Breathing to Move 1: Earth

I was in the library, glancing through the “New Nonfiction” shelf, passing time until the end of my son Jordan’s stage band rehearsal. “The Secret” caught my eye. Having heard so much about it, I took a look. I found it fascinating and troubling all at once. Sure we can embrace the power of our thoughts in creating our reality; we can ask for what we want and be grateful for what we have. Still, the teaching presumes that we know what we want. Do we?

Here, I find, is where our imagination is decidedly limited. We are so well trained to think and feel and act as if we are minds operating in and over bodies, that we have lost touch with our senses, with what we are feeling--with the movements that are making us. We rely on technology to tell us. We look around us and see what other people have and decide to want what they do. We are not alive to the creativity of our own bodily movement.

When we lose our senses, life loses its sense, for we no longer know who we are, where we are going, or what we want. What can we do?
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Traditions around the world recommend meditation as a practice for learning to listen to our inner selves. We sit quietly, focusing on an image, a sound, mantra, or the passing of our thoughts. We sift out the pressing concerns of the world to dial in to the deeper truths of our own being in the world.

However, if we are already living in our minds, such practices of meditation may reinforce the distance from our senses that is preventing us from knowing what is true for us in the first place. Sitting may stop the barrage of noise we experience in daily life, but do little to awaken our senses to new possibilities. For that, we need to move. We need practices that will bring our senses to life—not only the usual five, but also our sense of being a breathing, beating, becoming body, moving in space and time.

To sense is to move—an eye scans, an ear drum trembles, skin tingles. What we sense is itself moving—the waves of light and sound, frequencies of taste and touch, the brush and heft of weight. Thus, to bring our senses to life we must move our bodies in ways that exercise and awaken us to this movement of sensing and responding, and the constant flow of the elements into us, through us, becoming us.

When we can sense it, we can think it.
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In my explorations, I discovered a pattern of breathing that helps me bring sense to life. A pattern of four breaths came to me one day as I was swimming in a mountain lake. Each breath invites us to pay attention to a different element—earth, air, fire, water. Doing so, I swam as I never had before. I knew: my movement, breathing and attending, is making me into someone who can swim this way.

Since then I rely on the breaths daily to draw me into the present of whatever I am doing, and sift through the wisdom in sensations of pain, frustration, and despair. They are funding a new philosophy of bodily movement.

I share the first breath today, with others to follow in the weeks ahead.

Action:
To begin, just breathe. Pay attention to the air entering your nostrils. Feel the air pass through the back of your mouth, stream down your throat, and into your expanding chest. Every breath enters your heart, passes through your heart, and picks up whatever is there on the way to the rest of your body. Our sensations and desires, our feelings about them.

Sense your ribs lift and lower, your belly softly open and release.

Breathe in. Breath out. Take another breath into your bright white heart, and as you release the air out again, open your sensory awareness to notice the points where your body is connecting with the earth, or at least with the chair or floor that connects you and the earth. Where do you touch down?

Follow the movement of the air through your heart and into your body down to your points of contact with the ground. Rest your consciousness around those sites. If you are sitting, feel your sit bones pressing on the chair. Feel the chair pressing back. Feel your feet on the floor, or tucked under you. Feel one leg pressing across the other. Feel the small of your back against the chair.

Take a breath into your heart, and again, as you exhale, send the breath down to those points of contact. Imagine the points together, forming an image of your connection to the earth—of where you are. Breathe alive this matrix of sensory moments.
Feel the earth pressing up to keep you up.

Keep breathing. Sense flesh hanging loosely on bones like soft drapes. Empty all thinking, feeling, and sensing, hopes, fears, and expectations, wanting, judging, and yearning. Surrender it all into the ground. Stop holding yourself up. Feel the earth as your strength. Feel the earth in you as your strength. Feel this sensation of earth in you as your strength, enabling you to become who you are.

Know. There is not a moment in our lives when the body of the earth is not supporting us, holding us up, enabling us to stand and walk and breathe and be. The ground may shudder in an earthquake. It may fall away beneath us in quicksand. We may launch ourselves into the water; or propel ourselves high above the ground in elevator or airplane. But even so there is some point of contact where the forces of gravity pin us to the earth. Hold us up by holding us down.
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This breath is the first of four. When we ground down and release into the earth, wherever we are, whatever we are doing, we open up a new sensory perspective of our movement in that moment.

Try it. When it comes to mind, practice the earth breath. Perhaps you are driving, or folding laundry, or walking to work, or shelving books. Perhaps you are talking with a friend or colleague, reading the paper, or playing a sport. Take a breath into your bright heart and release it into the shape of your contact with the ground. Where are you? Where is your strength? What is holding you up? What do you notice? What new thoughts can you think?

