03/26/2026
Embodying Equinox Paradox:
The theme for today (Thursday at 9:40 and 11) will be paradox prayers - a way to hold complexity in our bodyminds. This is the convergence of the themes of the prior 2 weeks: embodied expressions of light (borrowing from choreo by Alvin Ailey) and then dark, described in the newsletter like this:
This week we explored practices for a somatics of darkness. Our primary reference was Zenshu Earthlyn Manuel, who reminds us "when you turn away from darkness you turn away from life." An ordained Zen Buddhist priest who grew up Christian, Osho Zenshu's work reflects her background as an older, African-American le***an with a working class background. She talks about darkness as both physical (related to blackness) and metaphysical (related to the darkness of the womb, the grave, the earth, night, ocean, and what she calls "dark experiences" that can heal us if we can "learn how to dwell in the darkness."
Like the pandemic, for example. In a dharma talk she said her response to pandemic was a kind of "FINALLY! finally we're going to STOP. We're going to see who we are as a human species." This hope for the powerful potential in darkness to differently - and more clearly? - illuminate reality led her to write a book called Opening to Darkness: Eight Gateways for Being with the Absence of Light in Unsettling Times. The book is full of beautifully complex poems and puzzles that never dare to define darkness, in a refreshing refusal to collapse s**t into dualistic categories of good/bad; right/wrong. To approach darkness as medicine and heal the socialized fear of darkness and blackness, rendered inferior to lightness and whiteness, she offers eight gateways for entering, surrendering to, and expressing from darkness. Darkness isn't a stage we pass through before we graduate to light. Seeing in the dark is its own form of knowing - a cosmic, sacred form of perception that is, in fact, our home in the womb and our destination in the grave. It is a space of truth and depth and integration rather than fragmentation. The vastness of darkness isn't devoid of meaning, but we need to get to know it to learn the wisdom of what she calls "presence without pressure" (SWOON!) to counter the striving in this culture of overexertion. The dark body is the body of the unknown. Its domain is silence. Stillness. Feeling our way. Embodiment. Paradox, Differently-attuned sense awareness. So to reclaim the sacredness of darkness we have to go back to the darkness that birthed us and get to know it, ourselves in it, the world through it.
Part of seeing the world darkly, Osho Renzu teaches, is letting go of the thrall to the visual plane, our preoccupations with appearances. What if, to perceive, explore, and express who and what we are and all that surrounds us, the visual plane is the least sensitive instrument? What if we let go of the need to perceive and represent truth through the lens of visuality? To rest the eyes and come to our senses is to rediscover a generative, intelligent field that restores the body to itself. Reinvigorates spiritual and ancestral wisdom we can't seek with our eyes. The home of what's hidden - grief, memory, intuition, spirit - all that we can't see. And we move beyond this obsession with identifying our identity to simply ALLOW Self to emerge. To stop fu***ng performing and just let reality suffuse our being, letting ourselves to feel without worrying about how we're seen. To find the unseen body of truth and hold it up over external image. The constant light, the reaching for it, in this friggin internet culture of hyper-visibility and productivity and constant relentless blinding light. And when we enter the darkness, not with our limited limited intellect but with the brilliance of our bodies, we heal.
And THEN Osho Zenshu gives us another, crucial next step! It's not just about experiencing these things for ourselves, it's about becoming, in her amazing turn of phrase, "messengers of darkness." How can we bring who we are and what we learn and the modality of being in our practice out into the rest of our day? Always the pickle. Always the move that determines whether this is spiritual bypass or a fractal, ever-widening ripple of transformation. So that was a query offered in classes this week: in what way are you serving as a messenger of darkness?
But you know maybe it's never worth describing our practices here, since it's really about the experience - eyes closed, those Bartenieff/Bonnie Bainbridge womb movements, or feeling our way fingers and toes up and down and around the mat, or risking a subtraction of all the habits of aesthetic prettiness we've learned in a balancing pose, and replacing them with raw, authentic movement... THANK you for your courage to be vulnerable - your willingness to go there together. Among many very cool moments this week, one stands out: in the Wednesday night class, Somatic Resourcing for the Givers, where we close our practice with connection, I offered two prompts for authentic relating. The first was, essentially, "how was this experience for you?" and I heard a cacophony of voices talking about how to work with a hurt shoulder, the crazy angle on the mat or feeling around for props, the challenge of the eye mask falling off... And then the second prompt was something like, "choose an image, memory, or a few words that describe your intimacy with darkness." And the tone in the room completely changed. The voices were hushed, halting. Musical, searching. Reverential, uncertain. People actually shifted languages, and started speaking darkness. THIS is what it means to be "messengers of darkness," to bring our practice out into the world. To gain fluency with unknowing, with a faltering, flawed yearning to convey what is beyond words, a worshipful approach to broader forces that resist our easy definitions, working on voicing the truths that lie ready to be discovered beyond our opinions. To give a feel for what it sounds like, here are two poems by Osho Zenshu, which say more than all the well-constructed sentences I can architect here. I read them aloud in a kind of rhythmed flow, without line breaks or a feeling of punctuation (to see them with their original line breaks, you should get the book)! The first poem arrived as a gift in her bowing 108 times for 3 weeks in her dharma transmission, long before the book was even an idea:
"In the beginning the dark water of the womb was home without ears eyes a nose a tongue and without light there was still sight smell sound taste touch we descended in birth from the great mystery of the dark making us rich and full with the forever unknown in the darkness and in the dark waters of our beginnings we did not know light so there was no fear of darkness life was dark and we rested in it in this place of origin we still live massive blackness surrounding us not good or bad itself unattached to light yet related upon our birth light was as unknown as the darkness from which we came radiance bright to our new eyes and body, was undefinable and we were left to explore this light forever in the same way we explored our home of darkness we were without words uncertain of the light or the dark we speak of the light that can and cannot be seen with these eyes is as unknown as the dark the world lit up upon our birth and still we do not know the light that is beyond the sun and the moon we can only know a kind of light with these eyes that were formed in darkness a kind of light we could never create or conjure eyes closed we remember the stillness of our beginnings filled with sound without speech movement and without a destination the smell and feel of flesh bone and muscle gave texture to blackness by which we could touch life we still can see into darkness not with the eyes that are closed or open but with the sight given in the darkness of our birth"
And another, written at the assassination of George Floyd:
"darkness is asking to be loved our composure is long gone come down on all fours and greet the darkness that reeks of death reaches out its desperate hand and asks to be loved as much as we love the light it gives come down on this earth each scream a bell that never stops ringing if you have nothing to say now is the time for the deeper silence it whispers in the dark and wakes you from the nightmare come down here and be still on the earth and when it hurts from being down here so long roll over and see what you couldn't see from the other side come down here where the only lullaby tonight will be your heart drumming the songs you were born with"
Drumming the songs, y'all. Rich and full with the forever unknown. See you on your mat - mwah.
Art: Skye Peterson
