Give Thanks for Pain? You're Kidding

A question often arises in response to my book, What a Body Knows: What if my body is wrong? It isn't doing what I want it to do--it hurts! Where is the wisdom in that?

While I have addressed the issue indirectly in other blogs (see below), it is time to address it head on. At the heart of the matter is the question of pain: what it is, how we sense it, and how we respond to it.

Pain, together with pleasure, comprise the primary feedback available to our thinking selves about how well the movements we are making in the world are making us.

My aim (or one of them) in writing What a Body Knows was to shift our experience of pain along (at least) four registers, in each case, moving from a mind over body perspective to one that affirms our sensations of pain as resources guiding us along the path of our own unique bodily becoming.

1) Part/ Whole: When we hurt, our mind over body tendency is to identify the pain with one part of ourselves, isolate that part from the rest, and work to make "it" go away. Whether our head hurts, our stomach cramps, our back aches, our hips creak, our heart pines, or our energies flag, we either try to ignore our sensations, or we become obsessed with fixing them. Pain is the problem. "I" must fix "it."

However, when we shift to an experience of ourselves as movement--the movement of creating and becoming patterns of sensation and response (as described in What a Body Knows)--we realize that any manifestation of pain in one part of ourselves always expresses a movement pattern that engages every moment of ourselves, physical to spiritual. A part is part of a whole, and that whole is what is hurting.

The implications are several. Because any pain involves a whole person, any healing must also engage the whole person. Any effective response will involve integrating the part into the whole, understanding the connections among person parts, and discerning as best we can how the movements we are making are creating this pain as a guide to move differently than we are now.

2) New/ Old: When something begins to bother us, we also tend to think of the pain or illness or injury as new--that is, as a departure from our otherwise usual or normal healthy state. Most pain feels accidental. It comes upon us as a surprise that we were not expecting. We experience it as an obstacle to our forward motion.

However, once we understand our bodily selves as movement, we realize that by the time we feel a part of ourselves as pain, the whole-body patterns that that pain is expressing have already been in play for a while and at many levels of our existence. Our thoughts and feelings about ourselves and others, the movements we make as we go about our usual activities, our hopes and fears, as well as our general outlook on the world, are all, to greater and lesser extents, bound up in the pain.

The implication here is that healing involves recreating patterns of sensation and response that have been at work for a long time, slowly creating a situation where we feel a particular point of pain. Healing takes time.

3) Read/ Felt: Further, when people acknowledge the importance of "listening" to their feelings of discomfort, they often talk about reading "the" body or listening to "the" body, as if there is an "I" that exists above and apart from the body who can see it, know it, and fix it.

However, the kind of wisdom that our bodily selves have is not a formula or a schema that "we" can read and then impose upon our bodies, so as to make them do what we want to do, and stop hurting.

The kind of wisdom our bodily selves are is an ability to sense impulses guiding us to move in ways that will coordinate our pleasure, our health, and our well being. This is who we humans are--this impulse to connect with whatever will support us in becoming who we are. We can and must connect with other people, with elements, with our own bodily selves, with ideas, activities, and cultural forms in order to unfold our skills and abilities.

In every case, as we connect in life-enabling ways, we learn something more about how to move in ways that will connect us more effectively with what nourishes our well-being. This is what pain teaches us: not how to deal with it, and not to obsess over it, but how to discern and move with whatever impulse to connect it represents.

Pain is a desire to be free from it. Yet unless we allow ourselves to welcome it as offering us vital information about our selves and situation, we will not fully grasp that desire.

Pain is not holding us back. It is calling us to be free from whatever is holding us back.

4) Responsible/ Participating: Where I am moving with this line of thought is far from the all-too-common self-help theme: you can heal yourself. People seem to think that once they acknowledge their pain and admit that their sensations have something to teach them, then any pain they feel is their fault. They are responsible for healing themselves. When the pain persists, self-judgment can weigh heavily.

