Movement

Over the weekend, I attended a workshop with Michael Shea at Native Yoga. We explored the movement of early stage embryos as it relates to the biodynamics of the human body, and we touched each other’s heads, palpating and observing the subtle movements of the cranial bones. It was pretty cool to be in a room of masters, learning something totally new. My sign-up for this course was random and impulsive, having decided to sign up for all the workshops at the studio rather than trying to decide which ones would be most beneficial, entertaining or easy.

I miscalculated the depth of the work we were doing and attended the Jerry Garcia Birthday Bash immediately after the Sunday class session. Ideally, I should have gone home, reviewed my notes and the handouts, reached out to friends about practicing on them and gone to bed early, but instead, I went directly to the party. It started at noon and I arrived in the evening, during the lull between Guavatron and Unlimited Devotion; the weather was nice, partly cloudy, and the artificial rainforest inside the stage area was humid, but well ventilated. I had some friends with a table and proceeded to enter into what I call a full body shake while having a mind-blowing epiphany on movement.

The first thing Dr. Shea showed us during the projector/media section of class was a murmuration: a large flock of starlings dancing in the sky, holding form, but no identifiable constructs; he showed this to us as a metaphor for how the early stage embryo moves as it begins to take form. My partner, Todd, and I spoke briefly about how it resembled the timelapse I had taken of the class he taught at the Bimini Hilton last month; and I considered how important yoga is to me and how important it is for us to move our bodies in these organized, but formless ways. When palpating his skull I felt some of the stretching-squeezing-expanding-condensing movements. Later, at the party, I let myself surrender to a similar movements in a pod of humans and remembered how healing it is to simply move.

I have to be honest, a few days before the workshop, I was falling asleep trying to review the handouts I’d been emailed before class. Embryos? I thought I was signing up for some kind of subtle scalp massage class. Yes, I recognized that the skull and early development were connected, but I didn’t realize we would be studying embryo movement, particularly the primordial ways that we move that forms our physical body and how it initiates development. I also didn’t realize that humans are the only mammals that never stop developing, therefore, we never really stop these movements. During discussion, Dr. Shea spoke about the patterns of these movements and touched on the biological laws that define them. In the hands-on portion of class, we palpated and observed these very subtle movements through the cranial bones. It’s powerful to notice anything subtle, especially on another human and in the stillness, I felt the movements of Todd’s skull. I also felt my aversion and fear of deep, subtle work from a decade ago, long before anyone ever taught me about energetic boundaries and energy clearing; I also felt the need to break through that fear, to facilitate my own self care and healing in that moment.

Rumi said that “your deepest presence is in the very small contracting and expanding.” It's not a hard bridge to cross to see the parallel of primordial movements to the organized movement practices of yoga asana. Most open movement based yoga teachers start out with a spinal warm-up, expressing the six ranges of motion of the central axis. No matter your involvement or following, to say you “like yoga” generally means you like something about the up-down-bending-twisting-squeezing-flowing-arching-collapsing-expanding movements of whatever practice you subscribe to. Maybe it makes you feel relaxed, or strong, or connected, or focused, maybe you never really thought about it, you just like it. Maybe all the yogis are tapping into a primordial urge to move in different ways and that’s why yoga has become a multibillion dollar industry; maybe buying yoga pants, self-help books and weeklong yoga retreats are just our consumer minds’ way of justifying the need to move our bodies.

After the second day of the two day workshop, I put on mascara, cute shorts and beelined it to the bar. Alcohol is extremely grounding and although I’ve laid off in the past year or so, it doesn’t suprise me that it was my go-to to unwind from the intensity of the weekend. Truth be told, the tequila numbed my energy body, but my mind was still processing. The band started to play and I started to sway, letting myself release more and more as the movement vibrated deeper into my gross body. I was just back from the stage and off to the left, so I could see most of the front and center crowd; I marvelled at the way each body moved side to side, back and forth, feeling out a rhythm and resigning to organic movemen patternst. It reminded me of Gloria Estefan’s late 80’s declaration that the “rhythm is going to get you.” It was interesting to see how humans, fixed on a two dimensional plane of movement (dance floor) still manage to express in multi-dimensional ways. It was interesting to be a part of that movement, as a single starling in the murmuration— the movement that only exists with us as a group.

While surrendering to the group movement dynamic of the audience, I let my eyes glaze over with joy and my mind wandered to the full body shake and how we, as humans, are constantly expressing that movement: as we fall asleep, our leg will twitch; or in response to pain, we will jerk an arm away and shake the hand; when displeased or uncomfortable, we shake our head side to side, motioning “no” with the top of our body; how we mate, using somewhat synchronized movements, and we mimic those movements through dance— a dance that formed on the cellular level. We shake or shudder to shed trauma by disrupting energy patterns, and rejuvenation to sleepy systems, In my massage practice, I used gentle shaking or jostling movements to break up holding patterns, move stagnant energy or keep the client from falling asleep. As I drift back to how much I love dancing, I reflect on how sometimes its hard to let go of everything that creates rigidity, how hard it is to just move; other times, I find myself needing to marinate in those movements for extended periods of time.

I think movement is a reset button that takes us back to what is referred to as primordial respiration— the very first movement our pre-embryonic bodies expressed; that we naturally feel drawn to organizations of humans expressing those movements, like yoga classes and concerts to feel healing at what may sometimes seem to be on a totally unconscious level; and group movement is a kind of therapy that mimics our natural, subtle, early developmental movements.