Lost Art of Squatting

I wish to discuss the importance of squatting, at least for me.

In light of the last post on yoga and digestion, hips and mother complex, (seen here) where I discussed being grounded through the heels (connecting to mother, the great nourisher) during forward fold, and the new ability to see into the gut region, the seat of the second brain or the soul, I wish to discuss another facet of this: the squat.

The squat rounds my low back. As I wrap my arms around myself, I am soothed, as if Mother was here in her most loving embrace. This engages my anus and my rectum, and strengthens the muscles connected to my loose hip.

For a girl with digestive and mother-related issues, this is an excellent pose too. I am continuing the work with uttanasa and garland pose with arms hugging the legs, coming down and back up through chair pose. I warm up with a sun salutation.

The Human Condition, Yoga | 13.12.2009 15:05 | No Comments

Openings

My yoga practice has taken me deeper and deeper into the levels of my body, from the skin inwards. At first my attention was solely with my posture, and the organs of action: namely, arms and legs. I moved towards understanding how my arms and legs attached to my trunk, noticing when the big bones sat in the joints funny. Shoulders and hips, my teacher told me, are multi-directional joints that are representative of options. I remained unaware of the rest of my organs, until my colon got ulcers and I could not help notice it was out of whack. The point here is how much there is going on in the body underneath the skin in the organs, which attach to bones and are affected by the joints. Many of us, including myself, have been cut off at the neck, as Marion Woodman writes. The stuff of our intellect lives in its own world, often disconnected from the heart and the gut. My awareness of myself was scarcely more than skin deep, stuck in the contours of the surface.

The pain in my sacrum from my weak left buttock, which let my leg dangle off to the side, brought my attention to the options represented by the new awareness I was getting in my left hip and the muscles around it. I went to see Rick Olderman, and he helped me a ton. I learned to work my left buttock more and stretch my front thigh area. RIck’s work is amazing.

The physical correction of lifting my left quad even more in a forward bend put me down more firmly into my heels, rooting me more firmly to the Earth, the sacred Mother Matter. Fascinatingly, this adjustment in my forward bend, as my crown stretched toward the earth, facilitated an opening of awareness in my anus… the chakra associated to this deals with rootedness to Earth. I knew I had been cut off here. My teenage bulimia too, repudiated motherly nourishment and nurture. There in the gut, power center, fear of my father depreciated my self-worth. There, when I am there in a forward bend, staring at my knees, I see the other side of me. Folded in half, the other side of me is directly in front of my gaze. I can look into my gut, look for the blocks, breathe in opening, offer my attentive love, and she responds.

That is the thing to do in some of these yoga poses, and it had just been theory before: connect the crown and the anus. As humans, we are connected to spirit AND matter. We are mind AND body. Both demand our awareness– the rational and the irrational. Words AND symbols. The spoken and the unsaid. The good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the civilized and the wild. When the one is repressed, it begins to clamor for attention. Doesn’t it?

Rick, the physical therapist whom I highly recommend can be found here and here

The Human Condition, Yoga | 7.11.2009 16:38 | 2 Comments

Negative Animus in a Snake

This dream began as a tour of Soren and Steph’s house, and it was totally my dream house. Afterwards we were outside in the woods. A white and orange spider with long webby legs appeared in my hand, and it turned into a nasty, aggressive, orange snake, that shot at me from the river and then clamped on to my finger. I was squeezing its neck with my other hand so that it wouldn’t bite down any deeper. It was very intense!

I had been having no idea what this snake could possibly represent.

I was riding along Chris on our bikes, talking about how the school job that I thought I had so luckily got was not going to pan out (it was already supposed to have started several times. It’s already Thursday again, and I haven’t heard a thing about Monday.) I had started looking for other jobs. I am down to one night a week at the restaurant, and the sub job at Sheridan is by no means a regular source of income. No calls yet this week. Jefferson County requires a 5 year sub license; Denver is not hiring, neither is Littleton, except there are some paraprofessional positions that I have applied for. I haven’t heard anything from anyone with these yet. They barely pay enough for me to get by, anyway, and some don’t provide sufficient hours. Today I looked at Higher education jobs. Most require way more experience in fields than I have. However, a couple turned up that I think I may have a shot at, especially with my master degree candidacy! I just have my thesis to write… and they pay well! Who me, a sweet job at CU? Why not???? Everyone must start somewhere, and for this job, at least I’m not OVER-qualified! Maybe this job I “got” in July was just a place-holder, until a better job came up. I hope, pray, and dream…

