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Leo Peppas added a new photo to the album: Embodied Anatomy.
October 13 at 4:27am ·
Embodied Anatomy: Changing levels
Every time we shift levels, like from lying to sitting or standing, we are asked a similar question; ‘do we have the support to deal with our relationship with the world from this new perspective?’
The same process happens to us as babies, as we gradually come into the world, one step at a time, slowly finding support to deal with each new question - renegotiating our relationship with the world, defining who we are and the world we are meeting. There is a lot of wisdom in this process designed by evolution over the lifespan of the planet. It supports our informed choice making; built in a ‘bottom-up’ fashion, so the top-down, the more thinking based experience, has more freedom and space too. If you are short on humor, creativity, inspiration, and clarity of mind - this may be the first place to look: Do you have the support so that your mind is free?

One profound reason it takes us so long to learn to stand, is that we need a lot of support to deal with our big brains, to get the best and not the worst out of them. We are not only developing a capacity to manage complex social situations and choices, but also experiencing a rite of passage - the step by step of how we got there. How is it we seem to have missed the point here, to ignore the wealth and wisdom we are born with? Our teachers, the world we meet, like a trellis for a vine, can stimulate and encourage the whole or a part - most commonly it shapes us in its own form. Our caregivers, from the start, can unwittingly train us to fit perfectly into the consumer society, it’s values, to depend upon it, even to love it.

As babies, we spend months moving backwards and forwards between levels. This teaches us how to make fluid shifts between different states in the nervous system: If our urges are met with clarity by a world that confirms these, that satisfies them. But, to be a good consumer, it’s important that we don’t really know how to be truly satisfied or nourished, that we are dependent on others for this. Generally this teaches us to make a ‘deal’ in relationship, that binds us, yet at its base it feels unsafe, so we cling to it more tightly with the mind. When fear is at the base of all relational needs, we need to be able to listen to this fear to deal with this disconnect.

We see this clearly expressed in our society’s fanatic response to diet, the health of the body and sex.

When we see a baby move, we can observe what’s called the ‘satisfaction cycle’: the baby’s ability to get in touch with what it needs and to get these needs met in its relationship with the world. This tells us many things, like whether and where it needs more support. That is, if we can experience this ourselves we can see it; our gaze is informed by our own experience.

For the parents who are fortunate enough to have a more intact capacity to relate to the wider world, expressed in their fluent language of ‘relational movement’, there is more chance that they will nurture and nourish what is already there. These caregivers, for example when they relate to a baby, tend to naturally get down to its level. Literally; if a baby is crawling on the ground, it’s much easier to relate to it if you get down to its level rather than always dragging it to yours. The baby is at a level where it under-stands the world inside and out, how to interact, what makes sense, where the level of sophistication in the development of its nervous system can handle the relationship.

When for example we sit a baby up too early, or encourage it to stand and walk before its time, it can develop compensatory mechanism to cope – it is asked to flourish in an area it’s not yet ready, not backed up and supported fully enough. This encourages us to grip with the mind on the world outside for support, but support does not work that way, it may be promised but it cannot deliver. The cognitive mind and its immediate underlings, get too much attention before they are ready. What makes a human being special is not the unique capacity of the cognitive mind, it’s the whole, that includes everything that came before.

It’s remarkable how many babies I see with smart phones these days, an ironic and rather shocking replacement for the dummy! The question is which world do you want your baby to be ready to deal with? If we prepare our children to only deal with the consumer society, they remain slave to a system of exploitation without being empowered to make an informed choice, they can only deal in it not with it. The prison keepers become the mind reinforced by the body, particularly the muscles.

If you, like much of the world today, think it’s all about getting more sophisticated conscious muscle control, you may be missing the point completely. This idea is not new, its roots go back particularly to the Renaissance, when we first made a big step towards mastering nature, disconnecting the mind and body - we are now feeling more fully the consequences, the legacy of this choice. Anatomy, particularly the objectified form, still the most common approach, has a big portion of its origin here. Do we really still need to see the body from this disconnected point of view, to reinforce the misleading the illusion of mastery?

