What Do You Do with the Flu?

Sometimes, what our bodily selves know is not obvious. So it was with the case of the flu I contracted two weeks ago. It was a Monday evening. The symptoms began as soon as I pressed “publish” on my last blog entry. My skin felt hot and prickly. It hurt to move. I felt generally strange, askew in myself. I rushed to get everything and everyone washed and put to bed as soon as possible, so I could be too.

Tuesday morning was worse. I stood up and nearly passed out. Nausea churned my stomach; I broke into a cold, clammy sweat. Not good. I felt as if I were turned inside out. My skin ached and pulled when I moved. My head reverberated with a glistening pain. I set my sights on bed, wondering. Why this? Why now? The blog had been the last of several assignments I needed to complete before diving in to a major project I was hungry to do. Does my bodily self know anything? My mind was blank.

As I crawled into bed, a wave of relief washed through me. I don’t have to go anywhere, do anything, be anyone. I don’t have to fight. I can rest. The flash of relief was soon swallowed by a fierce discomfort. I don’t want to be here. My bodily self was a hostile environment, and I wanted out. Now.

I doubled back and set out to heal myself. I tried the cycle of breaths. I tried circular breathing. I tried colors and lights and flooding myself with feelings of love. I couldn’t move the pain. None of my methods, tried and true, were working. The pain would ebb ever so slightly, only to crash back at the slightest break of concentration. I couldn’t find a way to sink inside it and through it to a deeper wellspring of health, as I so often do. Something else was going on.

Meanwhile, my mind clamored relentlessly. Hopelessly obsessed with the unanswered emails in my inbox, my mind kept composing “I’m sick!” messages I was too ill to send.

I kept asking myself: what does my body know? What am I supposed to do with this pain? I had no ideas. No insights. Just empty pointless rambling. It was as if the pain were a wall separating my chattering mind from the silent knowing of my sensory self. Bereft of its sensory ground, my mind was mindless, lost, in exile. It was running in circles, unable to connect with any insight, unable to move my bodily self in any way.

One thought broke through: maybe my mind is always this dependent, always this unable to function without its sensory ground.

As the morning progressed, so did the dis-ease. Wrapped in fleece, piled under two down comforters, on a balmy summer day, I convulsed with cold. I tried to eat. I am still nursing. Two bites and I couldn’t swallow another. It was strange. I had no congestion or altered digestion; no sore throat, cough or other tubal ailment. I had never known that this layer of my sensory self could register so much pain without involving the rest. What was going on?

I checked in with a nurse to make sure I wasn’t missing anything obvious. She recommended Tylenol. I never take Tylenol. The bottle at the bottom of our bathroom drawer sported an expiration date of 2003. I took two. Within twenty minutes I felt the numbing effects. My body fell silent and I fell asleep, hoping my bodily self would heal without me.

That night I was too hungry to sleep, too nauseous to eat. I lay awake, too hot and too cold, head pounding, perched on my side, trying to make room for a restless toddler who couldn’t understand why the milk wouldn’t come.

One stream kept me going. Water. I could drink. I wanted to drink. I had to drink. Bottle after bottle of clear, cool, cleansing water. Usually it makes me sick to drink water on an empty stomach. It didn’t.

On Thursday morning, the pain finally, suddenly, let go. A large metallic sheet dropped from the back of my head, and slid away. The sky opened up above me. My bodily self began to reappear. I sunk in and began to reconnect with my sensory self.

I felt weak; echoes of the pain trembled at the edges my awareness. Yet joy steadily gathered. Food was revolting, but I cast about, trying to imagine something I would want. Saltines and ginger ale? Geoff went to the corner store and bought the only box of saltines on the shelf. It was dusty; the crackers stale. I popped them into the oven, nibbled a few and stopped, wanting to want to eat.

Hours later, a first breath of hunger returned. It was the sweetest sensation I have ever felt. Oh to be hungry! To want to nourish myself! To be able to give myself the pleasure of nourishing myself! To be able to feel and move with the sensations of meeting this life-enabling desire!

This sweet hunger—it is what my body knows.

