Hello Friends,
I’m hoping this correspondence finds you well. I have written and discarded many emails since our last communication and with the Autumnal equinox having now come and gone I feel a pressing need to touch base. Each year I am most apt to notice the end of summer by the decrease in daylight. Anxiety for lack of sufficient time is a common theme for me that generally shows its face strongly during the last third of the year. While I still notice the bodily sensations that accompany this habitual anxiety of “time is running out” the overall character, of what seems like a more existential reality, is very different in this year of vast uncertainty.
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More than a few of you have likely experienced some death or destruction in 2020. Whether your recent loss be literal or metaphorical it is likely that many of you, personally, have experienced an ending. The typical months of flourishing and growth have been framed by isolation and permeated with destructive ideology and rhetoric. One is either called to fight against an external force or to flow with the river of change that is overflowing in the wake of many ruptures in our collective dam.
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Transition has a nature of instability. Anyone who has played a dynamic sport against an opposition, or been in a physical altercation, knows the need to stay light on your feet. Whether we are engaging with a fight or assessing escape routes for flight we are not rewarded for clinging to how things could or should be. With armies amassing on different lines, I suspect those “lines” will get blurrier as issues become more personal to each of us and the thread that connects our inevitable relational identities pulls against the transcendent individual identity. All of this can be incredibly disorienting… depending how we fix our gaze.
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We are taught in Yoga-asana of the drishti: the point of visual focus that holds our attention. A point of stillness. At an instance of mastery, the practitioner may shift the external drishti toward an inward point. The eyelids close and we are either lost in the ever changing winds of identification, or compelled to fix our attention upon a solar center within our internal landscape. Teachers grounded in practicality remind us “not to meditate in a house on fire” but focus, we must. The individual who remains scattered at the perception of smoke is little more effective, then one who does nothing at all, in evading a harmful outcome. Focus is essential but focus is not simply concentration... We can just as easily concentrate on the wrong things.
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We are told drishti is focusing the gaze on something that is not moving; but we are on an organic spaceship orbiting a ball of fire: It is all moving! This is also the case with identity. Identity is always moving, no matter how complete “it” may seek to become. Even if we don’t think of identity as fixed at present, we often behave as if it is. We rarely consider the daily variations in identity from a person who is well-rested and well-fed to one who is stressed and afraid; Let alone the political, professional, romantic and platonic that change and develop complexity throughout situations and under a greater sense of history (assuming one is being influenced by the expanding and developing world that surrounds them).
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Two of the many overlapping battles I perceive as being fought at this moment are between
1. the subjective and the objective and
2. personal vs. communal identities
Information is influenced by these “polarities” differently, and we tend to relegate one to the other in different circumstances. Our society, and thus our collective reality tunnel, is framed/dominated by systematizing and delineatory thinking (a consequence of masculine/Yang energy), by this “unit” a thing is right or wrong, this or that. Having long consigned our more fantastical selves to the systems built to deal with the unconscious, such as religion and story-telling, we seem to be entering an apocalyptic necessity to integrate paradox and nuance (female/yin energy of chaos), that was long left in the shadows and kept as a subservient force. Both are creative and both can (and have throughout history) become destructive. A world built on zero-sum games and their progenitors in myths of scarcity and war seem to be driving us to “Pick a Side!” on everything, as opposed to recognizing perfect balance is the thing that stops a wheel from turning.
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We transcend in our unique individuality, but we live in relationship. In one form or another, every current battle appears to be playing out this division of inseparable realities. At their best: Some look to specify and hyper focus on specific identities to address the disintegrating web, others take an unmoving peripheral attention to see how the web of society and community is tangled in multitudinous ways. Specialists ridicule the generalist as unfocused while generalists mock the specialist as missing the forest for the trees; both take in different information that makes a unified whole.
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I’m hesitant to take a public stance on most things at the moment: in part due to personally understood ignorance (including the insight that it is all continually moving) and in part due to fear of being identified as “the other.” The individual who’s dissenting opinion leaves them without a tribe of protection against inevitable external threats of a brutally violent existence, is not long for this world. In one context we may be called to ridicule a voice that descents from the “collective narrative” while in another embrace the few enlightened voices that speak out against an unjust authority. Pending your tribe, the one’s who have seen the light may be labeled as “Woke” or “Patriots,” but if they deviate on other issues of communal consensus they may just as easily be labeled as Facists of Red or Blue identities and unwelcome in polite company.
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There are individuals who exist on polar ends of an existence that can be mapped as a flat line, but I suspect these identities are (at stable times) few and uninteresting; People existing in absolute terms who don’t have the capacity for nuance and ambiguity. They believe their righteous focus is the correct way in what is in reality a pathless field of possibility. Folks who believe in a flat earth are easy targets of mockery, but those who believe/act as if most human individuals can be mapped onto either side of binary scales of ideological identities are just as selective in their inference and assimilation of observable data. Of course as our personal concerns and fears become more provoked, nuance and paradox become harder to see and battle lines are drawn and wars waged. As I was expressing my concerns with what I notice, one friend said to me: “Growth is never comfortable”; She forgot that no battle ever created growth; Growth only comes after a winner rises victorious from a destructive war.
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As we exist in the liminal space between seasons (practically), in a year that is largely framed by a liminal state for a global society: I hope we can let go of singular identities and simplistic solutions; bridging the complexity of interconnectedness, in the uniquely individual way you personally can. I urge you to dance with paradox and accept individuals who attempt to embody a new web of existence, instead of clinging to familiar and the outmoded identity of the past; This includes taking in dissenting opinions - INTELLIGENT dissenting opinions, they exist, and if you don’t think they do: you are in an ideological reality tunnel. We will survive only by engaging with complexity, not simply denying it as ignorant, stupid, evil or “other.”
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We talk of fall as a season of letting go, but it is also a season of gathering. Autumn is a season deeply imbued with paradox, and a community is made up of individuals who are as uniquely multifaceted as the communities that must communicate with one another to survive, let alone thrive. Let us gather what might serve us in the days ahead and let go of that which weighs us down, the forecast for the winter ahead appears long and dark, but if we broaden our gaze we might notice Spring exists on a distant horizon.
❤️Noah
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I have three digital classes available (by request), and am in the process of recording new classes with much improved audio and visual quality. The new format is taking much more time (particularly as I have to record and do postproduction by myself), thank you for being patient. I intend to have at least one new class available by the end of the week.
I am currently scheduling online Private lessons and outdoor training sessions, please email for sliding scale rates and to schedule.
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If you do not already please consider supporting my Education page(providing content including instructional videos and blogs) by joining my Patreon or by making a one time donation (Paypal, Apple Pay and Venmo @noahmoves / Noah Julian Sedgwick)
Continued big Thanks to all who have joined and contributed, your assistance has allowed me to continue improving the quality of digital content I am releasing while making this time less stressful. 🙏❤️