Returning to the practical example of changing levels, we need to be able to know on which level we need to be for the current state of our nervous system to best function. Do you know when you need to lie down, whether this would be better on your front or back? Do you know when are you ready to sit or come to your feet, whether you have the support? Not only from your willing, but from the integrity of the whole!

If we can’t answer these questions, manage this process, amongst many more important things, we may miss the opportunity to tune into the most nourishing practice. Learning to manage level change can enable us to better manage many things, like stress when we are challenged. Making informed choices is based to a large degree on an under-standing whose structure is built ‘bottom-up’, by the process of changing levels. When this is not available, we tend to give too much importance to purely ‘top-down’ processing, like only thinking about. This is plays out in many ways, for example the over importance, the value we give to information – brand names, image, being guided primarily by technology and information in general. In these times, the manipulation of information is more sophisticated than it’s ever been, we are certainly following that path consequently. The question is whether this is an informed choice that we collude with, or we can question.

Growing up, many of us never get enough chance to fully learn to listen to ourselves and benefit from a relationship where what we experience inside is met by the world outside. We often see babies propped upright long before their nervous systems have the capacity to deal with all the sophisticated information the world thrusts upon them in this posture. A baby needs to learn to get to sitting, standing and walking by itself, it will do so when its time, if as caregivers we trust ourselves. Sure some stimulation, a world that welcomes it, that embraces its whole, is also important.

Our sits bones are our first feet (to read more: Leo Peppas - Putting the embodiment back into anatomy is a... | Facebook). When we are ready to sit for the first time, when it will make sense, what we experience of the world inside and out, we yield, push and reach ourselves to sit on our sits bones. If this happens before its time, we are confronted by a level of sophisticated information we don’t have the support to deal with, and we are usually overwhelmed, collapsing or propping as a result. We have also not yet learned to choose whether we need to be there, we are not yet ready to define this boundary or have the capacity to say ‘yes or no’. So we have no choice but to learn compensations, to devel¬op strategies to deal with it as best we can. The baby learns not to make informed choices, but to deal as best it can with the world it’s presented with. Unfortunately not in a way that can get deeper, to ask the more important questions, to have the capacity to reality check in the present moment. To undo the conundrum it’s locked into. Being empowered to ask questions like; ‘Is this all there is?’

Many of the compensatory strategies we learn due to being ‘out of time’, contribute to an insatiable consumerism, we have lost our peace on earth, in this place we do not have a stable ground or clear boundary. Here there exists a perpetual un-quietness, because we grasp outside for something missing inside. Being bombarded with the world before we are ready may also teach us to overvalue ‘sophistication’, over stimulation of the nervous system and accompanying hor¬monal states, like adrenalin junkies - we may have never got to sense or value what is appropriate. States often become traits.

A yoga practice is an opportunity to clarify our relationship with the world – to either affirm or question our choice in each moment. For this we need to be able to find an authentic place to begin, to sense what kind of practice is appropriate today, to listen and to remain receptive throughout. The more we do this, the more a practice becomes intuitive, so rather than eternally following a fixed regimen, the practice unfolds experience by experience.

There are many cues that can of course help to guide us in this practice. For example each posture can be seen as a rite of passage that follows on to the next. If we rather jump ahead with another idea of what we ‘should’ do, we may well lose the thread and simply be reinforcing, in a more sophisticated way, the original disconnect.

For example, you can know if you are ready for the full Dandasana (see image), not only will the hips not grip, the belly not bulge, but more essentially you will not need to compromise your presence to do the posture - so you will be able to reference inside and outside, to listen fully, without too much willing.

