My fourth book of spiritual nonfiction is coming soon. Lighting the Sacred Fire addresses the topic of spiritual practice. Are the different paths to the truth? Are there stages on the spiritual journey? What are the major obstacles and how can we overcome them? These questions and more are answered, and practical advice is offered for both seasoned practitioners and those just setting out on the path.
I’m looking forward to getting this book out soon in both print and ebook formats. Here’s the copy from the back cover:
There is a difference between intellectual understanding and direct experience, between theory and real knowledge. On the spiritual journey, walking the path means actually engaging in practice. Lighting the Sacred Fire illuminates the overall process of spiritual practice and offers straight-forward advice on overcoming a wide range of traps and obstacles. Aspiring and seasoned practitioners of any tradition or no tradition will benefit from the clear insight and inspiration contained within this book.
The audibook for When You are Silent It Speaks is now available on Amazon, Audible, and ACX. Narrated by me, this is the second audiobook I’ve recorded. The audiobook for That Which is Before You has been out since 2021. If you enjoy audiobooks and are interested in nonduality, enlightenment, and the spiritual path, I hope you’ll give them a listen.
I very happy to be able to record these audiobooks and share these words in the voice of the author. I’m speaking from direct experience in these books and hope a bit of that experience shines through in the reading itself.
It’s a somewhat long and arduous process to record these audiobooks. At times, my voice get tired or strained and I have to take a break for a few days. With a sustainable pace and editing, progress is relatively slow. This one took six months to finish — longer than I expected, but that’s the way of most projects. :)
Although I’m eager to record the audiobook for A Billion Fingers Point at the Moon, I’ll be taking a break from audiobooks for a while in order to complete work on some other projects, including the next book in this series, which addresses spiritual practice (Lighting the Sacred Fire is due out by the end of the year).
Whether in print, ebook, or audio, it’s been great to share these books with readers. And it’s a real joy to hear they are hitting their mark and having a positive impact on the spiritual lives of others. I look forward to continuing this series with a few additional books and audiobooks covering new topics and expanded teachings. Here are the books available now:
Writing and publishing projects have progressed slowly for a while due to an exceptionally chaotic school year, but things are about to heat up. I am officially taking a year-long sabbatical to focus on book and game projects, and a lot of exciting things are in the pipeline.
First up is the third book in my series of books on spirituality and enlightenment. No official release date yet, but proofs are on the way and it should be out sometime this summer.
The first two books are available now. That Which is Before You contains an account of my awakening, insights and teachings, as well as a brief overview of spiritual practices. When You are Silent It Speaks contains a more detailed discussion of the spiritual journey as a whole.
The aim of this new book is to address the language of spirituality and attempt to clear up confusion surrounding its vocabulary, and as always, to point beyond. Here’s the copy from the back cover:
“Decipher the language of spirituality for yourself, by getting to the heart of fundamental questions. Look beyond the confusing rhetoric of dogmatic and philosophical views that focus more on differentiation than on discovery of the Truth. Traditional teachings, conceptual understanding, and intellectual discourse are great, but as the saying goes, don’t mistake a finger for the moon. A Billion Fingers Point at the Moon appears to be about words and language in the context of spiritual traditions, but actually, it is all about the fullness of the moon.”
I’m looking forward to sharing this book with you. Keep your eye out for release updates. :)
When You are Silent It Speaks is available in print and eBook. This is a stand-alone book, but it is also a follow-up to my previous book That Which is Before You. That book contained an account of my awakening and an overview of insights, teachings, and practices. This new book is dedicated to a more detailed discussion of the spiritual journey. The topics were selected and organized to explore stages along the spiritual path — beginning, middle, and end.
It’s taken a bit longer than I expected to get this one out, and I’m very excited to be able to share it with you now. I hope you enjoy the book and find its content both helpful and illuminating. Feel free to contact me with your questions. And please post a reader review if you get a chance.
I’m happy to announce that When You are Silent It Speaks is in the final stages of pre-publication and will be released sometime this summer. A release date is still unknown, but I’m very excited to be sharing this new work with you soon. This is the second book in a series addressing the topics of enlightenment, awakening, and the spiritual path. Each book stands on its own, although it makes some sense to read them in order. The first book, That Which is Before You, includes an account of my awakening and an overview of insights, teachings, and practices. When You are Silent It Speaks is dedicated to a detailed discussion of the spiritual journey. The topics in this book were selected and organized to explore stages along the spiritual path — beginning, middle, and end. May it aid you on your journey, and may it be of some use in bringing illumination, true happiness, and an end to suffering.
