Welcome to Zohar BodyMind

Imagine a journey devoted to deep listening to the Divine Feminine within. A journey that establishes a strong connection with our inner space. We begin healing the individual and collective past and move toward living consciously in the present moment. Projecting the vision of the future, creating a heart community and partnering with the earth is the next step in our evolution.

Reflections: Creativity communicates in silence

”Let your mind starts a journey through a strange new world. Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before.

Let your soul take you where you long to be. Close your eyes.

Let your spirit start to soar, and you’ll live as you’ve never lived before.”

Erich Fromm

A creative mind is open to experience life fully and is able to translate it and express it in new and inventive ways. It is a mind that can see the extraordinary in the ordinary and can express creativity through action. It is resourceful, inspiring and original. A creative mind observes deeply, listens with awareness and experiences life genuinely. It is in the spaciousness of mind that these abilities can be developed and allowed to become the creative force in our life. This is done in the presence of silence. Silence creates the space to explore and observe. Silence creates the space where imagination and ingenuity can flourish.

In silence integration and deep connections are happening. All creative minds owe their inspiration to the silence behind the static noise of everyday life.

The mind of a child is creative, curious and imaginative because the child does not have concepts and fixed views about reality. For a child, a cup can be anything from a drinking device to put on her head to make a hat, a bed to put her dolls in or an experiment in gravity. She is playful and full of delight, present and alive.

Silence brings us those hidden treasures, a new way of experiencing reality, a renewal for our senses and pleasures. Without interference from preconceived notions and automatic responses the ordinary can be experienced truly as the extraordinary.

Exercise: Sit for few moments in quiet contemplation, paying attention to breath and body sensation. When thoughts resede and make space for silence, open your eyes and see your surroundings without interpretation, just seeing; what do you see? Look at anything in your surroundings that you are familiar with and look again, look at it as if it is the first time. See it through a child’s eyes; discover it with no previous concepts, with fresh eyes and no thoughts, just pure impressions.

Reflections: Listening is an act of love. The ability to hear others in silence

We live in relationship to our surroundings in ever expanding circles of relationships. From the inner circle of oneself to the intimate relationships of family and friends, an expanding circle including coworkers and neighbors, wider circles of the people who you know and so on to include your whole surrounding human and non-human connections.

The one most important and rare quality in relationship is deep listening. When there is a conversation the mind hardly hears the spoken words of others. The mind is busy planning the answer or just dreaming, or getting ready to oppose, or attack, agree or disagree, interpret an insult, judge, assess and so on. The mind is far from being present with the person who is speaking. The reactive mind is on the run.

So relationships too become a cycle of reactivity looping around the same pattern over and over again. We change partners, places of work, places of worship and neighborhoods yet we do not change the patterns of relationships to them. Unintentionally we fall prey to the same “Program”, the program that runs our life and our relationship to life, our thoughts, emotions reactions and behavior. It is the same program on the personal level as on the global level, history repeats itself.

Embracing silence in the realm of relationship we become quiet mirrors to our partners, we reflect like a deep calm lake their love, their concerns or their anger. In the lack of reactive thoughts, emotions and actions relationship can be seen naked, what truly it is: the longing for love, connection and acceptance. Deep listening in silence is an act of love. The deep reflection in the calm lake penetrates the deep water of the heart and love can be seen and felt and shine through from whatever shore you stand on.

Exercise: next time when you are talking with your friend, feel your breath; notice your partner’s breath. Notice your body; notice your partner’s body. Listen to the tone of the voice, see the facial expressions, and absorb the presence of your partner consciously. Notice your reactive mind and let it be. Just listen. How does it feel?

Reflections: Nature communicates in silence

To commune with nature we need silence to hear the tree growing, the flowers talking, the grass singing, the rocks whispering in our ears. To enjoy and feel nature we sit quietly listening to the whisper of the wind, the sounds of dew, the shapes of rocks, the voice of clouds. The space is full of whisperings. Do you hear them?

As we go into the woods or ocean shores we keep busy talking; trying to enjoy ourselves we fill the air with chatter. When we are alone in nature our mind does not stop producing thoughts that take us out of the landscape. To hear nature communicating her song we have to consciously choose to quiet the busy mind and let the heart open to the call of nature.

The sound of wind among the leaves brings us to the breath quietly breezing in and out of our body. The heat of the sun and the cool evening temperature brush the skin and mingle with the fire element in our body. As we feel the weight of our body we touch the earth’s magnetic force holding us with her gravity. The sounds of ocean waves or water rushing in a brook are synchronized with the blood flow in our veins.

We are Her (nature) and She is us,

her rhythm beating in our hearts

Who are we without the earth,

the wind the water and the sun?

Mother is calling us back home

Back to her green bosom among the trees

Her white bosom on mountains peaks

The blue water in ocean deep

Come sit, be still and listen

To the breath of the grass

The caress of the sun

The changing shapes of clouds

Come, you are invited to the feast

on ruby red, emerald green

purple sky and golden wings

All for the eyes to see.

Reflections: The body in silence

To be powerful we have to know and to know is to know oneself, and to know oneself is to know the body and its secrets.

The body, a treasure of knowledge, information and wisdom holds the secrets of life, past, present and future. It is in the reality of the body that life’s experience is encoded. It is the wealth of our universe waiting to be discovered and honored on all levels of our being.

