Exercise A (Expansion)

I have several deadlines this week and am also in the midst of grading papers for three classes (once I get home from work), so I have felt “crowded” and distracted internally when I have taken time for my TSK practice.

1.  On my first attempt to practice Exercise A this week, I felt strong resistance to “manipulating” my experience in any way.  It was not possible for me to move directly to the expansion or contraction, as it felt like my bodymind just needed to be contacted where it was.  I tried settling into my experience first, before engaging in expansion, but even then found resistance.  This shifted once I reframed expansion as a kind of magnification in the service of intimacy.  Once I was able to see the exercise in this light, the constellaton of feelings and images that constituted my present state gave themselves over to “expansion,” and I found through this, as I expanded these feelings all around me like an immersive environment, I was able to move into the “thick” of my experience.  At one point, the exercise took an unexpected “shamanic” turn: I encountered an area in my body that felt blocked and inflamed, and I imaginally sucked out the toxins there and spewed them into the receptive soil of the earth.

2.  During another practice session, which I was doing late at night right before bed, I felt several areas of tension expanded “larger than life” around me on different parts of my body, as though I were wearing those inflatable “floaties” that children use to help them learn to swim — though, here, not on my arms, but on my neck and sides.  Allowing them to inflate helped to release and open some of the tensions.

3.  On a walk around my office today, I attempted to practice Exercise A again, and at first (again) encountered resistance to changing anything about my experience. So, I switched to doing Exercise 16 as a warm up, getting in touch first with the space of my experience, then the time, then the knowledge aspect.  I found that the space experience lingered, especially, and I felt myself moving within an expanded sense of space, reaching far up into the sky and all around me.  This showed up at first as the feeling of being a tiny entity moving within this vast field, but as my sense of embodiment became highlighted, I began to expand the sense of embodiment outward, until “body” encompassed vast space and my environment became the embodied field.  It was surprisingly natural and easy to feel the whole world expanse as “body” — and as this became familiar, there was a gradual decentering.  I no longer felt that I was a body moving through this landscape, but rather I was this whole landscape of movements and flows, of tensions and ecstasies.  Expansion and contraction, then, became a function of space and light, moving in and out as the whole field of attention shifted in different contexts — under trees, under open sky, entering into the murky hallway of the office building….  Allowing and receiving this felt nourishing and stimulating, like a subtle-level massage.