I follow a blog from Sadhguru called blog.ishafoundation.org. Thought it was supposed to show up on my page here, but I don't see it. Anyway, this morning I read his new post entitled "Life is Movement" and it is so amazingly, shockingly timely.....

Yesterday I went to a friends' house here in Goa who has a dog with serious health problems. We both recently met a new homeopathic doctor who also treats animals so she was going to my friends' house for a consultation about the dog. I was invited to sit-in on the consult.

When I arrived, the consultation had already begun but the moment I stepped in the room I was shocked to see how the condition of the dog had deteriorated so extensively. My very first thought was, "Oh, this dog is dying. What is there to discuss?"

Well, it turns out there was plenty to discuss, but I won't go into the details. What I observed and experienced is what matters right now.

The dog was laying on the floor on a bed my friend had made next to her own bed. The doctor was sitting on my friend's bed and my friend was standing next to the doctor. I immediately sat on the floor next to the dog and got very, very quiet. The dog was sleeping, or at least resting, and was very still and I wanted to, not so much enter into her still space, but I didn't want to disturb it. Stillness is a huge part of the dying process and should be respected. That space was almost sacred.

Some people would call that environment "depressed" or "sad" but that interpretation is simply an avoidance of the experience. The vast majority of people today would do anything to avoid stillness or silence. The first thing they do when walking in the house is turn on the t.v. or some music. Something to "fill" the emptiness. It's a compulsion. It is not done with consciousness, it's a compulsion driven by an extreme discomfort and is an automatic response.

As I sat with this dog in a very meditative state I realized that I was having a hard time maintaining my own stillness. Part of the reason may have been that there were two other people in the room talking (quietly) and I felt a bit self-conscious, wondering if they were thinking, "Why is that woman meditating next to the dog?" So I would try to keep my eyes open, which is WAY too advanced for me....gotta shut off that visual stimulation.

Then I realized I was trying to support the dog in her stillness and help somehow to pave her way out of "here." She had a very, very strong life-force and was almost like the Terminator; programed to live. Period.

On top of that DNA programing you have the emotional attachment that pets and their owners develop, so as the result the whole situation becomes quite entangled. But there I was trying to enter into my own space of stillness and I was having a hard time. It was like this little internal timer kept going off and shaking around inside my body. Then I witnessed an interesting thing.

The dog woke up and my friend took her outside while the doctor and I observed her from the window. After a few minutes of re-orientation the dog started walking in clockwise circles. She had been suffering seizures off and on for a while and clearly they had taken their toll on her physical and neurological condition. She had been doing this circle walking for weeks, sometimes walking around the boundary of the house, sometimes the boundary of a room, but now she was just walking in circles.

The strangest thought came to my mind: she is trying to run out her life force via sheer exhaustion gained from repetitive movement. Energy moves in specific patterns and circles are important patterns...cycles. This dog is totally emaciated and there she is compulsively walking in circles with a driving force that is coming from God only knows where. She is not done.

Later that night when I was home alone I noticed how jumpy I was inside. I would try to sit quietly and focus on some reading but I kept jumping around inside my skin; my mind was flitting around I realized that I couldn't control it, couldn't focus it. This compulsiveness is something I noticed in myself years ago, a compulsion to move to a different place, to be "out and about" or better yet "participating". It is understandable considering where I come from and my cultural up-bringing. In the US if you aren't super busy "doing" something then you are considered lazy and basically worthless.

But in the context of what I had witnessed earlier in the day, and the juxtaposition of stillness and movement, experiencing the compulsive jumpiness of my mind took on a new dimension. That dog is compulsively walking in circles holding on to life, or trying to run out her life, I'm not sure which...and there I am with my mind totally out of control spinning around, grasping on to any and everything. Somebody please get me off this ride!!

This morning in his blog Sadhrugu says, "Movement is pleasant only to a point. The planet earth is moving gently in such a beautiful manner — it is only changing seasons. Tomorrow, if it just speeds up, throttles up a little bit, then all our seemingly balanced minds will become imbalanced, everything will spin out of control. So movement is beautiful only to a certain point. Once it crosses that point, movement becomes torture."

I'm not kidding. Synchronicity is really just like this.

There is a relationship between physical movement and the mind. Maybe you've heard about techniques of meditation that utilize repetitive motions to get a person into a meditative state. You use movement to get to stillness. It really works and maybe you've experienced this when you're doing some repetitive movement like jogging, or doing the dishes, or vacuuming. You may suddenly find yourself in a very still, quiet place.

I haven't heard from my friend this morning but it definitely seemed that the movement had become torturous for her dog. Movement on many levels becomes torturous for plenty of people too. I hope they turn the coin over and find Stillness.