Once we shift to an experience of ourselves as movement, however, we realize that pain is not our fault, that "we" are not responsible for our pain, and that "we" cannot heal ourselves. Rather, healing is who we are: it is an ever-ongoing process in which our bodily selves are ever and forever active. In this process, our pain is helping us appreciate how and where our healing energies have more potential for creating us anew. What that "we" can do is learn how to align our mental energies with the trajectories of healing already at work in our bodily selves.

The question then is this: how can we participate in our healing as consciously as possible?

What a Body Knows offers a response: if we cultivate a sensory awareness of how our movements are making us, we have what we need to begin to discern the wisdom in feelings of disease, discomfort, dissatisfaction, and depression.

It is not just a matter of allowing ourselves to feel what we are feeling, though such mindfulness is an important first step. Nor is it a matter of identifying the patterns of mental, emotional, and physical movement that are knotting us. What is most important is being able to open a space in ourselves where we can find in our sensations our core desires, our impulses to connect, and begin to move with them, in ways that do not recreate the pain that troubles us.

Every pain is a potential for pleasure that is yet to unfold.

For more blogs on this topic:
1. about the seemingly pointless pain of the flue: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-body-knows/201008/what-do-you-do-the-flu
2. about the limits of "listening" to your body
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-body-knows/200909/the-limits-listening-your-body

The Home-Work My Son Loves

My fourteen-year-old son hates homework. It’s not the work per se. During school hours, Jordan is happy to learn and will lecture at length on fine points of modern history or the properties of an equilateral triangle. Give him the same assignments at home, however, and he perceives them as an intrusion of his time and space. An injustice.

Home, he reasons, is for other kinds of work. Home is for milking his cow, Daisy, and planting potatoes. It is for chopping down a tree with an ax whose handle he carved, and then using Bright and Blaze, his team of young steer, trained to a yoke he shaped and shaved, to pull the log into the barn, where he and his sisters will hack it into firewood. Home is for churning cream he skims, from milk he squeezed, into butter and ice cream (though not both at once).

While school is for schoolwork, home is for home-work.
*
The question of education is in the news, running alongside concerns about the United States’ ability to sustain its place in the evolving global economy. We are familiar with the refrain: innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship will secure us jobs. Schools must teach the next generation these essential survival skills.

So far so good. The next question, of course, is how? Can you even teach creativity? The oxymoron is evident. Some deny that it is possible. But what does it take to be a creative, innovative entrepreneur?

For one, it takes the perspective required to see a problem as a problem in the first place, independent of what others think. It takes the passion of wanting to do it better. It takes the patience to wait for ideas to come and mature, and the persistence to brook the resistance new ways inevitably elicit.

In short, if we want to nurture creative problem-solvers, we need to help kids develop an intrinsic desire to unfold what they have to give in making the world a better place to be.

Did I say it would be easy?
*
I recently read NutureShock, a book about parenting practices that unmasks our common sense ideas as not so sensible after all. One chapter focuses on theories about how to develop the “executive functions” of the prefrontal cortex that aid us in planning for the future, carrying out strategies, and harnessing our impulses to them. These executive functions are almost always described as a top-down kind of self-control: mind over body. Until recently, the road to such skills has been paved with training that focuses primarily on the intellect.

However, as NutureShock relates, the balance is shifting, for researchers are discovering more effective means of developing these skills. Project-based, case-driven, collaborative learning opportunities are being proposed in which students design, carry out, and even assess their own work. When students learn what they need in order to solve a problem, they know that what they are learning matters. They know why. They care, and so invest more of themselves in learning.

In the preschool years, such learning is called imaginative play. Ask a four-year-old to sit still and you may get thirty seconds. Tell him that he is a dragon guarding a precious jewel and you might get four minutes. Involve a jewel thief, a dragon family who loves the jewel, and the magic rainbow it opens, and he may sit for twenty.

The same logic works for a twenty-year-old. Put her in a life-like situation, and see how learning disciplines improve. Why? Those so-called executive functions are fueled and funded by our emotional, sensory selves. It’s not so mind over body after all.

