CHAPTER 4
THE DAILY SEIKI EXERCISE

Immediately after receiving seiki, it is the traditional Japanese custom to teach the recipient the daily practice of seiki taisou, the basic seiki exercise. Once you are filled with seiki, you need to keep it moving and make it an active participant in your everyday life. Here is the miracle: the daily seiki exercise requires no willpower, discipline, or stamina. It is simply three steps that are easy and natural. Unlike aerobic exercise, yoga, diets, and innumerable other therapeutic programs, the daily seiki exercise is effortless. You could say that its purpose is to perform spontaneous effortlessness of both mind and body. Doing so awakens and amplifies the movement of seiki within you.

When you master this seiki exercise, endless benefits will enter your life. Seiki jutsu, as always, never asks you to force any movement, thought, attitude, or feeling. It only asks that you take a 10-20 minute recess each day to allow yourself to move as your body desires, doing so without purpose, without work, and without effort. In this break from the constant demands of everyday life, life’s vital energy will be delivered to you, ready to energetically charge your whole being.

In the traditional Japanese practice of seiki jutsu, you are asked to sit on a wooden stool and then allow your body to perform a spontaneous movement. Simply sit and wait for something to happen. You may sway from side to side, back and forth, bob up and down, or in circular or elliptical patterns. The movement may be localized more at the base of your spine, in your neck, or in your legs or arms. As you sit on the stool and allow movement, you may fall into any imaginable motion. The pattern may stay locked in one form or it may change frequently. In seiki jutsu, your body is allowed to play, tinker, and experiment with these motions, and in doing this you learn to fall into movements so natural that you feel as if you are being moved by an unseen force.

Seiki jutsu reminds you of your previous expertise with natural movement--when you were a child you allowed your body to move naturally. It happened unconsciously without any intentional choreography. Now as an adult you are invited to return to those freely expressed movements. Use this freedom of expression to take you into automatic motion, where movement takes place without your having to make it happen. This spontaneous motion can bring you inside the “seiki tuning zone,” a place of complete absorption and enhanced awareness. Here you must learn to ride out the motion and feel the ecstatic emotion it brings, allowing it to tune you in a natural and effortless way. This is when you have a sympathetic resonance with the vital life force and find that it energizes and revitalizes your whole being.

Seiki continues to dance all the parts of me and I no longer can track where the movements begin and end. They are happening everywhere. I am immediately and fully awake, completely aware of the present vitality that is surging through my body. My mind feels empty though it is full of seiki currents that bring forth a sense of inner expansiveness. And then there are the surges of tingling sensations, vibrations, and interspersed tremors. They take me inside an experience that is not anything like the trance facilitated by a hypnotist. Here I do not get sleepy. Instead I am more awake. It is difficult to describe, however, as this experience renders all categorical names absurd. Here we only find metaphors that are inspired to transform without concern for conceptual encapsulation. This is a close encounter with life’s vitality. Here there is nothing separate from the whole of me. No mind separate from body, no consciousness differentiated from that which holds it, no life that is distinct from whatever can be distinguished by trickster mind. This absorption is being plugged into the source. It’s an incredible buzz, a sound way of opening yourself up. Seiki opens us so much that we become the universe, the vast all inside the awe that dissolves everything into a river of pulsing energy.

The seiki exercise is both a way to prepare you to receive seiki and a way of nurturing seiki after you have received a transmission. It is not necessary for you to be filled or overflowing with seiki as a prerequisite for initiating the seiki exercise and movements. Anyone at any time can start moving into these effortless rhythms. The spontaneous movements of the seiki exercise help prepare you for receiving seiki, just as the reception of seiki brings forth more enhanced spontaneous movement. When you realize that both preparation and reception are not two, but also not one, then you become readied for a life-changing journey with seiki.

We have identified the essence of the seiki practice, paring it down to its basic principles so that it may be easily learned and practiced by anyone. The seiki exercise basically involves three easy steps that are outlined for you as follows:

Step One: Initiate a body movement that has rhythm. Sit and start a simple motion of your body, like rocking, that turns into a vibrant rhythmic pulse.

Step Two: Continue improvising a moving performance. Express some improvised body movement, ranging from small movements to dancelike gestures, and feel free to make sounds.

Step Three: Enter the seiki tuning zone. Allow the free and spontaneous expression of your body to carry you into an ecstatic awareness that is free of mind-body dualisms and disassociated experience. We playfully refer to this as the “seiki tuning zone.”

Seiki arrives without notice. It’s here in an instant, showing up the moment you forget about trying to receive it, as you feel absorbed in the movements. There is no longer mind nor body. The more they disappear, the more you become seiki.