissed her forehead and bade my last farewell.

Would you think of somebody who you adore, who is no longer there…somebody in your life whom you love with all your heart, is no longer with you. Bring that person into your mind and follow the B all the way to the C and everything that Chopin wanted to say will be revealed to you. – Benjamin Zander

One of my all time favourite TED talks by Benjamin Zander combines music and passion, demonstrating that the vibration and resonance music produce have the possibility of touching every cell in our body right into the deepest part, often at the seat of our capacity to love, the heart.

mahler symphony no. 5 adagietto (1) & (2) conducted by Herbert von Karajan.

I heeded Benjamin’s advice. There isn’t really any sentence I can possibly string together that can describe this feeling inside when someone whom I had lived with for the past 28 years is no longer around even though I willingly let her go.  For this, Mahler’s wordless adagietto resonates in the tune that no words can.

2009 march, kyoto

“Love teaches us that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, part of a big System or Being.  Love is where we learn the really big lessons of attachment and loss.” – Stephen Nachmanovitch

In my first acquaintance with butoh, I was tucked warm on a cold, rainy summer morning in my Munich family’s apartment alone.  I was seeking solace not only from the weather, also from one of those big storms that hits us all at some point or another in our lives.  And solace came to greet me in a DVD on the table.

The story of Kirschblüten began in a small Bavarian town, then traveled to the metropolis of Tokyo of which both are familiar territories to me.  A wife who learned about her husband’s impending mortality, arranged their last journey together to visit their children and see the north seas of Germany.  From the heartache of losing her husband very soon, she dies unexpectedly.  Her widowed husband who only then discovered her wish to visit Mount Fuji that she kept so long, so silently to herself and her secret fascination for the butoh, took the trip on his own into the foreign land of the rising sun.

With some curiosity plus the desire to move and dance, I participated in a workshop with a Brazilian butoh dancer.   He pushed us beyond our safe limits of expressivity.  He made us continue through screaming fatigued muscles.  In my tired body, I knew dancing could not be my bread and butter, despite the immense joy I derive from dancing.  The question arised, “Why am I here? Maybe I wish to be somewhere else, instead of pushing the body so hard, especially on a Sunday morning.”

That morning, he was not teaching us how to move our bodies to attain perfect form even though he was deliberately demanding our bodies to strive for beauty in movement.  As we danced nearer to the final minutes of the workshop, his demands and expectations revealed a higher purpose.  He is a dancer who is driven not by how aesthetically perfect his movements are or how successful his stage career will be.  His sole motivation is a soul motivation.

As he spoke, his words resonated through the room, reflecting back and permeated through the thin veil of our skin.  He forced us all to examine a question you and I ask often, “What is my purpose in this life?”  For him, no matter which profession you choose to be in, there’s only one way of doing it : with all of your whole existence and with all your heart, nothing one bit less.

I’d like to share his words of this man, filled with love, inspired by the beauty and ugliness of the world he lives in and who dedicates his life to one singular purpose.  This is what he said :

“I am a dancer, my life is my dance.  When I prepare a performance, I put everything of me into it and everything means all my ideas, all the books I’ve read, all the music and art that inspired me, the mind and the stage props.  When I perform, all of me is in the performance.

Why is it so important that we do so?  My audience made an effort to come watch me perform.  They drove to the venue, they sacrificed their time, they chose to spend the money of the ticket instead of something else.  For all the effort that they made, do you just want to give them an energy-less performance?  They came to see you – and everything of you which you have dedicated your life and effort to your art.

We don’t know how long we have in this world.  It can be tomorrow, a month, a year….but we don’t know. However, we all know for sure that our time is brief.  That is why we cannot waste any time not to do our work with all our heart.  Whether you are a doctor, an architect, a farmer…this world, this planet needs us…what have we done in our brief existence for it – for its people, for its environment and for its future? “

He planted on my cheek a kiss as I thanked him for sharing his work, words and presence with me.  The brief moment as we embraced to hug, we connected from the same universal source of putting everything and above all, love, in every single moment of our work.

2010 July, permaculture perak, lenggong

“As the crickets’ soft autumn hum

is to us

so are we to the trees

as are they

to the rocks and the hills”

– Gary Snyder

Nothing can quite beat the clouds nesting deep in the valley, guarded by the mountains behind and the gibbons singing away their tunes. A magic moment when everyone is asleep just as the sun is rising.

2007 march, st peter’s foot, the vatican

“A client is rather an expression of divine life and the client brings with them not only the experience of their lifetime including their prejudices as well as their obvious gifts, but they bring with them millions and millions of years of wisdom imbedded in the body process. Carl Jung said something like “inside of each one of us is a two million year old person”. In other words, inside each patient is this incredibly experienced healing process, far more knowledgeable than you or the client can fathom.” – adapted from remarks by James Jealous, D.O., adapted and edited for bodyworkers, with respect, by Tom Myers.

Tom Myers was one of first people whom I studied with years ago and those two days with this man opened a door to the world of structural integration and Rolfing.  Straightaway I was attracted to him philosophizing about how modern medicine has taken the soul and wholeness of a person, reducing them to merely soulless objects to be rid of disease, bacteria and bad cells.

As he wrote above, the client who steps into my practice becomes my teacher and thus begin my work set in a tone of humility, in the space of not-knowing and the unknown.  Two days ago, a friend came to see if we could find a way for her to lift her left leg and get off the bed without pain after a recent birth and a not-so-recent caesarian birth.  We didn’t know where to start but we worked our way through the session guided by both our intuition and sense.  We didn’t know either where that would lead us but when she stood up, her left leg lifted as high as it possibly could with none of the previous discomfort.

