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A Beginner’s Guide to Overcoming Everything (an introduction)
I climbed the long, wooden staircase toward what looked like a giant tree fort built into the woods. I let the warm sun–rare for an Oregon October–soothe the frustration of realizing just how many times I had passed it while driving on the same winding roads, getting progressively less on time.
It wasn’t exactly in my character. I had taken my one day off from a grinding schedule of teaching writing at a college in Portland to drive two hundred miles and attend an event put on by someone I hardly knew anything about, only that he had worked with the late, great Christopher S. Hyatt. But after two years of diligent work with undoing, I had begun to lose interest in things that were in my character. So I knocked on the door, and I waited. The door swung open, I was briefly welcomed, and then led to the living room, where, amidst a jungle of potted plants, framed by a cinematic window enclosing the dense forest outside, a group waited to be led through the series of undoing exercises presented in the document below.
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Fast forward one year.
After dedicating countless hours of intense work to further developing the undoing current in the damp, fertile atmosphere of the Pacific Northwest, Garrett and I picked up the flag and carried it to Ojai, CA, a mixture of secluded Southern California paradise and Twilight Zone episode—a Mecca and laboratory for alternative healers, thinkers and weirdnicks of all conceivable kinds. We had tested the undoing work on our friends and ourselves; now it was time to test it within the rich and progressive culture of bodywork professionals.
We arrived with nothing but a carload of possessions each and a determination to share the work with as many people as possible. Since then, we’ve had the privilege of working one-on-one with massage therapists, yogis, cranial-sacral therapists, energy workers, reiki practitioners, shamans, hypnotists, occultists, martial artists, tai chi practitioners, personal trainers; we’ve taught local classes, worked with local clients, reached out to an international audience with our first online course. We’ve tested undoing with peers and students from all backgrounds, and have received the same feedback consistently: this work does something that nothing else quite does, and it does it every single time.
Descriptions vary: it purifies the nervous system; it releases deep muscular tension; it breaks through energetic blocks; it drains the brain of fear; it heals splits in the psyche; it releases the kundalini; it resolves psychological conflicts; it rewires the brain; it deprograms the mind. Each of these metaphors reflects an aspect of undoing, but it is somehow more than any of them.
Regardless of what words we use, one thing has become clear: undoing is ready for a larger audience, and the world—or at least a good enough portion of it—is ready for undoing.
So in the spirit of carrying on the experiment, we invite you to peruse the document below and try the exercises for yourself. They are just a small beginner’s sampling of the vast and deep undoing repertoire, some of the simpler and easier exercises to perform (think of them as the pushups and sit-ups of undoing); but don’t let their simplicity fool you: they still make things happen. (Incidentally, this is the same series of exercises Garrett used for his famous [or infamous] seminar at Esozone in Portland, OR, which apparently generated an energy so thick that people from workshops in the neighboring rooms left to come see what was going on.)
If you do choose to perform these exercises earnestly, you’ll likely find, as we each did years ago, that it’s not long before you’ve crossed an invisible threshold—a first step on a “pathless path” through which fear transforms into power, anxiety into adventure, and the mundane into a mystery.
-Riley Holland, Ojai, CA, 2011