If our aim, then, is to nurture passionate, patient, persistent problem-solvers, the plot thickens: how do we teach our kids to play?
*
I am learning with Leif again. Master of rolling that he has become, he no longer needs to pull his knees to his chest to initiate the move. He simply twists his torso, belly button first, and rolls to the side, hauling his legs behind him. He learned this torso twist because the leg-lifting, jack-knife move he practiced so many times arranged his body in this pattern, pulling it into his sensory awareness as a possibility. He learned it, he perfected it. Now, this corkscrew is his move of choice as soon as you lie him down, for example, when attempting to change his clothes or a diaper.

Once on his belly, however, he finds himself again at the horizon of his abilities. Stuck. He tries arching his back and lifting his arms and legs off the floor, waving and kicking, while making the sound of a strangled cat.

Then, after several moments of ear-scratching screech, he resorts to that same knees-up pattern of movement that taught him how to roll in the first place: he pulls his knobby knees up under his body. Lo and behold he finds his toes. They connect with the floor. Executing his usual downward push, something unusual happens: he finds himself launched forward in space, at the edge of his blanket, forehead to the floor. Wow!

What’s happening? Faced with a new challenge (belly down), Leif mobilizes a pattern of sensation and response he already knows how to make (knees up). When he does, the familiar pattern takes a different shape in relation to gravity and weight (toes connect). He learns about him self and his world based on what happens when he makes it (face to floor). The pattern evolves (a bit more up). He repeats the experiment again and again, playing with the possibilities, and hones in on those patterns of movement that unfold his potential to move some more (he's almost crawling!). The movement Leif is making is his making him.

While the spinal movements Leif is making are basic to human health--at the core of yoga, dance, and other physical disciplines, overlooked to our detriment in our sedentary lives--what's even more important about Leif's adventures is the process he is engaging. He's playing in the most fundamental way we humans can: discovering and creating the patterns of sensation and response that make him who he is. He is not just moving, he is exploring and unfolding his potential to make new moves. He is playing at his own horizons and doing so because it is fun. He is participating in the rhythms of his bodily becoming.
*
To survive in this century, we are going to need to learn to make new moves in relation to the most basic elements of our ongoing existence--food, water, air, earth, and its human and animal creatures. We need to be able to play--to envision, plan, and carry out scenarios that anticipate the impacts of our actions on the health and well being of the earth in us and around us. What are we creating?

We might think that once we learn the basics of rolling, sitting, crawling and walking, it is time to restrict the focus of learning to our intellects. However, for our thinking to remain free, flexible, and responsive to our time, we need exercises that challenge our intellects as well as bodily practices that call our attention to how our movements are making us. To respond to the challenges we face, we have to care. We have to know why it matters to our bodily lives, and to do either, we need to move in ways that bring our senses to life.

It’s our home-work.
*
Bright and Blaze may not know it. They are not just pulling a log. They are pulling into existence a passionate, patient, persistent problem-solver.

Movement Manifesto, Part 1 of 2

I am surrounded by babies—bovine, human, and avian--a bull calf named Dutch, my four month old Leif, and twenty-six two-week old chicks. I am watching them all closely for signs. Who are we animals anyway?

What do I notice? How they move. Babies move. They move constantly. Even when they suddenly collapse into a heap, fast asleep, their bodies balloon in and out with the beats of their breathing.

Take the chicks. From the moment we opened the peeping package we picked up at the post office, these fluff balls on toothpicks have been moving constantly—pecking, preening, poking, scratching, scooping water and tipping up their chins so that the drink runs down their throats.

Then one by one, they crash. Heads loll, legs splay, and wings curl as the chicks flop over, between, and through one another in a mound of pulsing puff. In the next instant, a sound startles. One head lifts, and the mass comes alive, peeping and pecking again, stronger, louder, and bigger. You can see them grow.

Leif is the same—a veritable whirligig of wriggling and waving until the moment when all he wants to do is suck himself into sleep. Tucked in my arms he falls over some unseen edge into a rest so deep you can feel his cells inhale. No anxieties about the day rev his small self; no anticipation or regret props his eyelids open. He pulses, present to his rhythms of bodily becoming.

