Listen. You know I have this thing about liminal zones? Well, I'm going to tell you what they are and how I began to notice them.
For me a liminal zone is a place that exists where time and space don't mean the same things as time and space normally mean, like when you catch the train to work or go out for tea with a friend. Liminal zones can be independent of time and space, or they can be alternative paradigms. They are mostly lost pockets of time and space , black holes in the loose knit fabric of life. Airport lounges, motorway underpasses, 24 hour supermarket at 3am in the morning, transitional places where the dweller really is on the threshold. An event can also be a liminal zone and liminal zones can exist in your mind. You know what and where your liminal zones are, you know the way to enter and the way out but you just don't want to go there most of the time.
So, I was thirteen and sitting in the car in a car park of a country market. We are on holiday in Dorset. I am waiting for my dad to come back and have been told to stay in the car because I always mither for one of those Aron sweaters they sell at country markets. My dad is buying some bulbs for the boarders of the front garden. I'm really bored and quite hot in the car. It's a really hot day. This man walks up to the car and is really staring at me through the window. I don't like him, he looks quite old and is wearing a flat cap and has a stick. I'm wishing he would go away and I manage to stare back. I'm a defiant child. Then he turns around and walks quickly off in the direction of the market stalls, swinging that stick. Git. He looks like old man Steptoe.
When my dad got back from getting the bulbs I told him about the man who looked like old man Steptoe and peered in at me through the car window. I thought about this incident for years and years and I used to tell people about it and everyone thought that it was really funny and that I was pulling their leg.
When I was 28 we found some old super 8 movies from when we were kids.Seriously funny too. There is this one of me round at the Lowe's house with their kids. The Warburton's are there too and Ian Foster. Us kids are all about 3 or 4 and we are splashing about in the paddling pool on the back garden. I'm wearing a red swimming costume with three white buttons on the front and a tiny white pleated skirt attached to it. I have my hair in bunches and I am very tanned. In the background you can just see Bill Lowe faffing with his red jag - it's half in and half out of the garage and he is showing someone the interior of one of the doors. All the kids are running wild and I go up onto the slide and sit at the top. The cmera looks towards the bottom of the slide, sees what I would have seen. At the bottom of the slide, looking up at me, staring, is the old man I was to see in Dorset years later. He is staring in the same way.
I don't remember seeing the old man when I was 3, I only remember seeing him in that car park at the country market in Dorset. I have never forgotten what he looked like, I still remember what he looked like very clearly too.
This was my first experience of a liminal zone 'event'. The second was in an airport lounge.
You get the drift, no? You can identify your liminal experiences - things that just don't seem quite right, out of time, space and place, but you have never really given them much thought until now. If you find them will you tell me?
Thursday, 12 April 2012
Saturday, 7 April 2012
Merkabah
I practice ashtanga yoga which is a dynamic flowing yoga that 'heats' up the body making the limbs and spine flexible. As it is often a very challenging practice I am always glad of the quiet meditation time a the end of the asanas. On my own I usually do vipassana - a breathing meditation - it calms and stills me, but I also do various mindful meditations and occasionally a guided visual one. In class our teacher generally takes us through a guided visual meditation at the end of the session and these are usually done lying down. One evening the teacher asked if we would like to do a sitting meditation and we agreed. She had us sit either crossed legged or in half lotus and took us through this guided meditation where we were basically building a three dimensional star of David around ourselves whilst breathing in a very prescribed way. At some point in the meditation (but I can't remember which point), she asked us to imagine the bottom half of the star beginning to rotate in one direction and then the top half rotating too. After a very short time, perhaps less than a minute, I began to feel sick similar to motion sickness. I put this down to the practice I had just completed and thought I must have worked pretty hard. Quite suddenly I felt a strong 'pull' around my navel area and I felt I was being pulled into what I can only describe as a 'void'. I began to feel quite panicky, which is not at all normal for me, and I was desperate to get out of this meditation, which I did fairly quickly. The feeling of fear was with me after I had come out of the meditation. Quite a few of the others in the class had a similar feeling, but none had experienced the fear I had. After about half an hour or so I began to feel relatively ok and calm.
About two or three months later I was listening to some meditation MP3's I had downloaded free gratis from some site or other. I had intended to listen to them and decide which ones were worth keeping but I fell asleep whilst listening to them. I awoke quite suddenly, fighting for my breath and realised, with some horror, that I was hearing the very same instructions for the meditation I had heard and followed in my yoga class. Because I had woken quickly I was a little confused as to whether I was actually dreaming all this but I was experiencing the same sensation of being 'pulled' or 'sucked' out of myself around my navel area and around my face. When I did manage to pull myself together I again felt dizzy and my brain felt as if it was lose inside my head.
