Looking Glass Rock, Ashville, N.C.
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52.
The Evolving Form 6/ 07,2004Since my visit with Ken Wilber, Brenda and I took a road trip to Ashville, NC. While driving it was like a continuation of the meeting with Ken. He spoke to us through the tapes of Kosmic Consciousness.
Looking
Glass Rock, Ashville, N.C.
I recommended this set to others for a comprehensive understanding of Wilber’s work and what will become our living future, hallelujah. For me, along with some other readings I am starting to have some different views of what integral means and how it affects the way we both look at other works and how we talk about them. That the integral age is dawning, I have no doubt. It is the language of the integral modal that is new and shifts thinking time and again towards a more embracive and discerning inspection of how the work of Alignment for the body and body evolution itself are being treated.
Perhaps, when I have said that alignment is the bodies’ nature and we get pulled away or distracted by ignorance, I am making a blunder, which is called a pre/trans fallacy. That means, in a way, that nothing is there when we take our first breath, but the process of becoming acquainted with the body form. Oh yes, there is usually a lot of love in the room. Contemporary science does acknowledge that natures form is updated with each succeeding generation, so I'll buy that.
“After conception we have a human being first in utero (womb) and thereafter for several years fairly helpless and at the mercy of the caregivers and the surrounding world. The potential psychological impact of maternal stress, anger, fear or frustration on a child in utero has already been well described. But what is the impact of prenatal or early childhood emotional trauma on our tensegrity structure.” Aleš Urbanczik.
So as we develop and grow, we acquire cultural information about our body rather than it being a pregiven. Breathing itself, can go from an automatic response to a transformative process as we learn more about this dynamic.
Considering that easily 90 percent of earth's population doesn’t know where their joints are located or how movement at each joint occurs, much less where the diaphragm is and how it functions, education about the body becomes a useful exploration. Some basic understandings can be gained by simply using an anatomy book and finding all the moving parts of your own body. For children this is generally a fun activity of locating and moving all the joints of the body.
Walking around a room with attention on the skeleton and feeling the bones move may be very enlightening. Not knowing the skeletal make up or only having a vague idea where things are located, I feel, can lead to many problems later in life. Professional athletes who are vague on their form often have problems for this very reason. The problem then gets taken to one specialist or another to handle and may work well for awhile but the vagueness can remain in place.
This absence of both understanding the make up of the form along with not understanding the dynamics of breathing can lead some to say that we are victims of gravity. Fortunately our body form is quite durable and people are living longer even with out knowing what ‘the precious human body’ is all about. Therefore education on the body, to my mind, can help us lengthen the life span of the body and also add to the time we can have for integrating all the current goodies of the subtle and causal realms.
I am suggesting that when we treat ourselves with what ever therapy or yoga or skill, we might have some basic information about the construction of the form and how it moves, to better understand how a particular practice works our form. From this basic start, ideas of how alignment principles influence the way we use the body can be introduced, so we can develop some constructive habits for living in the body. See the ABC’s of alignment treated in previous blog entries for a fuller explanation of the principles. The Rolfing axiom, that structure determines function points to the need that we understand our own structural make up.
By educating ourselves about the body and its alignment we have a foundation for working with all the fine activities that our elders have prepared for us. We can contribute more to our understanding of any practice by knowing our own form better both structurally and sensuously. Bottom line is, that being in the body can be more joyful when we acquire some simple basics about the structure and movement of the body.
In June of 2003 I started to get a bursitis pain in my right arm. This came on full blown and had me working with it, by myself, for a full year. I knew this is something I would not take to a doctor Because of all the cases I have treated. Usually I have helped others, within a session or two, both eliminate the problem and learn how to work with the joints so they are not becoming inflamed again. However treating my own inflammation was a long drawn out process that I welcomed. Daily, I would work with movements, breath and releasing. For a while it was certainly an exercise right out of Jon K. Zinn’s book ‘Full Catastrophic Living’. ‘Work with it, be mindful’ etc.
That a good Acupuncturist or Rolfer could have helped, I have no doubt, but I am fairly isolated here and don’t have immediate access to these modalities, besides the challenge of working this out myself is always instructive since it is what I generally recommend to others after some education about the joints. I did have the benefit of Brenda’s excellent Massage to work out the many muscular knots the formed around the scapular and shoulder for which I was grateful. Whether this was psychosomatic or a 50 year old injury coming up for inspection made little difference to the fact that just working with it was all I could do, while feeling confident the body will respond. That problem is 95% solved and truly on its way out. This doesn’t mean another demon will not rise to take its place, for sure our daily body sensations are numerous and having an awareness of the structure and its design has paid my doctor bills.
Love the body
Posted by harmon at June 7, 2004
Comments
Dear Harmon, Dear Brenda,
Thanks for your mail, I tried to answer, but my mails keep coming back by mail
daemons...so I try it this way and copy it in here:
Since we have a lot of Computer virus problems around here at
the moment, you might rather use klexelf@gmx.net for e-mail address, and sorry
that I answer many days later. After being "jobless" for a long time, I started
to work at the beginning of May at a place called "Puzzle", a clubhouse for
young underdogs in a nearby town called Prenzlau, not well payed and more than
eight hours a day, but a perfect chance to develop Bodhichitta and a little
puppet theatre.
Thanks to you and your blogs I'm reading Jean Houston's Mystical Dogs in English
and (thanks to my friend Kathrin) Pema Chödrön in German. I still dream about
either coming over again and learn more about alignment or bring you people over
here. But though the world is providing me with a lot of enlightenment-stuff I'm
still missing a gentle rain of money and a man who loves me. It's a bit lonely
sometimes now that my son lives on his own. But I'm not complaining, just a
little to tired to go on writing.
So more later...Hope you are all fine in "Avalon"
LOVE & PEACE
Elfriede
Posted by: Elfriede Schrodt on June 8, 2004
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