Movement is who he is. His movement is making him.
*
In our contemporary age, movement has been co-opted by the language of exercise and fitness, and moralized into a task we should perform. We congratulate ourselves when we succeed in spurring our seemingly sluggish bodies into action, and then measure the minutes spent, the miles clocked, and calories counted. We treat our bodies like pets we must put through their paces, so they will continue to obey our commands. We earn our just reward of fitting in to clothes, cliques, or the conceptions of beauty that barrage us.

Our view of movement is reinforced in our experience by our sedentary values. We prize the ability to sit still as a measure of our success in thinking and learning. To sit is the goal of a day's work. When our energy pools in our toes, and we don’t feel like moving, we assume it’s because our body blocks don’t want to. We forget that we are no longer feeling through our bodily selves.

Mind over body is what we have become. Our movements are making us.
*
Leif found his foot. Or, his foot found him. Or rather, his foot and his fingers found each other. Grasping and grasped, he found himself, but it’s not a matter of agency. He didn’t decide to link upper and lower digits. His parts found each other, as they moved.

He found himself by moving.

How could this be? The movements that we make are neither fully conscious, nor fully planned, but neither are they arbitrary or accidental to our evolving sense of self.

The beating and breathing that we are pulls nutrients and elements into places where they burn. Energy emerges, wanting its own expenditure. Cells act, muscles contract, nerves fire, and movements happen along the trajectories of our physiological form. As these movements pass through us, they create sensations of their happening—patterns of coordination the movement requires.

The movements also invite effects—a smile evokes another, a cry calls for arms, a sucking warms the belly. The impress of these effects remains. So overtime, as we move, we gather patterns of sensing and responding that guide us in discerning what we need and how to get it. A sense of agency forms, as an after-thought. Suck, reach, cry, can I.

I is an afterthought. It is a thought we can think based on the bodily movements we have made. It is a word that gives unity to the splash of sensations we gather as we move through space and time, toward and away, with and against, up and down, in and out and around.

I is an afterthought that becomes a forethought. Once it emerges, it serves as a powerful hook on which to hang further patterns of sensing and responding. It becomes a sense of ourselves we want to protect, so we learn new movements that do—avoiding, deflecting, attacking, retreating, and repressing all those aspects of ourselves that don’t conform to who we want our "I" to be. We want to believe that "I" comes first.

It is when we identify too strongly with our I-protecting patterns of sensation and response that we stop moving. We forget that our bodily movement is making us, and we lose the sensory awareness that would allow us to discern new patterns of sensing and responding. We lose degrees of freedom. Faced with the challenges of our lives, we rearrange the furniture in our minds, unable to find a way out.
*
Watching the babes, I remember. It is time to move.

Movement is our birthright. We are born moving. We are born to move, and when we are not too tired or stressed or hungry or preoccupied, movement is what we want to do. When we move we breathe, when we breathe we feel, and when we feel we have available to us resources for greeting every challenge in our lives as a potential for pleasure we have yet to unfold.

When we move, we bring sense to life.

The Land of the Super Smiles

The baby chicks we hatched a few years ago were born pecking with a ferocity that left them panting. Minutes tucked into the warmth under mother’s wing and the fluffed-out fledglings were pecking again, this time adapting their freedom-finding moves in pursuit of food and water.

When Dandi, our Jersey heifer, first landed on the barn floor, she rested in a calf curl while her mother, Daisy, licked her free of her birth sac, stimulating her spinal chord and nerve networks to fire and wire. Within an hour, Dandi was struggling to stand on wobbly legs made for walking, ready to reach for the all-nourishing colostrum raining down from above.

Leif is now nine weeks. He can’t feed himself. He can’t stand and walk. But he can smile. Could his smiling be as essential for his survival?
*
Yesterday morning, as usual, Kai woke up and ran into our room. He used to beg to snuggle between Geoff and me. Now he only has eyes for Leif. He wiggles in next to “the baby” and watches. I am aware, but dozing.

