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Performance or Preference, Which do you serve?

Posted January 16th, 2012 by Rob McNamara

Performance, genuine elegant performance, requires that you step beyond your habituated preferences. 

 

Performing within the sphere of your conditioned preferences is never an expression of your highest levels of elegance and achievement, but instead is rote repetition. While repetition is necessary for performance, it is not sufficient. 

 

Habituation serves adequacy. Preferences are most often in slavery to comfort. Performance worships elegance. There is a mysterious effectiveness and grace that is simple, direct, fluid and refined. Look into your peak gestures of performance, I think you know what I am talking about. Genuine performance celebrates what is beautiful - not our cultures conventions around beauty - I'm talking about the heart and essence of beauty. I'm talking about your complete rapture in and as the simple movement of joy.

 

When you train today, when you pick up injunctions to engage your full embodied experience in this ever-present immediacy, start with the intention to explore your experience outside of the boundaries and limitations of your habituated preferences. If your preference is not to train the larger sphere of the elegance that is your emergent beauty, all the better! 

 

Cut through preferences and I think you'll find something much more precious, or rather something precious will take hold of you. 

 

Enjoy! 

 

Cross Posted from www.RobMcNamara.com

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God & Mammon

Posted January 16th, 2012 by Layman Pascal

Hi Rob,

Again, your message is self-evidently true and your energy is to be commended.  

Yet you currently have 3 threads in the top 15 -- that means you are holding open 1/5 of the available recent conversation space.   This verges on excessive.  Especially since you are mostly posting but not responding.  Like a cat leaving delicious dead birds gutted at the family's doorstep in the morning.  

But, more interestingly, this all bears a subtle resemblance to the vaguely standoffish hints that come across in the enthusiastic "marketing" tone in some of your prose.  Although we can certainly appreciate many reasons to communicate in this fashion, we would no doubt enjoy a more intimate & shared inquiry here -- rather than running the risk of compounded, cross-posted, propaganda blurbs.  No matter how agreeable the message.  "Which do you serve?" has a fine rhetorical flourish but without a little more personal engagement there is a chance of divisiveness, of the feeling that You are putting this question to Us.  We would rather feel, I daresay, that you are deeply among us from the beginning...

In fact I am keenly supportive of this distinction between the developmental aesthetics of "performance" and the tendency of human beings to slip into static, even regressive, evaluations which rise out of habituated "preferences".  From Ancient Greece to High Tibet there is an embrace of the precision of beauty, the evolutionary commitment to excellence & the purifying "line" which leads forward toward the clear and total functional exactness of our omni-dimensional Being.

Thanks, I've been...

Layman Pascal

 

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