Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide

INTRODUCTION

We react, consciously or unconsciously, to the places where we live and work, in ways we scarcely notice or that are only now becoming known to us…. In short, the places where we spend our time affect the people we are and can become.

—Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place

Body and Earth is about relationship. It is a guide to help us reflect on what has shaped our attitudes and ideas about the world and about ourselves. Through our education in our homes, in schools, in our travels, and in our spiritual communities, we have developed a relationship to our bodies and to the environment. In this book, scientific views and experiential exercises are interwoven to help us investigate these attitudes and ideas, to notice if they are currently useful to our lives and to the health of the earth.¹ With attention to how memory and new information interact, we can become aware of our biases and assumptions and stimulate our imagination and curiosity for further exploration.

HUNTING FOR HOPE

Environmental writer Scott Russell Sanders teils of a backpacking trip he took with his sixteen-year-old son. His numerous books and articles detail the changes in his Midwest landscape, the destruction ofecosystems, the carelessness of our relationship with the earth. At the end of a difficult climb, the son turned to his father and said, Your writings are destroying my hope. This comment inspired his next book, called Hunting for Hope.

The body is the medium through which we experience ourselves and the environment. The ways we gather and interpret sensory information affect both how we monitor our internal workings and how we construct our views of the world. Thus, the text begins by exploring underlying patterns and perception, including basic principles of life and earth sciences that have shaped and currently affect our views of both body and earth. Next, we focus on the weave of relationships between bones and soil, breath and air, muscles and animals, digestion and plants, water and fluids. The text concludes with animating aspects of body and earth, including sensuality, creativity, and spirituality. Thus, the book provides a context to revisit and revision what we know, by noticing patterns of interconnectedness.

Throughout this study you are invited to choose a place in nature near enough to home for consistent field study visits. With notebooks in hand, we attend to specifics of our environment in order to connect to the places we live as participants and inhabitants, rather than as passersby. Weather patterns and seasons help us notice natural cycles of change, experience death or transitional stages as part of life, and deepen our relationship to the rhythms of the natural world. The goal, as we heighten sensual awareness of the environment and track our perceptual biases, is to expand our ability to respond, our response-ability, and ultimately to recognize ourselves as active participants in the world.

Language is a map for a way of thinking. Recognizing that language can point toward but does not replace experience, I have attempted to present specific information to enhance our creative explorations. In this study we learn the names of things as a way of claiming intimacy. We see not simply leg but femur; not bird but barred owl. We use naming to suggest valuing through specificity. With a fresh view of language we can enhance our sense of familiarity, of family. Names reflect the universality as well as the uniqueness of each individual person, plant, or soil type. We are part of a larger group with shared characteristics, and we are also unique in each moment.

The art images, writing suggestions, and to do exercises in the book suggest forms for creative expression. They represent the life work of many individuāls filtered through my own experience, offering a brief introduction to much larger fields of inquiry. In many cases the primary source of an exercise has been obscured as, over time, information has been passed from teacher to teacher. By using these exercises to enhance awareness of body and earth, we honor a heritage much larger than ourselves. Multicultural images encourage a world perspective, children’s art refreshes, and illustrations clarify. Sometimes it takes many views to point toward truth.

Storytelling is included as an integrative process. The experience of reading, telling, and hearing stories can enhance our connection to people and to place. In many ways, storytelling transmits an experience so that listeners envision it for themselves. Re-creation in the form of storytelling is a kind of re-membering, assembling pieces to create a whole in which many dimensions can be experienced at once: emotions, ideas, facts, sensations. Within our bodies, a good story engages the limbic system of the brain, the area that registers interest and emotions, and engages memory.² It’s the part of the mind that keeps one turning the page when reading a book. A good story touches all of us, brings us to the moment, not simply as observers but as participants.

When I ask students to write their history of place, many create eulogies for places that no longer exist. Even at twenty years of age, they see that the open field is now a parking lot, the favorite woods a subdivision, the family home long since departed. Writing about place is often writing about loss. We begin by recognizing our grief; we continue by celebrating connection to the places that shaped our lives.

