WHY OPEN HANDS CHANGES YOUR LIFE. AND HOW.
OPEN HANDS
Open Hands can change your life, just as it changes mine and that of many of my students, because it does the following:
Instead of cultivating the art of fighting, Open Hands cultivates the art of responding
Instead cultivating of the art of winning, Open Hands cultivates the art of being in contact
Instead of only resolving a conflict (making it going away), it releases the higher potential for all parties at the core of the conflict
Instead of dominance, it cultivates dialog
It takes the step from self-realization to world-realization.
THE ART OF RESPONDING
A response is very different from a reaction. A reaction happens in fixed patterns. When a dog reacts to a command, it does not respond, it simply functions according to a pattern. And we are exactly the same. Every time we don't respond, we react. To the extent that we have forgotten that we are responders, we are reactors. To the extent that we have not developed the competence to respond, we are reacting like the dog. This command triggers this reaction in us, that word triggers that reaction. Every time a moment does not arise from within with our participation, the past is simply reproduced. Of course, this does not mean that everything is always completely new. But there is a significant difference between re-acting and co-creating.
One look, one situation, one tone of voice is enough to set a whole machinery of patterns in motion in us and a process that actually has nothing to do with the actual situation. We react to something and something, separate ourselves from it and take the whole thing for reality. We react to a trigger and re-act, i.e. re-produce a pattern. For the most part, this happens automatically and unconsciously.
A response, on the other hand, is something completely different. A response has to do with responsibility. I take responsibility for my actions. I am not the victim of the other person. I am anchored in my center. Nobody is forcing me to react in a certain way. It is my free decision whether I react or respond. Of course, I have to develop various skills for this. We experience this most clearly in Open Hands, the martial art form of peace, which gives us time and space to track down our reactions, resolve them and reintegrate them into a stable and agile whole through deconstruction and reconstruction. Open Hands creates space to learn to respond, because responding is a skill, and the core skill is centering and being open. Martial arts becomes the art of loving and responding.
BEING IN CONTACT
Where does a relationship find a home? Where is it? Only in the hearts of individuals? Is it not more than that? What is it? In my perception, a relationship is also something material, it has a body. Interest also contains goodwill, willingness, openness, the urge to explore, the desire to discover and, at the same time, a sense of having arrived. These are all wonderful gifts of a relationship that create individual and shared stability. The shared center that can emerge in Open Hands is something similar. It is more than two individual centers. Through us we become more. We unfold. And yet we always remain centered and grounded, remain individual, even if we create ourselves together, even if we each take on an individual and a common form.
At any moment, I can decide to be reactive or creative. I am not lived, I live.
Dialogue, as we learn to embody it in Open Hands or in the Yoga of Dialogue, and as we can then also lead it in life, is about becoming a whole together that grows beyond itself. So on the one hand, it's about complementing each other. If someone just doesn't want to move, I invite them to move by moving. If someone simply doesn't want to relax, I invite them to relax by relaxing myself and the situation. We complement each other. This process becomes dynamic when both parties get involved. And it immediately becomes exciting: what does it take, what do I need to activate in myself for us to become whole? The dialog begins through interest, because I have to ask questions, get to know, receive information. We ask questions with our listening hands and bodies. They ask intelligent questions: at first somewhat superficial, nice, non-committal, then more and more to the core, to the point. We therefore need to know how to ask questions. We broaden our range of questions. We do this by broadening our own spectrum of movement. From this, a wider spectrum of interaction can unfold.
RELEASING A HIGHER ORDER
Open Hands is a dance that challenges us to dance on the border and with the border and to expand it. We learn to approach people openly and unconditionally, to really meet them, to be in dialog and to transfigure any conflict, be it structural or dynamic, into a higher order.
We get to know our ingrained reaction patterns in the truest sense of the word and learn to deconstruct them and replace them with creative but well-structured spontaneity. We replace patterns with answers and remain in our own center, in self-responsibility. These answers do not primarily come from the intellectual realm (and therefore also from the realm of concepts, categories, ideas, wishful thinking, ideologies and self-delusion), but they come from the body and are therefore first and foremost an unraveling, a freeing from rigid concepts and physical rigidity. In this way, we can allow ourselves to be seized without falling out of the center. Open Hands and dialogue yoga are immediate feedback systems that show us our grounding potential and the degree to which it has been realized. But they are much more than feedback. Because feedback is monological. In my opinion, they are manifestations of the most important path of transformation that humanity can take in our time: the path of dialog, of dynamic, constructive, committed, accepting cooperation. A necessary path, in my opinion.
DIALOG INSTEAD OF DOMINANCE
Dialogue is an open engagement with an open outcome. It is not about winning, being right or not being moved a bit. Rather, it is about moving together, allowing and cultivating a flow and influence that flows through me, you, us and the things between us. So if a dialog is a double openness (open engagement, open outcome), then in a certain sense it also requires two centers. The two centers are observation and perception. This means that we are already adopting two perspectives and neither perspective is absolute. By centering ourselves in this way, we take a standpoint, but it is not fixed. We take a stance, but this can be changed. This gives rise to openness, and therefore expansion. We touch each other openly and centered, observe, feel. This changes the form and we allow it to take shape through us. We differentiate and integrate. This changes the form again. We subtilize and essentialize. It changes again. A Gestalt flow emerges. We come up against boundaries, expand them, preserve and expand at the same time. We recognize rigid patterns and rehearsed reactions, deconstruct them and reconstruct a well-structured spontaneity that does not follow fixed patterns but embodies natural principles. A dialog is not an interview and not feedback. Our feedback culture is the death of dialog. Structured spontaneity knows no rigid role assignments. We ask questions, we answer, we explore together, our encounter is an incessant, exuberant, creative engagement with one another. Perhaps a misunderstanding arises from time to time, but this has great creative potential by revealing other layers of meaning.
FROM SELF-REALIZATION TO WORLD-REALIZATION
With the path of dialog, we cultivate skills that we can apply one-to-one from one dialog field, such as open hands, to another, such as dialog in speech. These are basic skills that we do not have to transfer. They are immediately applicable. That doesn't mean that we don't have to practise them in the new field. But we have already created the basis for all fields.
When a relationship arises, it is extremely important not to immediately steer it back into familiar channels and impose a form on it that you know - or that conforms to the rules. This does not mean throwing all conventions overboard. But it does mean deconstructing them and allowing the parts of them that are conducive to the relationship to rise up from within so that they lend the relationship their very own shape, while conventions that are ultimately unfounded are recognized as invalid.