Bodysong

By Patricia Anne Dye

For all our technological wizardry, we have failed to arrive at a critical understanding of what it means to be human. Trees grow true to their seeds, dogs know how to be dogs, kittens naturally mature into cats. In our case, we just don’t seem to have ‘connected the dots’. In spite of age-old advice from Those Who Know – the saints and seers of every religion – we are further than ever from reaching our potential for the kind of greatness, creativity and beauty of being that every true sage unanimously advocates.
In short, we are more ‘off-song’ than we have ever been. This has resulted in a seriously ‘off-key’ planet. Our Mother Earth may even stop performing!
Perhaps, being the complex beings we are, we don’t know practically speaking, where to begin. So we place the whole business in the too hard basket, or deny our destinies, leave questions about growth, meaning and a lasting happiness unanswered. By default, we fall back into the customs and rules of our surrounding cultures, assuring ourselves that this is all there is anyway. The ‘songs we sing’ are reflections of our cultural shortcomings, often disappointing and discordant. Turning our backs on our amazing potentials, we fall prey to social ills and spills. Why do you think our hospitals and our prisons are full to overflowing, our suicide statistics so high?
The point is: it’s not all that hard to find and express your true ‘song. It’s far more divine than difficult in fact.

The author’s story, told with candour and humour, is rich with helpful hints on practical ways for you to find your way through to a life of happiness and harmony.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris NZ
• Release date: Oct 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543495751

Patricia Anne Dye

Patricia Anne Dye is a visionary writer and poet. Her eclectic research into world wisdoms guarantees in-depth backdrop to her writing on the subject. Other interests include Raja Yoga, sacred dance and foreign languages. She divides her time between her home in Christchurch New Zealand and Corfu Greece.

Book preview

Copyright © 2019 by Patricia Anne Dye.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2019913545

ISBN:       Hardcover       978-1-5434-9577-5

                 Softcover          978-1-5434-9576-8

                 eBook              978-1-5434-9575-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 09/05/2019

Xlibris

0-800-443-678

www.Xlibris.co.nz

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CONTENTS

Consciousness

Chapter 1 Heart Harmony

The How of Eating

Chapter 2 Tuning Up the Instruments

Trees

Chapter 3 Fiddling Around

Breath

Chapter 4 Herd-song

SunSong

Chapter 5 Creating a Life

Sound

Chapter 6 Orchestrating

Stress or Stretching?

Chapter 7 Playing with Others

Humour

Chapter 8 Earth-song

Pleasuring the Planet

Recommended Reading

Let your body wear your knowing.

Let your heart sing songs.

Lalla ‘Naked Song"

A LL DEEP THINGS are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song…

Thomas Carlyle

This is a book about conducting one’s life, as if the body, in both form and action, were a kind of orchestra where each and every organ and cell aimed to be part of that ensemble, so that the ways in which it shapes and expresses itself are based on the play of its inner harmonies.

It’s always surprised me that we don’t learn more from nature about this topic. Its application and breathtaking magnificence have somehow eluded us in the distractions and clatter of modern living.

And yet, rhythm and harmony are all around us – the sequences of day and night, our life stages, the seasons, the star-patterns. We take these rhythms for granted.

Think of the exquisite patterning of a flower. Even those we might class as weeds, like dandelions, plantain or chickweed present themselves with pure order and artistry, often with compelling healing properties.

Once, when I was walking past someone’s garden, I spotted a beautiful rhododendron flower close to the fence. This was the bush’s expression of colour and form, breath-takingly beautiful. I paused to take it in. Suddenly, to my surprise, I ‘became’ the flower. And in that instant, I knew the bush was singing and the flower was its ‘song’. I also knew that it was ‘instructing’ me about my own ‘song’ – what it was and what it could be if I paid enough attention to the soul-forces that resided in my depths and heights outside the stridency of culture.

Mindfulness: you pay attention to what’s happening, what you can feel, what you can hear, and you practise not getting pulled away from the fantasy world of your thinking.

Britt Mann

Mindfulness is a start. There is increasing emphasis on attentiveness as a way of being completely in the now-moment, eliminating Angst about the past and worry about the future. It’s logical. And it works. All kinds of people are buying into it.

