12A. 30 Minutes Eyes Closed

• Everybody find a place for yourself on the floor and either stand, sif, or lie down. Get comfortable and close your eyes. Bring your attention inside yourself. Relax. Focus on your breath. Nofice how the air comes in anc goes out. Notice the sensations that surround that experience. Every time your breath goes out, relax your body and your mind even more. Let go ol the tension that forms thoughts.

• Keep your eyes closed for the next thirty minutes. Shortly after I stop talking, begin to move. Notice a sensation in your body and move into it. Or just start moving. Whatever happens happens. Follow your movement. Listen to it. Listen to it from the inside of it. Allow what you hear to cue you, lead you. There's nothing to understand, like or dislike. You're noticing designs the course. You don't have to create anything. You are responding to what you notice.. .. Whatever you're doing right now, intensify it. Go further into it. Give over to it. If you're moving into a very soft, "void-y" kind of place, go further into that void. If you're moving into a hard, tense place, go further into that. If you're moving into a painful place, go further into the pain. If you're moving into fun and play, be even more playful. Keep from naming, labeling, talking or reporting to yourself. Continue to notice sensation. Continue to notice feeling. Whatever you notice. Sweat, hard breath, calm, still, whatever.... If you come in physical contact with another body in the room, do whatever you want. Play, mess around, get hard, get soft. Do whatever you want. Follow sensation and feeling. If you want to withdraw, leave it, then leave it. Whatever you want is perfect.

As soon as the eyes close the pressure's off. There's no where and no thing to go to, make, do, or be. I'm only with myself, here, laying on the floor. My observing mind notices sensation in my shoulder, the weight of it, how it presses on the floor. I press more and feel the bone, the hardness, the mass. Bump, bang, slide the hones, more bones, dry bones, brittle, breakable, dig in and in and in. Tunneling in and in, deep into dark matter, thick surroundings, mouth opening, pulling back into neck, back arched, opening the belly, stretching, bursting.

Eyes Closed is a physical exercise. We let the body lead. Feeling, memory, imagination and thought respond to the sensations of the body. Action results. That action is experienced as sensation. A feedback loop between sensation, feeling, memory, thought, imagination, and action develops. One ignites another. In any order. At any time.

Sometimes an image, thought or feeling pulls attention from sensa­tion. You may be moving an arm, then suddenly believe you're moving your arm towards something, and discover that while you were thinking that plan, you've forgotten how it felt to get there, you only got there. Stay present. Throughout Eyes Closed, students are reminded to return to sensation.

"Whatever you're doing now, go further."

What does that mean? Faster, bigger, louder or more tense? Maybe. Or, maybe it means that whatever you are noticing at the moment, you accept and explore with undisturbable devotion. Maybe you're already on your way, rising and falling into realms of unexplored behavior. Maybe you just need a nudge, a prod to remind you that you can let the reins out.

Going Inside

A student may come upon an emotional block. The feeling could be overwhelming. Tears spill. The student gets caught in emotion. What triggered the emotion may be somewhere underneath the threshold of awareness, from a remembered, or imagined, thought or image. To return to the present, she must return to the immediate experience. Go inside of it. Investigate its sound, energy, texture. Discover its legs, head, hands. When we go inside of crying, we become foreigners to it. We're no longer in the familiar of crying. Think of it. When we cry, our attention fixes on a painful idea, or thought. If instead, we let go of the thought and change our focus to the crying itself, to the actual experience of crying, we become a landscape of sound, energy, movement, weight. We're present.