surface of the body as your lungs fill with air; on the out breath, the diaphragm releases (toward the fourth and fifth ribs) and the muscles soften. We call this area of your lower back your “breathing spot.” Encourage its movement with each breath. As breathing deepens, invite sensation to travel all the way down your spine, and spread into your buttocks and legs; then up to the heart, spreading to shoulders, neck, and skull.
In yoga, this is called Balasana, Child’s Pose. Imagine a soft, rounded spine, responding to each breath. If you hold tension in your lower back, this is an excellent exercise to increase circulation and lengthen muscles.
Yoga: Child’s Pose, Balasana.
To write: Place story2–4 hours
Write your history of place, using a chronological approach. Include all the places you have lived and visited. Consider home, travels, dreams, and longings. Reflect on the place-origins of your ancestors. Notice the ways your place history has affected your movement and your attitudes: did you grow up by water, near forests, or surrounded by city streets? How does place affect your life today?
FARMSTORIES: MODELS—THE TRAVELER
My mother was a traveler. She was always at ease with the wealthy. In 1939, after two years of college and before her first teaching position, she took “the grand tour of Europe” collecting the ideas and objects that were to fill my childhood. She sailed across the Atlantic, arriving in England, then in Africa, traveling on the Continent, encountering Mussolini, turning around, and heading for home.
On the farm, this heritage of world adventure was transmitted to us by the Della Robia Madonna and Child porcelain plate hanging over our kitchen doorway, by the leather gloves and amethyst ring from the Ponte Vecchio in Florence; the carved-ivory Coloseum on the bedstand; the transparent blouses embroidered by women in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia; the woven vests and skirts from Norway.
Each of these objects, however small, was to detail a path that would make me a traveler. And so, in my twenties, when I began my own journeys, I walked under the smiling Madonna, wearing a transparent blouse embroidered by women who knew that life is how we embellish it, that’s all we get. That life is the body. That’s how we see it, smell it, taste it, and love in it.
Read aloud or write and read your own story about attitudes.
Place visit: Body scan
Lying in constructive rest or seated comfortably, with a vertical spine and eyes closed, begin a body scan. Pass your attention part by part through the body, beginning with your face and skull. Notice any sensation that occurs on this part of your body. It might be an itch, a tingling, or the pressure of your body against the ground. Move your awareness to your neck. Notice any sensation on your neck at this moment in time: the touch of air to skin, heat or coolness. (Repetition of language helps to focus attention.) If you feel no sensation on an area, notice that, nonjudgmentally. Sensations are happening all the time, whether we are aware of them or not. Move your attention through every body part: the back surface of your body, front surface, sides, pelvis, each arm and each leg. Remember, if you feel nothing, just wait, inviting awareness; then move on. Finish by observing breath as it falls in and out of your nose and mouth, moving the ribs, muscles, and skin. Open your eyes, remaining aware of sensation. Is your attitude toward place affected by deepening attention to body? 20 min. Write about your experience. 10 min.
Body scanning helps to develop an equal relationship to all parts of the body, with no hierarchies or areas of avoidance. It is a component of Vipassana Meditation, a Buddhist practice also known as insight meditation.
Photograph by Erik Borg.
Underlying Patterns: Body
Evolutionary Movement uses the metaphor of evolution, from the state of undifferentiated wholeness, through cell, vessel, tube, fish, reptile, and mammal, to open up fluid movement capacity and inspire a sense of relationship with the natural world.
—Caryn McHose, Resources in Movement
We live in a fluid body; our origins were in the primordial seas. If we follow the evolutionary story, derived from fossil record and close observation, we see that our ancestors traversed through various body forms. Through all of these changes, we retained our liquid core. The amniotic fluid in the womb and our blood retain the saline content of the sea. Our skin keeps us from drying up; in fact, a human can be described as a sack of water walking around on feet! Although we may think of ourselves as solid, fixed, or hardwired, we are indeed fluid creatures, with adaptability and responsiveness as key characteristics for survival on earth.
Underlying human complexity is the unity of the single cell. The unique pattern for the whole body is contained in two strands of DNA housed in the nucleus. The fluid cytoplasm of each cell, like the body as a whole, is approximately 70 to 80 percent water. The selectively permeable cell membrane, like our outer skin, both separates and connects internal contents and the external environment. A collection of like cells of similar structure and function is called a tissue. Groups of coordinated tissues form organs that comprise a body system. For example, muscle cells form muscle tissues, which make muscles, which create the muscular system. For our study we will differentiate seven body systems, based on the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and the School for Body-Mind Centering®: skeletal, muscular, nervous, endocrine, organ, fluid, and connective tissue.1 Although we can look at each system individually, it is essential to remember that the body functions as an interrelated whole and that the systems balance and support each other.
Study for the Couple—Woman, painting by Gordon Thorne. Watercolor, 3 6 in. × 4 5 in.
HERITAGE
My colleague, Caryn McHose, teaches the fluid body by introducing the image of “blenderized tissue.” It’s like putting the body in a blender and turning it on high, she suggests. Suddenly, all tissues are one tissue; we are back to the primitive cell.
Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh encourages awareness of breath. In Peace Is Every Step, he offers a simple meditation: “Breathing in, I feel my body. Breathing out, I smile.” Repeating the thought with the action, several times, heightens awareness both of the body—as we breathe in—and of connection to the world—as we breathe out. He writes, “If we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.”
Top to bottom: cell; multicell; vessel; bilateral symmetry (horizontal): fish; bilateral symmetry (vertical): human
We can revisit our phylogenetic history, the development of our species through evolution, to discern various body systems. From the oceanic matrix came the asymmetry of the first living cell in a shallow tidal pool, the sharing of resources in multicelled organisms such as sponges or sea coral, the vessel-shaped digestive cavity of sea squirts attached to the ocean floor, the central organization of radial symmetry in starfish, and the bilateral symmetry of fish, with many permutations in between. This oceanic heritage of our species is still present in our structure, such as the hollow tube of our digestive system and our segmented spine.
As our predecessors washed up on shores and became land creatures, gravity and inertia placed new demands on successful forms. The skin became the mediator between the fluid interior and the air-exposed exterior, modulating exchange of fluids and nutrients and maintaining a range of temperature suitable for life. Our ancestors traversed from belly slithering to four-footed to two-footed creatures.