Principles of Open Sky Inquiry-Based Practice

3/31/07

As many of you know I have a body of teaching work, grouped under the heading of "Open Sky" practices. There is Open Sky Yoga almost daily, I book Open Sky Bodywork (formerly called Core Sequencing) almost daily too, and train others in my approach, I just started offering Open Sky Tantra workshops for couples, and I hold 3-day Open Sky Retreats. My latest teaching tool is an 8 CD comprehensive overview of this approach to yoga, anatomy and mind-body developmental psychology called Radical Transformation: A Map to Mind-Body Ecstasy. This series of 4 lectures and 4 yoga classes has been fine-tuned over the last 6 years presenting it to live groups of 20 to 60 students around the country - the recordings are taken from the most recent incarnation offered in 2006 in Santa Monica California.

I am also co-teaching with Hala Khouri a 5-day retreat at Esalen Institute June 24 - 29, 2007 called Urban Yogi: Contemporary Teacher Training in Mind-Body Yoga. This is suitable for psychotherapists, yoga teachers, bodyworkers, and students of any of those disciplines interested in grounded growing edge perspectives on mind-body, East-West, psycho-spiritual practice, healing and integration!

Principles of Open Sky Inquiry-Based Practice

I wanted to offer a brief discussion of three core principles that I consider central to inquiry-based practice. In turn, Inquiry-Based Practice is one of the three aspects of what I call 21st Century Spirituality. Shadow Work and Cognitive Development (including critical thinking) are the other two. You'll notice that just about every post on my blog invites engagement of at least one of these three aspects of 21st Century Spirituality.

Inquiry-Based Practice

Whether on the yoga mat, meditation cushion, massage table, in student-teacher, bodyworker-cient or love-partner relationship, the practice of inquiry as I teach it has three basic principles: Breath, Presence, and Compassion.

We use Breath as a way to bring mind and body into more integrated contact. Feeling the breath in the body, using breath through a variety of techniques to either calm or activate, receive or release, unwind or circulate energy. Breath begins to alter the body-chemistry, to shift consciousness, breath brings us into feeling, aliveness and into Presence.

Presence is not something to aspire to, believe in or attain. Presence is a moment-by-moment willingness to wake up into what is. Presence is not predicated on some attempt to realize any concept or state, it is merely paying attention, breath-by-breath to what is emerging. Inquiring into  the nature of present experience, neither grasping nor pushing away - and when either grasping or pushing away is happening, or when presence is elusive - noticing that too, with as much Compassion as possible.

Compassion is a quality that we invite into the inquiry as an act of engaging the heart. It is also something that we are inquiring into - what is compassion? Sometimes compassion shows up as fierceness, as forgiveness, as patience, as courage. Sometimes compassion allows space for the experience of something about which one is angry or sad. Sometimes we discover compassion in honoring a defensive reaction and understanding that there is suffering behind it. Compassion can even show up as a willingness to be present with the ordinariness of mundane experience without trying to make something special happen.

Riding The Process

Bear in mind that this is not a life philosophy per se, it is a trinity of principles to apply to the act of practice - be it yoga, meditation, breathwork, bodywork, ecstatic dance or dialog. Through applying these principles we create the conditions in which:

 a) an opening can begin to occur between the inner world of the psyche or unconscious and the surface awareness of the mind and
b) an authentic experience of the body-mind relationship can reveal itself and
c) a deepening initiation into both the energetic physiology and altered states of consciousness can emerge.

In inquiry-based practice, belief-systems, faith and metaphysical explanations for inner or outer realities are best put aside in the interest of both an unobstructed access to authentic experience as well as a clear-eyed groundedness in the process and it's later interpretation. This requires that we get intimate with the reality of suffering and build a tolerance for the simple facts of life and how they impact our body-mind.

To do this we practice building Resource - i.e. receiving and circulating  whatever is helpful. supportive, grounding, inspiring, beautiful, pleasurable, liberating, etc. in our felt experience. The more we have access to real resources, the less we feel the need to rely on fantasy resources or defensive strategies like rationalization, magical thinking, narcissistic inflation etc.

The altered state experience and energetic activation may also provide access to archetypal resources. Once in the steady state again these should be appropriately interpreted in a way that reveals their true purpose - that of better relating our inner and outer worlds and of bringing us more fully, effectively and honestly into contact with reality-as-it-is. Care should be taken not to confuse subjective altered state experiences with objective external realities, that way both realms can be honored and integrated in a healthy way. The overwhelming tendency here is to become inflated by the archetypal experience and use it as a way to "prove" defensive metaphysical assertions that often create an unhealthy split between the inner and outer worlds. This tendency will be particularly strong in direct proportion to one's unresolved shadow material, traumas,  and existential conflicts - thus enacting a "flight toward the light" or "spiritual bypassing" type of fragmentation.

On a more mundane, but equally sacred and mysterious level, inquiry-based practice leads us into awareness of our chronic contractions in the  physical, mental and emotional layers of experience. Relating to these chronic contractions with the principles of Breath, Presence, and Compassion eventually allows for their softening, unwinding and opening. As this occurs there may be insight and/or resolution of conflict or trauma. Often the resolution happens in part by a full-bodied re-experiencing of the feeling state that the contraction holds. This is where connection to resource helps to make that re-experiencing manageable.

As the contractions release, the conflicts resolve, the energy circulates and the altered state calms, one is often left with an open space of clarity, unobstructed love and peaceful acceptance. This spaciousness cannot be imposed from the outside in, it emerges out of the process. The attempt to will oneself into this open space will more often than not result in a kind of dissociation, because one has to actively ignore, repress or deny whatever is in the way in order to try and fit some ideal based in (often covertly) dualistic spiritual concepts/beliefs. The oversimplified dualism also usually perpetuates a deep confusion about the relationship of intention to process and the importance of working sensitively with the unconconscious shadow material.

Part of the integration process is to ground this emergent spaciousness in the felt reality of the body and heart and then apply healthy critical thinking and reality-testing to whatever insights have arisen. Equally important for  integration can be articulating one's experience with others, especially those who are very familiar with the territory and have themselves enacted healthy and grounded integration.

Approached in this way, the altered state experiences brought on by serious spiritual practices can be navigated with an inquiry-based respect for the process and it's emergent features. Deep healing of trauma, resolution of conflict and inclusion in awareness of previously unconscious and repressed Shadow aspects of experience can occur and an integration of the experience into everyday reality can be encouraged, such that authentic stage-wise growth in several  lines of development can occur.

More to come on the subject of Open Sky practices and their relationship to an Integral model of mind-body transformation.