You are here, now—your breathing movement is making you into someone who can and does feel and think in this way. What do you want? What does the earth in you want?

Next week: Air

Patterns of Sense and Response

So, what is involved in knowing that our movements are making us? What is it exactly that we are supposed to notice? And how will this awareness help us find wisdom in our bodily selves?

Good questions. First, we notice patterns.

Every movement we make—thinking, feeling and acting—has a shape and form, a rhythm and tempo.

So too these patterns of movement are never merely physical. Whether the movement involves analyzing a problem, bursting with compassion for a hurt friend, or jumping over a log, every one we make engages all levels of our being in the particular pattern of attention or inattention, animation or quiet that enables it.

Further, each pattern occurs in a given moment, as a way of sensing and responding to the situation at hand. It is these patterns of sensing and responding, then, that we are after.

Why? Because these patterns are the key to understanding how our movement is making us.

Every time we move, we exercise the pattern that enables that movement to happen. As we exercise a given pattern, it grows strong in us, and not only that. It becomes us. It makes us who we are. It guides us in sensing and responding to other moments in our lives.

My movement is making me. The pattern of sensing and responding that I make in any given moment makes me into someone who has made that pattern of movement, someone who can make that movement, and someone who is likely to make it in the future.

We are always making the movements that are making us. We can never not be, until we die. So the challenge is not just to know that this is happening, but to learn how to participate in it. Specifically, we can learn how our feelings of pain or discomfort in any realm are the result of movements we are making; and learn from those feelings how to move differently, in ways that coordinate our pleasure, our health, and our continued growth as human persons.
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Take an example: riding a bike. I learn to ride as I learn to coordinate my arms and legs in the patterns of sensation and response needed to hold, propel, and steer the bicycle. Each time I animate this coordination of nerves, muscles, and limbs, the patterns of riding grow stronger, clearer, and more precise in me. I change. I become someone who can pedal, steer, and balance, and not only that. I also grow more able to sense and respond to nuances in the movement of my body and the bicycle. I sense the tilt of a tight turn and respond with a shift in weight that allows me to stay upright. I sense the spike of fear, the press of determination, and the release of relief that accompanies as I do.

In this way, the movements I make in learning to ride make me into a bike rider—someone who can bike, who is apt to notice bikes, and who can respond to any object that appears as like-a-bike by straddling it, whether horse or motorcycle. I become someone who feels the feelings and thinks the thoughts that bike riding stirs and can respond to challenges that feel similar by animating these patterns.

Of course, I can ride a bike without this awareness of what is happening. However, when I tune in to how my movements are making me, something shifts. I find myself making new and better movements that align my pleasure and well being with the challenge at hand.

For example, perhaps as I ride along I feel a pinch in my neck or a tension in my shoulder. As I tune into the movements making me, the pain suggests to me a possibility for moving differently. I spontaneously adjust, making micro-movements on all registers of awareness—my right shoulder twists, my chin stretches forward, my lower back softens, and the thought of last week’s embarrassment lets go.

Of course, “I” am making these movements, but in another sense, these movements are making me. As I attend respectfully to my sensations of displeasure, I find myself riding with greater ease and strength, in ways that are freer, faster, and more precise. It is intoxicating.
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A similar dynamic holds in all areas of our lives. When we cultivate a sensory awareness of how the movements we are making are making us, we tap into an immense reservoir of wisdom. It is wisdom that is guiding us to make the movements that enhance our health and well being, that unfold what it is we have to give.

Next week: A concrete practice for cultivating this sensory awareness of the movement that is making us.
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Reflection:

Think of a movement that you are very good at making—a movement that you identify with as something you can do, with something special about you. It may be playing an instrument or sport, engaging a kind of puzzle or problem, responding to a friend or colleague, preparing a meal or a performance.

What patterns does this movement involve? What kind of coordination do you exercise across the range of your sensations—physical, emotional, mental? What “muscles” does this activity exercise in you?

Now think about other aspects of your life. How often is it that you exercise these patterns of movement as you sense and respond to other challenges in your life? How often do you mobilize this sense of yourself when facing a problem or a new task to learn?

What are you creating?

My movement is making me

When we hear “impulse,” what comes to mind? Generally not “wisdom.” We may think “buy” or “binge,” “purchase” or “pleasure.” We think of an impulse as an unreflected urge that passes beneath our rational radar and drives us to act in ways that are less than smart. Not what we want.

