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Authentic Movement as Spiritual Discipline
When I moved to San Francisco in 1996, a few years out of music school and having decided not to become a Zen monk just yet, one of the first things I did was to find the Contact Improvisation jam. CI had appeared in my life the year before, while I was a student at…
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Authentic Movement as Tandava
For many years, parallel with my training in Buddhism and Yoga, I practiced a contemporary contemplative discipline called Authentic Movement (AM). Developed by dancers and Jungian analysts in the 1970s, AM is rare in both its provenance as a contemplative art created and maintained almost entirely by women, and in its resistance to capitalism and…
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Traces of a past life
[Putting the last few words and videos I have from my brightest years as a performance artist here. How tremendously far away they, this I, feel. Making it a “post” instead of a “page,” date-stamped, scroll-lost, faded even more. I almost just left it off the new site entirely, but this is better. A little…
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Inner and outer gaze in dharma and art practice
I tell you that there is no making an end of suffering & stress without reaching the end of the cosmos. Yet it is just within this fathom-long body, with its perception & intellect, that I declare that there is the cosmos, the origination of the cosmos, the cessation of the cosmos, and the…
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Path and fruition in Buddhism and the arts
[An essay from my PhD exam process exploring a hypothetical parallel between practice-insight and rehearsal-performance.] Contemplative practice, framed by the various religions, is almost always represented as a Path — the changing of subjective experience from one state or understanding to another more wholesome one — that leads to a definite fruition. Teresa of Avila’s Interior…
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The Heart [of Art] Sutra (and a long commentary!)
Thus have I heard. Once an Artist was living in Vulture Cap Lofts, alongside a great community of craftspeople, aesthetes, deep listeners, critics, and granting organizations. She entered the samadhi known as All That Is Made Is Beautiful, and radiated a profound aesthetic satisfaction that inspired everyone [to be] present. Inspired, the theorist Audio-Visio-Kinesthesis exclaimed…
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now the eyes of my eyes are opened
Our senses are so much a part of who we are that it’s nearly impossible to think of ourselves without them. We have sense organs, called “doors” in Buddhism because they admit information, or “sense-objects” — the “guests” in the Rumi poem, “This body is a guest house”. In the Buddhist tradition, thought and emotion…