DANCE
Dancing through the Body Systems (based on the teachings of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen)
30 minutes
When you move through the bones, organs, and muscles, you access heat and enhance the life force in your body.
Dancing from the Bones (clarity and directionality)
Begin moving, with attention on your bones.
• Bone weight: explore how your bones create momentum in movement. Drop an arm, leg, or head in an arc and follow its trajectory in space. (This is pendular movement.)
• Bone directionality: explore how your bones lever you off the floor and propel and carry you. Extend a limb and follow its vector or line of intention.
• Bone contour and architecture: consider the curves, holes, and arches. Circle your pelvis or ribs, follow their circumference, and trace their inner archways. Sculpt space.
• Investigate head-to-tail movement, the central axis of the body. Remember life as a fish, undulating side to side. Consider how we carry wave motion through our spine in human form.
• Bring your focus to the marrow—the generative core of bones. This is where all the blood in your body is produced. Imagine breath flowing into the marrow, life flowing out.2
• Dance from your (206) bones; dance from the marrow, exploring the fire of each.
Dancing from Muscle (heat and qualitative range)
Start in movement (muscles move the bones). Explore:
• Pumping, pulsating, sponging (contracting and releasing) the muscles. Focus not at the joints, but between the joints.
• Energy level in your movement, raising the volume on speed and effort.
• Range from tiniest to grandest movement, and back.
• Endurance and repetition. Go beyond your personal 100 to 110 percent; reverse to quietest, slowest, least effort.
• Resistance, using more muscle than you need to do an action. Contract one muscle against another for sustained movement. Activate, motivate by lowering your body toward and away from the floor to increase resistance with control, getting longer and stronger in your muscles.
• Spatial integrity, linking throughout the 600 muscles in your body as one muscle system. Muscles work in groups, and are interdependent. Lift your arm, and your calf muscle fires to stabilize your base. Feel connected!
• Keep moving, building and noticing heat, sweat, drive.
Dancing from the Organs (weight and volume)
Stand, with your hands on your belly.
• Pour your belly weight forward into your hands. Allow the organs to release toward gravity, and catch them in your hands. Jiggle the organs, feeling their weight, volume, and tone (through the layers of abdominal muscles).
• Come back to vertical plumb line and yield the organs back toward your front spine. Plump them out. (We sacrifice so much for flatness.) Support with the abdominal sheath, while keeping spacious through your organs.
• Move with awareness of your lungs: the lungs empty and fill.
• Move with awareness of your heart: the heart is a cardiac muscle condensing and expanding; it has both weight and density.
• Move with awareness of your digestive tract: it connects mouth through anus in one long tube, with various structures to break down and absorb nutrients. Initiate movement with your stomach (left side; it fills and empties) and liver (right side; it’s dense, filtering blood). Your breathing diaphragm is the ceiling for your liver and stomach, massaging.
• Explore the twenty-one feet of small intestine, nestled in the frame of the pelvis: asymmetrical, gutsy, undulating, pulsing, expressing.
• Explore the large intestine, supporting the frame of your pelvis, then arcing back toward your sacrum and tailbone (coccyx) for the rectum and anus.
• Move with awareness of your sexual and reproductive organs, a base of identity and creativity.
• Orient to the weighted fullness of the organs.
• Consciously widen your pelvic floor: tail back, pelvis stable and horizontal. If tethered to the tail or pelvic floor, you may experience spontaneous elongation of the organs upward.
• You won’t get there by working or trying. Follow the pointers, yield to the exploration.
• When you get energy flowing in two directions, organs are expansive. All organs have movement, contracting and releasing in spiral flow. Let them move you.
TO WRITE
Fire and You
60 minutes
How does fire register in your body? When is it useful and when destructive? Consider both the volume body and the agency body. Write out ahead of yourself, and see what you find (10 minutes). Now, take this as the beginning for a whole new series of writings. Access fire in your language, and notice what emerges.
Photograph © Susan Lirakis
STUDIO NOTES
CARYN MCHOSE leads a class for our Body and Earth training at Pen Pynfarch in Wales (2010):
Core strength is reflective of appropriate orientation.
Volume body is our visceral body that gives us a sense of volume and feeling; it’s our interoceptive gut body.
Agency body is our action body, with an axis that moves us through space; it’s our exteroceptive skeletal-muscular system. (See Day 25 for more on exteroceptors and interoceptors.)
How are we supported? That story begins at birth, as our caregivers carry us. They are our backing, transporting us and giving us a feeling of support while we develop ourselves through expression of our needs. The process of developing a full and vibrant being strengthens us. We make a transition from feeling supported to acting in the world authentically without sacrificing our volume.
You can experience this in duets, leaning into each other:
• With a partner, seated, begin by being held—giving over agency and feeling support. Take time to feel fully held.
• As you separate from your caregiver (pushing, rolling away—becoming independent), your own axis comes online. When you leave, it’s not like you’re leaving. You have a sense of support.
We need our own sense of volume when presented with life’s dilemmas. In the evolutionary model, we find our volume through working with the cell, vessel, and fish. In experiential anatomy, we check in to some of the anatomy “bits” to refresh our orientation. We may notice places that have been compromised, confused, or compressed in the process of finding our way in the world. Clarity in evolutionary patterns and differentiating the body through experiential anatomy remind us that we can be more easeful in our connection to context.
The first question is the tonic function story: Where am I?
We all have our backing, and we all feel how we don’t have our backing. Work with inner exchange between your volume and agency bodies. We can use these orientation skills—a sense of volume that connects us to weight and Earth; and a sense of agency that takes us into the action space, fully supported by the ground—to meet challenges in our lives.
DAY 5