I was careful. The hunger was fragile. I paid attention, wanting always to pay such attention.

Then, as I began to eat, small amounts, crackers and cheese, I felt the hum. My bodily self was humming. Humming. I lay down and closed my eyes to investigate. There was a glow, a vibrating halo, emanating from the shape of my bodily self. Currents of energy crossed and swirled, in shimmering colors and complex textures. My bodily self was humming in response to the food, in celebration of its own healthy hunger, in its return to consciousness. My mind rested in its embrace.

Thoughts welled—the sweet insights for which I had been yearning. This hum is me. It is the movement that is making me. It is not just a hum that I hear; it is the hum through which I hear—the medium in which any awareness that “I” have, any ideas or imaginings, appear as ripples and waves, patterns of possibility. Any thought that I have and am is a vibrational echo of this bodily hum.

Soon I was swimming in gratitude at this inexplicable gift. The fever had ignited a new sensory awareness—a register of possible experience I would mine again and again for insights. Already I knew: it was what I needed to complete the project I had been so hungry to begin.

What does a body know? How to hum. How to heal. How to transform pain into understanding. How to dance.

What a Body Knows, 1

How do you celebrate the first birthday of a book? Share it!

In this month of May, I will post excerpts from my latest book, What a Body Knows: Finding Wisdom in Desire. I begin at the beginning, with a sketch from chapter 1 that describes the kind of movement-enabled "experience shift" that can open us to discern wisdom in desire.

“I am having a lovely morning. Our son Jordan, home sick from school, is not too sick, and I am enjoying my time with him. I allow him to watch a movie. Kai falls asleep. I sit down to write. Reading back over the previous day’s catch, I make corrections, clarify some rough passages, and print out the pages. I draft some new ideas. Kai wakes up. Jordan returns from screen land. I feel play in the moment, loving work, loving family, in a mutually enabling spiral.

A few hours later, everything starts to feel less fun. I am no longer moved as I had been just an hour before by the intricate web of vessels visible beneath my infant’s tender skin, or by the half-smile of a child finding comfort in my embrace. My senses are withering. My ideas stop flowing. I want sugar, caffeine — something sharp. I want adult company, some spark or spur. I want some vital touch. Life weighs heavily.

I have been here before. I know what I need. To move. I need to feed my body, stir up my sensory awareness, replenish love. A walk, the easiest thing. Of course, I do not want to go for a walk. I want to stuff myself into forgetful oblivion and lose consciousness of this dragging dullness. But I must. My desires, tousled, knotted, and confused, are pointing the way.

Geoff comes home and takes over. I bundle up. My mind is complaining bitterly. It is cold and snowy. Kai will need to nurse. The kitchen is a mess. There are other things I should be doing. Carrying my screaming mind out through the door, my body propels me forward.

I walk vigorously, pumping my arms and legs, sending blood rushing through my limbs, feeling the pull of air into my lungs. My head lightens and begins to clear. I feel brightness opening. I walk hard and start to feel again. Hunger stabs. I want to turn back and eat. But then the hunger slips sideways. I know that the energy I want is not of the caloric kind. I feel a deep gnawing ache for the return of my senses, for what my body knows. This hunger is the first sign that it is beginning to return.

I trudge up the mountain. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Each step plunges through a crusty surface into powdery fluff. I follow tracks I left earlier in the week, sometimes sticking my foot into an old hole and sometimes stepping sideways, taking cues from the past and honoring my new gait. My hands start to warm up.

I begin to notice things. There are prints in the tracks I made two days ago. Deer hooves. I follow the deer, who followed me. Perhaps I saved the deer some wear and tear on its shins. A thrill passes lightly through me at the thought of our meeting this way.

I keep walking, puffing, crunching up the hill, up and around the field. Ten then twenty minutes pass, half an hour. Gold and silver sparks of snow catch my eye. The rhythmic breaking of the snow echoes in my chest. A pale sun peeps through the soft splotchy clouds. Down by the pond I find the tracks of a snow mobile. An intruder. Anger and dismay rush through. I place a branch across the tracks. Keep out. Will they even notice?

