Today, quite by chance, I had one foot thoroughly planted, and I lifted — rather than shifted — the weight from the other foot before I moved it.
I’m not sure I can explain better than that. I had just shifted postures. I was in the middle of putting weight onto the right foot. Then, sort of by accident, I bent my knee just enough that my weight wound up about 80% in my right leg and resting on my right foot. And then… I thought… I think… This other weight in my left foot needs to be over on the right side before I move it. But, my body was already in the right position. There wasn’t any place to shift to, to move the weight. So, I sort of… lifted my thigh and calf with the relevant muscles, but left the foot in place. It was like, the foot was resting on the floor, but not planted there — it was really hanging in space, sort of. Very strange sensation. And then it was very easy to move it for real.
I did another ten postures that way before I lost the sense of it, and had to finish the form as I usually do. Each time, the sensation was the same: shift the weight to the opposite foot; then lift the thigh and calf without shifting the foot; then feel the weird sensation of knowing the foot is touching the floor without your body depending on that contact at all; then the shift of the foot to the new location. Wash, rinse, repeat.
And it occurs to me that the way that I did part of the form today, the plant and lift feet movement, is really what I was supposed to be doing all along. The very odd thing about the sensation of this occurring today, though, is that I’m not at all sure if I do this sort of thing all the time; or if I just somehow became hypersensitive to it today for a little while, and the profound awareness was too distracting to manage for more than a few postures.
I was talking to someone last week about magic, and one of the phrases that came up was “glimmerings from beyond the veil.” The idea is that there’s a veil that separates our ordinary, waking-life self from our higher self — and that veil is a thin curtain. But sometimes our higher self presses against that curtain, or the winds of our lives blow the curtain inward, and a shape or a form is revealed as the curtain or veil presses against the outline of the thing or being beyond, and we get a glimpses of that being. This was kind of like that. I became aware, however briefly, of a shape of things to come. I don’t know what to do with that information, or how to bring back this style of work so that it infuses my whole form. I only know that it will come, with time and sufficient practice.