What we want, or so we have learned, is control over our impulses, over our bodies. A quick skip through the Sunday papers tells: we want the diet plan that will help us manage our food cravings; the drug that will smooth the ragged edges of our lifestyle; the cosmetic surgery that will makes us feel happy with how we look. We want to be free minds ruling fit bodies.

When we live with this mind over body sense of ourselves, it is true: we will tend to perceive our bodily impulses, our sensations and desires, as obstacles to achieving our ideals. We imagine that we need more discipline, better methods for establishing control, additional props and procedures to make our bodies fit. The market is pleased to provide.
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We are not minds over bodies, and attempts to act as if we were fail. Diet success stories, as the ads themselves confess, are “not typical.” Botox fades in 3 to 6 months. Wrinkles and weight return. Our bodies defy control.

Yet in such “failures,” we find seeds for an alternative sense of ourselves. Our “bodies” are who we are. When bodies rebel, it is not because “they” want “us” to fail. It is because we are stuck in our minds, claiming a power that is not ours, ignoring our own wisdom.
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Bodies are not objects or containers. Bodies *are* movement. They are not things that move, they are movement itself. They are movement that is occurring in multiple dimensions at once--cellular and chemical, systemic and motor, cognitive and sensory. We are beating and breathing, healing and restoring, growing and evolving from the moment of birth to the day we die.

So too, this movement that our bodies are is essentially creative. Our bodily movement, beating and breathing, is, in every moment, creating us, enabling us to think and feel and act as we do.

A body that is not moving is not a body; it is a corpse.
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When we begin to think in this way, we can begin to experience our impulses differently. The sensations erupt in us are not arbitrary interruptions. They are who we are. They are what we are creating as we pursue our ideal selves. They are what we are communicating to ourselves in that moment about those ideals, about that pursuit, and about our way of going about it.

In this vein, for example, the urge to eat that crashes our diet hopes is a protest against the conflict between mind and body that we are creating in ourselves. Pursuing a mind over body fitness, we are denying our bodily movement, our sensations and desires, pleasure and pain any role to play in navigating our relationship to food.

We are more than mind. We want to be more than mind. We want to be whole.
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There is wisdom, then, in this apparent rebellion of our bodies, and it is a wisdom, once we learn to recognize it, that is guiding us to move in ways that coordinate our pleasure, our health, and what is available to us in our environment.

In the weeks that follow, we will explore this dynamic in depth as it concerns our relationship to food, our relationships to our partners, and our sense of being in the world. Food. Sex. Spirit.
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First however, we need some additional tools. We can learn to *think* this idea about our bodies as movement fairly quickly. However, if this idea is true, then, thinking it is not enough. We need more than an idea about our bodies, we need to cultivate a sensory awareness of our bodies as the movement that is making us. We need to be aware, to the best of our ability, of how our movements are making us so that we can learn to discern, trust, and move with their wisdom.

Next week: how to cultivate a sensory awareness of the bodily movements that are making us so as to find their wisdom.

Reflection:
Turn your attention to your breathing--the movement of your breath. Focus on the sensations of inhaling. Exhaling. Follow the oxygen- rich air as it flows into your bloodstream, to the heart. Sense that air being pumped to every cell of your body, becoming you. Flowing into you, through you, and from you.

Your breathing movement is making you. Yet it is not only making your flesh, taking in elements so essential that you cannot live without them for even four minutes; it is doing so in the rhythmic patterns, the phrases and timing, that enable you to think and feel and act as you do. Slow and fast, sharp and smooth, heavy and light. To learn any activity is to learn how to breathe in the pattern that enables it. We can’t sing or speak, ski or swim, feel happy or sad without learning the pattern of breathing--the phrasing and timing, that enables us to coordinate ourselves in that action.

The movement of our breathing, then, is not only making the stuff of our flesh. It is making the patterns that enable us to do whatever we do.

You may feel resistance in turning your attention to your breathing. Too touchy-feely? Just listening to your own breath? Think of it this way, you are engaging in a radical philosophical act, investigating for yourself the limitations of some of western culture’s most cherished values. It is not insignificant.....

I think therefore I am

I spent years looking for the smoking gun. When was it, I wondered, that people in western culture split “mind” from “body,” privileging the former over the latter as the true “I”? I scoured the writings of those dead white men whose brilliant ideas continue to shape our politics, economics, and religion--the value we accord to individual persons. I never found it.

