At the end of my rope, in one of those endless discussions where everyone is looking through their own lens, one word comes out of my mouth. "Idiot !" I hadn't used that one in a long time, for the Other as well as for myself. It sounded like it came from an attic, old as cobwebs. It felt like one of those objects that had become foreign to me when you pick it up again at random from old archives. These archives dated from a time when I easily threw to myself: "idiot! lame! stupid !...".
When we realize the power of the word and the incessant conditioning created between ourselves and ourselves, it becomes more and more incongruous to say them as well as to hear them, so clear is it that they are only a limiting belief nourishing nothing good, neither for ourselves nor for the Other. Yet that day, the old word came back to me. In its retrenchments, my body went off to find what would be strong enough to say what it was feeling. But what did it feel ? What did it really want to express ?
HUMAN ENGINEERING
Like an instrument where one would only use a part of its mechanics or like a piano where one would not learn to change the resonance pedal, it seems to me that the human mind sometimes forgets certain essential cogs. Being right or wrong has become obsolete. The mind has evolved enough to be able to give one result or another : this has been proven by showing statistics that can say one thing or its opposite, depending on how they are handled. Like a knife, our mind is a tool with which we have learned to separate, to cut at all costs ! But "what" to cut or "how" to cut ? The blade, twirling, at times, narrowly misses cutting the heart at random. Thus, by dint of wanting to cut wrongly and askew, in small and very small pieces, one risks cutting oneself from one's own being through one's other parts : the heart (emotional energy), the sex (vital energy) and even the feet (roots).
In other words, to be "stupid" is to be "ignorant", "not to know". But what knowledge are we talking about ? This is what came to my mind when this word came back to me with its implacable airs but good-natured enough not to believe it totally. The idiocy of us, little children of the earth, as the first peoples like to call us when they observe us in our crazy "purchasing power", is that of not knowing how to speak by connecting the heart or walk by letting instinct guide.
Idiocy would then be the fact of having a Stradivarius in one's hands, of knowing perfectly the score, but of not knowing how to play it - down to its finest subtleties. Handling a vibrato, a sostenuto, skillfully changing the pedal on the piano like a violinist changes strings smoothly, expressing a musical phrase by allowing each note to connect to the next (i.e., mastering the art of legato), and finally being able to "sing" the music through the sophistication of a specific instrument... That's true knowledge !
Thus, shouting "idiot !" my body did not mean "you have nothing in your head" but "what's in your head is not connected to what's in your heart!" And likewise, "my heart has closed its ears..."
The instrument must first be tuned in order to be audible. But do we even take the time to tune ourselves enough before we want to express ourselves to the Other ? Or before preparing the space to listen ? Do we know if our heart is sufficiently connected to our mouth and ears ? And does our body connect with our thinking ?
NEW PARADIGMS
I once heard someone talk about "ears of the heart" to refer to listening to the self. Not the egotistical self that we like to show off, but the real "self" that we hardly dare to look at ourselves, in our heart of hearts, and that tells us who we really are. Imagining these two ears on each side of the organ, like two wings needed by the bird to embrace the wind, I was inspired by the image !
Have you ever tried to think from your feet ? "Some say, "He thinks like his feet ! Yet it is blatantly obvious that when we are too restless of brain, there would be nothing better than to question our feet. I tested this idea a few times while walking in a forest or even in the street. Let my feet see, think. Exit all activity from above. Everything comes from below. The effect was striking ! In a few seconds, one reaches a state of well-being that some people would think they could only achieve through a long and tedious quest or by adding external chemicals.
In the same vein, I wondered what it would be like to see through the heart, hear through the belly, think through the spine. Letting the ideas infuse from the heart space... and without trying to let it go to the head, simply allowing the alchemy to happen. Simply place your consciousness lower, in other spaces of the body, of the being. The brain is also a space of well-being ! Floating, the brain is only an organ, in itself, made of billions of neurons capturing invisible information. It is possible to let it also feel its place between a frontal lobe and an occiput, between two ears, held in a liquid like a balloon in a large basin of water! We sometimes forget that the head can also be massaged, from the inside...
In the same way, we know today scientifically that the intestines and the heart, in particular (the skin also and almost all the organs) conceal a quantity at least as immense of neurons sensors of information. But what do we really do with them ?
OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE
When young students are told to "play more from the heart" or "put their guts into it", how do they really live it ? Do they conceptualize it with their minds or do they really experience it ? Do we only teach these young people the key to their own process ? Of their intimate virtuosity ? Like a child at school who is told to "concentrate" and who, in all good will, tries either to frown or to put his head in his hands, quickly bored by the absence of results and ending up saying to himself : "I don't know how to concentrate". The truth is that we don't offer him to go and find out the mechanisms of his concentration. However, once this agreement is found, everything else becomes easier. More fluid. More obvious.
A former opera star once told me: "with dancers, the top of the heart is the heart". And I imagined how much the dancer, with his chest outstretched and offered to the world, knows how to pay homage to this sublime, perfect and miraculous engineering called: humanity. How could we have believed that our center was the head because it was above the rest ! Very small, certainly lacking a field of perception, the head observes and contemplates from afar, just as the sailor can see from above but does not direct all the maneuvers of the boat and is only in command of the captain's destination, lower down, in his cabin. Without gathering our strength within ourselves, without relearning to think from our center or to see from the heart, we risk remaining "stupid", no matter what the debate is.
In an age where progress is brandished at all costs, what audacity would it not be to offer oneself the greatest progress : one's own evolution !
Among top athletes, we now know and can affirm without taboo that emotions can be a motor and not a brake. And that on the contrary the repression of emotions, in the long term, becomes a hell more terrible than the emotions of the beginning. So, from heaven or hell, creating one's engine or brakes, it is only a question of knowing one's very first instrument: oneself !
When I heard myself shouting "idiot !" the other day, I realized what was most important to me : not the reasoning but the coherence between words, heart and body. It was this coherence which, crying out of absence at that moment, on both sides - as much in the speaker as in the listener - was missing any possibility of true knowledge, of oneself, and therefore of the Other.
And here I understood that my anger of the moment was also a beneficial signal ! It was telling me to re-tune our instruments before trying to play together.
Wishing us a wonderful month of June
In the heart and to the hands...
From the tips of our fingers,
Hélène Tysman