So let’s not underestimate the importance of mindfulness. It is the necessary ground upon which all kinds of attention are built.

But it is only the beginning of the road to freedom, not the end. A burglar pays strict attention to the items he’s after nicking, a baby lives fully in total beingness. For adults the prospect of an imminent disaster focuses the mind like nothing else.

Each of us is a Homo Luminous or human flower in the making. Or, for that matter, a Homo Mortalis. It all depends on where we go with our mindfulness. Up into enlightenment …or down into death and obscurity.

Modern scientists have designated this epoch the Anthropocene Era, which is a heavy hint that our future, for good or ill, depends on how we run our lives right now in present time.

The planet’s score isn’t all that musical at present. Tuning into Earth-Song with its woeful discords of war, greed, pollution, self-centredness, identity politics, hate groups and overcrowding could plummet you into depression, or, at the very least, a severe headache.

So how do we evolve from a shallow mindfulness to the full-on focus required for personal and global harmony? Quickly, practically, sustainably?

It’s important to realise from the outset where NOT to put our minds. Continuous and unrelenting fixation on our frailties and negative mind-casts only intensifies them and releases chemical toxins into the body.

That’s not to say we ignore them and allow them to fester and wreak havoc in our lives. We need to dialogue with them, listen to them, help them to transform into our allies, blend them into our BodySong.

The connection we need to make on a sustainable basis is breathtakingly simple, so simple that it is mostly overlooked or dismissed as shallow, trivial or impractical.

It’s what I call BodySong. If the rough-and-tumble world has reduced you to a state of disharmony, as it has for most of us, let me assure you there are ways, simple but profound, exacting but exciting, of not only restoring your harmony, but opening portals on entirely new enlightened ways of being.

We are all variations on the theme of humanness. We have a lot in common: the air we breathe, the way we laugh and smile, our yen for a sustainable happiness and meaning.

What we may not be aware of is that each of has an inner blueprint, a unique patterning of our bio-energies which we need to study mindfully, intelligently and regularly if we are to arrive at that harmonious ‘aha’ state and hold ourselves there.

Call this faculty the soul, your inner guidance, your trusted source or Fred, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you have a living relationship with it, dialogue with it as you would with a best friend, be sharp when it comes to listening to its directives and conscientious in acting them out.

To learn to ‘sing’ your unique ‘song’ under all conditions offers the most reliable defence against an increasingly discordant and crazy world.

Finding Your Song, or Making One

There can be enormous difficulty for anyone who decides to find and live their particular song. It will almost certainly put you outside the cultural corral at times. It’s not that the culture isn’t ‘singing’ – just that much of it is ‘off-key’ because most of us are not living harmonious lives. Look at the overflowing human institutions like hospitals and prisons, the mental health statistics, the staggering number of suicides in our so-called first world countries.

For a start, the Journey into your most tuneful Self may be anything but clear. You are the Innocent, setting off bravely, even optimistically, into new uncharted territory, unaware of the challenges that await you.

Here are just some of the things I grappled with:

• I had no idea of how to listen to the ‘still small voice’ of my inner music-master, much less how to follow its instructions.

• Parts of me were grumpy and cooperative.

• My nearest and dearest treated me as if I were crazy.

• I found ‘herd-song’ or world-noise increasingly jarring.

• I felt lonely and deserted a lot of the time, as though no-one understood me.

• I had serious doubts.

• I often wished I had never started the whole darned thing.

And that’s just a few of them!

But I persisted, partly because the option of abandoning the Journey and returning to the mad music of consensus reality was simply untenable.

Mainly because of the unexpected delights, the human beacons who lit the Way, tuneful resonances, most of all the connection to the meaning and purpose of human existence, mine in particular.

As Ken Wilbur puts it:

What a long journey! What a rocky road…You don’t have to do anything except hold on –or let go – they’re both irrelevant…But you are still getting burned alive, which is, gosh, just the most fun you can have without smiling.

He is So Right.

Why Read This Book?

In her book ‘The Highly Sensitive Person’, Elaine Aron claims that one in five of us is a highly sensitive individual. The other four are tougher, more vocal, resilient and confident; they set the pace when decisions and directions are called for. Under these conditions, sensitive people often find