Moments later I hear: “Mom! Mom! Wake up! You’re missing tons of cuteness!”

I smile. Perhaps.

I look at Kai looking at Leif. Leif is smiling at him with a wide gummy grin. Kai is smiling back, lured into the land of the super smiles by his little brother. Kai glows. Cuteness indeed.
*
I have been trying to catch those super smiles on film. Leif’s features run so quickly through a range of emotional expressions that it is largely a question of luck whether or not I succeed. His smiles explode across his face and disappear, only to return a fraction of a second later, launched in a new direction, at a different angle, with a different color. It would help if I had a faster lens, but the surprises are fun too. I just keep clicking.

I ponder what the camera catches. Leif seems to have a complete set of feeling states, each tuned with dazzling detail. So too, this collection of muscular patterns not only fashion his face, each one arranges his every cell, every limb. No moment of his bodily self is left out. Smiling, for Leif, is a full-bodied activity. His arms wave, his legs pump, his torso curls in a “C” that begs to be snuggled.

Of course, his first smiles were simply ways to register his internal state of being. He wasn’t trying to communicate or respond to anyone. His smile was who he was in that moment; the relaxing and spreading of facial muscles, the pulling outward from the corners of his mouth was his existential condition. It was what his world was doing and feeling, and doing in order to feel. Often his eyes were tightly shut and still he smiled. His smiling extended and amplified his sensation, enabling him to know what he was feeling and who he is.

A first principle of philosophy: know thyself.
*
Now his smiles are different. He smiles in response to external stimuli—visual sensations—most notably, the appearing of a face. Somehow he is now connecting the appearance of a Face with an anticipated change to his world that that smiling is for him. He will be cradled, burped, fed. The Face will smile at him. So he waits, already patient. Smiling, he is making time exist for himself.

His smile is a sign, a first abstraction, but its meaning is not conceptual. It is kinetic. The smile and the sensation it represents are linked by the movement they share—the movement of pleasure-becoming. The movement of smiling itself releases the discomfort of discomfort, allowing us to believe in a world that exists for our pleasure.

Moreover, his smile not only signals his anticipation of what will happen. It is an effective move in making sure that what might happen happens. His smile is a call—a call to connect with him, to care about him, to want more of his smiles for ourselves. For his smile is contagious. Delight delivered. We smile back, unable not to reflect the pure joy beaming back at us. Smiling he works to create the relationships he needs to ensure that someone will respond to him.

That someone will hear his cry.

Smiling, he participates in the rhythms of his own bodily becoming, creating patterns of sensation and response that will help him secure what he needs to thrive.

Smiling, he moves his whole bodily self in ways that align with the trajectories of his best becoming, creating relationships that will support him in unfolding what he has to give.

So do we.

Living It: The Palin Pick

I have to confess, I am obsessed with Sarah Palin. (Who isn’t?)

It is also time to shake up my blog. (Anyone know of a vice-blogger I could hire—maybe one from Alaska? No experience required.)

I have written to the edge of my plan—spending two months each making the case that there is wisdom in our desires for food, sex, and then spirit in turn. All along I have hinted that our desires are entwined—that we cannot address our dissatisfaction or find the wisdom in one realm without involving the others. Now it is time to investigate.

Which happily brings us back to Sarah Palin, McCain’s VP pick. Hers is a story in which human desires for sex and spirit are enchantingly entwined. We are missing the significance of it.

Palin eloped with her high school sweetheart and gave birth to her first son eight months later; she continued her pregnancy with infant son Trig, knowing he had Downs, and her 17 year old daughter Bristol is 5 months pregnant and planning to marry the father. At every turn Palin’s attitude to sex and its fruits is guided by her Christian faith: abstinence-only sex education, no abortion (except where a mother is in danger), marriage as one man-one woman, with child/ren.

