Swanwick Star Issue No. 14 (2021)

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Doing Without Doing

 

Here were some of the programming highlights this year:

 

Doing Without Doing:  Krishnamurti and Transformation

An online weekend workshop with Oda Lindner

May 21-23, 2021

 

The workshop facilitator Oda Lindner is a yoga teacher who has been holding annual workshops hosted by KECC for many years. Attendance this time was smaller than usual, likely the result of the event coinciding with the Victoria Day long holiday weekend. Also, yoga sessions on the Centre lawn in beautiful natural surroundings may well be preferred over holding them online.

Oda was trained by the same yoga teacher as Krishnamurti, Desikachar, and has a keen interest in, and understanding of, K’s teaching. The focus of this workshop was on bringing an attitude of open listening to our ways of moving and being. This listening is in many ways a doing without doing. Is it possible to observe and sense without immediately interpreting what is felt?

Comments by the facilitator were skillfully interspersed with slow movements, Krishnamurti quotes and answers to questions from participants.

Included were:

  • Body sensing
  • Finding knots, habitual patterns and tensions
  • Being with tightness and tension
  • Guided movement sequences
  • Quiet sitting: Where or what are we now?
  • Breathing and sensing
  • Slow movement sequences (‘bodymeditation’)

These activities, together with Oda’s gentle guidance, were designed to explore the meaning of doing without doing and its potential for transformative change, rather than trying to create change by bringing in previous experience and ingrained patterns of behavior.

Participants were already familiar with K’s teaching which led to fruitful sharing and an expressed appreciation for its experiential approach that effectively applied it to movement and increased body awareness.

RT