The split, it seems, was never complete. Never final. Take Descartes, for example, who in 1637 published his infamous line: “I think therefore I am.” In the same breath Descartes acknowledges that he is engaging in an act of imagination: he can imagine that he has no body. He admits as well that he is able to imagine this due to years of training--years of bodily discipline. Further, even he is aware of the problem that arises in the wake of this imaginative act: once we think mind and body apart, how do we hold them together? “Body” slips away; “it” loses value. It may appear as an object of scientific study, but not as a subject in its own right--not as the very medium of our living. How can we think this?
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We can imagine we have no body. We train ourselves to do so, as noted last week, as we learn to sit still while mobilizing our frontal limbs and lobes, or as we pass through a day without moving in ways that draw our attention into our bodily selves. Yet our tendency to think and feel and act as if we were mind over bodies is nowhere more evident and practiced, perhaps, than in our responses to pain.

One of two responses generally prevails: “no pain no gain,” or “stop it now.” Either way, we use the power of our minds to overcome the pain--endure it or get rid of it. We respond to pain as if it were a bodily problem that our minds must fix. I think therefore I am. This I ignores it. Numbs it. Overwhelms it. Distracts our attention from it. Rarely do we rarely respond to discomfort as harboring invaluable information about what will nourish our health and well being. I move therefore I am. Might it be so?
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Wisdom. When people do think about wisdom “in” the body or “of” the body, they still tend to think of “the body” as a kind of container or text whose wisdom can be read or deciphered by a practiced mind.

As we shall see, however, bodily wisdom does not appear as a formula to apply. It appears as an impulse to move. It arises in the moment, for the moment, as a response to the challenges and opportunities present in the moment. It appears as a movement that will coordinate our pleasure and our health.

It is a wisdom that is present, then, in our sensations of frustration and desire, physical pain and emotional longing. Such pain represents a potential for a movement that we are not making--a potential for making a movement that will unfold more of who we are, and more of what we have to give. This wisdom guides us towards greater freedom.
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Really? How so? What do you mean? Any pain? You must be kidding.....

The issues raised by these claims are many and huge. We will tackle them in weeks to come, arising as they do in all areas of our living. I offer one example here to spark the discussion.

You are sitting at a computer, hunched over, eyes glued to the screen. Your neck begins to ache; a headache begins, radiating outward. At first, you ignore the pain. You have work to do. When that doesn’t help, you try distracting yourself. You play music or check email. You redouble your concentration on the task at hand. When that doesn’t help, you pop a painkiller, have a drink. The pain eases a bit, but it doesn’t stop. You start to feel depressed. You convince yourself that it’s not so bad, you can deal, yet are left with a vague longing for something you cannot identify. At the end of the day, you feel like all you want to do is escape.

Most of us engage in a similar pattern of sensing and responding to our discomfort at some point every day. I think therefore I am. Often it doesn’t seem like we have a choice. There are people depending on us--bosses, coworkers, partners, friends, children. And so we postpone the task of attending to our sensations and their possible wisdom, until it is too late. We get sick. Depressed. And we slowly lose our ability to know what is good for us--what will support the health of bodies--human, animal, earth, ours. We have options.
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I am reminded of a time my daughter Kyra, then 4, was describing how she missed friends we left behind in Boston when moving to our farm.
She noted: “My mind is a world.”
“Oh?” I responded.
“Boston is in my mind, but there is a piece that is not attached to my mind. And that is me, my self. My self is not in my mind. My self is outside my mind.”
I gasp as the foundations of western philosophy crumble before me.
“What happens when you are in Boston?” I ask.
“Then my mind is here,” she replies. “I miss both places.”
Kyra had not yet learned to identify her “self” with what goes on between her ears. Her self is her bodily being--what she can see, touch, move, feel, and feel with. What goes on in her mind strikes her as something else, somewhere else. Not here. Not her.
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We can indeed imagine that we have no bodies. We can also imagine that we are the bodily movement that is making us. Next week, we explore this alternative and the difference it can make.
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Reflection:
What do you do when you feel pain?
Think about several instances from recent experience.
How do you respond to the first twinge of a headache? What resources you draw upon when you feel a cloud of depression approaching? A wave of anxiety? A surge of inexplicable hunger? A burst of irritation with a partner or child?

How do you experience such sensations? What kind of responses do they evoke in you? Do you attack the sensations? Ignore them? Try to forget them? Do you numb them or sleep them off? Do you pull into yourself? Turn on yourself in anger? Take it out on others? How do you make sense of pain? What sense do you allow it to have?

In the weeks that follow, this discussion aims to expand your repertoire. We will learn to embrace sensations of discomfort as opportunities to learn, to grow, to discover potentials in ourselves, yet unfolded, for pleasure and well being, for living in love.

A blog begins

A blog begins.
Its purpose: to catalyze a shift in how we experience our bodily selves.