Keep walking. My body propels me along, beside the pond and up to the crest of the hill where we first stood in awe of this beautiful land. I feel an impulse to run, to empty myself into space. A surge of energy wells, lifting my arms to the horizons, breathing me deeply. I want, I want, I want… to play. I run down the hill on the other side, pulling my legs straight out of each crusty hole so as not to fall. I laugh with my awkward strides. My left leg plunges thigh-deep into a gulley and I tumble to the ground. Without hesitating, I start to get up. Time to move. Then I lie back. Wait. What can I see from here? What is it that this fall is enabling me to see?

I watch the clouds, drifting wisps of white and blue and gray. Their mottled layers pass through one another, thinning into translucent floss. I feel the icy cold of the snow seeping through my jacket and snow pants, cooling my lower back where an echo of an old back pain lingers, offering a healing touch. What do I look like splayed out here on the snow. Would someone find me if I couldn’t move?

I see the stalks of dead flowers and grasses poking up around me. I want to make something. An ornament. An angel from Hebron Hollow. A beating sound interrupts the thought. A crow. Will he see me and think I am food?A pressure squeezes my heart. Sadness seeps out. My friend. Her baby girl. It was Downs. She ended the pregnancy. The pain, a month later, is palpable. Breathing empties the sensation into the colors of the clouds, the cold of the snow, the still silence of the land. I see the beauty unfolding around me.

I sit up. My body sits up, stands, moves forward. I feel softened, revived. I breathe and plunge on.

Before me is Moon Rock. Around the shoulder and up the face I hike. I want to feel alive. An impulse to run surges again — something pressing forward and in and out and through me, a desire to touch what is. I run. Blood screams through my limbs. The horizon, the edge, opens before me. I rise to meet it, wider than before. It occurs to me: I need this place, this walk, to walk in this place. I need this land to open me to my self, my life, again and again and again. I see dry plants for my ornament. I pick them. Buttons. Milkweed. Thistles.

I plow my way back to Moon Rock and lean into its arc. I feel its weight, and my weight on it. In the meeting of the two, I sink into myself where I am alive, becoming more body. Tremors of love vibrate through me. It is time to go. The sun, a soft yellow ball, sits atop the tree tufts. The snow glitters blue and gold. Sparkles of light beckon. Again I follow the deer who followed me. Thoughts skitter through. I will need to write about this walk. To reflect on it, remember it, press it through my thinking so that it rearranges my ideas and holds them accountable to this experience of moving, to what is, here and now.

My movements, walking, breathing, feeling, thinking, are making me. My movements are opening me to sense and respond, making me into someone who witnesses this beauty. Someone who is sensing, who can sense, who wants to sense this wakeful vitality. This is who I am.

I enter the house. My dead bouquet is large. I lay it on a newspaper. Needs press in. I am hungry and tired. I need to eat, to write, to make something, to connect with Geoff, to nurse Kai. The kids are home from school. It is dinnertime. I breathe into the sensory spaces opened by my walking. Happy and elastic, I find play in the moment. Grabbing a snack, I nurse my son, hear stories of the day, and then dump my thoughts onto the page. After dinner I help Jessica and Kyra make milkweed angels. They are beautiful. Bits of Hebron Hollow come to life. Like me.
**
A simple walk, but as I write it down, as I know I must, I find it has all the elements of the experience shift that enables us to find wisdom in our desires for food, sex, and spirit. If we can name such an experience shift, recognize it in ourselves, and cultivate it in our thinking and feeling and acting, then we can develop a powerful resource for participating consciously in becoming the people we are and want to be.”

Excerpted from chapter 1, What a Body Knows: Finding Wisdom in Desire (O Books 2009).

Movement Manifesto, Part 2 of 2

Cats of all kinds are famous for it, after their notable naps. Cows do it too, after hours curled cud-chewing. I see human babies doing it, and know I can’t live without it. Even so, I was somehow surprised to realize that chicks do it too. Chicks stretch.