There are many key areas in this kind of posture that can give you clues as to whether you can ‘afford’ to do the posture with¬out compromise (the term ‘affordance’ is borrowed in the context from neuroscience because the phenomenon are related): The girdles for example, and here you can even include the jaw with the hips and shoulders. There will usually be unnecessary gripping here because there is not enough core support, the sense of orientation has been compromised in favor of doing the posture. With too much willing often goes fear; when core stabilization is not present the girdles are grip for support. The body is not stupid, unless we see it from an uninformed point of view. Shoulder and hip tension are not necessarily bad, we just have to understand what they are telling us. If we are not careful, we can further develop the sophistication of a gross misunderstanding of our bodies.

One of the most enlightened definitions of core (from Hubert Godard) is not a muscular one: ‘it’s an expression of the way we meet the world’. Our core activates when we are in a clear relationship, there is nothing to ‘do’. Thinking we can activate our core, at least in any meaningful and sustainable way, is a confusion that expresses perfectly the state of our society. There is far more wisdom in the body than that! If we reduce the human being to muscles, we will miss the point.

Luckily, unlike when we are babies, we can consciously step back, return to a level where we have more clarity and can still deal with what happens. If we can accept the limitation, we can build support.

Navasana (boat posture in yoga) can be broken down into more manageable stages, or you can return to Dandasana or even Sukasana (sitting with crossed legs) with more height under the sits bones. An easy way to gauge this height, is that there should be no tension in the hips, you should be able to tip the pelvis backwards AND forwards without struggling in the hips, the sacrum needs to be free and breathing, so with a little rocking (that you don’t ‘do’), this also means the back of the pelvic floor needs to not be gripping. If you can’t listen to these cues, not ‘do’ them, listen, you may not be ready to make an informed choice to go to the next level.

That is a rather muscle biased point of view, of course there are other more subtle and profound ways to gauge this. The higher the easier, so sitting in a chair tends to be the least challenging way to sit upright. It’s more helpful to be honest and accepting than ‘should’ here. Just listen to your body’s response to the way you chose.

You can even return all the way back to lying on your back and then slowly make your way to standing. Going back does not literally mean that your practice is getting worse, it means you are finding the level where you can best engage, and then to possibly also be to able continue. Accepting what is appropriate for you, where you are now, is one of the first steps to discovering a nourishing practice, that will support you in your relationship with the world. Where you need to develop your listening skills before moving on.

Sometime we take a step back to go forwards!

Or you can do Navasana without enough support and build your six pack! Just be aware of what it may cost, that includes among many other things a compromise of the clarity of your voice and capacity to express.

If this idea challenges your value system, what’s more important to you - action or presence? Imagine there is a way to include both!

Every posture asks us different questions, but often with the same basic theme; ‘do we have the support to meet the world, without the need for all the compensations, in this challenge?’ This is one reason why postures like Navasana are so brilliant, they target key areas, that will pose all the tricky questions - to ask if we are clear in our intention and purpose, or if there is still too much willing. If appropriate assertion become stubborn defiance, it’s always an expensive strategy; so see if you are able to breathe freely without ‘doing’ the breath, observe whether your state is receptive, non-exclusive, spacious? Remember these are listening questions and not a doing.

For those that feel the need to activate certain muscles consciously, I suggest first learning to listen to what certain other muscles have to say about that! In muscular terms, as babies we spend some time in crawl¬ing before we first learn to sit, this ensures that there is enough differentiation in the Psoas and Iliacus complex (See image), and that they can function separately and to¬gether with their ally the Piriformis in the upright stance and walking. This also helps to ensure that the back of the pelvic floor is not habitually gripped. If there is chronic tension in the back of the pelvic floor, we will struggle to sustain core stabilisation within a responsive, supportive system. These are all listening skills we need if we are going to talk more. The majority of the time, the sacrum needs to be free to orient in gravity and to express the breath. The crura of the diaphragm (see image), in normal movement and posture, also need to be free for breathing and not acting as chronic stabilisers. If not this has an impact on the neuroendocrine system, it will affect your hormones and nervous system. (There are plenty more posts around this theme in the ‘embodied anatomy’ album: Facebook)

These are all key areas to check if you feel muscles are so important.

