Session 6: Movement

+ Introduction

All the stretching, yoga, and meditation in the world does nobody any good, unless they are interested in a lasting peace—which is all well and good, it’s amazing and everyone should be interested in that—but all this should be for a reason.

Whether that reason is to reduce the pain your injury causes, whether that reason is because you want better sleep and your herniated disc keeps you tossing and turning, or something else, regardless, it’s reducing your effectiveness and causing a strain on your psycho-emotional process.

Chances are, you’re putting in a lot of energy and effort that you’d much rather put into other parts of your life.

The same is true if you don’t even have an injury and are trying to understand your body better.

So to be a more effective representation of yourself in every moment, to grow and expand and transcend, you have to be able to move.

Well, you don’t have to, but it really does help.

And that’s what we’re going to have you start doing in this lesson.

With practice visualizing and tuning in to the region of your injury, or trauma, you will be able to focus your awareness on different locations within your body.

With more practice, you will be able to focus your attention faster and faster, decreasing the time between recognition states.

Applied internally, you will realize a more active control over your emotional state.

You will be using your mental and emotional resources at the optimum level for your chosen state of being, which is limited only by your imagination, only by the limits of what you decide will be available for you.

The mechanism that is used to release tension through body scans & asanas is the same assess-release-surrender platform used here.

Notice any sense of expansion when you release tension during the asana practice, and you will find that you associate a similar positive feeling about finding limiting belief structures.

Speedy recognition becomes the norm.

This increased efficiency rapidly expands to other elements of your awareness, from the micro to the macro.

Better navigating the flows of life becomes second-nature.

With practice shifting your awareness through your body and through the focal point for your body/mind consciousness, you will begin to rapidly gain insight into the nature of your chosen injury/trauma/memory/pain point.

During a movement, when you feel a twinge, consider the relationship between your thoughts, and look into how you feel.

Check in and ask yourself: How am I feeling, right now?

+ The Power of Positive Reinforcement: Recognize the "Aha!" Moment

Positive reinforcement is the master key to transformation.

Positive reinforcement is how the mind is trained.

It’s the foundation of change: recognizing what you are doing right, and pointing your entire being towards that.

It is essential that you do not resort to negative stimuli to prod yourself onwards.

If you notice that you have a limiting belief or that you feel bad about something, gently bring your attention back and feel good about having noticed it, and then feel doubly good for having brought yourself back.

In this way, you will make this recognition faster and more available.

When we engage with self-judgement or self-recrimination at the recognition of our attention having strayed, the mind associates recognition as a bad thing, and over time your attention will stray even further.

If you get down on yourself for noticing that you feel bad, you will be less likely to notice next time. This is such a big issue that it deserves to be said again:

Whenever you recognize that your attention has strayed, feel good at having noticed it, and then gently redirect your attention.

To do otherwise is to train your mind to be even more scattered.

When you have an ‘aha!’ moment of noticing that you feel bad, acknowledge that it happened, and feel joy at having recognized that fact.

+ Introduction

Find an open location with clean airflow, free from bugs and dust, and set aside the next twenty minutes or so to really let this lesson settle in.

Hold each posture for three to five breaths, and take a deep breath between the end and the beginning of each posture. Remember to body scan with every breath and then to, if your awareness becomes centered on a particular location, observe the location if not the tension itself, witness the tension, allow it to be, and then to identify any other possibilities for holding yourself in that position.

Allow your body to find the natural, restful ease in each pose.

Remember: listen to your body and open your awareness.

Notice the pulse of each pose as you make micro-movements with the breath.

Holding postures will not become rigid if the adept continues to breathe deeply and is aware of the undulating wave this sends through the whole body.

Guide your movements with your breath, and feel good.

+ The Sequence

Namaste!

The theme of this sequence is reinforcement. When you set an intent, and then notice that you’ve strayed from that, it’s important to allow yourself to feel good for having noticed – to positively reinforce the recognition.

This is a movement sequence – the focus is to develop your capacity to move in different ways, to develop supporting structures in your bodymind, and to find comfort in the new.

• Tadasana (standing)
• Wide-legged squat
• Knee raises and twist
• Tadasana (standing)

Maybe you’re not going as fast as you want, maybe you’re not going as far down as you want. It’s important that you feel good at these little recognitions. You have a desire to improve! You’ve noticed where you are! In this way, you gently train the mind to be more effortless, and to not force your way through things.

