Surrendering to the Current
What's our first stop on the Sacred Ecstatics train? The luminous field of spiritual electricity. Who will meet us at the station? Read on...
Ten years ago this month, Brad and I moved to a one-room former lemon picker’s cabin in Hollywood, California and were about to launch a new offering: “The Mentorship Program in Seiki Jutsu.” Seiki jutsu is an ancient Japanese practice that translates as “the art of the vital life force.” We had just published a book about it earlier that year.1 This tradition was passed onto Brad by Ikuko Osumi Sensei, one of the greatest healers, Shinto shamans, and seiki masters of 20th century Japan.
Osumi Sensei did not train others to be teachers, shamans, energy workers, or healers of seiki jutsu. Instead, she taught people how to develop a relationship with seiki that would serve their ongoing health, wellbeing, and the fruition of their life mission. She began with a simple instruction: every day for about twenty minutes, sit on a bench and let seiki move your body naturally, spontaneously, and without interference from purposeful effort. Further guidance would be given only after surrender to pure seiki movement had been established.
In 2014, after many years of hosting “shaking medicine” gatherings,2 Brad and I felt that a concentrated focus on seiki jutsu would provide a fresh means of introducing others to ecstatic spirituality. We welcomed its contradictory combination of simplicity, ineffability, directness, and elusiveness. Seiki jutsu would allow us to experiment without the baggage of excessive verbiage, symbolism, interpretation, doctrine, anti-doctrine, belief, non-belief, or hang ups about religious names. Following Sensei’s wisdom, we trusted that whatever questions arose, seiki would provide the answer.
What’s the meaning of life? Seiki.
What do I need to know about spirituality? Seiki.
Who am I? Seiki.
What’s the force behind shaking medicine? Seiki.
Accordingly, Brad and I launched our new offering and invited the seiki wind to blow. And blow it did—with the force of a category five hurricane that turned all of our plans upside down and flooded our mentorship program with visionary dreams every night for the next seven months. Other spiritual lineages came roaring in to join the ecstatic festivities. Even Jesus entered the room, perhaps the touchiest of all spiritual subjects among New Age-leaning audiences. At the same time, outspoken poets, jazz musicians, and agnostic cyberneticians arrived to keep the frames shaking and changing.3
How did we handle it? Seiki.
What did we do? Seiki.
What did we do next? Seiki.
We surrendered to the current and let it have its way with us and everyone else. Brad and I had promised to immerse people in seiki jutsu, and we delivered on that promise in spades! Just not in the way any of us had expected.
To make a long story short, we eventually had to invent Sacred Ecstatics, a space large enough to hold all the lineages, saints, and spiritual inspirations that were coming into our lives. Paradoxically this vaster room has allowed us to keep our focus simple: the heart-opening, body-trembling, life-changing experience of sacred ecstasy.
I’m sharing all of this because our next Guild season begins October 5th, and recently we announced we’ll be offering something new that came down in a visionary dream: Electrical Grand Rounds. This will be a special time for coaching, advising, and teaching the art of working with “spiritual electricity.” This especially includes the fine-tuning of Ecstatic Sound Movement, our evolution of the daily seiki practice that is now empowered by ecstatic tones and beats that heat spontaneous movement.
Guess who arrived in that vision last spring to bring us this news: Osumi Sensei herself. But it only dawned on us this week that we seem to have come full circle. After launching a mentorship program in seiki jutsu ten years ago, we’re now following Sensei’s latest instruction: bringing Electrical Grand Rounds to the Guild with enough room for all sorts of new experimentations and questions to arise.
What do Sacred Ecstatics and seiki jutsu have in common? Electricity.
What’s going to happen in the Guild? Electricity.
Who are we and where are we going? Electricity.
There are only a couple of spaces left in the upcoming Guild season. If you would like to join us beginning October 5th, click here.
During the next few weeks Brad and I will be sweeping the floor, rewiring the room, and preparing for highly charged mystery to arrive. Osumi Sensei will be there, along with several more of our cherished saints. We approach the new season with great anticipation for the many thrilling ways reality will be turned upside down so the vital, electrical life force of creation can once again have its way with our lives.
Hillary & Brad
Seiki Jutsu: The Practice of Non-Subtle Energy Medicine (2014)
See Brad’s book, Shaking Medicine: The Healing Power of Ecstatic Movement (2007)
For the story of our first season, read Part 1 of my essay series, “Opening a Jar of Honey: Celebrating Ten Years of Sacred Ecstatics.” Parts 2 & 3 can be found here.
Thunder and lightning here in Toronto on this fine and rainy Saturday night. I look forward to another round of lightning to come, both inside and out. And thunder too (“funder”, as a child I once knew used to call it).
Thank you for this post, Hillary. I thought I'd share this dream from last night, for what it's worth. It was a very vivid one, so I wrote it down when I woke up -- it had the flavor of reality that some of my dreams do -- the ones that come true in some way.