Our twenty-six fluff balls are now three weeks old and sprouting tufts of feathers from all sides. One by one, while otherwise peeping, pecking, and pooping, a chick pauses. A ripple of movement begins in its shoulder, fans through its feathering wing, leaps to a lengthening leg on the same side, and spills out through a perfectly pointed toe with such intensity that its wingtips tremble. Chicks stretch.

It makes me think. For these birds, each stretch spreads through a range of motion that the bird needs to fly. The stretches bubble up spontaneously, improvised yet patterned. The moves are obviously pleasurable (or perhaps I project). If birds could smile…

It makes me think. Why stretch?
*
Cultural conversations about stretching reflect our attitude towards bodily movement in general. As noted in the last post, discussions about movement are dominated by the language of exercise and fitness. Stretching, in this regard, is something you do to your muscles in order to have a better workout or race result. Stretching is a physical means to a physical end.

From there fierce debates ensue over how, when, whether, and why. Does stretching weaken our muscles or prevent injury? Does stretching disperse lactic acid for a speedier recovery or put undue strain on fragile tissues? Does stretching increase flexibility or merely preserve it? Should it hurt or not? Should you bounce or hold or resist? What seems to count most are the measurements—how fast, how far, how much. Can you touch your head to your knees? Your hands to the ground? Hey, how’s your split?

Haunting these debates is an assumption that a muscle is a mechanical piece prone to harden over time like a rubber band or an old shoe. Keeping “it” toned and tuned is the responsibility of some one called “I”—someone armed with science’s best results. Yet according to science, the verdict is out. No one knows. Or do we?
*
Leif wakes up from his nap with a big smile. It was a good one. I watch as his fists ball, his elbows bend, his knees tuck up, and his back bends in an arc of intensity that shudders through his small self. His body is yawning, opening, releasing his limbs to move. He smiles again, waving his legs, extending his joy through the tips of his toes. No span of sensation escapes the awakening. All here and now he is.
*
We are missing the point about stretching because we have lost a sense of our bodies as the movement that is making us. Even while neuroscientists plot body maps in the brain, most people remain convinced that movement, aside from a few involuntary processes and reflexes, is from the top down. Brain drives; Body follows.

However, our brains are bodies too, and the bodies we are are not ours. If anything, we are theirs. The muscles we move move us, and they are alive, ceaselessly recycling, replenishing, and regenerating energy that exists to empty itself along a string of similar cells. Like a plant wants the sun, our bodily muscles want to move.

Moreover, this muscle movement that we are is not simply physical. Muscles don’t just move bones. They move our senses—the eye that scans, the ear that cocks, the nose that nears, the digit that fingers. How we move determines what we perceive, what we feel, and what responses we can imagine. The movement of our muscles also orients us in space and time: time is how long a movement takes; space is where it gets us.

It is the action of our muscles, grunting or groaning, that draws into sensory awareness a lived experience of ourselves as agent “I.” Approach or withdraw? Tangle or resist? Grab or release? My “I” is the one who did and can and will again make that move.

How we move our bodily selves, then, provides the basis for everything that our brains have to do in the realm of the executive “I.” Organizing, abstracting, calculating, reasoning, conceiving, planning, and carrying through are all mental movements predicated on and predicted by the earliest contraction and release of our bodily selves.

Stretching is an impulse to move. Stretching we bring our senses to life, animating the planes and surfaces of our sensory awareness so that we have at our fingertips what we need to participate consciously in making the movements that make us who we are.
*
I lie down on the floor. The congestion in my brain, the tension in my shoulders, the stiffness in my limbs are all letting me know: it is time to move. I breathe down into the ground and lift one knee towards my chest. Holding it with laced fingers, I exhale down into my bent hip and out through the leg lying along the floor. I do it once and then again. Suddenly a hamstring releases, seemingly of its own accord. My lower back sinks into the ground. Ribs lengthen, and ripples reorganize the bones of my spine. The front of my forehead eases and thoughts begin to flow.

Ah yes, that is what I was forgetting while sitting at my desk. While it is true that I begin the stretch, soon enough the stretching is stretching me past patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting, and into a present place where I am free to respond anew, in the moment and for the moment.