Interestingly, the way we look at muscles expresses just how informed our choice making is. So, if you currently believe it’s all about more control, this may simply be a sign, not to necessarily pursue this path, but rather instead to learn to first listen. It may be an expression of your value system. How much space do you allow to listen; to learn to trust your own system first, not simply your mind, but the whole? So if this choice is not a common one in your practice , see what happens if you back off the action for a moment, even though this is what our society demands, values - achievement and action. Stop believing and start trusting. It may take you time to learn to listen, the disconnected mind can be a sophisticated trickster - simply continue to hold it in the light of something less exclusive; the whole, your relationship with the world inside and out, in a context that is bigger that this thing enclosed in a box between the ears. This may challenge you to accept who you are rather who you think you should be.

The next time someone asks you to activate this or that muscle, just ask yourself: ‘am I making an informed choice in the way I am acting with the world?’ How do I feel in this experience, what is my quality of presence, is it spacious?

I used muscles to describe this phenomenon, only because it’s a familiar language for many people. There is a current trend to be primarily pre-occupied with muscles. Partly because we have conscious control of our movement and expression through our muscles, and the sophistication of this control is what many people value. Ironically, muscles present us with a much more profound opportunity, instead of focusing more on doing, to listen and differentiate in our action. So learning to observe how your muscles respond in certain circumstances can teach you far more that only actively engaging them. Talking more and listening less, where will that lead? It’s like any relationship, talking needs to be balanced with listening, and we need to be able to do both simultaneously - or we can easily disconnect from the ‘other’ and confuse the meaning. We all play a part in the world we create; if it’s all about who can assert their will in a more sophisticated way, the world becomes a very poor place to live in. Yes muscles are a lot about how we actively engage with the world, yet it’s the quality first that counts. There is a lot of wisdom in this process, if we don’t miss it, if we don’t over-invest in the value of willfulness – talking without listening.

Ironically, with too much willing comes fear, muscles also express this un-clarity of purpose – they can teach us a lot! If we override this response, following the urge for more sophisticated control, we will start to miss the wisdom four billion years of evolution has to offer, simply to prove a point! The urge to control usually comes when we start to disconnect in a relationship, rather than follow that urge, it may make more sense to reconnect, with ourselves and the other. Every time we do this, our courage and trust grows, our hearts have more space for expression. Why avoid the chance to grow and evolve?

The Emperor with new clothes is a great story to understand the blind spot in this issue.

Image: Hip girdle and crura of diaphragm gripping. To engage the muscles we need for stabilization we first need orientation, we need to know where we are, then the muscles we need for movement, expression and breathing can be free to do their job - otherwise they may be recruited to do the stabilization that does not occur.

So where do you need to be right now? Sitting, standing, lying, what makes most sense for the current state of your nervous system’s needs. If the answer is unclear, keep coming back to it, try different positions to experience the difference. Take your time to transition from one level to the next, to listen to the response of your system; am I supported am I ready, is this what I need?
Learning how to engage support in these challenges is a complex process, but this is one of the first steps. Take your time to get out of bed in the morning; first wait till you are present enough, able to listen to what you need inside, to the call of the world outside, to any dilemma this presents. To see what you carry with you to the next level.

For many Dandasana and its variations like Navasana are too challenging (if you really listen!), or rather at this stage don’t yet make sense. So you can also try returning to Tadasana, to stand. In other words the process is not necessarily linear - learning to stand can helps us to learn how to sit! Certainly for us as adults, though it can be useful to take a step back in our development to check we have the underlying support, every day of our lives we will be faced with the challenge to stand in the world. At first it’s helpful to go back and forth, changing levels, to listen to where we have support and clarity and where not, to differentiate