The return of the light

Internal alchemy is cultivating the light, the dawn of the light.

Cultivation is a dual process.

First, it is realizing that the source is you. You are allready what you are cultivating. The “I” is a portal to the endless light.

Second, cultivating the birth of yang is recognizing the nature of this light.

In the midst of winter, the true origin of bright, warm growth is at it´s purest. The seed is a spark.

Watch it expand, grow. Care for it, everyday. In it, no birth, no death, no old age, no suffering.

Aspiring to dwell in this light is to go beyond yourself. The essence and life is the same at the root.

Find the root and all else grows by itself.

Forget the branches, embrace the root, you are not bound by change

On discipline

One thing is unavoidable; if you want to get anywhere you have to apply yourself.

A long radio silence from me.

If you gave yourself no promises, no rewards and no laurels to rest on, would you still do it?

What would it take for you to go on? Into something you do not know.

I feel this dark.

Sitting, standing, walking, away from the story of your dreams and expectations

What would you do if you could not measure it?

The 2 minute immortality

This is probably not “Daoist” per se, but a synthesis of mindfulness and “Sitting and Forgetting” meditation that I have used with great benefit while sitting in meetings or on a bus. It´s a wonderful way to energize and refresh the body and mind:

1. Sit with open eyes and just sense your entire body.

2. Intend that you are immersed in a sea or soup of endless silence and light; you are a part of it, and it is you. Feel that this intention immediately changes your internal energy; calms it down, quiets the mind, and fills your body with vitality.

3. While sensing this silent light, breathe with every cell in your body, soaking in this light and silence even more.

4. Forget the breath, and detach from thoughts, or let these changeful sensations be overshadowed by the immensity of silence and light that permeates you.

Sit as long as you can, or just a few minutes, and end by rubbing your hands and squeezing them.

I promise you that you will feel like a Daoist immortal, even for just a short while…

Keeping it real; cavities and caveats

It´s mid afternoon in an abandoned yoga room in a downtown gym in Oslo. I reach for my iPhone in excruciating pain, hoping in vain for the alarm to sound. Half a dozen people have opened the door to the room the last hour, stopping in mid-sentence as they gaze at me in disbelief, and leaving me alone again in the twilight. I realized why they turned on their heels. It was not so much my meditative pose on the pillow, but probably the muffled groans and grunts of pain that turned them off, or scared them. It left me alone with anguish but I did not care. I had caught a whiff of the beyond, oblivious to the laughter of a dozen women waiting to get into yoga class. I had discovered the wonderful realm of an energetic cavity that opens up, finally, after years of resistance.

This is probably one of the undisclosed aspects of this already opaque practice; the extremely subtle effects that takes years of patience to cultivate, and sometimes the sudden opening of something you did not know was closed.

There should have been a caveat to the retreat I once took on this practice; You may sit with this practice for years without anything happening, and you may lose it all if you don´t pay really careful attention.

Nei Dan requires as much vigilance as a course on a gourmet restaurant, only it takes 10 years to prepare, and seconds to destroy.

Turning towards

Note to self:

I´ve used energy practice as an escape often. As something used for gain, for relief, for solace. Escape.

Lately, lingering issues have crept forth. My conditioned response was as usual the same effort to transcend, to surpass, to overcome, to solve.

Little did I know the grace waiting in the shadows.

At the moment of turning towards them, towards what I was running from did I embrace myself. My pain, my tears.

What life and debth resides there.

Turn towards your fears, your pain, your shame.

Dao is in the piss and the shit. Only there is there any chance of transformation, through total acceptance.

I was turning away from my self.

This is original sin.

The sea

In recent month´s the basic nature of cultivating the Dan, the “sea of chi” has revealed it´s importance to me.

In sitting and tuning into this vague space, I always get nourishment, always solace. Now, I have abandoned getting anything out of the practice beyond it´s immediate effect; sustenance, warmth, stillness, movement, energy. It is no coincidence that it recides where the umbilical cord joins the body. It is as if my body recalls it´s 9 months of inhabitating the womb of my mother.

After a long time, the only thing I feel when resting my awareness in this space is gratitude. The longing for something beyond this has faded. No need for immortality, transcendence or release. This is allready there.

In tapping into the sea, I feel I reside in creation.

Modern hermit series; Naked man

On standing

Already my gaze is upon the hill, the sunny one,
at the end of the path which I’ve only just begun.
So we are grasped, by that which we could not grasp,
at such great distance, so fully manifest—
and it changes us, even when we do not reach it,
into something that, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a sign appears, echoing our own sign…
But what we sense is the falling winds.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1924, Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Robert Bly New York, 1981

Free and easy

My trip at Hurtigruta ( Trondheim -Bergen)

The Pearl