Bending backwards .. How do you do it safely?

That’s what we’ll be exploring this term .. in a round about kind of way.

How to look up at the stars effortlessly .. or maybe to reach for the stars. So many movements involve a movement of your body behind the coronal plane.

We’ll be looking at our relationship to gravity as a starting point. One of the major challenges many people face is that their idea of ‘up’ is distorted. It’s hard to go up if your idea of up is down or if it twists away to the left.

So we’ll set the instruments for the heart of the earth and consider the steering wheel for ‘up’. The major organs of balance in our body are the inner ear, the eyes and the soles of the feet. Notice that two of them are in the head.

So we’ll be looking at our remarkable head in this first session. I hop you’ll be as blown away as I have been. Did you know that there are 22 bones in your skull? (28 if you include the bones of the inner ear) This is one of them ..

It’s called the sphenoid bone. Can you sense where it sits? or does it float?

The hands and feet each have 26 bones and they sit at the end of our limbs. All those bones create degrees of freedom or possibilities of movement in different directions. Our skull with its 28 bones sits on top of our spine. The bones of the head don’t move like your hands or feet but consider the different expressions of your face and the way the spaces inside your skull can open and close. Just how do those 28 bones contribute to the way we inhabit and sense space? How do they contribute to the way we express ourselves?

It’s absolutely central to everything.

So we’ll look at all those bones and consider our heads anew because until we have a clear sense of the middle and a clear sense of the vertical, bending backwards like this extraordinary woman from Rajasthan will always be a struggle.

This lesson may come as a surprise. You’ll need a bit of wall.

This series will also explore the role played by the curves in our spine and the particular twists and turns of our posture. How do we go with the flow of those curves when that flow is so complicated by the habits of life and the unconscious restrictions of our psyche?

What keeps us upright and what drags us down? Where are you looking now?

The vividness of our internal life and the changes it brings to the way we feel and function is a remarkable thing. It’s so easy to be seduced into thinking our internal judgements and feelings are statements of fact.

I have had the strangest week. I’ve been overwhelmed by an illusion of too much to do when in fact I have merely been forced to be present to the underlying dynamics of my beautiful family of origin. My internal judgements have been laid bare as I prepare, with my siblings, a memorial for Alex.

A modicum of clarity at last appeared. I realised it was only one thing at a time and so with this post there is another tick on the list.

I’ve been avoiding this series of lessons for decades for perhaps the same reasons. It’s always seemed like a lot of effort. Of course, it’s actually the reverse. I just needed the time to find the wisdom.

The universe is a strange and beautiful place

This blog post relates to the first lesson in the Central Limb series. You can find that lesson by clicking here

Blog

The Central Limb 1 - The steering wheel for up