Jeff Carreira: Hello Jody, I want to start by telling you that the theme for this issue is Awakening Through the Body. And just to set a little personal context, this has been a theme in my life based on a powerful kundalini awakening I experienced twenty years ago. Years later, I wanted to understand what happened to me in that experience and I started working with practices, teachers and traditions that emphasized the energetic dynamics of awakening. I did kundalini yoga, I worked with spontaneous forms of dance and contact improvisation, as well as other modalities. It was in that context that I met you in Hawaii.

I’ve been reading your book, Ke Ala Hoku – the Pathway to the Stars: Awakening the Ancient Soul of the Body, and I have some specific questions that I thought would be particularly valuable for our conversation, but I want to start with the story about how I met you on the island of Maui. I went to you because I had heard that you were a great massage therapist. I thought I would be getting a regular therapeutic massage, but it was so much more than that. I was laying on the table and I felt like I was eavesdropping on a conversation between your body and mine that neither of our minds was involved in. It was as if I could hear the bodies speaking to each other in the language of contact. It was so powerful that I had to ask you about it afterward and that is when I found out that you had trained with a Kahuna in the tradition of Ancient Lomi Lomi. A few weeks later, after I had returned home, I had powerful experiences of energetic awakening while reading some of your blog posts and decided to do a ten-day retreat with you. That started a journey of three years during which I began studying with you and practicing Ancient Lomi Lomi.

My experience with this practice was one of the most powerful awakenings I’ve had over the past decade and I would describe it as an awakening to the inherent wisdom of the body and the energetic language that the body communicates with. After working with you, I felt that my body was alive in a way it hadn't been before, or at least in a way I had never recognized before. I saw that it was intelligent and that is why I wanted to speak with you about the theme of this issue. I’d like to begin by giving you a little space to explain a little about the tradition of Ancient Lomi Lomi.

Jody Mountain: In a nutshell, Ancient Lomi Lomi is an indigenous practice of opening to the life force in the body. The ancient Hawaiians didn't delineate between our spirit and our physical body. They saw it all as one thing. In the West, we tend to think about God, and the angels, and our spirit or soul as somewhat ethereal and existing “out there” somewhere. These ancient people believed that we are infused with spirit and it is animating everything.

When we recognize life, life tends to recognize us. So, when we have an experience of meeting life, we experience the kind of awakening you described because we remember that the life inside us is fully alive and conscious. We get introduced to a different dimension that is moving through our physical body. We have a chance to expand our perception of spirit and our perception of soul to include this embodied life. We meet the part of ourselves that animates the body, the part that will continue on in a different form after we die.

Our concept of a spirit that is different from matter puts us in an adversarial relationship with the body: the body versus spirit. The body is often seen as imperfect as we strive to become pure and worthy of heaven. In order to embrace this ancient indigenous belief system and the awakening of the ancient soul of the body, we must move beyond our ideas of right and wrong and the sense of personal identity that we have been taught, because those ideas are distinctions created by our conceptual mind. What if there is just one energy moving through all forms of life? What if our mental concepts only capture a very tiny piece, while the mystery of the soul and spirit, and our connection with source, are constantly awake and working and moving and speaking inside us?

Jeff Carreira: I did an interview with Dr. Lawrence Edwards for this issue and he is a teacher of Kundalini yoga and he was saying almost the same thing. He described how we see the mind as separate from the body, but the life force energy of kundalini doesn't see that distinction. The idea of a mind that is separate from the body only exists as a construct in the human mind, and then we conform to it in how we act. But it's not a real distinction.

Jody Mountain: I would say it is real. If you believe it's real.

Jeff Carreira: Yes, it certainly becomes real as we conform to it.

Jody Mountain: It becomes real because you're limiting yourself to it. But as soon as you begin exploring what else is possible, something else can happen.

Jeff Carreira: In one of the training sessions on retreat with you, you were trying to teach me not to engage with my body through my ideas about it. You were explaining that I was doing the massage through concepts and eventually I saw that it was true. While I was giving a massage, I was thinking about the person’s arm or their leg, but these are just concepts. There is no actual arm or leg. Those are only ideas. In your book you write about moving from a conceptual view of the body into a recognition that the body is a collection of living beings. Can you speak about that for us?

Jody Mountain: My teacher, Kahu Abraham Kawai'i, said that we are made of beings within beings, worlds within worlds, universes within universes. In fact, quantum physics has discovered that the proportion of space to solid in our bodies is the same as in the rest of the universe. Most of our bodies are actually empty space, yet we focus on the 0.0001 % of matter that's present. The thing that I believe quantum physics is missing from the indigenous worldview is the fact that space itself is alive and that space is conscious. So the leap into the indigenous mind is the recognition that space itself is a conscious being, and every little piece of creation is a living being.

I have come to this recognition not only through my teacher's words, but through experiencing my own body and the different parts of my body as awake and alive in a way that compels me to ask my body to do things rather than tell it what to do. I spend my time asking my body for things and being surprised at what it can do. I believe that the body is made of hundreds of trillions of beings that are all working together in harmony in their pure purpose in life, which is to do exactly what they are born to do in the most perfect way possible. They're all connected by emotion, and they're connected by mental patterning. Everything is in a deep interrelationship.

In the book I speak about the concept of Kaona, which refers to the entire depth of reality that exists in any given moment, in any given situation, in any given person, in any given body. There are depths of being, depths of reality. And when we're able to see a fuller expanse of the moment, of a cell, of an organ, what opens up for us in that is more of life. So Kaona is the depth of reality that exists, but in order to see that depth, you have to have an opening to a depth of perception. I believe that every cell is alive and every microbe is alive and every sensation is alive. Every hope and dream is alive. Every emotion is a living part of us. These beings are here in every cell of your body, whether you recognize them or not. Every organ, every toe, has been supporting you even while you had forgotten that they existed as living beings.