Here some copy text from the back cover:
Chart a course through the whole spiritual journey — from the suffering of existential hopes and fears, through a search for truth, to the unimaginable awakening that awaits us. When You are Silent It Speaks is a map to the landscape of spirituality, and a guide to orienting oneself on the path to genuine Realization. If you have ever longed for the truth, but been confused by or had doubts about the goals, methods, and direction of your spiritual endeavors, here is insight by someone who can speak from direct experience.
If you are a reviewer, blogger, or teacher and would like an advance reading copy of this book, please contact me through the webpage here. Everyone else: you will not have to wait long. Stay tuned for a release date in the near future or subscribe to the webpage to get an email whenever a new post is made. It’s not too often — just when I have an announcement, an article, or some free content to share. You’ll find the subscription button in the upper right drop-down menu.
This is the final lesson for Movement 1. If you’ve enjoyed this free course or benefited from the practices, please consider making a donation. It’s easy to to do through the donation page on this website. All contributions are deeply appreciated and go to support future projects and teaching.
I want to once again thank Kaizen Taki of Movement Daily, as well as Vladimir Vasiliev, Konstantine Komorov, and the larger Systema community, without whom I would not have been exposed to this type of training. So much has been given to me, and through this course I hope to have passed on some of my understanding and insights into these practices.
INTRO TALK
When I started this course, I wanted to share some of the elements of my own training to help my students and other interested people with their movement, exercise, and solo practice. And I wanted to give people some direction for using their everyday training as a vehicle for self inquiry.
We’ve gone a long way toward laying out a framework of movement that can serve as the backbone for extensive practice — even life-long practice. There is so much more to explore with even these simple exercises. The scope of this kind of practice is a large as you care to make it.
For each lesson, I had to choose carefully just a few exercise that would point you in the right direction. There is so much more I would have liked to show you. But it’s impossible to show everything at once. I will continue to point and to answer any questions you may have, but ultimately, practice is a journey you have to discover for yourself.
In this final lesson, we’ll be taking all the different elements we covered — ground checks, turnovers, crawling, push-ups, rolling, sit-ups, transitions, squats, jogging, free move, walking, and recovery — and combine them into a 20 minute workout you can utilize in your daily training. And as usual, we’ll look at how to go even deeper.
STEP BY STEP
1. Get a timer you can use to time the practice intervals. Countdown timer on your phone will do, if you don’t have a dedicated interval timer. I use an app called seconds that allows my to quickly program different exercises for different times and link them all together. It has a voice which cues your next exercise, which means you can just keep moving! :)
2. Get ready! For each exercise, you’ll just be doing freestyle movement as follows:
Ground Checks — 1 minute
Turnovers — 1 minute
Crawling — 1 minute
Push-ups — 1 minute
Rolls — 1 minute
Sit-ups — 1 minute
Transitions — 1 minute
Squats — 1 minute
Jogging — 1 minute
Free Move — 3 minutes
Walking — 2 minutes
Transitions — 1 minute
Recovery — 5 minutes
NOTES
a. Look at the progression of exercises. They start with just lying on the ground in various positions while releasing tension. Then they slowly build in intensity. At or around Free Move (before or after), you can start to back off on the intensity, and start a gradual downshift toward cool down and recovery. Note that there are two Transitions segments. The first one is still ramping up in intensity, while the second one is more like a cool down. Remember that even while increasing intensity, we are still trying to minimize tension.
b. It’s normal for this practice to vary day by day according to you mood and needs. Listen to what your body is telling you and allow your practice to be self guiding. Some day you need high intensity, others will be more focused on relaxation and inquiry.
c. During Free Move, you can really do any kind of work you like, including more of any of the other exercises or combining all of them. Listen to your body and see what it needs and how it wants to move.
d. For Recovery, I usually lay flat on my back and just breath, restoring my body to a pre-exercise baseline and then going into a deeper state of mind-body relaxation. This is a perfect time to continue with further meditation and inquiry.
