Bringing Health Down to Earth

(Notes from a short course at Schumacher College 19 - 23 October 2015 with Bayo Akomalafe and EJ Clement-Akomalafe)

Many of us have lost touch with our bodies. Our physical bodies have become distant to us. There was a time when I was like this, when I was a head disconnected from the intelligence of my body. My mind can lie to me, my body never lies. If only I can listen.

What happens when we choose to open ourselves up again to all that our bodies offer and say to us? What happens when we choose to open ourselves up to the aliveness of the universe?

These questions invite us to rethink our relationship to sickness and health. We have always had access to the indigenous knowledge our physical bodies and our relationship to the bigger body (life) has to offer, but for too long we have been ignoring it. Now we have to find our way back. Counter intuitively in this moment the more we get lost the more we find our way.

Eco-metaphysically we need to re-energise what health means to us.

Unlike how socially we are cultured to behave, grief and suffering are not a private matter. They are a public event. Grief is not the enemy to be repressed. Pain is not to be stamped out or medicated away as is the mode of much of allopathic medicine. Wherever you are is the most sacred place you can be.

There is no outside.
There is no sacred mountain you have to climb.
How can we reimagine and come back into relationship with the multiple?
Life is an entire ecosystem of which we are a part.
It is all intra-active.
By slowing down, deeply listening and observing we can reconfigure our gaze.
It is not about solutions.
There is only an openness and awareness.
In the noticing we are losing our 'I' ness.
The universe is much more playful that we believe.
In a world that is entangled there is no outside.
Everything is connected to everything else.
Everything is dancing with everything else.
Let's throw a better party.
Let's reveal our own innate wisdom.
And come up with our own meanings of health.
Thus we lose the story that we are singular.
A full picture is not possible.
We lose ourselves into groundlessness.
There is beauty in incompleteness.
Where we reach a point of unsayability we reach the point of vulnerability.
We meet our bodies at the inaudible gasp.
Move away from predetermined grace.
AWKWARD IS BEAUTIFUL
At our height of confusion is when we have it all together.

Quilting is the shared collective of everyones listening.

Quilting Prompt 1: What is the living story of your body?

The unsayable wants to be known, it was to be seen and heard.
Our lives are becoming entangled with one another.
We are being provoked to make space for something else.
What wants to happen cannot be represented in words in the first instance.
Our bodies are speaking for us at this moment.