Welcome to juggling for mind body connection. My name is Miles Eddy and I am a professional juggler and along the way have found the benefit of juggling as a form of meditation, and as a way to give feedback to the thought process and the connection with your body - can you make your thoughts manifest into your body. And I want to share with you how juggling has been a force for calm and meditation in my life.
So I discovered juggling in college, a friend taught me the basic three ball cascade. And then I discovered the Renaissance festivals and decided that the next year I wanted to juggle at the Renaissance Festival, so learn to juggle a little bit better audition got a job down there as a local entertainer. And over the next dozen years or so put together a show. And ultimately, when I started juggling outside the Renaissance Festival, I mainly started doing nursing homes, and nursing homes partly because it just felt more meaningful to me. And I love teaching juggling, I love doing my show. And then teaching people the basics of juggling. And people just light up. And there are so many benefits to juggling. And I've known a lot of the benefits in my life personally.
So there's a lot that goes on in my head all the time, right? That's self voice that talks all the time. And I found that juggling while walking work the part of my brain that kept me a little calmer, a little more focused on what I was doing here. And now, because if I'm walking and juggling, then I can't do other things in my brain. Now that doesn't mean that I'm not doing this totally on automatic, I am, it's like driving, you can drive totally automatic, like if you're a musician playing scales, you could probably do totally an automatic or whatever song you're doing or your your jam. Jam is a little different. Jam, you get into a flow state, and juggling can be a flow state, or it's meditative and can help me get into a flow state like that.
And juggling, it's funny because teaching juggling, I had to really break down all the little individual elements of juggling. And being able to break juggling down and do one thing at a time to learn how to do it requires concentration, requires knowing where your body is in space, and requires movement. And the whole thing becomes, well, music -and I happen to be a musician too and is one of the reasons why I want to do this.
This brings us to mindset, right? Do I say that "I can learn to do this"? Or do I tell myself I can't do this, "I'm a klutz", "I have no I hand coordination", etc. And if you have no eye hand coordination, then great, learn to juggle, it will help your eye hand coordination.
But learning to juggle is actually not the ultimate goal of this program. Learning to do the practice, right, because even with meditation, you practice meditation, you sit and you meditate, you're practicing. And with juggling, you're practicing your mind body connection. How did I throw the club? Where did I intend it to go? Where did it go? Where's my awareness of where it went? Where's my awareness of how I threw it? Was I leaning forward right to throw a club and you're leaning throw, you're gonna probably throw it outward into your face. You know, if I'm doing tricks, how do I do this? The acceleration, the angle? Do you do a high lob? And then with clubs and when I'm passing with someone, you know, how do you throw it? Do you throw it with with one spin? Or can you do two spins? Can you do it just flat and throw it over and and what's the other person doing. And then there's the throw it fast this way, or let it lobby that way, and how to spin and if he's moving and if I'm moving, and I'm doing pickups, if I'm doing this and if I'm doing that, and it's like, it so represents the busy of the brain.
And none of it matters to actually learning to juggle. I could teach you every element about, you know, and I can bring charts and physics and and the ball will do this and your hand does that, and none of it is relevant, one, because it's the practice of juggling that's going to be important, and perfect practice. It's all relevant to the biofeedback of your body of what you're doing. That's the practice. But to actually juggle, the brain doesn't think about all those elements. Juggling is two elements: It's one prop, like one ball or one club, and it's rhythm, it's the music, it's the pattern.
And if you listen to this... there's a pattern to this. And again, the brain wants to do patterns without you having to think about, it becomes very hypnotic, and very calming. And if my brain starts thinking about other things, Ican only think about so many things, because even if I don't have to consciously think about juggling, I don't have to look at these, this is just natural for me to do. It's like playing a song on the piano that you've been playing for years. Doesn't require any thought, consciously, does require the brain to get into a certain state. And it's a whole lot of fun.
Hey, I'm going for another juggling walk. You want to go with me? Yeah, this is something I've been wanting to do for a very long time. I mean, juggling is more than just a hobby or a sport for me. Juggling has been something that has allowed me to connect with my body and Mother Nature, and just awareness in ways that I never imagined when I first learned to juggle, but like most people who learn to juggle, I learned by someone who was just an amateur juggler, taught me a basic three ball juggle, and picked it up in a couple of weeks, decided I was gonna be a juggler at the Renaissance Festival, and as they say, the rest is history.
