A Sample of Our Non-Directed Body Movement Class

I made this class public. Please share it with anyone who might benefit.

When people talk about the work I am offering, they often say I teach ZZ (Zhan Zhuang) or Qigong. Or when they come to a retreat they think I will be helping them take their meditation off the cushion or get more into embodiment and movement.

I do teach all of that, along with seated zazen, but I’m really more into getting them to creatively encounter and dialogue cellularly with their entire way of being, and see that it is guiding them to unify with life.

An important part of what I share is the Non-Directed Body Movement. This practice is a hard sell. I won’t give you a technique to master. I won’t reward you. There are no bells and whistles. There are no achievements. Instead, we are here to drop all of that and see what is happening. We are not in improvement mode. We are not creating a philosophy. We’re just here facing ourselves.

Instead of holding ourselves in a template of a body, we are discovering what is emerging out of us when we let go of control. This dropping of control reveals a whole new way of being guided by the universe. We learn to profoundly trust.

And I can say for myself, encountering it saved my life. It was as important to my process as seated zazen or Zhan Zhuang or Qigong. Daily digesting it ironically mobilized my practice in a way that I could never have imagined. I would even say that I am living this life of Non-Directed Body Movement.

I have people I work with right now and they are in struggle all the time. What would that be like if they weren’t?

I basically just couldn’t exist in space and the non-directed was a way for me to exist in space

It’s failure

And relief

Grace

So why is wuji so hard? Why is NDBM so hard? Standing for an hour or forty-five minutes? It’s a good question. What are we doing or avoiding that makes it hard? What about our way of being makes it a struggle?

We don’t need to add anything.

It’s not like we get better. We get cooked down.

And within that as we unkink the hose, let go of stuck places.

And the physical aspect does mature and harmonize and takes a long time.

And the tanden has a physical and non physical aspect

But yes, definitely exhausting to release and align from the inside

as we let go of unconscious gripping, everyone has trauma that needs unclenching

But people think we are adding. I’d oppose that

I feel like we do build ki/qi but it’s not even us really

But the huge relief is seeing the body wants to do zazen.

That’s where the profound relaxation comes from.

At all times in every position.

Not training or discipline…

If it were a skill, that could never be it