GOING DEEPER
Movement is only a part of this practice. The approach is really broad in scope. We are using movement here at a sort of entry point or a gateway into what is ultimately a larger holistic practice.
To go deeper, we can first take all the exercises we have done so far and explore them in different environments and with different parameters.
If you have been practicing in your living room, for example, try rearranging all the furniture, closing your eyes, and then doing all the same work. It will be totally different. Or better yet, go outside, in the yard or in a forest somewhere and see how the practice changes and how you change. Roll around on the rocks, crawl into the water, run up a hill, and so on.
Next, see that whatever other practices you are already doing or that you take up along the way are not separate from this work. It is the same work. To look inward is what really matters, and to inquire into the nature of things and into the nature of yourself.
So this work really includes all types of health, meditation, and spiritual practices. Massage, sauna, cold-water dousing, good diet and sleep habits, zazen, mantras, rituals, and prayer can all be seen as parts of this great practice. And many more types of practice as well.
Don’t limit yourself. See how everything you are doing, everything you encounter in life, all the ups and downs, and every practice and teacher you are blessed by, are all working toward an understanding and a way of being beyond your current conception of yourself.
It is the nature of paths that we do not really know where they lead. We have to follow them, all the way to the end, to find out.
ROUTINES
Every day for 1 week, do a 20 minute movement workout that incorporates all the movement elements of this course.
OBJECTIVES
Find consistency in daily practice, but allow that practice to expand and change over time. Allow your practice to go where it needs to go, and you will always be in the right place.
Recovery is an often neglected, but critical phase of any exercise or practice that pushes the body or mind out of its norms. However much attention we give to a practice session, we should give equal attention to recovery. But recovery is not just a static return to norms, although that is sometimes used as a benchmark. Ultimately, recovery also involves assimilation of the training and adaptation to new norms. After all, the exercises are meant to have an effect on you.
Much can be learned from actually practicing recovery. Too often people don’t recover properly because they don’t understand the process or they have not bothered to look inside themselves to see what is going on. So we can approach recovery as its own practice, and learn from it.
Through observing the process of recovery, we can learn a lot about the body, the mind, and ourselves. What happens to the body when we push it? What happens to the mind when we stress it? What body and mind elements do we most identify with and why do we suffer when they are taxed?
By actively engaging in the process as a practice, we can learn to recover faster when we are tired, out of breath, stressed out, afraid, or in pain. This is an incredibly useful skill — more useful than any particular movement or technique. It is a skill that directly facilitates survival, comfort, insight, and joy.
STEP BY STEP
1. Recover from breath hold: Lie down, get comfortable, and take an internal picture of you feel a kind of baseline. Note tensions, sensations, thoughts, emotions, et cetera. Now, Inhale … exhale … and when you’re at about neutral pressure inside and outside stop breathing. Hold your breath long enough to induce some internal tension, fear, and stress and watch carefully to see how these things arise and the course they take. Hold a little bit longer … and when you start breathing again, inhale through the nose and exhale out the mouth to facilitate recovery. Allow the breath to find the right rhythm to restore the body to baseline. Watch carefully the progress of recovery, and pay particular attention to heart rate and any feelings of anxiety and shortness of breath. Once the body stabilizes again, you find yourself taking a big breath as it settles back down.
2. Recover from exercise: Again, take an internal snapshot as your baseline. Then get into push-up position. Inhale … exhale … hold you breath, and do 1 push-up. Then lie down and breath in through the nose and out the mouth to recover, monitoring carefully your internal state. Be sure that you have recovered fully, and when you have, get into push-up position — inhale … exhale … hold your breath, and do 2 push-ups. Then lie back down again and recover. Continue like this until you’ve done 5 push-ups on a breath hold, and then go back down, each time making sure you have recovered fully from the exercise.
3. Recover while moving: Start with a slow walk. Inhale … exhale … hold your breath. Walk with breath held until you feel you have to breath again. Then start breathing, in the nose out the mouth, and do any other exercise while you recover — push-ups, sit-ups, jogging, rolls, crawling, et cetera. When you have recovered repeat the process, only this time try a different exercise for recovery. Pay attention to which exercises seem to facilitate your recovery more. This will vary by individual, circumstance, and what stressors are involved.
