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I was six years old. Powerful rhythmic music filled the room. A young woman, Rita was her name, and my older sister broke into a violent hip swaying pelvic dance—the Twist! I was overcome with dizziness and fear. I hid in the closet.

Today I understand that experience as my first conscious encounter with what the Shamans of Ancient Mexico called the Rolling Force, the primary vibrational energy behind life that shapes the reality we live in. In this instance that vibration manifested in the Kali-like physical body movements of Rita and my sister.

What I was to learn from this encounter was how overwhelming this  expression of the rolling force of animal rhythmic abandon was for my tender child spirit. In effect, my human spirit, or growing sense of ego identity and consciousness, was extremely fragile and needed to ward off the disintegrating effect of this rolling energy of nature. The key was to be able to maintain control over this flow at all costs.

My retreat to the closet allowed me to stop my exposure to the flow of energy, to separate my consciousness from the raging, twisting river of dance energy that threatened to drown me. This was spirit triumphing over matter. And so it begins.

Our evolving species has fixated its awareness upon a consensual reality of mind over matter, or spirit over nature. Within ourselves we prize the rational goal-oriented mind over the instinctual animal we are encased within. We joke about the animal we are, like the comedians among us who are proving to have taken it too far.

The consequence of this disidentification with the animal is a complete miscalculation of, and unrelatedness to, the power of its instinctual energies that flow within the human body and are essential to human life.

Sexual desire, for instance, is an essential component of the human animal. The human spirit, as ego, must deal with its instinctive hormonal promptings yet has no clue as to how or what to do with it. To truly relate to this instinctive energy is to encounter the Twist!

How does mind get comfortable being taken on a ride by an impersonal force of the body? How does consciousness hold on, channel, remain responsible and related with its instinctual, rhythmic self? Tall order for a spirit that just wants to exploit this instinctual energy without a real relationship with the body.

The present outing of the sexual behavior of powerful men clearly evidences the abusive use of control to obtain some measure of twisted sexual release by exploiting the bodies of both women and men. Outings of these behaviors must continue, yes, to bring justice to crime, but even more fundamentally to give credence to the dire state of immature relatedness to the sexual instinct in modern culture. The consequence of this dissociation and hubris is quite apparent: aberrant sexual behavior.

The powerful raging rivers of opinion and outrage that flood the gates of social media run the same risk of miscalculating the power of thought (spirit) over instinct. Nature always prevails.

The young boy in the closet has spent his life building a relationship with his rhythmic animal partner. Shortly after his encounter with the Twist he was to experience the same vibrational shattering in a pure spirit meeting while his body lay frozen in deep sleep. Rhythmic vibrational contractions permeate life in the body as well as life in the spirit.

In physical life our opportunity is to partner our spirit consciousness with the sensual rhythm of our animal nature. This is the key to the mastery of intent and manifestation. The abuses of control and power are really maladaptive attempts to solve the riddle of who we really are and form some form of relationship with our mysterious other.

What the abuses currently reveal is the underlying terror of powerful men to connect with their mysterious other in a genuine meeting of respect and love. This is indeed the greatest challenge of life in the body.

That little boy continues to learn how to meet his partner in love and the Twist. Perhaps a partnership with our younger other is the place to start.

Twist and shout,

Chuck