Years ago, I had a dream where our universe had collided with some other universe or reality, causing this crazy implosion where nothing made sense. Sofas came flying through the air, my house kept changing its shape so that I could never find my way to the elevator, (who knows why there was an elevator in my house), and blob shaped beasts kept trying to steal my picnic table. I woke up and thought, indeed, if the multiverse is my mind, we’re in trouble. 

Someone recently asked me whether I thought the multiverse existed. Hell, yeah! I credit/blame the multiverse for everything I can’t explain: the disappearance of my best pruners, only to reappear years later under my car seat, the time I met a young woman named Lavina who wanted to be a performer and whose birthday was the same day as mine 10 years later, the fact that I never even heard the word Feldenkrais until 1989 when apparently all my friends knew about it but had just never bothered to tell me, the 2016 US election, I could go on and on. 

In the movie, Everything Everywhere All At Once, the multiverse includes a universe where people have hot dogs for fingers, which opens a world of infinite possibilities for finding new options for how to navigate through life (not to mention endless opportunities for slapstick). 

There is a popular alchemical formula, “As above, so below.” I take that to mean that like the great multiverse, or “megalocosmos” as G.I. Gurdjieff called it, I too am a multiverse. Contained within my experience are cosmic interactions that might appear just as mysterious and inexplicable to the microbes and atoms swirling around in the vessel I call me. It’s one of the reasons I find studying how I move to be so compelling. How deep can I go? What’s happening in there? Why am I the way I am? And how do I become something more?

I remember once driving a teacher crazy with these questions. He sighed, and said, “Lavinia, really, you’re asking for nothing less than transformation!” Well, what’s wrong with that? The alchemists were interested in transforming their “lead,” our habitual, ordinary selves, into “gold”. We love stories of frogs transformed into princes. (What multiverse did that come from?) Of course, transformation isn’t always optimal – from hot dog fingers to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 

Is it possible to level up? To experience a transformation that offers deeper understanding and connection? I want to know if there is an up there. In the Tarot, there is a card called The Magician. He has one arm up, reaching to heaven, and one arm down, pointing to earth: As above, so below. The Magician makes sense of everything, and knows how to use it. After all, magic is simply science we don’t understand.

Using movement to guide self-inquiry, and practicing a deep listening can help me understand the blob shaped beasts that reside in my psyche and discover my own connections with both heaven and earth. My gift this month, a lesson I like to call Heaven and Earth and the pelvis In Between :-). I hope the transformation after doing the lesson feels like magic.

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