In that exact moment of lift, we both laughed.  Not at each other, not at ourselves.  We laughed with amazement and deep respect for the possibilities that made the leg lift happen.  ”Inside each patient is this incredibly experienced healing process, far more knowledgeable than you or the client can fathom,” as Tom said.  It wasn’t me alone that restored the movement in her leg, I am merely the enabler through which her body could assess her own healing intelligence.  In such moments, I am humbled.  Who needs alcohol and drugs when you can get such highs from work!

2010 July, the recently reorganized corner of the bedroom

“Our love of home is in turn an acknowledgement of the degree to which our identity is not self-determined.  We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical : to compensate for a vulnerability.  We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances.  We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.” – Alain de Botton.

Spatial intelligence is an innate wisdom we possess – in our cells.  Each sac or tubule in a cell may contain a particle which gives it a binary memory capability.  Instead of the brain acting as a central command system, our intelligence is an evenly-distributed system*.  So the skin on the sole of your feet is a smart as the lids of your eyes.

“Intelligence lingers between the spaces.” – Emilie Conrad.

Then what matters is not only what objects and furniture you place, but equally paramount is where you choose to place them. Similar to a 3-D puzzle, the space will feel just right once you are present within.  Like the monumental cathedrals built for the purpose of drawing out the smallness of man compared to the vastness of the power above and through their humility, be compelled to connect with their spirituality.  The cultivation of a space – through architecture, landscaping or simply moving around pieces of furniture, should be steered by its purpose and personalized to the needs and lifestyle of its inhabitants.

Small, seemingly insignificant spatial reorganisation has seedlings that rekindle the pleasures of living spaces – the patio, the study or the bedroom.  And often, it is a constant work in progress.  Our spatial needs evolve with the present state of being we are engaged in. The space we live in becomes our kinesphere, as an extension of our physicality and expression and as the outer garden that allows our inner garden to flourish.  When done right, can set off a motion of internal waves inside us.

*Spatial Intelligence, Leon von Schaik, 2008.

2005 March, Berlin, Pergamon Museum

“We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.” – John Berger, Ways of Seeing.

Here are some excerpts from a Saturday evening’s experiential movement workshop I taught to several teachers from a learning center for children with learning challenges on the relationship between our senses, our perception and the way we move and how they all influence the way we learn, communicate and experience the world we live in. I’m blessed to have the opportunity to explore and learn with wonderful teachers and colleagues all over. To share and to learn through sharing it with others challenges and teaches me once again in an entirely new way.

2010 May, Abbotsford, Canada

That became the title of my impromptu presentation a few days ago in Abbotsford just a few miles from the US border. A quick collaborative jam session with my Norwegian coursemate P on a guitar led us to staging a brief evening concert for our teachers and fellow coursemates. Thanks to a volunteer manager, we turned our study room into a candle-lit concert hall.

Haptic is a word derived from Greek pertaining to the sense of touch. In the context our perceptual and phenomenology studies, being haptic is the opening of our sensorial abilities through our ears, nose, skin, mouth and eyes which has a resultant effect on how we carry our bodies and coordinate our movement in our spatial kinesphere and ultimately that makes an impression of how we express ourselves to our world and how we receive the world around us. Now this perspective may sound completely foreign to you, but for those who are pursuing similar work and inquiry into the human body as I am, we are absolutely intrigued by these ideas.

Back to the performance. Let’s just say I’ve been offered the possibility to explore a potential career as a stand-up comedian after my apparently hilarious brief presentation – which I wasn’t even intending to make anyone burst into loud laughs. And if that doesn’t take off, you might just find me in Santa Cruz, on the Californian coast, collaborating a dance and music performance with P, who is a Rolfer, dancer, choreographer and potentially a poet and musician too.

In September, P will be debuting his dance piece, choreographed to this song titled “Perfectly Realised Human Being”, which he wrote and we performed that night. And yes, that’s me on the out-of-tune piano.

Listen to Perfectly Realised Human Being

HANS FEURER
- Tarpon Fishing World Record Holder + Fashion Photographer

Captured by rebel soldiers while river fishing in Sierra Leone, he was tied up next to two dismembered rotting heads perched on a stick. How did he prove he was simply a Swiss who loved to fish and not a government spy to the commander who spent most of his time in the tent feasting on women? He decided to yodel and everyone just laughed. His first advice of getting out of a dangerous situation : Laughing a lot!

On the same night the former art director decided he had enough with advertising and traveling in Africa was the thing he would like to do most, he wrote his resignation letter to his agency in London. About two years in Africa later, he decided his next career : a fashion photographer, because he adores women.

“When you reached a certain level of knowledge, perhaps through observation, you realise that ultimately everything is the same. Nothing is more important than anything else. Nothing is holy and everything is holy. Everything is the same and alright. It’s just a question of the way you interpret it and what importance to something you can make it into a big thing but, in fact, ultimately it doesn’t really matter at all. And that is freedom, a freedom most people are frightened of. But I have no vertigo.” – Hans Feurer

And on the possibilities of life :

“But you must try not to do too many things. You need to find out what it is you really love and concentrate on that and all of a sudden your life gets juicier and more meaningful. You have to follow your guts even if it doesn’t make sense or generate any money. Either you are one of the robots queuing with a number stamped on your ass, or you are a free individual who makes up his own mind. You have to hold on to what you love and what you really think is exciting – and go for it!”

Hans Feurer is a Swiss master fashion photographer since 1960s.