Day 1: Sensation

Sensation Is The Begining

Greetings BodyJugglers,

Welcome to the beginning of your somatic re-education process.  BodyJuggling is what we call somatic lifestyle fitness.  Somatic means learning through the body and is accomplished through increasing relaxation and sensation to create full-body awareness.  Lifestyle is about increasing awareness of our archetypal patterns and life decisions and understanding how these directly affect the quality of our daily lives.  Fitness, as we use the term, means making a conscious decision to live life through wellness and vitality because these are two of the most important factors to overall quality of life.

Make no mistake, the Balance-Power-Flow series is about improving the overall quality of your life, in every aspect, not simply shedding a few pounds or toning up for a gala event.  This program has been designed as a holistic process of self regulation and self actualization which will lead the dedicated practicioner directly into the center of their own awareness. This program will balance and strengthen your body, focus your mind, and free your spirit.  You will learn exercises that will stretch, and tone your muscles while burning tons of calories. You will learn perceptual tools that will allow you to manage your thoughts and emotions in an effortless and empowering way. And you will learn meditation techniques which will allow you to alleviate stress and tap into your own intuition to discover your true purpose and passion in life.  Commit to this process and you will discover inside yourself the truth, love and joy most people hopelessly search for outside.

The program:

The Balance-Power-Flow course is designed to be practiced everyday of the week for 7 weeks.  You will have Sunday to rest the body, but there will be a text lesson and meditation for this day as well. The reason for this is simple.  True change requires commitment. Anything you do everyday will automatically become a habit. The purpose of this program is not to get you to exercise vigorously for two months then return to your old patterns.  We want to develop an entirely new lifestyle which will support your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual growth.  We want to install a pattern which will program you for success in every area of your life.

This program has been laid out like a blog because this style of communication has become ubiquitous in our tech savy culture.  Each lesson is contained within one post and there is a post for everyday of the week. Each lesson will contain text with at least one perceptual exercise illustrating the point and a video of a physical BodyJuggling session.  Many will also contain an assignment to be completed at the end of the session.  The text, session and assignment should take no longer than one hour total to complete on any particular day.  Anyone with genuine desire for growth can commit to one hour a day. Wake up early, go to bed a little later, skip your lunch hour, whatever it takes…make this happen.  You are worth it. The skills are worth it. The change is worth it.

If you are new to BodyJuggling do not worry.  Like all BodyJuggling programs this course is designed in a progressive manner starting with the basic fundamentals and slowly building to more complicated and strenuous movements.  There are two workout sessions for each week which will be alternated so that each workout will be done three times in a given week. This repetition is important for several reasons: 1. All mastery comes from repetition. 2. These are complicated whole body movements which require muscle memory to be done correctly.  3. We are systematically stretching and strengthening specific parts of the anatomy. 4. We are laying the ground work for the even more complicated movements coming in the next week.

Commit to creating the change you desire and this program will give you the tools to create the body you’ve always wanted and a lifestyle to match! Now, let us begin…

Lesson 1: Sensation

Sensation is where we begin.  Sensation is the bio-mechanical reaction of sensory organs, such as the eyes, ears and skin, to any visceral stimulus.  Sensation is the source of all external experience and is the doorway to learning how to understand and manage our internal experience.

All suffering in life comes from the struggle to reconcile our external sensation with our internal perception.  In fact, sensation and perception are so closely related that they can hardly be separated, which is why things tend to become difficult whenever the two would seem to disagree.

But, can two sides of the same coin ever really be in opposition to each other?  Of course not, but if they both had minds of their own they could sure try. They could each create fantasies about what they really wanted and what the world should look like and where they should go.  But they would still experience every situation simultaneously and would still end up with the exact same fate as the other.

Sensation and Perception are like two sides of the same coin. They are equivalent to the most profound concept in all of Chinese philosophy, yin and yang.  We will explore yin and yang deeply in week 6, but for now just know that yin and yang represents the positive and negative charges that create everything in the universe.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, for every down there is an up, for every hot there is a cold, and for every push there is a pull.  Sensation and perception are the yin and yang of consciousness.  Sensation is the external stimulus, the information if you will, and perception is the internal awareness of it.  Sensation is external and perception is internal.

So, why separate something that is inseparable?  Science has been doing this for millennia. By dissecting something into it’s constituent components we can often understand the relationship of the unified whole better.  For the purposes of this course we will create an imaginary division between sensation and perception so that we may better understand the relationship between the internal and the external.

Exercise:

It is important to understand that sensation is an abstraction and not a replication of the real world. This is the nature of illusions.  Illusions are created when sensory stimulation is arranged in such a way that it misleads perception into drawing incorrect conclusions.

Of course you have already noticed the image below and how it seems to move, shrinking and expanding endlessly. Experiment with your perception of this image by looking directly at it as well as looking at the space around it.  Notice how your perception is unmistakably affected by where you focus your attention.  Can you make the image be still?  If so, what is the secret?

What is the secret to perceiving this image as it actually is?  The secret is focus.  Focus your eyes on any point in the image without allowing them to move at all, and you will notice all movement cease.  You will see clearly what is actually in front of you rather than the false assumptions generated from partial information gathering.

Sensation is the act of gathering information and perception is the act of interpreting this data.  Although your retinas see this image as it actually is, the mind interprets this data based on many different biases.  Previous experience, cultural behavior, expectation, motivation, belief and emotion all affect how we perceive any given stimulus.  Over the next seven weeks we will systematically learn to identify and remove these perceptual filters so that our internal experience can become a beautiful harmony with our external experience.  This is the nature of inner peace and what we call Effortless Being.

In the comment section below explain what you learned about your perception through this exercise.  Tell me about an experience you have had where you discovered that what you thought you perceived was not at all what had occurred.

Assignment:

Log into your wordpress account and then click the “My Blogs” button in the top grey navigation bar and you should find the Balance-Power-Flow site listed among them if you have completed your sign up process.  Log into the Dashboard for this site and write your first post and title it “Who Am I?”.  Add your favorite picture, and then write a post telling me your life story in as few words as possible.  Don’t over think this, simply tell your story like you would to a friend at a bar. What is your first memory? What was your first triumph? First failure? How did you end up who you are today?

Note: If you don’t know how to write a post to this blog, write it to your own and I will show you how to repost it here;)

Now for some practical experience with sensation, put on your seat belt and jump into your first BodyJuggling session by pressing play on the video below.  In this session do not allow yourself to become frustrated or annoyed.  This is only the mind creating obstacles.  Simply focus on what you are feeling in your body and trust that “If you do the thing, you will get the result.”  Good luck!

Checklist:

1. Read lesson
2. Leave comment
3. Post to main page
4. Do BJ session

Stay in your center, and free yourself!

Peace,

SaTek