Jeff Carreira: You said very simply in the book that our conscious mind is only aware of what it's paying attention to. It has a very small focus of attention. But our body, on the other hand, is aware of everything all the time, even though we may not be aware of what it's aware of. It's in constant communication with the moment. And so, in terms of our theme of Awakening Through the Body, it seems like awakening to the intelligence of the body means expanding our focus of attention so that we can become more aware of what our body is already aware of.

Jody Mountain: Yes, exactly. You're just allowing your attention to drop into the place in you that is already awake, and the place that's already awake in us is this cellular being that is in motion with source, with the infinite, moment after moment after moment. We can just swallow some saliva, or be aware of the movement of our breath, and just that simple attention will let our cellular being know that we're remembering and we're in touch. When we greet life, life greets us back. So what we're doing by coming into this deeper attention is allowing more life to surge through us, more energy to be available, more clarity and revelation to emerge.

Jeff Carreira: I'm listening to you and I'm having an energetic experience of revelation, which doesn't have any particular insight associated with it, but I'm feeling the energy that I always feel when I talk to you about these things. It's the excitement of being so close to something that is very important. Isn't it amazing that I can listen to you and start to feel the energy awaken?

Jody Mountain: That’s because it's the same energy that is alive in you. Your cells, all those living beings, are hearing this conversation. And, when I lead retreats, I explain to people that I'm not talking to their brain so they can’t expect to understand much of it. I'm talking to the cellular being and I'm calling it forward. I'm letting it know that I recognize it and I know it’s here and awake. I know it’s alive. And we're going to do things together so that it will have a chance to speak.

Jeff Carreira: I want to return to how you explained to me on retreat that I was conceptualizing the body. I didn't initially understand what you meant, but I recognized it was true. I finally experienced the difference when I was giving a massage and I let my arm do what it wanted to do rather than direct it with my mind. The massage started to spontaneously happen, and I realized that's nonconceptual because it has nothing to do with what my mind thinks. It was my arm doing what it wanted to do because I had set it free.

Jody Mountain: You were surprised.

Jeff Carreira: Yes, I had thought that I was really good at living, but I realized that actually, life is better at it.

Jody Mountain: That’s a brilliant way to say it. Life is much better at doing bodywork, and at doing anything really, than what we think. There are certain principles of alignment that need to be alive in us in order to practice the bodywork, but once we're in the zone of these principles, in alignment with the work, then yes, we are informed by life. You can let yourself be informed by the life that is already here. As I've developed in this work, I realized that I was previously focusing on a narrow band of reality and trying to shape it, and the whole time a bigger reality was here all along. In this breath, in this sensation, is the reality that will serve me and everybody around me in much wiser ways.

Jeff Carreira: We're trained to use the mind to live through, but when we flip it around, life can use our mind to live itself through us. Our mind is more helpful in the service of life.

Jody Mountain: They have a phrase in some spiritual traditions called Divine Mind, and that, to me, is when someone is able to let go so that life can use all of the knowledge and all of the wisdom gained and run with it. Life can take the knowledge of our experience and use it rather than being limited by it.

Jeff Carreira: I have one last thing I wanted to ask you about, and this has to do with the fact that before you got involved with Ancient Lomi Lomi you were a dancer, and part of the tradition of Ancient Lomi Lomi involves a movement practice called flying. I was curious to have you speak about that.

Jody Mountain: On one level, the practice of flying involves different parts of the body moving in a harmonious way in the shape of the infinite. So the head, the arms, the hands, the hips, the feet, the torso are all on different planes moving in this shape of the figure eight of the infinity sign. In Hawaii, when you do hula practice, the hula dancers will tell you that when they are depicting a flower or a mountain with the shape of their hands and their movements, they are not just depicting it, they are becoming it. They are embodying these elements in order to share them on a certain vibrational level. In its original form, hula was a prayer, a spiritual practice. I feel that the principle behind the flying practice is similar. When we step into the flying practice, we're stepping into the shape of the infinite. We're not just depicting the infinite or drawing the infinite with our bodies, we're actually stepping into the waveform energy of infinity. And it tends to accelerate anything that is stagnant, any part of us that isn't in harmony with the infinite. Anything that's been holding us back from feeling our infinite self tends to rise to the surface quite quickly. And in the process of flying on a retreat, we learn a kind of internal navigation that allows us to meet whatever is holding us back. And we meet it in an embodied way, not in a conceptual way. We actually walk through our own resistance to life with the support of our awakening cellular being..

Jeff Carreira: I remember that one day on retreat with you we went to the beach and practiced flying to the rhythm of the waves. It felt like communication was happening between me, the waves, and the infinite. I remember thinking that these waves have been crashing on this beach over and over again, day after day, year after year, millennia after millennia, eon after eon, forever. It brought me in touch with the infinity of life on Earth.

Jody Mountain: You experienced life meeting life, the life inside you opening up to meet the life in the infinite. It's alive and it's awake. Life is awake and it is the source of the awakeness in everything we encounter. There are no exceptions because there is nothing that isn't life. And that's what Ancient Lomi Lomi opens us to. It’s not a mental awakening. It's not an idea. It's an embodied physical contact where life meets life.

Jeff Carreira: Thank you so much for sharing your profound perspective with us today.