lori webb
posted in tango mailing list

Hello Dear Practitioners,

This is what I remember the instructors talked about in Mexico Seminar:

The Naghual said that when the time comes, the instructors should do a seminar in Mexico in order to brake the barrier that separated us socially and energetically between each other. They said that Mexico, the core of Don Juan’s Lineage, is a place for interaction where there is so much life and where things are being born. The idea of the isolated warrior was destroyed.

In this seminar we learn a new form: Silvio Manuel’s form (they told us that when Silvio Manuel reached his completeness he never came back to where he was before). They said also that we should cultivate the mood of a warrior that is to treat everything, others and yourself with care and respect. In Spanish there are two forms of using the language to refer to others, they said, one of them is the use of usted, which cultivates the mood of care and respect and not takes things for granted. This is the mood that we want to acquiesce instead of being self-concerned with ME, to work with groups and to trust your and others intent, and then reach the second gate of dreaming.

In the second gate of dreaming also we do not want stay fixated in one dream but move to another dream with fluidity. They said that we do not want to get fixated with or in what we are recapitulating. The recapitulation is not a ritual and there are no rules to do it, they said. Also, they said that a warrior is functional and fluid, and that that is to be impeccable: in our log we should acknowledge what works each day for us, it does not matter how big it is. When a warrior changes, they said, he acknowledges his change by painting a door, switching the order of their furniture or changing the position of their beds (like Florinda used to do).

Miles said also that to know where we are, what we are good at and where we are going to we want to see or keep track of which are our patterns of perception. When we are in a room and we close our eyes some tend to remember things like the faces of people, others the walls, others the colors and lights of the room, etc… So Miles said that we could place our attention in other things that we don’t usually perceive. They said also that we are used to perceive from only our upper front view and not our back and top views and also our lower view including our feet (they said that we talk about our feet as our car, our house, etc… but we are our feet). And we practiced some magical passes to change this.

A warrior adapts to the circumstances and acts immediately, and when he falls he stands up right away. They talked about putting our shit on the table to the side next to the window. They said that some of us are walking in the shit and say - what shit? I don’t see any. Others are also walking in the shit but don’t do anything about it and they are discussed. They also said that we don’t have to burn others with our shit, that to recognize our shit is only for ourselves (you are not supposed to call others and show them your shit). They said –don’t put it in the middle of the room, put it to the side, next to the window and don’t get obsessed with it.

They also said to listen to the energy body and to be humble in respect of our energetic capabilities or state, to know where we are at this moment and what we can do: trusting the connection with the energy body. They also talked about doing one thing at the time and learning to live the moment and
that that is to connect to your energy body. They said that we tend to have a list of things and always try to finish it at any cost without listening to the messages of the energy body. So for example if you are tired and hungry you should eat and rest first and then meet your agenda or list of activities. We also tend to believe that when we are resting we are doing "nothing," and that what we want to do instead is to intent to perceive with the energy body. They said we don’t want to mix dreams. Like for instance when you are talking on the phone with someone you do not want to interrupt the conversation by saying-hold on, yes honey put the trash on that bag…yes what you where saying…-.

They also talked about putting thoughts into action, feeling and perceiving the world with your fibers of the lower disk. They talked about putting feeling into action, living the moment and perceiving everything as if it where the first time with awe and affection by adopting a new view and that that is what brings us closer to the energy body.

They also talked about the assemblage point and how we can place it in a new position, in the warrior’s position. The sorcerers used to push the assemblage point from the back into the chest, now they discovered a more sober way of moving it by dropping it to the floor and then placing it into the chest. They also said that the breath is what makes the assemblage point shift.

A Big hug: Lori
   

From Tom Reavley

To add a little to the other posts on the April 2001 Mexico City seminar:

Darien Alexander told about a time when the Nagual asked her and Aerin Alexander to come over to his house and do garden work. They arrived and enthusiastically began collecting the leaves that lay all over the ground.
When they were almost finished, the Nagual asked them to come into the house because he had something else for them to do. When they entered he promptly excused himself for a moment, saying he had a phone call he had to make. The two women sat on the sofa, waiting, confident that they were about to be given a new task, something infinitely more interesting than removing leaves from the garden. Five, ten, fifteen minutes passed in silence. Excitement changed to impatience. Finally, the Nagual returned, only to leave again moments later to make a another call he just remembered. Time passed slowly; Darien's thoughts wandered to how they could have been finishing their work in the garden, or doing things that needed to be done at home later on. Then a sharp breeze came in through the window. She became aware of Aerin, now asleep beside her, and she reclined her head against the couch. Time seemed to stop. She noticed the shadows of the curtains moving slowly in the room.
"And the dripping of the faucet in the kitchen. And the dripping of the faucet in the kitchen. And the dripping of the faucet in the kitchen."
Florinda came into the room and told them to go home. They protested that the Nagual had asked them to wait for him, for something he wanted them to do. Florinda explained that the Nagual had sent her to tell them the other project could wait and that they should go home and rest. Darien returned home and soon got caught up in work she needed to do. The phone rang -- it was Florinda, who asked why she was working when she was supposed to rest. Darien explained that she felt like she hadn't done very much that day and had other things that needed to be done. Florinda replied that no, Darien had done a great deal, sitting and waiting in the Nagual's house, much more than she realized. Do you know how hard it is to do nothing? She needed to rest.
Nyei followed up by talking about the "one more thing" tendency: making ourselves continue down a list of tasks even when a part of us knows our energy is low and it's time to stop. Miles presented a related theme: that we should deal with other people, the world around us and ourselves in the spirit and mood of "usted", the polite form of "you" in Spanish that is used to convey respect.

