- Refining and Perfecting the Body as a Vehicle of Manifestation, a Vessel of the Spirit, and a Temple
- Body Sensing to Promote Mastery of the Body
Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern, and includes and is the soul; Whoever you are, how superb and how divine is your body, or any part of it!
—Walt Whitman
The saying that the body is the temple of your spirit is a familiar one. Yet often spiritual paths can focus on the spirit and neglect the bodily aspects of our lives. This dimension focuses on working with the body and body sensing so that the body can become the vehicle of your spiritual development. How well you care for your body directly affects both of the quality of your day and the long term quality of your life. Regular activity you enjoy is fundamental to your physical and emotional vitality.
Body Sensing can be seen as a re-acquisition of natural human capacities that have not been cultivated because of the overwhelmingly mental and external orientation of our lives. As you become more adept at body sensing it yields two important results. One is improved communication between body and brain and a strengthening in your ability to make positive choices for yourself. And secondly, it brings you to an experience of your own flow, power, and inner strength.
How does the tangible body become a vessel for the intangible spirit? Where there is calm and quiet, there is an entrance point for God. The subtle enters through the things in us that are like the subtle. One of them being calm, one of them being quiet. It is very important to cultivate those aspects and atmospheres. And what are their sources within the body? One place calm is going to come from is being grounded, relaxed, and body sensing the tangibility of the body. The other place calm and quiet comes from is the spaciousness of space and air, and body sensing the intangibility of the body. It is from a blending of those elements that calm and quiet will slowly suffuse the whole body as an aspect and atmosphere within which it dwells.
A sample of some key things to be focused on throughout the day in working with this dimension:
- The basic alignment focuses: grounded, tall and upright, open in the chest, and being one unit, which is basically the Pole of I from the third eye down to the hara.
- Once you set up these focuses, movement principles to work with are: moving as one integrated whole from center (the hara), circularity, rhythm, and momentum, and the arch principle behind all the other movement principles – push and relax.
Push and relax is about doing everything that is necessary to perform any movement well – that’s the push part – and steering clear of extra, unnecessary, disjointed, wasteful, uncentered movements and tension in any part of the body that isn’t about the muscle contractions specifically necessary for performing that activity – that’s the relax part.
Thirty spokes converge upon a single hub; It is on the hole in the center that the use of the cart hinges.
—Lao Tzu
