Tag Archive for: holistic

If Our Bodies Could Talk

Giving Rise to a Revolutionary Voice

We are what people use to attract love and create life.

We are also what people take from each other to feel powerful.

And, we are what people sacrifice to get ahead in the world.

We are bodies.

Bodies with inherent wisdom, born with instincts that protect humans from extinction and intuition that guides their lives toward authentic expression and purpose.

We touch, feel, and dance. We stand in and align with life passionately. We transform the mind’s chase for relevance into a spiritual presence—enjoying our unique greatness. We experience life, feel its nuances, and express what is real and Divine. We connect honestly and fiercely.

Yet, we are used, taken, and sacrificed, because human beings don’t recognize that they access their authentic expression through us. Instead, they rely on the mind’s rant  that we should be something other than what we are.

These beliefs seep into our soft tissues like a virus and plague us with tension. We become the voiceless soldiers of human existence, carrying the weight of unshared traumas and secrets. But we are also the breathing chamber that could give rise to a revolutionary voice.

A voice that is not concerned with what was, but instead with what could be. A voice that is revolutionary because it does not revolve around the mind’s practice of gathering information and analyzing research.

This revolutionary voice is a real-time energy download, gifted from the universe, that channels through our central alignment as a calm, nurturing strength. A transformative energy that positions us into a state of equipoise––a quiet, centered stillness––that our movement pivots and flows around.

Equipoise is found in our vertical center as an energized stretch between earth and sky. Our posture plugs into a relaxed strength that shifts the mind’s attention from future moments to this moment.

Equipoise aligns our inherent knowledge and the mind’s grid of information, giving us a sense of self that replaces the rant, so the mind can question and reason from a foundation of strength rather than fear.

Equipoise fosters the neutral-feeling state that minds crave.

I wrote this love letter to give our bodies a voice and your body a confidant. Now that you are listening to and confiding in your body, let me guide you step by step into the quiet strength of equipoise in The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind.

Get your copy of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind today!

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Inner Space––The New Frontier

Carol Burnett as Miss. Wiggins

Empower the Space in your Pelvis  

 

Remember Carol Burnett’s secretary character, Wanda Wiggins, played opposite Tim Conway?

She was a constant distraction to her boss, Mr. Tudball. In addition to having an exceptionally low IQ, her blonde curls, fitted skirt, baby-doll sway back and turned in legs left Mr.Tudball persistently bewildered and distracted.

It was as if she never fully stood up from her chair before she would shuffle across the floor in her black pumps, cowishly chewing her gum, readying herself to take notations perched beside the bosses desk. We would all giggle at the obliviousness of her presence.

Her posture told her story. She clearly had no interest in asserting herself physically or mentally, and though she had a nice enough hair-do, manicure and outfit, she had no real objectives beyond that.

Perhaps we were all giggling at our own propensity to embody the same unexceptional disimpassioned attitude. Don’t we all fantasize about how much easier life would be if we just didn’t care so much about being outstanding?  

 

If you’re over forty, you can (occasionally) relate to Miss. Wiggins’ squatty posture when you try to stand up after sitting too long at your desk. In the last two inches of getting to your feet your body creaks in retaliation before allowing a fully upright stance. If you’re over fifty you may not even make it to fully upright!

It’s as if the space in your hips and lower back silently shrunk while you were busying yourself in your seat, right?

This shortening of the iliopsoas muscle––which travels through the hip joints from inner thighs to lower back­­––can lead to the downward spiral of our fitness. Age and job demands can cause us to shadow Miss. Wiggins or it can be the agitant we need to lengthen the Iliopsoas into an upward spiral.

Sitting encourages tension in your iliopsoas muscles because the muscles become shortened, differing from its elongated standing state. The iliopsoas muscles also collect tension from their responsibility to direct your movement––physically, mentally or emotionally––and they become over-controlling when compressed inward for too long.

Balanced muscle use inspires purposeful alignment and attention.

Sitting tasks need standing time-outs to restore the space in your pelvis. When you fully elongate your iliopsoas muscles you place your torso precisely atop your pelvis. In that moment you are absolutely present in time and space––an opportunity for mental discernment and spiritual awakening. You are standing in your strength.

 

In the Tao te Ching it states:

The Master does his job and then stops.
He understands that the universe is forever out of control,
And that trying to dominate events
Goes against the current of things (Tao).

 

Many of us, unlike Miss. Wiggins, do pass through this aligned state, often unconsciously, and experience a sense of self and purpose in the world when doing so. To support this aligned state consciously unite the core trilogy of your physicality: abdominals, inner thighs and buttock muscles.