More is being stretched than muscles here--I'm stretching my sense of self. It is my "I" that is in danger of becoming hard and rigid, unyielding in its beliefs. It is my sense of who I am that must remain elastic, flexible, and free, not identified with the past patterns of movement that I have become, but rather with the process of making those patterns that "I" am. That's the point.

It's all about love.
*
Stretching I find ground, or ground finds me. A sensing center of self emerges where I can discern what will keep me moving and loving based on how I have moved and where I am now. My bodily self knows.

It is this finding and feeling that feels so good I want to do it again. I want to be this awake, this resourceful in every moment of my life, regardless of how restricted my reach may be. If I am beating and breathing, my movement is making me, and there is an infinite range of increasingly subtle sensations to discover.

Let's.

Breathing to Move 4: Water

There is pleasure in being moved by something outside yourself—boat or bicycle, skis or skates. A power-stirring gust of space rushes past.

There is a pleasure too in being moved by something you welcome into yourself—a rose hued scent or a mountain view, a jolt of coffee or bright burst of ice cream, the flash of a painting or a lover’s touch. The impressions scrub your sensory surfaces alive.

The greatest pleasure, however, is the pleasure of moving yourself—of being the beating breathing unfolding of your own capacity to do and be. It is the pleasure of discovering and creating new sensory shapes—stretching, bending, and twisting; running, skipping, and leaping; writing, building, or playing. It is the pleasure of making the movements that are making you.

It is for this pleasure that I dance.

I breathe to find and flow with life enabling currents coursing through me. What movements can I make? What is possible in this moment? What am I capable of thinking, feeling, knowing? What am I becoming?

I dance to practice the most fundamental, life enabling challenge we face as human beings: bringing sense to life. This task is not an abstract pondering of purpose-making reasons to live; it is a concrete exploration of the possibilities enfolded in our bodily movement. It is about breathing to move, moving to breathe.
*
I go into the living room where a span of rug and floor awaits, cleared of the body-binding couches, tables and chairs so often crowded into living spaces.

Lying on my back, pulling my knees to my chest, I begin the cycle of breaths. I inhale and then release down into the earth. I feel where I am. My back is a block. I am stiff and groggy, scattered and numb. I breathe again, releasing all effort, tension, and strain, all worries and preoccupations, into the ground. I still don’t feel the points of my connection to the earth. It is cloudy, bumpy. I breathe again, down. Let go.

Unexpectedly my right hip drops into the floor. The move is slight, yet my right knee now floats loosely in my hand. It is as if a fist in my lower back released. I can feel my hip touching the ground. A second ago I was oblivious.

An air breath. I breathe in and exhale my attention open and out through my skin into the surrounding space. I dissolve in white light. My internal gaze boomerangs home, lodging suddenly behind my eyes. My jaw hums. The beads of my spine settle along the floor. Riding an impulse to unfold, my right heel presses to the sky. A fire breathe (2/13) plunges deep into my belly, finding the strength to sustain the stretch. Then, with the fourth in the cycle, the water breath (see below), currents of energy shoot upward along the leg path skyward.

Suddenly I am tumbling into my body, shifting sideways and down. New angles of sensation, new flows of energy come into view. Who I am is this pleasure in moving. My movement is making me. I attune fiercely to the pleasure, following its firm, gentle guide.

I begin a new series of movements on my back, lowering my lifted legs to one side and then the other, passing through the cycle of breaths again. A pang in my hip prompts me to stretch up through my lower back, turning a bit farther than I have before, digging deeper into the ground with the opposite shoulder. I breathe into the new shape: earth, air, fire, water. A gasp of release. Something surges. I ride it through my finger tips. Lovely.

I stand up. I feel completely different. My head floats. My breathing glides in and out. My sense of weight gathers in my lower abdomen, off my back and thighs, freeing torso, shoulders, and arms. My rooted legs sing with anticipation of movement yet to come.

It happens, maybe once, for a few seconds. I can’t will it or force it. But there it is—a moment where I am nothing but the flow of the movement making me. Lost. Found. Present. Becoming. Vivid.

