Authentic Movement by Patrizia Pallaro

Author:Patrizia Pallaro [Patrizia Pallaro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1853026530
Published: 2014-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

Looking at this scene, limitless emotions,

But not one word. (p.7)

And the extraordinary Persian mystical poet, Rumi (Moyne and Barks 1984), expresses the impossibility of this task:

–In these pages many mysteries are hinted at. What if you come to understand one of them? (p.v)

–If I could wake completely, I would say without speaking Why I’m ashamed of using words. (p.41)

–Why can’t we hear thought? (p.79)

MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE AND THE BODY

A universal and completely central part of mystical experience is its direct affect on the body, which is visibly altered. Transformation of consciousness means transformation of the body. The Mother (Satprem 1982) writes vividly about this: ‘To transform, you need to go down into the body, and that’s terrible… Otherwise nothing will ever change, it will remain the same.’ She continues: ‘…I seek my way downward – that’s what I can’t find. The way I am seeking is always descending, descending – it’s never going up, it’s always descending, descending. Oh! I have no idea when it will be over’ (p.60).

The Mother’s contributions to this area of inquiry are dramatic as she worked entirely phenomenologically: ‘…One never really understands unless one understands with one’s body’ (Satprem 1984, p.240). ‘I have had a unique experience. The supramental light entered my body directly, without going through the inner or higher planes of consciousness. It was the first time. It entered through the feet…’ (Satprem 1982, p.163).

R. H. Blyth (1960) tells us that ‘Zen means thinking with the body’ (p.28). A great Jewish mystic, Abulafia, who was not unlike a Zen master, assigned each letter of the Hebrew alphabet to a corresponding body part. Focusing on a body part as an expression of a holy letter increased the aspirant’s possibility of reaching God (Epstein 1988). What follows is a description of what can happen:

After much movement and concentration on the letters, the hair on your head will stand on end…your blood will begin to vibrate…and all your body will begin to tremble, and a shuddering will fall on all your limbs, and…you will feel an additional spirit within yourself…strengthening you, passing through your entire body…[like] fragrant oil, annointing you from head to foot. (p.84)

Stephen Katz (1983) writes:

The concrete meetings of mystic and beloved in Christian tradition, moreover, are almost always with the Christ whose physical body and wounds…are seen and felt by the Christian initiate. Indeed, this feeling of sharing in Christ’s wounds is a striking feature of many Christian mystical occasions… Yearning to share in her Lord’s Passion, [Lukardis of Oberweinar] prayed that [Christ’s] experience of pain might always be present to her own experience. [The Lord said to her in response:] ‘Place thy hands against My hands, and thy feet against My feet, and thy breast against My breast, and in such wise shall be so much helped by thee that My pain will be less.’ And when the servant of God had done this she felt interiorly the most bitter pain of the wounds both in her hands and in her feet and in her breast… (pp.

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