15 minutes
Find a comfortable position, seated, eyes closed:
• Focus your attention on your mouth. Start by yawning, stretching the mouth and back of the throat.
• Continue to allow the mouth to open and feel or imagine the sensation of stretch hollowing the center of your body, like shaping an empty vessel (a bottle or vase), with the pelvis as its base. (In humans, the trachea and esophagus separate for breathing and digestion, but imagine that there is simply one open chamber continuing down through the organs.)
• Imagine a primitive sea squirt attached to the ocean floor. Continue to breathe and notice if any sound emerges.
• Gently play, with a gradual opening of the lips, mouth, and throat. Allow a breath that is barely audible to emerge. As you continue opening the mouth and moving breath more deeply down the core of the body, it may feel odd, stimulating primitive patterns.
• Continue this breath for some time, following impulses for movement as they come.
This is related to Ujjai, a breath in yoga in which you slightly activate the vocal folds and surrounding tissues (glottis) deep in the throat to heighten sensation.4
Fish swish* 10 minutes
Lying in constructive rest, eyes closed:
• Focus attention on your spine (the 24 vertebral bones plus the sacrum and coccyx, connecting head to tail).
• Initiating with your tail, begin undulating the spine side to side on the floor, like a fish or a snake.
• Imagine a mouth on the top of your head, a tail extending from your pelvis. (Relax and “disappear” the legs!) Try initiating the undulations with your head, swimming toward or away, directed by the special senses in the skull.
• At some point, see how small the undulations can be; micro-movements may take on a life of their own, with subtle waves undulating your vertebral column as you breathe.
• Roll over; try the undulations on your belly. Allow your organs to hang off the spine, like a fish. Pause in open attention.
OF SPECIAL INTEREST: MORO REFLEX
The startle response, called the Moro Reflex (in developmental terminology), comes from our ancestors. When a warning is sounded in the jungle, our chimpanzee relatives take to the trees, using both hands and feet to climb and swing their way to safety. Babies on the mother’s chest hang on for themselves. A strong reflex is encoded: to arch back, opening the hands and feet momentarily, so they can grab forward again, clutching big handfuls of fur to get a stable grip. We can see this pattern of release and holding on (extension followed by flexion) in our own startle response. When a car horn causes us to “jump,” for example, a slow-motion view would show our spine arching, throwing the arms and head backward, rapidly followed by a protective closing of the front surface and a clutching of hands. Depicted in cartoons, the startle reflex is instantaneous, common to us all, encoded in our tissues.
Often, only the extension phase takes place, so the startle is not resolved by the hugging or taking-hold phase. Sometimes, when ongoing or intense trauma occurs, like war, abuse, or even the constant stress of work, we can find ourselves living in constant startle, or shock. The result is a rigid spine; unable to let go or hold on, we are frozen in time. Stimulating the front surface can be a useful intervention. This moves the focus of incoming information from the back (where the dorsal root enters the spine, bringing sensory information) to the front (where the ventral root of the nerve emerges, conveying motor activity—action). As we bring the information “to the front,” we can begin to work with it, to understand and act. Sometimes this takes years; sometimes it can happen in a moment.
FARMSTORIES: WATER
I know myself to be one with water. How did I find this to be true? Perhaps it was being pulled below the surface of the sea and thinking I would never return; submerging a tired body in a bath, recovering; tossing a backpack over a desert waterfall, jumping; seeing the wet world of birth, after so many dry words describing.
I know myself to be one with water. When did I find this to be true? It wasn’t during grade school or junior high, or high school or college, but years after solidifying my image of self, when someone told me, in a voice that I could understand, that we are mostly water, with a few minerals and fibers to hold us together. That all living things are mostly water. That the earth is mostly water.
I know myself to be one with water. The daughter who assists her father in his dying, by withholding fluids; the mother who assists her son in his leaving, by withholding tears; the son who assists his love to her life, by withholding semen; the grandfather who frees his children from his curse, by withholding spittle: each act made from love helps us drink deep from the well of life.
I know myself to be one with water. Wading, standing waist deep, immersed.
Read aloud, or write and read your own story about water.
Photograph by Erik Borg.
Fish swish (with a partner)*10 minutes
One partner lying in constructive rest, eyes closed; the other standing at their feet, knees slightly bent:
• As standing partner, reach down and encircle your arms around your partner’s legs, below the knees. Slowly and carefully, begin walking backward, giving a small side-to-side “swish” to your partner’s pelvis, noticing how the spine undulates in response. Encourage relaxation of your partner’s neck so that the undulation can move throughout the spine. Work at a speed that is safe, so that there is no whiplash or strain!
• Pause, release the knees, and take a moment in open attention; change roles.
Place visit: Attention to underlying patterns of body
Seated, eyes open or closed: Bring your attention to breath. Explore the vessel breath, encouraging the receptivity of the body. Initiate small undulations in the spine as you sit at your place, remembering the fish swish. Imagine the fluid contents of your body responding to the environment around you: the air, water, plants, animals, and soil. Remember, they are filled with water too! 20 min. Write about your experience. 10 min.
*The exercises in this section are drawn from Caryn McHose, movement teacher and educational bodyworker. Also see Caryn McHose and Kevin Frank’s “The Evolutionary Sequence: A Model for an Integrative Approach to Movement Study,” Rolf Lines, May 1998.1
Underlying Patterns: The Upright Stance
Our senses, after all, were developed to function at foot speeds, and the transition from foot travel to motor travel, in terms of evolutionary time, has been abrupt.
—Wendell Berry, An Entrance to the Woods
Bipedal alignment is our two-footed stance, a high center of gravity over a small base of support. As our vertical axis constantly sways over our feet, reflexive contraction of the muscles of the lower legs keeps us on balance. A subtle shift past the base initiates walking, striding, or running. In effect, we are constantly falling; instability is basic to our structure. Walking, arms swinging freely by our sides, is an underlying rhythm of our species.
In the evolutionary story, our quadripedal mammalian forebears emerged during the Age of Reptiles, around 180 million years ago. For these small, ground-dwelling insectivores and herbivores, larger carnivorous animals