Time is a considera tion for the journey through Body and Earth. The overview of thirty-one days or learning sessions can be approached as a month of exploration, a twelve-week course meeting three times a week, or a progression to do at your own pace, alone or with a group. No matter what time is set aside for study, we are cultivating timelessness. Some experiences take a lifetime to understand; others, a decade; some are integrated in a moment. Building this quality of timeless exploration into our lives in a conscious way, helps develop the sensibilities essential to humane and creative living.

Environmental studies students at my college are like the art students of the sixties. Energetic and hopeful, they feel they have a role to play in changing the world. And the results of the environmental focus are evident, changing the face and values of our college. Backpacks are everywhere; beards and hiking boots balance J. Crew; organic gardens and compost heaps replace overstuffed dumpsters; alert, lively senses counter the numbness of alcohol. We need reminders that change is possible and that each discipline, each person, has a role to play.

This book provokes an essential question: How best to live on this earth? By focusing on our human bodies as the vehicle through which we experience ourselves and the world around us, we learn to value the earth equally to the self. Thus, the perspective is both anthropocentric (human-centered) and ecocentric (earth-centered). The body and the earth are complex and profoundly interconnected entities developed through billions of years of evolutionary process. Our task is to develop a dialogue with this inherent intelligence—to learn to attend. By enhancing active awareness of our bodies and the places we live, we deepen our engagement in the intricate and delightful universe we inhabit.

What Body and Earth offers, simply, is a map to guide experience. In editing the text, I’ve attempted to honor the body’s capacity for absorption. In reading, one can only integrate what is relevant to the moment of attending. As writer, I offer what I can hold in one life, shared with friends like a good conversation. So when I had to choose what to include in a chapter, I would go outside and read aloud to the plants, go to the studio and speak as I moved, or go to the mountains and tell the story about water to the stream to see if it rang true. And that is what, finally, I offer to you in this experiential guide.

Preparation for using the text

Find an indoor space suitable for private work. A wood floor and natural light is ideal; the space should be warm and comfortable. Minimize distractions: unplug the phone, turn off the computer, remove your watch. Wear loose-fitting clothing; no shoes or socks. Have pencils and a journal or pad for your notes and drawings. Establish a realistic schedule; consistency of time and place helps calm the mind for focused exploration. You will also choose an outdoor place (See Day 1); each offers unique resources.

Drawing by Claire Crowley, age two.

My stepson’s seventh-grade math class focused on grapbs. The teacher began by taking a survey of what students were most afraid of. The final pie chart, colored in pale red, green, and blue, showed homelessness was the major fear for 60 per cent of these rural students, followed by war and divorce. They were facing the fear that there is no place on this earth to call home. How do we acknowledge that each of us has a place; that both our body and the earth are home?

To Do movement explorations

Read through (and tape-record yourself if possible) the entire to do section first, then begin. As you become familiar with the process, it will become easier to follow the instructions. When working with a partner or in a group, have one person read aloud; then change roles. Respect your own limitations; modify any exercise that does not feel comfortable to your body. Use a yoga pad, meditation cushion, pillow, or chair for support as necessary.

Use the margins in the book to record your experience. Note what actually happens—your feelings, sensations, and associations—so that you can observe your process over time: I was distracted or I felt light and relaxed.

Creative writing

Write from your whole body. Try to keep your pen moving, as you maintain a nonjudgmental attitude. Resist editing or censoring your words. The task is to let your body write you, that is, to become a vehicle through which your own stories emerge.

Read all of your writing aloud; include every word. When you read, both hear and feel your language. Often the experience of reading is different from writing. Cultivate a supportive listener within yourself. If emotions come, allow yourself to continue reading with the feelings. We need our whole self present in our words.

When giving feedback to others in a group, comment on what stands out for you, what moves you. Maintain your nonjudgmental but discerning mind.

I

Underlying Patterns and Perception

Cape—rope bridge. Photograph by Bill Arnold.

DAY 1

Basic Concepts

We are not separate from the earth; we are as much a part of the planet as each cell in our bodies is a part of us.

—Mike Samuels, M.D., and Hal Zina Bennet, Well Body, Well Earth

We begin in wholeness. The interconnectedness of human life with the world around us is the subject of our study.

