Mind-Body and a Balian.
Opening the dialogue with Self & Mystery through body and ritual.
I visited another Balian the other day, a traditional Balinese healer.
I’ve read that there are many kinds of Balians and my Balinese friends attest to this.
There are some who work with mantras and spells, some who work with magic books, some who work with trance and spirit.
I keep finding the ones that work with the body. With its blood and the flow of life in the limbs.
They seem to have a sixth sense, one that recognizes what is happening in the body, how it affects the mind. They then find specific pressure points and press these with their fingers.
Theirs is a belief that connects body and mind; soul embodied.
It still has its duality; Atman is not the body and it must be freed upon death but one’s well being spiritually, mentally, physically is represented in the body and can be affected through the body and through physical ritual.
So the Balian works on the body and prescribes rituals to unite meaning and embodied action.
Body
The last Balian I worked with gave me a full massage focusing on specific points in the body.
He was younger than the first one I met and you could tell some of the West had mixed with his Balinese beliefs.
Much like my experience of traditional Chinese medicine some of the points he pressed hurt more than others. As my acupuncturist would say “that’s where the chi is stuck.”
Any time I asked the Balian (or my acupuncturist) what that point is related to it always strikes home with its accuracy.
“This rules the mind and thinking too much. This rules the back, you’re sitting too much.”
My acupuncturist has come across points relating to my depression and mania and points for things I didn’t tell her about. “This is a liver point, it rules over our anger and holding on to things.”
Ritual, a dialogue with God.
When I asked the Balian how he learned his skills he said “my ancestors very long ago knew but people have forgotten. All I know now comes from God.”
I asked how this teaching took place and he said through meditation. “Sit and meditate and let the light come through” he motioned to his third eye “let it teach you. Listen to God as if God is your lover.
“God will teach you. The conversation is different for each person. What works for you won’t work for some. What works for them might not work for you. Meditate, talk, listen.”
He then prescribed a ritual. (After telling me to stretch every 90 minutes and not sit so long.)
He asked my day of birth and from that derived a color (many cultures around the world assign gods, colors, and other attributes to the day of the week).
He said to take a glass of water and meditate this color into the glass, talk to the Divine as a lover and tell it what I need, make plans for the future, treat the Divine as a partner and listen.
When I finish meditating drink the water.
That’s the purpose of ritual, to take the spiritual and symbolic and make it physical. In this case to physically hold space for the conversation we’re having with the Mystery or the Divine, the Cosmos or your unconscious, whatever it is you seek to talk to.
It’s a dialogue.
We speak our needs to the world around us. We open up honestly, no false pretense, no displays of holiness or fake perfection, just the truth, what we would say to a loved one.
Then we invoke our mindfulness. Pay attention to the messages in our body, to what arises from our meditations, to the conversation occurring all around us in synchronicities, signs, omens.
This mindfulness acts as our listening and we can ritualize it through ceremonies where we receive, whether it’s the water in the glass, the rice and holy water of a Balinese blessing or the Eucharist or Kiddush on Saturdays and Sundays.
This is how we live in dialogue: open, honest, mindful.
What about you?
How do you conceive of your mind and body? Do you feel like they’re connected? Do you use one to understand the other?
How do you open a dialogue to that aspect beyond the mind and body?
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