NOTES
a. This is just to give you some practice with facilitating and speeding recovery through focused breathing, and to get you into the habit of monitoring your internal state.
b. We are using basic breath-holds as a method for stressing the body and to have something to recover from. Other stimulus can be used, including any exercise, work stress, pain, et cetera. It’s important to see that the application of this work is wide ranging, and reaches into all areas of one’s life.
c. While recovering, if you can link your breathing to heart rate — for example, three beats inhale three beats exhale — you may be able to expert some control of actively slowing the heart rate. When you listen for the pulse, do so internally if possible, not with a finger to your neck or wrist. Develop the kind of internal sensitivity that allows you to know how hard your heart is working.
d. As with all these exercises, it’s vitally important that you actually do them and observe yourself if you wish to have any understanding of what they’re teaching. There is no substitute for doing the work.
GOING DEEPER
More than any other exercise, the practice of monitoring stress and its effects offers benefits in every area of our lives, be it work, relationships, health, or happiness. If you don’t see the wide-ranging benefits of this training, you are missing the point. It can truly transform how you live.
So in addition to the focused exercises, it’s important to make an effort to notice stresses in your daily life. Pay attention to when you are holding your breath, tensing up, getting worried, becoming anxious, or angry. When it happens, take a moment to practice recovery, calm yourself down and return yourself to a more neutral baseline.
When we allow stresses to go unnoticed and do nothing to bring the body and mind back into balance, we are headed for trouble. Eventually we will become overloaded and have some kind of meltdown. Depending on the situation that could be an embarrassment, miserable, painful, unhealthy, or even life threatening.
Because recovery is so neglected, it’s helpful in some sense to make it the focus of your practice. All the exercises you do, are just to create opportunities for practicing recovery, which includes skill assimilation, as well as mental and physical adaptation.
ROUTINES
Every day for 1 week, monitor your stress levels throughout the day. Practice recovery as needed, and spend 5 to 20 minutes working on focused recovery by deliberately stressing the body and mind with various types of exercise and breath holds, and then practicing active recovery and observation.
OBJECTIVES
Observe and understand stress responses and the recovery process in yourself. Develop instinctive practices that enhance recovery time and efficacy. Notice stress levels as they’re happening in the context of your life and apply appropriate recovery strategies.
Walking is so familiar that it gives us a unique opportunity to look deeper within. Since we are just walking, it would be difficult to seek something extraordinary or exciting. And yet within this simple movement, there is so much we can explore.
All the same work we began with jogging — working with various breath patterns and manipulating the course of impact waves through body — can be continued with walking. The impacts are smaller so we’ll need to use more sensitivity, but this greater sensitivity allows us to see small variations in greater detail.
Furthermore, because walking can easily be slowed and tempered to a very calm, even meditative state, it facilitates deeper inquiry while moving. So within movement we can explore such things as minute sensations, ego volition, and spacial perception.
STEP BY STEP
1. Walk very slowly and monitor every minute sensation as weight shifts and various pressures and tensions travel through the body. Bit by bit try to adjust your walking to reduce overall tension and any tension that seems to stick out or rise above the overall tone. At first it will just seem to move around from one place to another, but slowly see if you can balance out all the tensions … as much as possible. :)
2. Experiment with placing your attention in the feet, then the calves, knees, thighs, hips, lower back, upper back. Shoulders, neck. Make note of any changes in your walking as you shift your attention to different places. Experiment with generating the walking movement from different areas. There are so many subtly different ways to walk!
3. Close your eyes, and walk around the room. Note how this changes where you place your attention. As you walk, note any anxiety or fear that builds around running into something or not know where you are. And note proximity to walls and object can create a kind of pressure. Relax yourself and walk in such a way that running into something will not injure you. Don’t worry if you run into things, but pay attention to any self-judgment and your desire to do well.
NOTES
a. If you’re ambulatory, there is hardly another exercise that you will have more opportunity to practice. Walking is fundamental movement in our daily lives. Use your everyday walking as an opportunity for practice.
b. If you’re not ambulatory, every practice we have done can be modified to whatever level or type of movement you can manage. The walking part, or the jogging, or push-ups, rolls, or whatever, is just a variety of movements that provide stimulus for inquiry. Find this stimulus within your own movement and activity, pay attention to your body, sensations, thoughts, and do the same kinds of inquiry.
c. There is no excuse not to look into and try to understand yourself. Even if we are on our deathbed, we can look and understand what gets left, what remains, what we are not, and what we really are. True happiness and peace can come from nothing else but recognition of our true nature.
