This evening, I attended an evening with Gabrielle Roth, and American Shaman. Back in 1975 and 1976, I spent much of my time with Gabrielle, as her student and assistant. Her main contribution to my life at that time was to support me through the worst of my son’s bout with cancer. In addition, I learned a lot about movement from her. She actually had trained with Anna Halprin. On the day my son went into the hospital for surgery of his tumor, I was supposed to go to Eselan with Gabrielle to assist her in her workshop. However, this was not to be. A month earlier, Gabrielle and I put on an amazing event to honor Rajneesh. We had about 250 people attend, and it was wonderful.
This evening was very nice for me. As Gabrielle entered the auditorium, I greeted her and she remembered me by name. She had just recently told someone about my son’s miraculous recovery 21 years ago.
After about thirty minutes of movement, Gabrielle began to speak about trialectics (although she didn’t mention the name). From my understanding, trialectics teaches that for every active force and its corresponding passive force, there is a neutralizing force to go along with them. Gabrielle spoke about awareness, attention, and action in the context of ourselves, our one-on-one relationships, and our relationships to a group. These last three concepts fit nicely into the three instincts of the enneagram. In respect to awareness, attention, and action, Gabrielle spoke about thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations – the three centers of intelligence. At an appropriate time in the discussion, I delivered a little speech about the advanced stages of these centers. I used my concept of playing tennis with mindfulness as an example of being about to move before you know how you will move, that is, very instinctually. The phenomena occurs in athletes when the enter the “zone” of ultimate capability. This was an example of body awareness that goes beyond the normal range of effort. I similarly spoke about feeling things before you know what you will feel, giving rise to lucid dreams, clairvoyance, and other psychic phenomena. Finally, I spoke about having thoughts that seem to come out of no where in which you just simply know. With these capabilities in place, one being to experience what it is like to be another. Gabrielle was pleased with what I had to say, and told the crowd that this was the essence of what she was teaching.
By the way, earlier that day I had a wonderful session with Leslie Davenport.