As an aside to these experiences, a friend of mine, also a practitioner of yoga, related a similar experience. One afternoon she was reading the newspaper and listening to the radio when she became aware that her breathing had become very controlled and she began to experience a 'whirling pull' in her stomach area. She said it was like her soul was being pulled out of her body. She felt that the music that was playing at the time , "had something to do with it all" (sic), but she was not composed enough to identify what the music was. She thought it may have been Jay Zee but can't be sure.
I came across Merkabah meditation on the internet by chance after my experiences. I did not consciously go out to find an explanation. It would seem that I had experienced the new dressed up version of a much older spiritual technique known as the Merkabah and this shiny new version was being peddled by Drunvalo Melchizedek (formally known as Bernard Perona) a spiritual teacher and author living in Arizona. After looking at some of his stuff on youtube and reading bits and pieces from the internet about him and Merkabah meditation (I wish to make it clear at this point that I did not read any of his books) my gut instinct was that it was all a bit of a scam. Since I published this piece in the ITLAD Walker Group on Facebook I have been contacted by people who have stated that they have followed the Drunvalo Melchizedek Merkabah meditation and have have excellent results - although I am not sure what those results were and have not bothered to follow up on them. I did read some pretty wild and not very believable things about this Merkabah meditation. like, anyone practicing this meditation gives off a certain vibration that is picked up by the CIA! That Drunvalo Melchizdek is a shill and in league with the CIA and at which point I gave up looking into it any further.
Based on the two experiences I had, it's my gut feeling that the meditation did not work well for me and I think that it was something to do with the breathwork. I want to say that I feel this meditation was in some way unsafe. On another level I feel that there is something shuffling around on the edges of my mind, just out of reach and that I cannot fathom, that is indicating that the method is in some way connected to an odd type of spirituality that goes beyond the bizarre - I have no words to describe to you what I am trying to say. All the odd and crazy things that happen in life, the ghouls and the alien abductions, the illuminati and the otherworldly, I feel, sometimes, are a core phenomena, that there is one source from which they come. But then again, I don't know.
About two or three months later I was listening to some meditation MP3's I had downloaded free gratis from some site or other. I had intended to listen to them and decide which ones were worth keeping but I fell asleep whilst listening to them. I awoke quite suddenly, fighting for my breath and realised, with some horror, that I was hearing the very same instructions for the meditation I had heard and followed in my yoga class. Because I had woken quickly I was a little confused as to whether I was actually dreaming all this but I was experiencing the same sensation of being 'pulled' or 'sucked' out of myself around my navel area and around my face. When I did manage to pull myself together I again felt dizzy and my brain felt as if it was lose inside my head.
As an aside to these experiences, a friend of mine, also a practitioner of yoga, related a similar experience. One afternoon she was reading the newspaper and listening to the radio when she became aware that her breathing had become very controlled and she began to experience a 'whirling pull' in her stomach area. She said it was like her soul was being pulled out of her body. She felt that the music that was playing at the time , "had something to do with it all" (sic), but she was not composed enough to identify what the music was. She thought it may have been Jay Zee but can't be sure.
I came across Merkabah meditation on the internet by chance after my experiences. I did not consciously go out to find an explanation. It would seem that I had experienced the new dressed up version of a much older spiritual technique known as the Merkabah and this shiny new version was being peddled by Drunvalo Melchizedek (formally known as Bernard Perona) a spiritual teacher and author living in Arizona. After looking at some of his stuff on youtube and reading bits and pieces from the internet about him and Merkabah meditation (I wish to make it clear at this point that I did not read any of his books) my gut instinct was that it was all a bit of a scam. Since I published this piece in the ITLAD Walker Group on Facebook I have been contacted by people who have stated that they have followed the Drunvalo Melchizedek Merkabah meditation and have have excellent results - although I am not sure what those results were and have not bothered to follow up on them. I did read some pretty wild and not very believable things about this Merkabah meditation. like, anyone practicing this meditation gives off a certain vibration that is picked up by the CIA! That Drunvalo Melchizdek is a shill and in league with the CIA and at which point I gave up looking into it any further.
Based on the two experiences I had, it's my gut feeling that the meditation did not work well for me and I think that it was something to do with the breathwork. I want to say that I feel this meditation was in some way unsafe. On another level I feel that there is something shuffling around on the edges of my mind, just out of reach and that I cannot fathom, that is indicating that the method is in some way connected to an odd type of spirituality that goes beyond the bizarre - I have no words to describe to you what I am trying to say. All the odd and crazy things that happen in life, the ghouls and the alien abductions, the illuminati and the otherworldly, I feel, sometimes, are a core phenomena, that there is one source from which they come. But then again, I don't know.
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