GOING DEEPER
When we walk, we usually perceive ourselves as moving through space or through the world. In other words, what we think of as internal we perceive as moving, while what we think of as external we perceive as being static or stationary. But this is just a particular way of looking at things.
As an experiment, try to see things the other way around. In other words, when you walk try to see yourself as remaining stationary while your walking moves the world — and the entire universe — around you. This may take a little work at first. If you need to, close your eyes and imagine empty space moving around you as you walk.
If you get it, the feeling may be a bit disorienting at first. Suddenly you are seeing the yourself and the world in a whole different way. This is just a step in exploring perception. This kind of exercise can point toward seeing all views as conditioned habits of interpretation, rather than inherent experience. More work will likely be need to uncover the depths of this conditioning.
ROUTINES
Every day for 1 week, spend 10-30 minutes walking, specifically working different breath patterns and experimenting with spacial perception.
OBJECTIVES
Learn to use walking as a the context in which to work on yourself internally and to do serious inquiry.
To move freely implies more than just do whatever you want. Of course, that fine too. Maybe you are a dancer so you want to dance. Maybe your are a martial artist so you want to kick. Maybe you do yoga and you want to move into your favorite postures. Maybe you feel like doing more rolling or crawling. Maybe you don’t know what to do. That’s all fine.
Whatever the case, though, usually our movement is constrained and guided by prior conditioning — both in patterns of movement and in thoughts. If we are trying to do the exact same thing in the exact same way based on preconceived ideas or prior circumstances, we are not really training for freedom. Instead, we are imprisoning ourselves in a limited conception of our bodies and being. We may or may not break out of this prison later on, but for the time being, we are incarcerated.
So in these exercises, the practice is to move from something other than conditioned thoughts and habitual movements. Be careful though. It is easy to trick oneself. If you say, “I don’t want to repeat my same old patterns, so I’ll do something different,” then you are moving a thought. If you do not think, but just repeat the same old movements, then you are moving from habit. We need to find an origin for our movement that is not prior thoughts and habits.
When we move freely, the body adapts and responds to current circumstances, always attentive and listening to what is really happening now. And when we move from a place of real silence, even if the body responds in a familiar way, it is something different entirely.
STEP BY STEP
0. As preliminary, just move around however you want and see what you do or don’t do, as well as your mind set and how you relate to the body.
1. In the first excercise try to guide your movement be moving into tension. Think of when you wake up and and stretch out to release residual tension get every loose and moving. Feel where there tension stick outs and move to stretch and mobilize those areas.
2. The second exercise is a little more subtle. Try to guide your movement by moving into relaxation. It may help if you create a little tension first on an inhale. Then exhale and follow the direction of the relaxation to guide your movement.
3. The third exercise is more subtle still. In the previous exercises note how the mind tends to pay attention to and identify with either the tension or the relaxation, depending on the instruction. In this exercise, being neither here nor there, move from emptiness, into tension or into relaxation as guided by … what should we say … the whole situation … or just something quite mysterious.
NOTES
a. We might think there’s a lot to wrap our minds around in this section, but that would be missing the point. Explore what is actually happening within yourself and see where it leads. That’s all.
b. Even if you fall into or want to do familiar movement patterns, that’s fine. But look deeper into what’s happening within the movement. Find yourself beyond the body and beyond the movement.
c. This work is endless. So it’s important to practice hard, cultivate curiosity, and have some fun too.
GOING DEEPER
When we approach this work, even with a so-called “open mind”, most of us are still deeply entrenched our ideas about who we are and what this experience of life is. And our own conditioning is a blind spot. We do not see how conditioned we really are, and so we mistake our ideas for reality.
We often act like we know what is going on, without ever having investigated our experience thoroughly and honestly. If we are studying movement, ask yourself: what is the origin of movement? We usually leap at anything we might attribute it to — thoughts, sensations, the ego, the world around us, and so on. But look closely and see if you can ever really pin it down and establish a definitive origin.