Inside the body resides sixty trillion cells, each cell has a membrane that acts as a skin around its cytoplasm content. The membrane has the ability to perceive environmental cues and act accordingly for its survival through receptor and effectors proteins. Each cell belongs to a community of cells that has a function. Each community of cells communicates with other communities of cells in harmony, so as to continue the survival, protection and growth of the whole organism. There is an entire world of organization and communications and never-ending cycles of life and death in each moment. We can find armies and defenders in the immune system, communicators through hormone secretions, garbage collectors, food suppliers, and peacemakers, local and central control organization to name a few. Each cell is a living, breathing body, a mirror image of a human body. It is a sentient being that has its own skin, its own mind, consciousness, awareness, genetic material and the ability to make decisions moment-by-moment. Each cell is giving and receiving from the environment and serving the harmonious whole.

Knowing this tremendous treasure, this mirror into the intelligence of creation, how can we approach the body and how we can learn from the body?

Through silence and awareness, in quiet time of contemplation, we listen deeply to its constant communication with us. With a mind that is present, important communication can be perceived and learned from.

Coming into the body with reverence and quiet mind we come to know ourselves with depth that is immeasurable. We come to know in wonder and respect the whole mystery of creation. We come to know happiness, pleasure and pain. We come to know the wisdom and intelligence that underlies the physical universe. We come to know the laws governing the universe. We come to know life force and its powers. In that knowledge lies our power.

Meditation: Lying down on your back, legs long, hands beside the body, feel the contact with the floor. Which parts feel heavy, light, cold, warm, hard, soft? Let the breath come in and notice where it goes and how it moves in the body. Now choose one part of the body to listen deeply to and stay there for a while. Gently ask this part to communicate with you, feel its movement, and sense the inside of its structure.

Any new sensation, insight, discovery?

Reflections: Time for silence

What does being spiritual mean in our time of chaotic busy-ness? It is first and foremost to be in silence. It is to clear the mind’s screen from the noise, to delete the static disturbances and to be in the emptiness of the white screen. To wait in the silent space is to give rise in our consciousness to the subtle and delicate spiritual energies of our being, the refined inner voice that speaks in silence.

There are many paths that lead to silence and it is up to us to find and choose. The open space of silence is one and we are invited to enter.

The open space of silence is the spaciousness of our wholeness.

As a womb holds and forms the new life, the open space of silence holds, informs and forms all of what comprises our beings; thoughts, emotions, feelings, perceptions, states of mind, memories, energies of the body, information we gathered along the way, insights and knowledge. It is in the open space of silence that our being can be found, transform and flourish.
When we realize the wholeness of the container the feeling of fragmentation and separation dissolves, the inner and outer struggles release, and we can expand and breathe into the space of all inclusiveness.

The mystery is holding us in her open space of silence.

When we recognize our limitation to grasp and understand the mystery through the intellectual faculty, we no longer look to our thoughts and emotions to be the guiding force. We let it all go. When no-thing is there, silence is there and we feel the presence of this silence as it envelops our being. We know it not through understanding and inquiring; we know it not through memories and stories; we know it, simply know.

This deep knowing is the driving force that sends us looking and seeking in the first place. It is the light in the darkness that shines and leads the way inward to our journey into the open space of silence. It asks us to look deeply through the ocean of fears and confusions, layers of conditions and memories. As in the story of Moses, the inner voice asks us to trust the splitting of the sea and to walk into the desert, into the unknown space of silence. The journey into the “desert” is the path of growth the ones who hear the voice of silence and answer it. It is the’ presence’ that calls us and welcomes us home to enter the center of our being.

Exercise; Look around your environment for few moments and see the space in and around the forms. Now listen to the silence between the sounds. Enjoy the space and the silence you’ve created. Pay attention to silence and move through your day with this awareness.

Reflections: The prophets of all times in silence

Man cannot discover new oceans until he has the courage to lose sight of the shore. Albert Einstein

If we take the stories of wise sages as signposts to our inner journey, we will realize that all of them had to be in the presence of silence to hear the voice of God in them. They were either sent by circumstances or went looking for it on their own. They came upon a place of “Desert” a spacious space of silence. In the ancient Hebrew language the word “desert” “MIDBAR” is translated to mean “The One Who Speaks”. In the “MIDBAR” there is a “sound” and the sound is ” KOL DMAMA DAKA” the fine voice of silence.

Moses, Muhammad, Jesus and other prophets of the past heard “The Voice” spoken in the silence of Deserts. Monks and hermits in all spiritual traditions left the market place of everyday life to go into solitude, into silence. We in the mundane world of householders in modern life cannot go off and leave life behind for years to create an emptiness that will be filled with a voice of “The One Who Speaks”. Yet we can go inwardly into our own silence within anytime we choose and be quiet and listen. As we hear the voice of silence we hear our inner voice of wisdom.

Time for silence

What does being spiritual mean in our time of chaotic busy-ness? It is first and foremost to be in silence. It is to clear the mind’s screen from the noise, to delete the static disturbances and to be in the emptiness of the white screen, to wait in that space. It is to give rise in our consciousness to the subtler spiritual energies of our being, the inner voice that speaks in silence.
How we create the space to hear the silence is up to us to choose. The open space is in us and silence is the bedrock center in it.

Exercise: Look at you hand, open the fingers and see, what do you see? Most of us will see the fingers and start to notice the details of them, few will see the space between the fingers, the space that forms and informs us about the fingers. Now imagine the fingers without the space. Does it look different? That space is within each cell, within each particle. What is the sound of that space?