Why? So that we can learn to find, trust, and move with the wisdom--yes, wisdom--in sensations of desire and frustration, yearning and depression, pleasure and pain.

Is it possible to shift our experience of our bodily being?
Isn’t our experience simply raw data given to our minds to interpret?

Yes and no. Our sense of what a body is, and of what our own bodily selves are, is something we learn as we move through the years of education it takes to become an adult in the contemporary world.

For example, when we are born, we do not recognize our hands as ours; by the time we choose a career, we decide how to employ these hands for our maximum benefit. In between we learn what our hands are, how to direct their movement, and how to perceive and respond to sensations of pleasure and pain they transmit as they move. The same dynamic is true for every aspect of our sensory awareness.

In contemporary society, we do not learn to experience our bodies as sources of wisdom. We can hardly imagine it. We learn, rather, to identify ourselves with our mental capacity, and to experience our bodies as material objects, biochemical machines, that we inhabit and should control.

The implications of this training are everywhere evident, as we shall see, in the patterns of persistent, recurrent, and chronic pain, physical, emotional, and spiritual, experienced by many individuals across all walks of society. We have lost the ability to understand our bodily sensations as guiding us to move in ways that will enhance our health and well being.

Nevertheless, if we can accept that our experience of our bodily selves is something we learn over time, then it follows that we can also learn to sense and respond to our bodily life differently--and perhaps in ways that acknowledge and attend to its, that is our, wisdom. It is a wisdom present in our bodies' infinite capacity for movement.

This is the challenge raised here: to find wisdom where we least expect it--in our bodily life. Every week, drawing on my experience as a scholar and author, dancer and choreographer, life partner and mother of four, I offer a spread of ideas, anecdotes, and exercises; as well as analyses of both relevant scholarship and current trends in contemporary attitudes towards human bodies. I invite you to share your thoughts and experiences in response.

To begin....

Body/Block:
Which of the following best characterizes your sense of bodily self:
1. I have a body.
2. I live inside a body.
3. I am responsible for controlling, disciplining, dressing, and decorating my body.
4. I am a body.
5. I am the movement that is making me.

Chances are, most of us feel most comfortable with one of the first three, and perhaps the fourth. It is not surprising. Nearly ever aspect of our culture teaches us to perceive our "bodies" as material objects within which “we,” as minds or spirits or souls, dwell.

For one example, take a look at our systems of education, and the years we spend learning to become readers and writers. We learn to sit, for hours a day, grade after grade, so that “we” can learn to manipulate ideas and facts, numbers and formulas, pencil and keyboard. We learn to think and feel and act as if we were minds operating in and over our passive bodies. We learn to experience our bodily sensations as obstacles to our success, as problems to fix. If we can’t sit, we don’t fit.

The fact is, we could not think these thoughts about ourselves as minds operating in and over bodies without the breathing, beating hearts, without currents of water and warmth, without the relationships with other bodies that enable us to do so.

So what? Our bodies are, first and foremost, movement--and not just any movement. Our bodies are the movement that is making us who we are--able to think and feel and act as we do.

What would it be like to experience our bodily selves as the rhythmic movement that is making us who we are? What capacities for thinking, feeling, and acting would such a shift in our experience of ourselves open in us?

With such an experience shift, it is possible to discern the wisdom in sensations that we might otherwise be inclined to ignore, numb, or repress. It is a wisdom guiding us to move in ways that will enable us to unfold what we have to give. It is a wisdom, as we shall see, that impacts our relationships with ourselves, with others, and with the world.

We begin to realize that all we have to offer the world is the work that the satisfaction of our desires demands.

Reflection:
Take a few minutes to think through an ordinary day. Think about what you do. When do you wake up? How do you wake up? What do you first? Next? Go through the whole day, and as you do, pay attention to what your body is doing at each moment of the day. Is "it" standing? Sitting? Walking? Being washed? Being fed? Being exercised? Put to work?

Now ask yourselves. How often do you touch the ground with anything but the soles of your feet? How often do you sit on anything but a chair-shaped apparatus?

Imagine, in your mind, that your day is a dance. What movements would that dance involve?

For most people, the range of motion required to get through a day is small. We sit to work, eat, relax, visit, commute, and even exercise; we stand in between and occasionally, lie down. For the most part, we move in ways that do not draw our attention into our bodies. As we do, we learn to think and feel and act as if "we" really were minds who are responsible for managing and organizing our bodies. It seems logical, even common sense. It isn't.

Next week:
Why does the sense of ourselves as minds over bodies fail to serve our health and well being? What do we need instead?