So how did I learn to be a juggler. The juggling community I think is what drew me in. Basically, there was a friend when I was, I think in my second year in college, maybe my first year of college. I had a friend who learned how to juggle and he taught me and I learned the basics and about that same time about the Renaissance Festival and became a juggler at the Renaissance Festival, at Colorado Renaissance Festival in Larkspur. So I see juggling as metaphor, in a lot of way I see metaphor to interconnect a lot of stuff - the dance of metaphor, the music of metaphor, and all of this brings us into a community that we can then share with juggling, with music.
I want to do a full immersive multimedia show with an inspirational message. And I want to bring the audience, as the show, it it goes out the door and it grows as a movement not just as a juggling show or a concert or music or anything else, because the people are involved. And I want to get people involved by teaching them to juggle by giving them some insight into what's going on behind the scenes within the show, both within just what juggling is about and what it can do for oneself, and then what it's about learning to juggle in different ways. And then there's passing, and when they're watching something on stage, they got a better understanding of the art coming in.
Part of what I'm hoping for is is that if we get enough jugglers in the world, that there will be this synergy and this momentum of teaching everybody to juggle, or at least raising people's awareness of what juggler can do for their own health and their connection with others. The other really wonderful thing, the other pillar of juggling for me, is being able to pass with people. Even just taking one ball and learning to just throw that ball to your partner and watch their response and then have them do a self throw and then pass it back to you one ball, well, you start noticing a rapport, you start developing a communication with the other Juggler, and if you both can learn throw, to throw to juggle three balls, if you can both learn to juggle three balls, then you could learn to pass and synchronization.
And when you get to clubs, when passing with someone else becomes really interesting. And I love passing with others and then if you get two or three or four other jugglers who all can do clubs, I can be at the point of other jugglers and have a juggler 123 and then go up and down. I'm doing a pass every throw, they're doing like every three throws. There's other patterns you can do and stars, you can get five jugglers and do like a star pattern.
So when I get 100,000 People who have learned to juggle through this program, I am hoping that that will connect us to enough people to do worldwide concerts, and share this vision of peace with other groups, and be a juggler for peace and link that in with the story of Sebastian, The Peasant Juggler, the Blessed-Fool, the advisor to King's. So juggling is going to be central to these three characters that I'm developing for the wizards fooled. And I want to bring the audience into the show, and one of the ways to do that is to teach them to juggle.
More importantly, though, I'm looking for people who want to engage in this community, and meet each other and find ways to take the lessons that I've learned, the lessons that you've learned, the stories that we have to tell, and put those out into the world to get other people involved in their own creativity, for healing, and telling their own stories for their own healing.
Where am I going to change the world? Well, you know, what I need to juggle for my body connection to help change the world in some real ways. And I, I want to be able to share that with people that I want to do this as a grassroots movement, with real mindfulness of the community of juggling because it's the juggling community, I feel, this is going to help grow this movement of wanting to share geography with 100,000 people.
So thank you, I am just so excited to be juggling with you all and can't wait to put the rest of this together. Alright, so here's the deal, I am creating a beta of Juggling for Mind/Body connection. And in this program, you will learn to juggle. More importantly, you will understand how you can use this as a walking meditation, as a movement meditation, and just to have a lot of fun with it.
But awareness is part of the goal here. And this will be online training plus some group coaching through zoom. And I'm really, really excited to do this. And I'm really excited to get on zoom with you too. I've been juggling for over 45 years, I've been working on the awareness of juggling within my own meditation practice as meditation for me in mind body connection.
And we're going to do this at a greatly reduced price. At a greatly reduced price? Yes. What? I'm going to ask for money, you know? Okay, yeah, I'm going to ask for a little bit of money from this, and when this program gets going, then you know, I'm going to ask for a little bit more.
If you already know how to juggle, then you're going to learn how to juggle a lot better through this program. And I think that you're going to start noticing some of the things that that juggling has done for you if you think back to when you didn't juggle. And if you juggle with any regularity at all, you probably doing it because you're looking for some sort of movement therapy therapy, right? juggling two in one hand is still juggling. So you can take two balls in one hand, if you're in a wheelchair, you could do that three is a little harder sitting down but is certainly doable.
Juggling is is is kind of a hidden art, I think in a lot of ways, because there are social jugglers everywhere and if you just try you'll find some people who know how to juggle. The biggest obstacle to learn to juggle is convincing yourself you can't juggle, you know, or that you don't want to take the time that it's going to learn because you think it's going to take a long, long time. And it doesn't have to take a long, long time, it doesn't because there's one ball and there's the rhythm.
So a heartfelt thank you to everyone who is following this project and following my music.