Body, in this text, refers to all aspects of what it means to be human. The parts may sometimes be referred to individually as soma, soul, spirit, psyche, physical body, emotional body, intuitive body, energy body, thinking body, mental body, or collectively as person, self, I. In our study, the word body is an inclusive term referring to the whole being.

Earth, in this text, refers to all aspects of our planet. The parts may sometimes be referred to individually as atmosphere, ecosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, mantle, crust, core, or collectively as Gaia, globe, world. In our study, the word earth is an inclusive term referring to the whole planet. Body is an aspect of earth.

Place, in this text, refers to a particular part of the earth that we know through direct experience in the body. Relationship to place is a process of assimilation, without which there can be no understanding. It is through our interaction with specific landscapes and environments that our movement patterns, perceptual habits, and attitudes have been formed. As we reflect on the places that have shaped our lives, we recognize that body affects place and place affects body in a constant process of exchange.

Where we focus our attention affects what we perceive. In this text we attend to the body as the medium through which we experience the earth. At various points in our exploration, we must put down our books, quiet our words, and simply go outside. Participation is the connecting link to awareness. As we open our senses to the natural world, we can recognize the experience at hand as the primary resource for our learning.

CONNECTIONS

When I first taught a course called Ecology and the Body, a colleague met me at a department meeting with a stack of books and a typewritten note. The first sentence stated that ecology has nothing to do with the body. The note ended by saying that if there was no math in my course, it was not ecology. The Environmental Studies chairperson responded to my concerns with the reminder that scientists use language to be specific, writers to encourage association. Both are useful. He also quoted Rachel Carson: You can’t write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.

Several weeks later a student reported a sign posted in a bathroom downtown: Don’t flush, save the Ecology. This helped me see the need for specificity in language; it also encouraged my sense of humor. Then, at a college-wide lecture, a distinguished environmentalist began his talk by announcing that every elementary student now knows that ecology means the interrelatedness of all living and non-living things. From my perspective, the human body is included.

Some students who protest the use of chemical spray on blueberry barrens in Maine, scorn pesticides and fertilizers in the grain fields of the Midwest, denounce pouring raw sewage into streams, and bemoan the cutting of trees in the rainforest, do not hesitate to take Ritalin—vitamin R (to stimulate brain chemistry so that they get their homework done), Paxil (to slow down or feel calmer), Motrin (for torn or overused muscles), or Valium (to get to sleep at night after too much coffee and too many hours of computer buzz).

What goes into the bloodstream enters the tissues, alters hormonal secretions, and affects the overall balance of the body. Why is interconnectedness important when talking about the migration patterns of the yellow rumped warbler but not the hormonal secretions of the thyroid gland; DDT threatening reproduction of the bald eagle because of thin shells on eggs but not the possible effect of Paxil on sexual function? We are odd creatures, we humans. We still don’t recognize that what is out there is in us, and what is in us is out there.

TO DO

Inner and outer awareness

10 minutes

Lying comfortably or seated, eyes closed:

• With each breath, feel or imagine the exchange between the outer environment of air around you and the inner environment of your body. The outer environment becomes part of the inner environment with each inhalation, and the inner environment releases to the outer environment with each exhalation.

• Gradually open your eyes. Notice whether you can remain aware of the sensations of breath while adding vision. This is the primary dialogue we will be engaged in throughout our work: the capacity to maintain inner awareness while attending to the outer world, a process of inclusive attention.*

Constructive rest

10 minutes

Lying on your back on the floor, in a warm, private place:

• Close your eyes.

• Bend your knees. Let your feet rest on the floor, slightly wider than your hips. Let your knees drop together to release your thigh muscles.

• Rest your arms comfortably on the floor, below shoulder height.

• Allow yourself to be supported by the floor.

• Allow your breath to move three-dimensionally in your torso.

• Allow the eyes to relax in their sockets, like pebbles dropping into a pool.

• Allow the brain to rest in the skull.

• Allow the shoulders to melt toward the earth.

• Allow the weight of the legs to drain into the hip sockets and feet.

• Allow the organs to release toward gravity.

• Allow your mouth to gently fall open; your tongue to relax.

• Feel the air move in and out through your lips and nose.