I arrive at the end of my dance time. Limbs tremble slightly. Every breath washes through me, cleaning bright. Pockets of strength break open; courage streams out. Thoughts crackle in the horizon of awareness, snapping with intention and understanding. I greet my new self with relief. With joy. Time to feed lunch to the kids.
*
People live day in and day out, not knowing that there is more of them—more in them—more breath, more movement, more vitality, more wisdom. There is.

Action: Water breath

The final in a cycle of four, the water breath gathers the first three (see 1/29, 2/5, 2/13). Earth, air, fire, we are also water. Mostly water. Lapping around our island eyes, beneath our lips, everywhere under our skin, in our blood, our lymph system, our flesh. We are like sponges. Squeezed out, all that would be left is a small pile of dust.

The water we are is warm water. Water cooked in the fires of our cells and center. It is this water that washes through our bodies, streaming through shapes of sensation.

Breathe in through your open heart. See the air, feel the air, streaming in, illuminating the heart. Exhale, sending air down through your points of contact with the earth and out through the surface of your skin, leaving a clear flame in the fiery hold of your belly.

Breathe in again and as you exhale imagine your glimmering belly fire caught in waves of fluid. Imagine this light flecked fluid, warmly flowing from your center through arms, legs, and out the top of your head, rushing out the limb-lined trajectories into space.

Breathe in again, filling your heart, and then breathe out, spilling the fire of your desire through your extended self. Feel it moving through you, moving you.

Let whatever you are doing flow. Even if you are sitting to read these words, let your spine straighten, your eyes open, your attention clear. Come to life.

Next week: Finding wisdom in our desire for food

Breathing to Move 3: Fire

As much as I love it, I don’t walk everyday. I can’t. As much as I need to breathe myself into this time and place and open to the shock of its relentless creativity, I need something else too, and just as regularly. I need to sink my awareness as deeply as I can within the folds of my sensory self and discover what this beating, bodily becoming can know within.

For this I do yoga.

The postures of hatha yoga represent a science, thousands of years in the making, of bodily movement. It may seem ironic to say so. A pose is a pose, still and quiet. Yet each pose systematically massages the pathways through which energy moves through our bodily selves—food, water, air, electricity, and awareness. As the poses draw our attention to organs and systems, tissues and skins, bones, muscles and nerves, we practice releasing into the flow of the movements that are making us. We ignite a fire within.

Really?

It begins with the breath. To enter a pose, you breathe your bodily self into a bend or stretch, balance or twist. The shape tugs at your awareness, pulling your sense of self into the bodily form of the pose. The pressure in your hip, the squeeze in your back muscles, the unbuckling of a hamstring trains your focus on these places—as points strung along a possible trajectory of movement.

As a felt sense of the pose comes into view, you notice too whatever is preventing you from feeling ease in the pose. Your breath finds such places when it stops at them, unable to pass through. While the pain may be physical, it is often not, infused with emotional hues as well. It is not that there is some abstract connection between emotional states and bodily parts. Rather every sting you have ever felt, every zoom of excitement, every flash of fear, registers in you. Whenever you cringe, shrink, freeze, flail, or brace yourself for the worst, your bodily self remembers those shapes—patterns of sensation and response. Over time, you become them, they become you. Rigid. Unmoving. Your enduring habits.

Moving through the postures, you find such frozen places. The pose may trigger feeling of frustrating at your limitations, doubt in your ability to do what you want. Distrust of your bodies, your desires, your self comes rushing in—the patterns you mobilize in response to challenges in life.

So too, moving through the poses, you find your freedom. It is the freedom alive in your capacity to drop into the creative flow of your own sensory existence, and make new patterns of sensing and responding. Each pose invites you not only to assume the pose but guides your attention towards the source energy and strength, coordination and balance you need to sustain it. The arc and fold and reach of these poses points your awareness into the bowl of the pelvis, the cradle of our vital energy, roughly four fingers below the belly button.

Here, at the root of our spines, is where the fire of life ignites and burns. It is the fire that rises through you, animating your senses, feelings, thoughts, and actions. It warms skin and soul; it radiates through pores and projects.

