Movement On
A short and curious dream led us to a simple daily prescription for life changing action.
Last year Brad dreamed of reading a photo essay in The New Yorker magazine. It presented twelve commissioned original works of art by leading painters to honor the major historical contributions to the healing professions, including those in psychotherapy, bodywork, and traditional spiritual healing. To our shock, one of the honored contributions was Sacred Ecstatics. The painting was a modern depiction of floating dots juxtaposed with wiggling lines in various hues against the dark, starry background of the cosmos. Underneath the painting was the caption, “Movement On.”
If there is one common dynamic underlying the various ecstatic traditions, it is movement. Whatever name you call the mysterious life force that underlies healing and transformation – seiki, n/om, holy spirit, or sacred vibration—they are by nature found in motion. Though it is true that spiritual healing traditions have many other values in common including loving one’s neighbor, sharing, caring, and surrendering to divine direction, these concepts are ubiquitous and therefore too easily reduced to abstractions or platitudes. Movement, on the other hand, is unambiguously the name of an action. This vision is a reminder to pay attention to the spiritual engineering know-how of ecstatic living. Are you only talking and thinking about the sacred, or are you letting it move you?
After we shared this dream with the Sacred Ecstatics Guild, it became a kind of unofficial slogan, a daily call to action. We’re now bringing it back into focus. When you sit down on your seiki bench for your daily spontaneous energy break you can say, “Movement on!” Before you begin any activity, whether it’s feeding your family, writing a letter, watering the plants, or sweeping the floor, give it some creative juice with a two-word wake-up call: “Movement on!”
When you pray before going to sleep, throw your heart up into the night sky and say, “Movement on! Movement on!” You may be transported to the visionary classrooms to receive another prescription for action that has more traction and brings greater satisfaction than a non-moving platitude vaguely aimed at altering your attitude.
With or without music, slow or fast, for twenty-five seconds or twenty-five minutes—rock, tremble, shake, wiggle, sway, stomp, twirl, or whirl. Do it freely without purpose other than to get your movement on. Make some motion with heartfelt sacred emotion as a lasting contribution to the history of human transformation.
-The Keeneys, April 29, 2020