In constructive rest, rather than controlling your body, you let it be supported by the earth. As you release your body weight into gravity, the disks are less compressed and the spine begins to elongate. Constructive rest is an efficient position for body realignment. It releases tension and allows the skeleton and organs to rest, supported by the ground. Constructive rest is useful at any time of day but especially if done for five minutes before you sleep. The relaxation of the body parts returns the body to neutral alignment so that you don’t sleep with the tensions of the day. Constructive rest is discussed by Mabel Todd in her book The Thinking Body: A Study of the Balancing Forces of Dynamic Man.

* Inclusive attention is a term used by Susan Gallagher Borg, director of the Resonant Kinesiology Training Program.

Place map

30 minutes

• Draw a map of a familiar place. Choose any place you have lived or visited that evokes strong feelings. Take time to fill in details and important landmarks. Consider pathways, boundaries, and orientation to light. Don’t worry about the process of drawing; use symbols to represent areas of specific memory or meaning. 10 min.

• Write about the map and/or the place you’ve drawn. 15 min. Read aloud to yourself or a small group. Breathe deeply as you read, allowing exchange between the inner landscape of body and the outer landscape of place. 5 min.

Place visit: Finding your place

• Find a new place outdoors that you can visit each day. Look for an area that you can enjoy, within walking distance from your home or workplace and private enough that you can visit consistently, undisturbed, for twenty minutes at a time, engaging inclusive attention. Follow the place visit with ten minutes of writing in your field journal. Remember to allow time for direct engagement with place before writing and reflection, valuing experience as well as the language used to describe it.

Standing amid a swarm of mosquitoes, my flyfisher neighbor in Maine addresses the principle of interconnectedness even more simply: You can’t have the fish without the bugs.

Quarry, New Haven, Vermont. Photograph by Erik Borg.

FARMSTORIES [1994]

We left the farm when I was twelve. I don’t remember the details of departure. There must have been weeks of packing and a moving van. There was a huge barn sale, I am told, and good-byes to friends and neighbors. I don’t remember anything. I don’t remember what happened to the thirteen cats who lived in the outbuildings and supervised the field mice or who took or killed the last of the grumpy laying hens whose eggs I had so diligently gathered through the years. I don’t remember the day that Rosebud, our five-gaited mare was driven away in the horse trailer or whether I kissed my best friend Cindy good-bye and promised to write and be friends forever. I don’t remember emptying my bedroom closet of its pile of discarded dolls, seeming angry or sad about no longer being loved; whether Huffer Puffer, our very stupid but lovable cocker spaniel was returned to his original owners; or who took the trunks of grandmother’s white dresses and linens that my mother had so carefully saved to pass on to her girls.

I don’t remember anything about the move except arriving at our new house on Park Place and sleeping in the same familiar bed. I vaguely remember arriving; meeting Judy, my new best friend; taking Traveler, our collie, for his first walk on a leash to the park at the end of the street. But I don’t remember saying good-bye to the fields, to the luscious cherry tree, which gave us fruit for jam, or to the garden where my mother grew zinnias and I came to know the fecund smell of overripe tomatoes. There was no farewell to the pump house where we stored our tadpoles; the deep cistern that we were not to fall into; the giant elm tree where the cicadas left their shells; the willow tree, which was our dollhouse; the outdoor stone fireplace where I prepared flower-petal soup for of all my imaginary children. Or the long flat view, which showed the horizon, and the houses of all of our friends and neighbors; and the line of dust warning that a car ten miles off was coming our way. I don’t remember saying good-bye to any of this, and it is with me still.

Read aloud, or write and read your own story about home.

DAY 2

Attitudes

The failure to develop ecological literacy is a sin of omission and of commission. Not only are we failing to teach the basics about the earth and how it works, but we are in fact teaching a large amount of stuff that is simply wrong.

—David Orr, Ecological Literacy

Our attitudes inform our actions; the way we think affects what we do. One prominent view in Western culture is that nature is a thing, an object with utilitarian value to be bought and to be sold. With this consumerist focus, we may consider the empty field, the lake, or the mountaintop to be property, a storehouse of resources, or a challenging landscape to conquer or control.