As you learn to breathe into this fire, fanning its flames, you fuel an ever-expanding array of sensory creativity. Your senses open beyond whatever pain you are feeling. You can imagine alternative ways of being in the posture—alterative pathways for the energy to flow through you. Alternative arrangements of limb and thought appear in your opened awareness, and you move with them. Over time, with practice, effort-full places release into the stronger, enabling flow of your creative bodily self.

After 22 years practicing yoga, through books and performances, pregnancies and nursing, often surrounded by kids climbing on and over and under me, I am constantly amazed. Every time I practice, I discover something new. Every time. A span of awareness, an arc of intention, dawns in my sensory self and floods me with joy. I touch the places that hurt, gently, and release into the movement that is making me.

No, I can’t do every pose perfectly. Far from it! But I am better able to sense what that pose has to teach me today, about myself, about where I am, about how the movements I am making are making me, about how to move in ways that will open me to the flow of enlivening life coursing through me.

The process is infinite. Ecstatic. What flows through, really, is love.

Action:

Fire breath: (Are you breathing?) Follow that breath into your heart, and through your heart to the places where you are touching the ground (see 1/29/08), to the surfaces where your skin dissolves into air (see 2/5/08). Feel your weight against the earth, your light oneness with space.

Now as you exhale, release all of the air out of your body. Empty yourself down to the very bottom of your belly. Push the air out for a second more. Wait in the emptiness until the urge to breathe opens you again.

Breathe all the way in and exhale again. This time, follow the breath out even further, sinking your awareness deeper into your internal cavity, the bowl of your pelvis. At that moment of greatest emptiness, push your diaphragm down and squeeze the muscles along the bottom of your pelvic floor up. In this pulled circle of muscular sensation, light a fire.

Release the effort. Take another breath in through your heart. As you exhale, activate that same muscular sphere, sending fuel to the burning fire. And again. Feel the fire blaze. Feel its vitality, your vitality, coming to life.

Breathe in again. This time, without contracting any muscles, activate a sense of them. Feel the strength and the length of the lower abdomen, its width and breadth and depth. Feel that fiery core rooted into the ground and warming the airy volume of your physical space.

Try this breath, with the earth and air breaths. Try it whatever you are doing--walking, driving, swimming, or doing yoga! What happens?

Next week, the final breath: water

Breathing to Move 2: Air

It was a grey chill of a day here on the farm. A dull sky leaked icy drips. Grey stubble pecked through chunks of snow stubbornly bunched against the rain. The forest brown seemed spiky and unkempt. A creeping cold seeped into bones where it pooled in cooling reservoirs.

I went for a walk. With the right wrapping, there is never a reason not to, short of a blinding blizzard or hail by the handful. Then again, it wasn’t really a choice. I didn’t just want to go for a walk. I had to. In the open air. Several times a week at least. Why?

It is not about firing up muscle tissue and burning calories (as if my body were a machine to maintain). It is not about putting my body through its paces (as if it were a large pet). Nor is it about seeing the scenery, though I have had memorable viewing moments on such days (as when a grey shroud focused my attention down to a Queen Anne’s lace shriveled tightly around a gleaming tear drop, or when ashen trunks appeared before me, tracking skyward, their vertical rails receding into the mist).

The need to walk comes from somewhere else—from what walking awakens in me. The movement of walking, legs and arms, fingers to toes, shifts my experience. It releases me from the rooms of my mind, and into the sensory reaches of my bodily being. Something wakes up, and I know: I am not a mind living over and against a body. I am the movement that is making me.


How does this happen?

Walking I must breathe, more deeply than before. Oxygen rich pulses prod my senses to life. I start feeling what I am feeling. I notice the pain in my back. The ache in my shoulder. The cramp in my heart. As I notice, my breath follows my gaze, finding in that discomfort a span of awareness whose potential for enabling my walking I am about to discover. It is a call to move.

Breathing down into the earth (see last week’s Action), I feel the press of the ground on the soles of my feet, up through my legs, resisting me, releasing whatever discomfort I am feeling into the waves of my walking.