A few additional points of emphasis in the previously described story of the practitioner's visit to her married sister and young daughter: the practitioner's shift of attitude from being put off by infants to an attitude of wonder at the child's ability to contentedly observe herself and her surroundings with complete attention (she could watch her own hands for hours) also gave the practitioner a new sense of confidence -- if this young being could perceive the world in a manner so free from the restrictions of socialization, then so could the practitioner achieve this type of perception. And in realizing that her sister was a warrior and living impeccably as a homemaker and mother, the practitioner realized that it is not what one does that counts, but how one does it. Even though the family had given up on the sister ever marrying and having a family, the sister never gave up. Every day she did something intended to move her life in the direction she wanted to go.

Another practitioner told of a visit in the spirit of recapitulation to the city where he had been a student. After he arrived at the bus station he walked the streets of the city and noticed that everything was almost exactly the same:a street carnival, the buildings, how people looked. He found the school and it was the same too: students were working on computers in the classrooms in the same way he had remembered. He was about to go upstairs to check out the second floor when he got a call on his cell phone. He decided to take it outside so as not to disturb the classes. When he came back in, he found a building with judge's offices instead of the school.

A final practitioner's story involved his meeting Carlos Castaneda at an early Mexico City event attended by about 30 people who heard Castaneda speak and learned some magical passes. Sometime after the seminar the practitioner had a dream in which he was making some very unusual metal sculptures and he heard Castaneda behind him saying, "Muy bien. Muy bien. Muy bien." Years passed and the practitioner completely forgot about the dream, but after many turns and twists, and for apparently unrelated reasons he began designing and making a type of small metal figure. One day a man appeared who wanted to buy his entire collection of some 17 figures. The buyer looked at them and said: "Muy bien. Muy bien. Muy bien." Only then did the practitioner recall the dream.

For me this seminar moved further in the direction of the Mexico City seminar last fall and the Anaheim seminar: toward a new mood -- one in which the heavy use of tendon energy and the energy engendered by precise uniformity of movement in the whole group are less important, and individual rhythm, timing and emphasis are encouraged. Toward this end, passes are presented with subtle changes, with new points of emphasis, rather than presenting a lot of movements that seem unrelated to what we have already learned. It is as if we have accumulated enough energy and discipline that the energetic "high" brought about by the original approach is no longer necessary. In my case the result is an absence of the emotional excitement I used to feel at the end of a seminar and in its place, a quiet calm. At first I viewed this shift as a disappointment and a loss. But now it seems more powerful than before. At the end of the seminar and afterward, it's like a mood of "hopelessness" -- the absence of hope, in the sense of my usual focus on the future, but without the self-pity or regret or sentimentality usually associated with that word. A sense of one's capacity to live supported only by intent, without the intoxicating emotional exhilaration, which, like sugar or caffeine, wears off, and while in effect, interferes with silence and intending.

posted by Fred Guerin in tango mailing list

Here is a partial account of the Mexico workshop.

Cleargreen showed no new passes, but instead they reordered several passes into new long forms, and emphasized the use of some single passes. There was a new variation of mapping the physical body, and also a form to be done with partners or alone which mixes a lot of passes from the Tensegrity book. The tiger of intent was emphasized and we focused on the breathing and gripping the ground with the feet, and keeping the intensity of the tiger. One person commented that "not much happened, but we did a lot". There were lectures almost every hour. We have been tasked to write in our logs, between now and the next full moon, "all the things that work for you". Things that you do which are positive
and follow the flow of energy.

The theme of the workshop was to adopt the mood of the warrior, and we are to strive for increased awareness of everything that we do. When going about our daily live, or doing the passes, we are to pause to assess the effect. It was stressed that it isn't important what you choose to do, but how you go about doing it.

A Mexico practitioner gave an account of her changed relationship with her sister. She had always considered that her sister was wasting her life because she spent her every moment preparing herself to be a mother and to run a household. Her sister did not marry for a long time, but when the family had
given up hope, she found a husband in another country, moved and started a family. When the practitioner made a visit to her sister and her 4 month old daughter, she was prepared to see the same insignificant person she grew up with, but her sister had transformed into a vibrant person with purpose,
assurance and humor. She said that before her stood a warrior. The practitioner said there was more to the story. Until that time she thought raising a child was a waste and was not comfortable around children. When she saw the child, she noticed its curiosity and ability to find delight in the simplest things for hours such as looking at its hands. After spending several days with these people she felt a gratitude toward the child for bringing back the sense of wonder about the world that she remembers as a child but had forgotten. She left her sister and the child with a sense of longing for the child and she felt the bond that had been created.

It was mentioned that we need to stop trying to do too much; that we should not always try to fit in that 'one last thing' that makes us too tired, or hurts us.

We were on the mat a lot for the laying down form of stabbing for a new position of the assemblage point, and for the mapping of the physical body. Erin told us that the Nagual used to make them sit for hours pressing the point of mystery on the bottom of the feet, and said that when we wake up in the morning, we should do the mapping passes that wake up the toes and the web between the toes. This is because we usually spend the rest of the day ignoring our feet. They further defined the point of mystery on the foot as the intersection of the two extended lines of the big toe and little toe when they are spread apart. We should press on the top part of the foot as well as the bottom at this point.