Another view offers a radical alternative: that nature has intrinsic value in and of itself. We can experience the world around us as an organic living thing. It is not object but subject. It has interiority, subjectivity. It has something to teach us, and it inspires respect. When we have this attitude, the natural world can evoke awe and astonishment, stimulating connection to the sacred, integrative forces of life.

The same attitudinal values are prevalent about the body. One predominant view, perpetuated by our educational and medical habits, is that the body is an object, a machine to be repaired when it breaks down. It is our property to do with as we please. It is a resource to get us from here to there, a commodity to help us get what we want, a storehouse of resources, a challenge to control, to conquer or overcome.

Hayloft, painting by Philip Buller. Watercolor on paper, 22 in. × 33 in. Collection of J. Slovinsky.

VIEWS

Many students want to gain control over their bodies. I have to remind them that this is not our goal. The task is to learn to listen to the intelligence of our home. When we value what the body has to tell us, we create a dialogue with our senses. The same is true for the earth. The task is to develop a relationship with the details and cycles of life around us. In this way, we are participants in a larger story. Control limits possibilities; dialogue invites surprise.

A young psychology major wrote of her childhood close to forests and rivers and her years of caretaking the land. Then she said, You know, I treat the environment much better than I treat myself. An athlete remarked, This is a new experience for me; I’ve been abusing my body all of my life. A student from Manhattan said, I realize that I am most comfortable in rural Middlebury when I am near the highway. I need to hear traffic to fall asleep. As we listen to our bodies, we hear the stories of our lives.

The only time my life has been threatened was when living at a wildlife sanctuary. In that protective environment, our bluebird boxes were regularly smashed, and my husband was chased by men with baseball bats because of our assumed role in restricting land use. One young man in particular considered any environmentalist fair game for harassment. On my afternoon walk in the neighboring countryside, he would drive his pickup truck as close as he could, making me jump off the road. After a few weeks of intimidation, I decided to stand my ground. As he sped in my direction, I stood in the middle of the road, waving both arms for him to stop so that we could talk face to face. I leapt to the side just as he rushed past. I could have died. Being considered a spokesperson for the earth puts your life on the line; not speaking up threatens life as well.

Our neighbor tells of visiting a professor of ornithology for help in identifying a bird. The teacher responded, Wouldn’t you also like to know something about how it lives its life? A bell went off in his mind: there is more to identification than naming. It’s the matrix of relationships with the world that gives us insight into another species, not just its label.

The radical alternative in body attitude would be that the body has intrinsic value in itself. It has interiority, subjectivity. It has much to teach us if we learn to listen. We can consider that we are part of a vast interconnected system, rather than separate from the world around us. We are nature too.

As we recognize our interconnectedness with the rest of the earth, we begin to see the world from a relational perspective, supported by our context rather than in isolation or at odds with it. We experience the air, the water, the soil, the animals, the people around us, and our own bodies as familiar. In this view, both body and earth are home.

Underlying the environmental crisis is a crisis of attitude. We are coming to the end of our nonrenewable resources, such as fossil fuels. We are also coming to the end of renewable ones, such as clean water, clean air, and healthy soil. This is true of the body as well. We can no longer count on resiliency in our structure: our bodies are too busy recovering, attempting to filter internal as well as external toxins. Yet we can consciously cleanse our systems and balance our energy, just as we can protect the resources around us. Our attitudes toward our bodies have everything to do with the health of the earth.

As we open our senses and attend to the earth, we encounter grief. Emotional memory is encoded since childhood, associated with specific terrain: the beach explored on family vacations, the tree climbed in moments of retreat, or the room where a child was born. All too frequently, loved ones are gone, places paved over—in reality or in our hearts. Earth systems, too, are dying. Forests, songbirds, and the air in our lungs are in trouble.

Grief is a natural response to loss. Engaging our grief requires softening our guard. The process includes several essential stages: acknowledging our denial, allowing emotion, accepting death as part of life, and expressing through creative forming—giving voice to the forceful feelings that occur. Our attitudes toward our grief affect our ability to feel and to act.

Environmental Studies is one of the fastest growing majors at universities across the country. Alternative health care is a growing force that challenges traditional medical practices to include a holistic view of the body. Books, magazines, and art reflect environmental perspectives and healthful incentives. There is no discipline, institution, or individual exempt from environmental concern and responsibility. As we become aware of our underlying attitudes toward our bodies and toward the places we call home, we experience the dynamics of living an interconnected life.

