Snow

As a New Years Resolution ( to stop me being a fruit and nutcake) I have started meditating when i wake up and before i go to bed and the image that keeps recurring in my head as i do it is of a huge snowdrift getting deeper and deeper under a layer of silently falling snow. This image connects me with the idea of being empty, which feels really rather freeing and lovely. It does not in anyway connect me with the urge to write a blog!. However, as this blog represents a commitment to document the process of learning Parkour, i will try to write about where i'm at. Inevitably it will connect to Parkour ......everything usually does..... Parkour is everything.

There is such a blizzard of ideas working their way though my life that I haven't known how to start writing this blog, or where to go from here. Being practical; reflections on Thomas' post about Women's Training on Girlparkour.com could be a good start, one of many topics of discussion during the Parkour 'In Person' Forum (written up on http://www.britishparkour.org.uk/index.php?name=Content_6) would be another. Comments on a Somatics workshop i took seem an interesting addition to cover in a post and a very teary and then hugely triumphant moment doing a straddle vault in an acro class nearly 22 years after i was first paralyzed by fear and decided to never ever risk doing it it could add some fire to my verbal meanderings and blaze a heartwarming trail to more sucsess fuelled uplifting blogs of 2009. My NLP (neurolinguistic programming) session about my vault phobia could be a blog in itself but to be honest whilst it brought alot of intellectual and emotional clarity, i still really dont know what happened...
and this brings me to the heart of it....
I don't really know whats happening with me? ....
either inside or outside in the world...

mostly i notice so many words!
words on forums, in person, with friends, traceurs, dancers,acrobats,healers, physio, teachers, experts, children, family, with this blog.....
and so much movement!
repitious training; up the wall down the wall, pirouettes, downward dogs, straight jumps, warm ups cool downs, dancing in clubs, in the living room, in the street, spinal curls, press ups, rugs jogs, railbalances...and hours and hours every day traversing this crazy city.

As traceurs we study our movement, we listen, we train, we seek out experiences, we judge without being able to help it, we share, we make 'informed' decisions about our lifestyle, our training, our goals...but i look at everything i have learned and its nothing. absolutely nothing...the moment i got over the vault that i had built up to have a world of significance that it didnt have i didn't use anything i had 'learned'. There was really no rational reason why i could'nt do this simple thing (but that didn't make it any less of a prison) and so it took someone i really trust saying to me..well then if its not rational, the only thing you can do is just run at it.which was profundly true enough that it cut through my bullshit and i did it. How often do we bring all of ourselves to a movement...to a moment?...and how often does it feel exactly the same as bringing nothing of ourselves with us?

I have been struck by how so much of your life is played out subconciously and on top of the momentum of previous thoughts, actions, or accidents. I live where i live from a chain of events that started 10 years ago when i decided to be a dancer, i broke my hand because of a tiny split second sub concious decision to act one way rather than another. I love the idea of momentum in Parkour, i love how it feels, i love the idea that it can propel me through life like a human cannonball. But right now i feel like learning about movement from stillness, and from emptiness.

So im not blogging till February.
xxxx