• Stand down in base
• Purva Uttanasana (Frontal Body Lifted Pose / Bridge)
• Purva Uttanasana (Leg Lift Variation)
• Matyasana (Fish Pose)
• Savasana (Corpse Pose)

Check in with yourself, and feel good at every ache and pain and release of tension – not in an egoic way, not in a prideful way or a self-destructive way, but simply for having shown up and getting on the mat, doing the practice. You don’t need to force yourself to do anything, just to allow your natural expression to reveal itself through time and consideration.

• Sukhasana (Seated Pose)

+ Introduction

Your bodymind is a part of an integrated whole, just as your awareness is.

At a certain level of awareness, all subject/object distinctions fall away and are understood to be merely for the sake of convenience, convention, and communication.

However, for most of us, we have become identified with our bodies and the assumption of separation has become default.

You are seen as separate from me.

Which must be the case, because you’re here, and I’m there.

Your awareness is wrapped around, entangled, if you will, by the idea of the physical bodymind, by our identifications.

A belief in separation, in lack, is the root cause of most of our suffering, anxiety, and fear.

This constitutes the person, for most of us.

The more clearly we dissect what exactly is and is not true: for example, I am a person, in a world, with these beliefs about the way the world works, the more we observe and understand this, the more effortless it becomes to rest not as a person, but as the bigger I-Am Presence.

So to understand your physical body, to build a deeper relationship to the focal point of your awareness in this seeming reality through even such things as how to stretch properly, with awareness, you can start to see the body not as something to just be lived with, or as a shell carrying around a higher consciousness that is the ‘Real You,’ but instead the body becomes more of a portal, a gateway for greater understanding, and your inner radiance begins to shine through more and more, pervading all aspects of your life.

Through tracing this process at play in yourself in your day-to-day life, and then demonstrating its validity to yourself, over and over again, until it becomes your experiential reality, you will turn an unconscious process into one that you can actively observe and influence.

By positively reinforcing the recognition of a negative emotion, you will allow yourself to:

a) more readily notice the next time your conditioning shows up, decreasing recovery time from injuries, and when applied internally, to your conditioned habits and attitudes and beliefs,

b) opens an inner dialogue that will automatically shift you from “I have adopted a point of view” into “I choose a point of view.”

This is a multi-layered process.

Belief structures are usually nested within each other in a matryoshka doll of a belief system, usually contradictory in the most exquisite ways.

During the practice of yoga, while you are moving and interacting with the subtler aspects of your body, especially during injury recovery and trauma engagement, this process will become increasingly clear and vibrant.

Remember, our bodymind is a miracle, and not a threat, something to be bashed and battered into submission, although this conflicts with many commonly held beliefs about the mind in spiritual and therapeutic circles.

This is how we learn, and how we entrain the brain, consciously or otherwise.

Regardless of how much you want to believe you are more than just your body, which is the case and everyone should at least consider the thought for a moment, regardless of how much you may disidentify with the body, it pays to pay attention to it.

If you still want to believe that there is an objective universe out there, beyond you, if you still want to believe that there is an external world that exists independent of you and your perception of it, if you still want to keep yourself limited to something as seemingly small as such and such number of cells and bones and maybe some brain goop somewhere, if you still want to believe that you are somehow independent from everything, and unable to be anything more than what you already are, that’s up to you.

Looking beyond the body and towards that principle of aliveness, paying attention to the innermost sense of “me” while living life and while practicing the asana sequences, this greatly accelerates the path of self-growth and expansion because the same mechanisms the body/mind access when running a body scan and releasing tension while in a position are the same mechanisms used when focused internally, on perceived barriers and obstacles and hiccups and all the petty frustrations of a life of victimization and lack.

In other words, developing an asana practice supercharges the processes of both the paths of Self-Realization and Self-Actualization, The twin paths of Awakening and Empowerment.

To the true master, everything is a tool.

To be a king, one must act like a king.

Or queen.

Whatever your preference.

+ Homework

Pay attention to how you move. That’s it.

Next time you lean forward to grab a cup of water, next time you turn your head to answer a question, whatever it is you do with your life, you are moving your body. I have yet to meet a completely static consciousness that did not move (at this plane of reality).

There is no movement that does not use these parts of your body.

Let’s just limit this to the everyday experience of being a human in a civilized society, and not bring in niche cases like acrobats or ballerinas. This would be a different course where they my intended audience.

Bearing in mind that I expect you to be a reasonably intelligent, self-dedicated individual with at least your own fair share of discipline, your body will do these movements throughout the day, in one form or another.

What I want you to be absolutely clear on, experientially in your own life, in your own mind, in your own psyche, is to see in everyday life, in action, how you move.

Become aware of your own experience of being alive in the world, and how your body is a core part of that reality.