This summer I have been gifting myself a weekly learning session with my friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk who are leading a TaKeTiNa workshop here on Bowen Island.  TaKeTiNa is a moving rhythm meditation that provides a learning medium for dealing with questions, inquiries and awareness.  In many ways it is like a musical version of the aikido based Warrior of the Heart training that we sometimes offer around Art of Hosting workshops.  It is a physical process that seeks to short circuit the thinking mind and bring questions and insights to life.

We do this by creating difficult situations, polyrhythmic patterns using voice, stepping and hand clapping.  This exploration of the edges of chaos and order is powerful, even in the short 90 minutes sessions we are doing.

Each session is offered as a learning journey, and so I have been coming the past two weeks with questions and ideas that I wanted to pursue.  Yesterday I was think a lot about community and how people get left behind.  In our group there were six of us, stepping, singing and clapping in ever increasing complexity.  There were times when I lost the pattern and laid back into the basic drum beat, the basic vocal sounds and found my way back into the complicated rhthyms.  It brought to mind a question: what violence do we do to groups of people when we have no heartbeat to come back to?

For any community or group, this heartbeat could be their deepest passion, their shared purpose or the thing they care most about.  When those things aren’t visible, people get left behind, and chaotic circumstances lead to alienation and despair.  So working a little with sensing the heartbeat, and arriving at a solid home place to return to.