Swinging, landing, rolling through, with each step I breathe again. Into the earth and then, from that grounded place, I open up to the world around me. I breathe myself wide, out beyond the surfaces of skin, filling and spilling over the outline of my bodily self. I pass through my senses, uncurling them into a world rich with possibility. I come to life. Life comes to me. I smile.

What do I see and hear and smell and taste and touch?

I live in a rural place, known for its rolling meadows, forested hills, quiet ponds, and gurgling brooks. We moved here two years ago to live farther from the clamor of consumer culture, in closer contact with the rhythms of the natural world. Yet it soon became clear. Nature is far from the pastoral balm we imagine it to be. The natural world is brutally alive, hurling itself moment by moment into the future. It is constant birth and death and becoming. Unrelenting creativity.

This is what I sense as I walk: movement. The self-creating movement of all that is. There is no one sense for it—but it is all I sense, in every sense. Every day here is different. The very same spots and sights look, smell, taste, sound different than before. I am struck by these changes, and as my senses come to life, I notice more of them. The tracks in the snow, the matted clouds, the trees thinning day by day against the arc of hillside, preparing for the instant they will shade into auburn tones then explode in color.

I am shocked by this great green growing, even when locked in the grip of winter. And shocked once again by the blast of recognition that soon follows. I am a part of this great green growing. It is alive in me, in the movement of my senses, in the movement of my walking. My movement, walking-breathing-beating-attending, is making me.

Walking, awake to my movement, I find that I am no longer rearranging old ideas. New thoughts shoot up from below, from within. Every surface, organ, and limb is creating images, patterns of sensation and response--possibilities for thinking and feeling, understanding and acting that I did not have before my walk. Knotty problems loosen, threads unwind. I learn from them what that have to teach me about how to untie them. My movement is making me.

This is why I walk. I walk to know that I am part of this great growing green—and to know it not only in the sense of thinking that I am, but to know it in my sensory awareness, as I participate in it, thinking new thoughts, feeling new feelings, following the impulse to move in song or dance. I walk to find my freedom—to cultivate a sensory awareness of my ability to respond to the challenges in my life. I walk for this shift in experience. To know I am, becoming.

Without such movement, what we can imagine shrinks to an imitation of what we have already thought.

We cannot will such a shift; only invite it. And one way to do so, whatever we are doing, is by moving through the cycle of breaths. 

Action:
What kinds of activities do you do that bring your senses to life?
What kinds of movements awaken you to a heightened sense of your own possibility?

Whatever they are, experiment with the following breaths as a way to enrich your experience. 

Where the earth breath (last week) grounds you in the present, helps you drop your sensory wraps, and allows you to feel what you are feeling, the air breath opens up the sensory dimensions of yourself so that you have space to unfold what you are feeling and thinking, turn it over, examine it from different angles, allow it to grow into new shapes.

Try it. (Are you breathing?) Begin with an earth breath. When you breathe in, follow your breath in through your heart, flooding it with white light. As you exhale, let all tension, hope, fear, and effort you that are holding drop onto the ground. Release your sense of weight. Allow your limbs to hang loosely. You are plumbing for a deeper strength.

Breathe again. This time, sense air streaming into the nose and mouth, throat and chest, and rippling through your bodily core. As you exhale, imagine that air expanding to fill every cell of your bodily self. Every organ, fiber and fold is filling and spilling over with clear, clean, cleansing air. Feel how light you are. How empty. How full.

Breathing in, follow your breath into your heart, and out through your body to its edges. Allow an image to form of this length of skin, the surfaces where the air filling you spills over into space.

As you breathe out, imagine this skin as porous mesh, a translucent web of tissue connecting inner and outer, self and other, sense and world. As you breathe in and out again, allow this sense of skin to dissolve in currents of air passing through you. Sense how open and light you are. Free. All that exists are the soles of your feet, pressing down against the ground, and up against this light. Trust that ground to support the vulnerable expanse of skin. Watch what unfolds within.

Move back and forth between the breaths. What do you discover?

Next week: fire breath