Author Archives: Paula Josa-Jones

Dec4

island time

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This was the view leaving Wood’s Hole for Martha’s Vineyard yesterday around 4 pm.  The sun, sky, clouds and sea were creating an elegant, spare choreography of light.

Island time according to the Urban Dictionary is, “The time vacuum created by the ocean’s presence. Similar to stoner’s time, everything moves nice and slow. This carefree aura even has the ability to travel with islanders and can engulf you in their presence.”  Not this time.  I am here to help with my autistic godson, Jacob.  His time zone is uncharted water.

Last night, he was wild – climbing, banging, shrieking – his lanky prepubescent body a commotion. It is humbling to arrive with a somatic therapist’s bag of skills and perspectives and realize that none of it may apply.  To be with Jacob is both quintessential improvisation and unrelenting repetition.

Jacob’s parents have done, learned, implemented, studied, applied, conjured every possible treatment and approach for their child.  Time is moving inexorably toward the need for bigger answers as Jacob grows bigger, stronger, faster.   Adolescence looms.  Time – both the long stretch of each day in Jacob’s world, and the fast moving need for solutions is here.  And yet, what Jacob teaches is the need for consummate attention to each moment – excruciating and beautiful all at once.

For more ideas about time, check out Brain Picking’s 7 must-read books on time.

 

 

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Dec3

Monday’s poetry angel

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Mind Wanting More

Only a beige slat of sun
above the horizon, like a shade pulled
not quite down.  Otherwise,
clouds.  Sea rippled here and
there.  Birds reluctant to fly.
The mind wants a shaft of sun to
stir the grey porridge of clouds,
an osprey to stitch sea to sky
with its barred wings, some dramatic
music: a symphony, perhaps
a Chinese gong.

But the mind always
wants more than it has —
one more bright day of sun,
one more clear night in bed
with the moon; one more hour
to get the words right; one
more chance for the heart in hiding
to emerge from its thicket
in dried grasses — as if this quiet day
with its tentative light weren’t enough,
as if joy weren’t strewn all around.

Holly Huges

Nov29

the hard and the soft of it

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Many of you have commented on my post about softness.  I want to give full credit to Mark Rashid here.  It began when I heard him at Equine Affaire, and has continued as I have been watching his DVD called Developing Softness.  It is available from his website and on Amazon, and is well worth the price.

For me, the idea of softness was new.  I love that!  Something new in the somatic world?  I have thought a lot about ease, flow, relaxation, releasing, opening, expanding – but not about softness in a specific way.  So I have been thinking & feeling deeper into that subject.

I am someone who has always enjoyed quickness.  I love a quick mind and moving quickly.  Alacrity, sparking, lightening, tap dancing – all feel good to me. Sometimes the quickness is nervous energy – un-centered and twitchy.   When things go slowly, or slower than is my habit – like that driver in front of me – I get a physical itch, a discomfort, because that person is not going at my speed.  Or at the speed that is my habit.

My question is, can we be habitual and centered?  I think so, if the habit is something like bringing ourselves back to the breath.  I find that many habits are reflexive or reactive and unconscious.  Going fast is a way to not be in the moment, especially if it is an uncomfortable one. Hurrying is a good avoidance technique.

So back so softness.  When I feel myself accelerating, or hardening – as is often the case with my sutbborn pony Amadeo – letting that feeling remind me to soften is proving to be very effective and brand new to this pretty educated body.  The sensation is more palpable than relaxing, and more specific than just breathing, although breathing is part of it.  It is a physical/mental/emotional letting go, opening and centering in that place just below the belt buckle that I talked about the other day.

How do you soften?  Do you soften?

Nov29

a new year offering

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I am planning a January offering – Natural Horsemanship for You and Your Horse.  This one’s a teleseminar – four weeks of strategies for aligning, attuning and improvising with your horse.  Each week will combine instruction and suggestions with time for questions and answers.

You may be wondering how we can do that via phone or Skype, with no horses in the room.  Sometimes it is a good idea to take the physical horse out of the equation for a bit so that we can focus on out own bodies, our own breathing, our own emotional landscape.  Getting clearer about that through visualization and meditation can help us to be more mindful, more aware, softer when we get to the barn.  Our horses appreciate all of that.

Stay tuned for details.