Make no mistake: the direction I am pointing challenges all the concepts and ideas you may identify with. If we trace our experience back, looking not just for the origin of movement, but for the origin of our thoughts, sensations, egos, and world … you may discover what first appears to be a kind of emptiness or nothingness. The tendency is to ignore it, but if you would like to go deeper, don’t ignore it. Investigate this too.
Look beyond the prison of your mind, and beyond the prison of your body by seeking the source of yourself. when not bound by thoughts, ideas, and concepts, you truly will understand free movement.
ROUTINES
Every day for 1 week, warm up and spend 5 to 20 minutes doing free movement and inquiring into the nature of this freedom.
OBJECTIVES
While exploring and enjoying movement variety, inquire into and recognize a deeper more profound kind of freedom than the idea of “doing what you want.”
Jogging is another movement we have learned to take for granted. It’s good exercise, of course, but it’s also ripe for deeper inquiry.
In the progression of our practice, there are some reasons for starting with jogging rather than walking. At this point we are still increasing the intensity of our work while simultaneously relaxing ourselves. So … let’s jog.
In general, we are using the jogging as feedback for posture and internal tension. We are also using it as a mechanism for relaxing the body further and making sure the whole body is working and ready for more standing movement.
With each step, the impact travels through the bones and tissues of the body like a wave. When it hits tension the wave doesn’t travel through as well or stops completely. If you pay attention you can diagnose and even massage out various tensions just through jogging.
STEP BY STEP
1. Check your standing posture: bend the knees a little and relax the hips and shoulders. Pick your whole foot up as if it were being lifted by a string attached to the knee, and then put it down again as if the string were lowered. Do the same with the other leg … back forth a few times until you get the feel of jogging in place like this, making sure the knees have some bend in them, the hips stay relaxed, back is mobile, and the arms hang freely. Finally take a little jog like this to get the feel of it.
2. Start jogging with the follow breath pattern. Inhale one step, exhale one step. Inhale two steps, exhale two steps. Inhale three steps, exhale three steps. And so on. Go as high as you can, keeping in mind you’ll have to go back down. Let’s say you get to inhale 15 steps and exhale 15 steps. Then go back down, with inhale 14 steps, exhale 14 steps. Inhale 13 steps, exhale 13 steps. All the way back down to inhale 1 step, exhale 1 step.
3. Jog freely in different direction — forward, backward, sideways, and so on. Try long steps, short steps, different gaits, and so on. Look inward and see how the impact of each step travels through the body. Where does the energy go? Where does it stop? Where does it accumulate? Try to jog in such a way that energy passes freely through the body and does not accumulate in any particular area.
NOTES
a. With jogging, as with other exercises, so many breath patterns can be explored. Try triangle type breathing where you inhale, hold, exhale for your steps, or box breathing where you inhale, hold, exhale, hold for your steps. And this is only the beginning. Breathing itself is a much deeper topic than a few patterns.
b. Too much tension in the joints prevent them from functioning properly to absorb and transmit impact. Examine the tension patterns inside your body while you jog. Are impacts predominantly hitting one area or joint, or are they distributed throughout the body?
c. Jogging has ancient roots. Our ancestors jogged for hunting, survival, travel, and surely pure joy. Jogging can be good check on the status of your mind. Go for a run and watch your thoughts. See what kind of thoughts intrude. After a mile or two, you will have a good picture of your mental blocks and habits.
GOING DEEPER
Once we begin to see how the impacts created by jogging travel through the body as waves, where they go and why, we can begin to manipulate the waves through changes in body structure, tension, and density.
Work on changing the course of the impact wave by experimenting with slight changes in posture, gait, and breathing. See if you can direct it into various areas and body parts. And see also that the source of the walking can come from different areas as well.
Now, just by jogging, we can work from and massage various parts of the body: the feet, calves, knees, thighs, hips, lower back, upper back, neck, and so on. Jogging then becomes a way of diagnosing various dis functions and of healing them.
ROUTINES
Every day for 1 week, spend 5 to 20 minutes jogging. Work different breath patterns, and use the jogging to relax yourself and massage different body parts.
OBJECTIVES
Learn to jog in a efficient way that keep you healthy and expands breath capacity. Use jogging to remove stress, re-pattern conditioned tension, and even heal injuries.
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