I think back to the couple of Intensives I attended in Arizona. At that time, I was still really uneasy about Jesus, and I remember that coming up -- that people would believe in anything, but they wouldn't say they loved Jesus. Little by little, I've felt drawn to him since then, in different, unexpected ways. A year or two ago, I heard a Byzantine Orthodox chant that just made me cry and cry, and that was a new and fruitful inroad. Lately, another long recording of singing of Greek monks has moved me -- I just keep listening again and again. I think that's related.
Lately, when I've been doing Qigong, I've been saying the Jesus prayer in my mind, trying to feel it intensely -- "Lord Jesus, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." A couple nights ago, I felt a response, a feeling like a thought. And so I wonder if the dream follows on the heels of that. Before that, interestingly, I had a dream about being in a group home with young people, and there was a strange scene of changing light bulbs in the bathroom -- I was surprised that incandescent bulbs were on top of fluorescent bulbs.
Bu in the dream I wanted to share, a group of us were in a cozy, dark home, sitting on comfortable sofas. It was "my" house in the dream. It was a group of Intensive students. Brad and Hillary came in and sat on one loveseat, or near each other on perpendicular L-shaped love seats. What I noticed was, both were heavy-lidded, but from extreme ecstatic drunkenness -- like, they were so saturated with love, deep in bliss, they could hardly keep their eyes open, but wanted to melt into it.
I asked them, "Is it okay, since I'm here, if I participate?" Brad wasn't sure, but Hillary thought about it and said... "Normally we don't allow that, and maybe if we were far away in a foreign, exotic place, you'd have to join like everyone else does, but since we're already here, we'll see what happens." I said, "I've been doing Qigong, so I'm more sensitive now." They didn't say anything to that, but conveyed the feeling, "Yeah, ok. We'll see about that."
Then, the ceremony began. I sat and closed my eyes and opened myself up to feel whatever happened. Whatever it was, it was very subtle and calm -- like they began by humming, or playing a very soft, gentle music. I just melted into listening to it, and I noticed my hands twitching a little, or my head, and I just went with it, letting myself be guided. Then, as I listened more deeply, the music got stronger -- and it reminded me of being "inducted" into an ayahuasca ceremony, where suddenly you find you're going way deeper from the surface-play.
In my mind's eye, I saw like... a pattern of L's, or like a herringbone brick pattern, slowly stack up and aim towards me, and I realized it was the shape of a long spear-arrow, which pierced my heart, and I groaned in ecstasy -- it hurt, but felt so good, and I could tell that Hillary was pleased -- she'd sent me an arrow of love.
Then, we were on a journey. I don't remember details, but it was like we were in a dark, maybe even rainy, neo-noir nightscape in the south, like Louisiana or Mississippi. I think I was in a car with them, or following them, going through all these streets. We got out... and then it was like they cut me loose, switched cars, and disappeared.
I was like, "Where did they go?" I missed them. But I was also pleased by the challenge and test. I simply quieted my mind, tuned into my heart, and asked to be led to them. I walked into an alley, and noticed this old brown 70's/80's station wagon pull up to the corner and parallel park under a streetlamp. A young man came out -- handsome-ish, skinny young white man. I thought it was strange. As he walked away, I walked up to him and asked him where he got the car. He said he traded it with a couple for his own car. He said they wanted privacy and valued that.
Somehow, I ran and found the car -- kind of like a newish, stylish hearse -- like a stretched-out purple-pink VW bug, brand new and shiny. It was Brad and Hillary getting into it, relaxing, ready to get away, all the doors open -- and I ran up, and jumped into the back seat to be with them, happy. They were a bit sad to lose their privacy, but I could sense I also passed a test.
As I sat back there, a young black man, maybe late teens or early 20s, showed up and got in the back -- as if it were a taxicab. They thought that was amusing, and started driving -- Hillary driving, me and Brad in the back. Brad was in his own zone, humming or singing to himself, looking out the window or just closing his eyes.
The young man said, "I need to hear music." I said, "How bad do you need to hear it?" He said, "I've GOT to hear some music" -- intense, serious. I said, "The potency of your prayer determines the quality of the response you get."
So, to this request, Brad began singing -- and the young man (and I) were waiting with bated breath to hear what Brad would sing, what kind of music. To me, and to my surprise, it sounded like a mix between a barbershop quartet song and a Baptist hymn -- I could see in my mind's eye 4 clean-cut men singing in harmony. It was almost absurd, but also so pure, and heart-breakingly simple. The words were, "I'm so happy, I'm so happy, I'm so happy, I'm so satis-fiiiiiiiiiiiiied." And that last line echoed into silence, and I just started crying -- intensely, but softly -- not messy. The young man was surprised and touched, and he said something like, "That song made him cry."
Then, the last thing I remember is that he had a squeezed out half of a grapefruit, and he squeezed a lime's juice into it, and gave it to me, then to Brad, to drink -- and it was so refreshing and delicious. He seemed to give the impression it was medicine.