You may, or may not, meet tension in your iliopsoas muscles when standing up out of a chair (yet!). But by following these simple steps you will ward off thwarting their upstanding value. This is how you know your iliopsoas muscles are in their fully elongated uprightness:
·      Ground through your heels to stand up, lean your torso onto your abdominal muscles and keep it there as your pelvis travels forward.
·      To adjust your pelvis forward press your hip bones forward until you feel your buttock muscles naturally engage.
·      When your buttocks naturally engage stop the forward press, and gently rotate your inner thighs toward your central plumb line to replace the iliopsoas muscles’ compressed grip.

When your core trilogy is united experience the silence of the moment. Recognize the inner space you have created in your center and the renewed vitality you instantly possess. This space is the Creator in you––your Spirit Self.

 

The Tao te Ching continues:

Tao in the world is like a river flowing home to the sea.

 

Making decisions from this silent space is making choices from the inherent wisdom you were born with, combined with the gathered information you studied to possess. The intelligence that lives in your body and your mind are united for your greatest good. You are living in your strength.

 

To learn how to release tension in minutes check out this FREE video!

You’ll Never Look at a Pregnant Woman the Same Again

Losing one’s center of gravity is a lost and found phenomenon.

There she is walking ahead of you, legs slightly spread causing her whole body to waddle side to side. She looks like she’s steadying herself on a sailboat but, even from behind, you know she is pregnant. You can’t help but marvel at the miracle of childbirth and the mystery of the female form, but have you ever considered her instability as Creation’s stability?

Pregnancy is an energetic phenomenon. Her mind body connection must navigate through an interruption of being, what she has come to know as, herself. A foreign state of instability overrides everything; she has no control over what is happening to her! How does this instability serve her as a mother to be? (Yikes, it’s enough to scare the rest of us off!)

When talking to my neighbor, Lorelei, mother of one and soon to be two, she said, “Being pregnant is hard, but it teaches me a lot about myself. I can give more than I realized!” She explains how being pregnant stretches her beyond what she knew of herself in every way!

But she had to lose herself to find herself.

Lorelei’s first experience of feeling lost was impressed acutely in her memory. The moment she couldn’t get out of the car on her own volition she exclaimed, “Oh My God, this is really happening!” When we looked deeper into that moment she said, “It’s a foreign state that is one sided. It affects mom not baby.”

My holistic interpretation of this lost while pregnant is:
•    Her center of gravity–the Dan Tien Energy Center–is engulfed upon.
•    The sense of self that comes from knowing her center is growing increasingly distant.
•   The abdominal muscles have split centrally to permit the fetus to grow, leaving her detached from her core strength.
Up until now, her energy and strength have been devoted to her independent desires. Now they are devoted to keeping an embryonic life incubated and emerging. Her autonomy is gradually disappearing. (This might be a good time to say, I love you mom!)

How does this instability sure up the future for nurturing a new life?

Stripped of independence, completely exposed to the world, overwhelmed with fatigue, empathy turns to sympathy toward herself. She is solely responsible for another life form, afraid of unexpected pregnancy conditions (breech, cerclage, preeclampsia), as well as the common cold. She believes that the baby isn’t fully hers to safeguard until it is born.

I liken this unstable state to jibbing, a sailing maneuver that turns the stern of the boat, so that the wind changes from one side of the sail to the other. There is a moment in the maneuver that the sail is completely disconnected from the wind, directionless, powerless; but to navigate through life changes one must jib, let go of the control, to transform values and align with new circumstances. This applies no matter what you are birthing in life!

In this personal maneuver she transforms. She cries a lot. She is no longer embarrassed to feel; she has no physical shame left! In this loss of autonomy an internal spark chases her into action. The urgency to nest has her spouting demands, and expecting others to jump. Her mind becomes insightful, sensitive to the single life force she is sharing with her baby, knowing (not guessing) what they need.

In this lost state she finds her direction. A direction that can only go forward; there is no turning back. She has jibbed successfully!

All of this to say, once the baby is born she will need to jib back into the wind to re-find her independence. And when she does she will become acutely aware of the split down her body’s center, where her baby once lived. Alone in herself again, she is forever changed. Lorelei remembers from her first pregnancy, “I felt like I was missing a body part. It took me nearly 3-years to actually be able to own my new self. It was a weird identity crisis.” She recalls that trying to go back was the wrong focus. Trying to be healthy and embody a better newfound sexy–mature, accepting, soft woman–is what completed her experience of being a human incubator. To create a stable internal environment her external standards had to weather physical and emotional instability, but as Lorelei says, “Life is more than appearances. I can’t imagine life without children.”

Entitlement isn’t to be judged in new mothers. It is founded in the fact that she is a spirited and devoted incubator for the human race. As fellow human beings we are obliged to help her! Help support the journey back to herself.