Tag Archives: Body Connection

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The Secret of Brilliant Movement – Mini Sensation Meditation

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Let’s make this interactive:

This might be a conversation you open and hold with your body only, or perhaps you’d like to share your discoveries with the rest of us.

Diving into Sensation. Or tip toeing. Or crashing. Or stomping. Or sinking. Or slipping in.

Take a moment and awaken your Body Awareness. Three full, easy breaths.  Bring your attention to a body part and notice how it feels. Choose a sensation word and said it softly out loud. The door is open…

How do you define “brilliant” movement?

What is the Sensation of brilliant movement?

Would you describe your movements every moment as brilliant ?

Let’s not think of this as an all-or-nothing proposition, so… where and when are you moving brilliantly?

Do you sense brilliance in your entire body or does a particular body part or area come to mind?

When you receive the answer, stay with it. See in your mind’s eye and feel your brilliant movement as an immediate and intimate experience. In the intimacy is the details.

Is it when you’re dancing with your friends? Are you moving brilliantly when you’re running? When you’re cooking?

What is it you do, then, that isn’t brilliant?

Why isn’t it brilliant?

Who told you it wasn’t brilliant?

Not brilliant compared to what?

Revisit your brilliant movement. Take time to consider the questions and the answers your body gives you. Spend as much time in any one as you like. As with any of my meditation suggestions, you can explore the meditation in it’s entirety or you can take it apart. Play with one question in the car, stopped in traffic. Play with a question while you’re standing in line and another at the computer, in front of the tv or anywhere to practice and heighten body awareness.

Remaining connected to the sensation of brilliant movement in your body, invite your mind to explore these mental toys:

What about using the words brilliant and energetic interchangeably?

Where does your sensation go?

Now we’ll use brilliant interchangeably with difficult.

Where does your mind go? What sensation or sensations do you notice?

How about brilliant and specific?

How are specific and difficult movements connected to brilliant movement? Are they?

Let’s go to brilliant and painful.

Are any of your brilliant movements painful? Yes? Why? Must the movements result in pain to be brilliant?

What if we use the words brilliant and functional interchangeably?

Will you go back and answer any of the above questions differently? Is there a change in your body sensation?

How about we use the words brilliant and pleasurable interchangeably?

What changes now? Is there a difference between functional movement and pleasurable movement? Sensation?

Now let’s make easy and brilliant interchangeable.

What’s the change? Does the change occur in your mind as shifts of perspective? Is the change wholly physical?

A bit of both?

Let’s bring the sensation and concept of satisfaction into the equation. Brilliant and satisfying?

When and where is your movement brilliant and satisfying?

Ok, adding  another element into the mix.

For brilliance, it must also be satisfying and painful. To be satisfying, it must be brilliant and painful. To be painful, it must also be brilliant and satisfying? Does this work? Is it possible? Where does it breakdown? Do you know this sensation or these sensations in your body?

Are all of these possible? Some? None?

When we make brilliant interchangeable with authentic, what happens?

Brilliant with healthy?

How easily can you equate your body’s natural and unfettered movement with brilliance?

Where does your mind go when you consider brilliance in the organic nature that is your very personal movement style?

Are there rules to being brilliant? Is there a charge for brilliant movement? A piper to pay?

Is brilliant movement expensive?

Is there a sacrifice?

Or is brilliance freedom?

The “Secret” is within you.

Art by Kalidou Kasse

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Embracing Nature

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I’m having the pleasure of playing with how I wish to brand what I do. Happily, I am finally Do-ing what I am. Apparently it is critical that I define myself. Defining myself is something that I’ve  been resisting as I have found that exercise to be limiting. Now, it seems, business people tell me I must find some verbiage to describe this thing I do. In less than a paragraph!

I love to Move! No? Not specific enough? I love to Move ALOT!!!

Alchemy speaks to change, transformation and for change or transformation there must be a catalyst…

Learning a new language as an adult can be challenging. It can often feel awkward, be embarrassing and feel thoroughly frustrating when the word desired cannot be enticed from memory or is simply not yet in the vocabulary.

The above is pretty much how I feel when I speak all the time – in English.  I am far more comfortable communicating through my body. That doesn’t mean I avoid speaking. I am aware that I am able to communicate with something closer to impeccability if I can move.

As a child I would take a failing grade on an assignment rather than speak in front of the class. In college and beyond, I took public speaking classes and actor’s workshops – to no avail. In each situation we were given clear and repeated instruction not to move while speaking. Being that I would rather move than speak, it’s not a wonder that verbal communication did not become more comfortable.

Like I said in an earlier post, my earliest memory is a sensation. My connection to my body has been strong my entire life. I moved all the time as a child. I liked speed and grace. When puberty kicked in, my familiar body became very unfamiliar. I easily weighed 40 pounds more than I do now. My brain didn’t get it right away, so I approached movement as though I was in my former body. I didn’t receive speed and grace. I couldn’t get off the ground so I was slow and I didn’t understand how to move this new self and grace wasn’t happening either.

At 18 I was introduced to body building and my body got to play with new toys. This was the first glimpse I got of “mind-body” work; I thought about the muscles I wanted to change and it happen. Like an eager child, my nervous system drank in the sensory information. I didn’t know what was expected of my body, but my trainers (Olympic power lifter trainer and a physical therapy student) were delighted.

In the beginning the sensations were fresh and fun. The stronger I got, the more my body changed and the lighter I felt. I felt quick, sleek and elegant in a foreign way.

Then, my trainers shifted gears and wanted me to compete. In one word, the fun, the pleasure, the lightness was gone. I was sleek and elegant, why – how could this body compete in body building? The sense I had of my body from the inside was not quite the same as the external reality. Uh hu, I’d seen the cuts, but only when I was lifting, then I slinked away all swishy and liquid, to play on another piece of equipment.

When my boyfriend commented in displeasure on my “wings”, my illusion was shattered. I saw then. What I saw did not square with what I sensed as my body when I moved.

Since that time I have kept my body’s responsiveness quiet. It wasn’t feminine. I didn’t have to be body building either, so to look “acceptable” I had to be very conscious about my choices – lighter weights, no challenge, not much fun.

Then the pain started.

I was surprised by the voice of my body and even more surprised when orthopedists couldn’t seem to diagnose it properly. After a few years, the white-hot shrieking dulled. A dull ache it remained until 5 or so years ago. At that point I began to question the true origins. A flash of realization and I knew that this pain was about more than teaching too many classes or kick boxing. It was the how.I was suppressing my Nature so that those around me would be comfortable. In that suppression I couldn’t ever gauge the depth of what I could be capable of.

Many, many people go through long periods of their lives playing someone else; being something other than what they really are because it was what was expected. Some make the break and choose authenticity. Many more forget that instinctive part of  them that knows how to move. They forget, so they pretend that there is no instinctive part – that they are civilized and that since movement is what children and “savages” do, they will be still.

And the pain starts.