Of course, her personal life is irrelevant to her ability to lead, say Republicans and Democrats alike. What counts is her executive experience, her intelligence, her charisma, her promise. Except that they don’t. For every bend in Palin’s personal story is further proof of what matters most to the social conservatives who rally around her: namely, her belief.

Representatives of the religious right are embracing her joyously with open arms as one of them—as someone who believes. To them she is someone who values life, commitment, family, love, and God. There is no one better for the White House. Period.

How can this be?
*
Democrats and some republicans are dismayed, calling McCain’s move a distraction from the major issues (e.g., economy, environment, health care and the war in Iraq); a sign of weakness (caving to the religious right), cynicism (who cares whether the VP has any experience), or desperation (the Hail Mary pass of a losing team).

Yet the fact is, McCain’s breathtaking move scored every point he wanted to make. He wrested media, web, and public attention from Obama; energized his campaign, his party, and its conservative base; refreshed his image as a maverick and change agent; undercut Obama’s case against him, and made his ticket as potentially-historic a reign as Obama-Biden’s.

Even more important, however, is what is implied in the response of social conservatives and the religious right. McCain shifted the race to a terrain where Reagan and Bush won regardless of their (lack of) international experience or positions on the issues—a terrain where what counts is what you believe. McCain made the race about whether we live in a world where life is holy, good triumphs over evil, and the progress we want is assured. It is not an easy position to oppose.
*
In a thoughtful essay on the Palin choice and the political mind, George Lakoff makes the distinction between “realities” (issues named above) and “symbolism.” He argues that McCain had no hope of winning based on the former given his ties to Bush and so had to rely on the latter. With the Palin pick, Lakoff argues, McCain’s ticket is now strong in symbolism. Palin not only believes what she believes, she lives it. She is thus a symbol of integrity, of the power of belief in our lives, of what is possible when you, as an individual, believe.

Lakoff praises Obama for being strong on symbolism too—with his descriptions of a democratic America as a place where people care about one another and help one another to succeed. Nevertheless, he urges Democrats not to fall into the trap of arguing over “realities” while ignoring the symbolic dimension of what they offer. Democrats must also provide frameworks and narratives—visions of who Americans are—that enable people to affirm the solutions offered as moral and right, and not just effective. Otherwise, their arguments will fall short of what motivates people. Heart. Love. Desire.
*
So too, there is even more at work here than symbolism—which is where sex and spirit come in again. In choosing Palin, the network of belief that McCain is tapping is not solely conservative or Christian. It involves patterns of sensation and response common to Americans across parties: namely, the lived sense of ourselves minds dwelling in and over bodies whose best recourse in facing any problem is to use the power of those minds to exert control over our bodies and those of others.

Palin’s story authorizes the mind over body belief system that underlies McCain’s policies. She lives it in relation to our most basic human desires for sex and spirit. She confirms for us that all we need to do is to exercise the power of our minds over our desiring bodies—or over the bodies of women, terrorists, animals, earth—in order to get the physical intimacy and love, the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging, that we most want.
*
Still critics howl: none of these strategies—abstinence, war, or more petroleum fuels—works! The evidence is clear.

To those who share a mind over body sense of self, however, the fact that these strategies don’t work does not necessarily invalidate the framework, for it might be that they just haven’t worked yet. For those who believe that belief is what matters, the apparent failure is a call for more—more restraint, more war, more drilling. They want that world in which life is good, pleasurable, and meaning-full.

In response, simply arguing for abortion rights, an end to the war, or energy independence does not go far enough in addressing the underlying issues. What we need in addition is a vision of life that allows us to believe in these responses as right--not just because they fix a problem, but because they create the conditions within which we, as humans, can thrive, to the extent they do. What we need is a vision of life that allows us to welcome the failures of the noted strategies as vital information about how to move differently to do what they intend: honor and protect life.
*
Moving beyond this impasse requires the kind of experience shift I have been describing, where we dislodge the sense of ourselves as minds over bodies and learn to discern the wisdom in our sensations of discomfort. It involves articulating a moral universe rooted in a sensory awareness of ourselves as the movement that is making us.

Next week: What would that look like?

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