waves before sunrise

Photo by Tobias van Schneider on Unsplash

unpolished thoughts 1/27/2019

I woke up in the middle of the night last night and knew I would stay awake, so I got out of bed and lay on the floor to feel something new.

Throughout the past week I have been studying my self-organization at the Feldenkrais Training Academy with trainer Jeff Haller.

Studying your self-organization means finding new specificity in your ability to pay attention to your relationship to gravity.

The more you can feel what it means to move and breathe without restriction, the more you have to offer others who also seek greater comfort in their own skin.

In the last hours before we broke for the weekend, a classmate of mine lay down while I worked with her feet.

I was amazed to discover what I could see and feel inside the connected circuit we made together. There was a degree of sensitivity in my hands that I had never before possessed.

This week was seriously powerful learning.

My inquiry in the hours before this morning’s sunrise began with the breath.

Recalling an Awareness Through Movement lesson that Jeff taught earlier this week, I imagined my breath filling a column of air from my pelvic floor to my right shoulder. Again and again, I breathed in and expanded myself through this length.

After many minutes, I imagined this same space contracting with each inhalation. Then I alternated between expansion and contraction, feeling the elastic possibilities of this part of myself.

I have learned through consistent Feldenkrais practice that I habitually over-contract through the right side of my ribs. Feeling this pattern once again, I shrunk the image of the contraction until I felt less urgency in my thinking.

I continued, breathing from my pelvic floor to my left shoulder, first expanding, then contracting, then alternating. As I expanded my left side, I listened again to the corresponding contraction of my right side, again asking myself not to be quite so determined as I shortened those parts of myself.

This kind of Awareness Through Movement lesson works like a methodical painter who makes sure of the solid blanket of color he wants by painting it over and over, vertical, horizontal and diagonal.

I breathed once into my left side and once into my right side, again and again.

If you search inside yourself to find space for your breath, you may notice that your eyes are alive with the effort. They shift in their sockets, shining a searchlight to find the path.

As my breath moved back and forth, I could feel my eyes tripping over the midline. They didn’t know how to look to both sides with the same precision.

It seemed perhaps that the midline itself was tripping them up. It wasn’t actually in the middle.

No one ever told me that I could move my midline, but this is what I began to do. I began to slide the midline of my being from side to side so that both of my eyes would be right of center, then left of center.

By pushing aside this uneven mirror, it became possible to look down into left side of my body with both eyes, and then look down into the right side of my body with both eyes.

The path came more clearly into view and my lungs took in more oxygen.

Then I brought the midline back to the middle so I could breathe along the whole length of my spine. I imagined a column of air shooting upwards to lift the roof of my skull.

As I sensed small asymmetries that persisted, little places where the gaps between vertebrae still opened on one side and closed on the other, I imagined the channel of air widening.

I also widened the midline until left and right disappeared. The line dividing my middle became wider than I was.

Then I rested, until a new idea led me to turn onto my belly.

With both hands above my head on the floor, I turned my head to the right and brought my right knee up the towards my chin. I breathed to expand the length of my left side again and again.

Then I re-invited alternating contraction and expansion, my breath slow, loud, and steady. The sound and the movements brought me the image of waves.

In the same position, I transferred the waves to the right side, the forward-looking part of myself where I was already folded. Into this smaller space, the waves still crashed, shortening and lengthening in a different way.

I returned to my back, feeling like the beach at low tide on one side of myself, and high tide on the other.

I returned to my belly, following a similar path, but now oriented towards the left side of my world.

Sensing a rolling against the floor, I placed the palm of my left hand in front of my chest, my elbow pointing to the ceiling, to find a new support. I followed the waves with my eyes, looking left towards heaven as the waves crashed into shore and right towards the earth as they returned out to sea.

Then I reversed directions, allowing my vision to swim out to sea as the waves came in, and return to shore as the waves receded.

Again, I rested on my back, reflecting worldlessly.

But something told me then to stand on my knees.

I remembered something else that Jeff taught us this week, following the movement of pressure under our shin bones as we sat backwards to kneel on our heels. I could feel my balance was clearer to one side, so I allowed myself to move towards that sense of stability.

Standing again on my knees I shifted my weight from the center to the same side, again and again, trying to discover how to make my knee feel like a foot.

Each time, I invited an internal spiral through that leg to help wind my roots deeper as I breathed again into a column that lifted my head towards the sky.

When I was tall enough, I sensed that it was safe to bring my other leg forward and stand on the sole of that foot.

Kneeling now on one knee, I brought my hand to the top of my head, gently bending it sideways to open the accordion of my ribs, inviting more air into that lung.

After resting to feel how I was different again, I explored these shapes with my weight moving the other way, finding my balance on the other side.

My body had calmed and sleep was a possibility again, but first I stood upright.

To my pleasant surprise, the architecture of my feet appeared in the darkness, as if my eyes could look directly through my heels. I saw the shapes of the individual bones and the contours of their joining.

I felt the invitation to move one last time again.

I only shifted myself from side to side, riding the current of breath. I was able to float without disturbing the ground below me, moving only by intention, in a way I knew I had never moved before.

I thought, “This is my life’s work. This is what I came here to do.”

But it isn’t just for me. It’s also for you.

It’s already inside you if you are curious to know it.

It’s inside every one of us.

************************

Experience a movement practice to rewrite the story of how you move through the world.

Click here for more information on my ¡Reimagine Yourself! online classes

************************

You can now receive my unpolished thoughts in your email on a daily basis when you subscribe to my mailing list.

New subscribers also receive a series of welcome emails which include two free full-length Feldenkrais audio lessons.

Click here to subscribe (and make sure to check the box to get the unpolished thoughts RSS feed just below where you enter your email address)