The park with the trees began to look like the scenery from my snake-bite dream. What did this snake feel like? Woodman, the Jungian analyst of an author whose book I just read, is describing a shift of consciousness that asks us to embody our consciousness, to drop down into the gut, which is much like a second brain. This part of us operates on feeling and metaphor. When this feminine side of our nature is pushed aside, we may be overtaken with a negative sort of patriarchy, which is all about go, go, go, and get, get, get. It strives after perfection, rationality, pre-dominating an age which is un-balance, out-moded, according to Woodman. I see it, the materialism and physicalism in our culture, in individuals, and the sadness and disease it brings. I do believe that this type of thinking, that was imposed on me by my father, literally, and that I then imposed on myself, has caused my dis-ease, literally, again. Patriarchy, closely associated with the legacy of Cartesian dualism, which has allowed this practice of disembodied spirit, or as Dr. Gillian writes (how different is what he says, anyway?) disembodied intellect. I have been cut off at the head, not listening to the wisdom of my body, telling me to slow down, and smell the roses more often. Really, really, smell them. Is it surprising in this culture which has paved over and polluted much of the world? We are cut off from that nature, material Earth, our mother, whose language, in its positive form, is love.

I was cut off from my mother when she died.

Linda told me to slow down, warned me about burning it at both ends. I bet she read the wisdom of Woodman.

No, this snake in my dream was not negative femininity, dealing out death (from which comes new life.) It felt like the negative animus, or negative masculine principle within me, arising from an absent father (also something Linda discerned.) This time it was a snake, not a big black unseen, paralyzing force. The feminine is about being, and the masculine, about doing, I imagine. When this capacity is diminished, this portion of the human being is unable to execute projects successfully. The snake represented an inhibited animus in my professional life. I have not sought out a job like I found today at the university, because I didn’t even know a job like that existed, yet I’ve been training for a job like this during all my time at the university. I DO want to work at the college level, in a humanities field- social science, political science, psychology… my thesis reflects that. I can, nothing is stopping me but myself. (And negative archetypal constellations, as Woodman would say.)

It time I engage my creator function, create a form, and fill it out with my energy.

I’ve just been in charge of healing the little girl in me so I can move on, be an individual, creating my own prosperity and well-being.

Dreams, Psychology, The Human Condition | 27.08.2009 23:05 | No Comments

Stream of Consiousness

Neighborhood schools

What goes on in them, I wonder?

I want to infuse them with energy

I reflect on the value of Community

How well do we know ours?

Membership in community, have we lost this?

Shamanic rites of initiation, transformation

Each individual faces the unconscious

The unknown

The shadow

What of this personal transformation?

School of the Self

The Human Condition | 11.04.2009 19:29 | No Comments

From Gandhi and the One-Eyed Giant

Introduction by Thomas Merton

Tyranny, which makes a sagacious use of every human need and indeed artificially creates more of them in order to exploit them all to the limit, recognizes the importance of guilt. And modern tyrannies have all implicitly in one way or another emphasized the irreversibility of evil in order to build their power upon it.

Hitler’s world was built on the central dogma of the irreversibility of evil. Just as there could be no quarter for the Jews, so the acts that eliminated them were equally irreversible and there could really be no excuse for the Nazi’s themselves…

It is no accident that Hitler believed firmly in the unforgivableness of sin…”

In St. Thomas Aquinas, we find a totally different view of evil. Evil is not only reversible but it is the proper motive of that mercy by which it is overcome and changed into good. Replying to the objection that moral evil is not the motive for mercy since the evil of sin deserves indignation and punishment rather than mercy and forgiveness, St. Thomas says that on the contrary sin itself is already a punishment “and in this respect we feel sorrow and compassion for sinners.” (Summa Theologica) In order to do this we have to be able to experience this sin as if it were our own. (Original italics) But those who consider themselves happy and whose sense of power depends on the idea that they are beyond suffering any evil are not able to have mercy on others” by experiencing the evil of others as their own. Ibid.

Have I been a tyrant? Expecting inhuman perfection from myself, being so violent towards me, having spotted an unforgivableness of my being. I noticed my frigidity towards others, sometimes… holding them responsible to a stoic point of callousedness.

My turning point is compassion towards myself. Transformation. An inner peace exuding non-violence, not to myself, nor to anyone. Liberating the oppressed and the oppressor.

Gandhian non-violence-not the means and the ends, but a means to an end…

The Human Condition | 14.08.2008 22:43 | No Comments