I have called upon the cycle three times now, to help us sort through our desires for food, sex, and spirit, so that we can discern what it is these desires are trying to teach us about how to move in ways that will synchronize our health and well being. Each time, I have given an example of how to use it, when to use it, but I have not explained how and why it works.
So why does it work? Why should bending my attention to four measly breaths have any effect at all?
We are so practical. So rational. We want concrete proof before we try a new thing. So we surf for the ratings, the reviews, the consumer reports. We don’t want to be had. We don’t want to waste our time. We want to be informed. We want more.
Me too. So here I am, speaking to the rationalist in me.
The cycle of breaths works. Why?
1. A breather. Most basically, it provides us with a time out. The sheer fact of pulling our attention away from what we are doing for a mere 60 seconds can give us the space we need to reconsider our initial impulses, our emotional habits, our ingrained patterns of sensation and response. Such time and space is crucial—not so that we can attain mastery over ourselves or our desires, but so that we can stay in touch with our freedom. We want to be free to sense and respond in the moment and to the moment in ways that coordinate all of who we are and have been with what is going on now. The cycle of breaths gives us a minute to breathe.
2. A paradigm for problem solving. As a breather, the cycle of breaths is far from unique. Anything that times us out could serve the same function. The cycle of breaths is unique, however, in how it occupies that time. It provides us with a paradigm for problem solving—that is, for solving the kinds of problems that arise with the eruption of a tangled, frustrated, or otherwise very intense sensation of desire.
The cycle of breaths does this by leading us through four different perspectives on whatever it is we are feeling. With each shift in perspective, we find a bit more wiggle room. It is like trying to untie a knot, when you turn it one way and pull, then another and then pull again. It is the shifting from one perspective to another that helps us find our freedom in the moment—not freedom from our desires, but freedom to discern what they are telling us.
This paradigm works something like this. (Earth) Find your ground; steady yourself in the moment. (Air) Open up the feeling, and explore its reach and depth. (Fire) Find where that desire connects with what is most real and true for you; clarify its and your fiery core. (Water) Release that truth, let it flow, and listen for impulses to move. Repeat as needed.
3. Elemental reminders. This paradigm, however, is not your average formula for solving problems. It doesn’t direct us to fixate on an object or a thing or even on a part of ourselves. As we cycle through the breaths, it is the fact of paying attention to a force—a creative, elemental force that is making us who we are—that trips open each perspective.
We are always pushing against and being pushed up by the ground. We are always filling and emptying ourselves with air. We are always simmering in our vital core, and we are always flowing with the fluids passing in and through us. We are these elemental movements whether or not we pay attention to their rhythms. They are who we are. But when we do pay attention to them, we inevitably enhance our experience of them; we can deepen our engagement with them, and we can use these forces as resources for helping us create ourselves anew in the moment.
How? This recreation is subtle but strong. Just remembering that we walk on earth can help us let go of extraneous burdens we may be carrying. Just remembering that we are breathing, can give us a felt sense of the movement in our lives. Just attuning to our fiery core can give us a sense of agency and possibility. Just feeling the flow of our own blood and breath and fire and feelings can help us affirm our capacity to create, to become, and to move in ways that will not recreate whatever discomfort we are feeling.
Practicing this cycle, then, is not about imagining what might be true, or pretending that what we want to be true already is so, or conjuring up visions of spirits and entities from a parallel world to grant us our desires. It is rather about tapping into and releasing the ever present, ongoing, creative potential inherent within our moving bodies.
4. A catalyst for sensory awareness. Of course, as I have been saying all along, the cycle of breaths helps us cultivate a sensory awareness of the movement that is making us. Here I add that it does so because of the three qualities listed above.
Yet there is more here too. For when we allow ourselves to feel our connection to the ground, our breathing, our fiery core, our creative flow, we are drawn into a different experience of ourselves, others, and the worlds. Our whole sense of being in the world shifts, and we find that we are no longer operating out of a mind over body perspective.
This effect is the most powerful, for it carries with it the most radical possibilities. It is also the one that can only be confirmed through practice. With this shift in experience, we have what we need to discern wisdom in our desires. We have the sensory awareness to recognize our desires, the space and time and paradigm for honoring them as containing wisdom, the sense of freedom and creativity that enables us to notice the impulses to move they represent. And at that point, it just happens. We are able to feel and receive impulses to move in ways that will not recreate our dissatisfaction.
At that point, it is a mystery. Just as we never really know why or how an idea pops into our mind, so we can never really grasp why or how an impulse to move does either. What we do know, is that when we cultivate this vulnerability something will happen, and that something will emerge from, as an expression of, the sensory awareness we are cultivating. We will move in love.
*
At its best, religion works in similar ways. It is not a matter of right belief or doctrine. Religion works and we believe when the movements we make as a member provide us with the breather, the paradigms for problem solving, the elemental reminders, and the sensory awareness that empower us to participate consciously in the rhythms of our own bodily becoming, creating a world we love that loves us.
Next week: More on religion. Or, why, in creating ourselves, we create the world.
Showing posts with label fire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fire. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
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
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
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