Any integrative experience is a spiritual experience, humanist John Dewey reminds us. One component of mystical or spiritual involvement that underlies ecological concerns is the feeling of being an integrated part of the whole planet. Aesthetic experience nurtures this sensibility in people. Thus, the arts have an essential role to play in encouraging us to face the unprecedented challenges of our time.

Our attitudes can be affected by information, inspiration, or direct experience. We can learn how a lake is polluted by reading the newspaper, seeing a painting, or finding a dying loon on the shore. Each instance connects person to place in a moment of alertness.

As we envision life, we create it. As we think, we do. Experiencing ourselves as participants, we foster attitudes in ourselves and in our communities that allow a lively and respectful dialogue between body and earth.

TO DO

Body map

30 minutes

• Draw a map of your body. Start with an outline and fill in the details. Include what you know and what you feel: anatomical information, ideas, emotional connections, colors, images, injuries, words, intuitions, memories. Follow whatever captures your imagination. 10 min.

• Now fill in the context around your body—the environment. 10 min.

• Write about your experience. Read aloud. Pause at the end of each sentence or phrase, and take a full breath—inhalation and exhalation. Allow a final breath cycle at the end of the story. 10 min.

With a group:

Using a large roll of wide paper, cut body-length pieces. In partners, one person lies on the sheet of paper with eyes closed; the partner takes a crayon or marking pen and traces around the outside of the body, in one long continuous line. Change roles. 10 min.

• Take the outline of your body and fill in the contents. Consider context, outside the outline, as well. 10 min.

• Write about your experience. Read aloud to your partner. 10 min.

Breathing spot (Child’s Pose)

5 minutes

In constructive rest: Roll to your side, flex your arms and legs close to the body and continue to roll to a deep fold position: limbs folded, chest resting on thighs, knees spread slightly for comfort, forehead on the floor, spine curved.

• Rest the warm palms of your hands on your lower back, between pelvis and ribs. Through touch, encourage the movement of skin and muscles in this area as you breathe. On the in breath, your diaphragm is pulled down toward the pelvis, compressing the organs and expanding the back surface of the body as your lungs fill with air; on the out breath, the diaphragm releases (toward the fourth and fifth ribs) and the muscles soften. We call this area of your lower back your breathing spot. Encourage its movement with each breath. As breathing deepens, invite sensation to travel all the way down your spine, and spread into your buttocks and legs; then up to the heart, spreading to shoulders, neck, and skull.

In yoga, this is called Balasana, Child’s Pose. Imagine a soft, rounded spine, responding to each breath. If you hold tension in your lower back, this is an excellent exercise to increase circulation and lengthen muscles.

Yoga: Child’s Pose, Balasana.

To write: Place story

2–4 hours

Write your history of place, using a chronological approach. Include all the places you have lived and visited. Consider home, travels, dreams, and longings. Reflect on the place-origins of your ancestors. Notice the ways your place history has affected your movement and your attitudes: did you grow up by water, near forests, or surrounded by city streets? How does place affect your life today?

FARMSTORIES: MODELS—THE TRAVELER

My mother was a traveler. She was always at ease with the wealthy. In 1939, after two years of college and before her first teaching position, she took the grand tour of Europe collecting the ideas and objects that were to fill my childhood. She sailed across the Atlantic, arriving in England, then in Africa, traveling on the Continent, encountering Mussolini, turning around, and heading for home.

On the farm, this heritage of world adventure was transmitted to us by the Della Robia Madonna and Child porcelain plate hanging over our kitchen doorway, by the leather gloves and amethyst ring from the Ponte Vecchio in Florence; the carved-ivory Coloseum on the bedstand; the transparent blouses embroidered by women in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia; the woven vests and skirts from Norway.

Each of these objects, however small, was to detail a path that would make me a traveler. And so, in my twenties, when I began my own journeys, I walked under the smiling Madonna, wearing a transparent blouse embroidered by women who knew that life is how we embellish it, that’s all we get. That life is the body. That’s how we see it, smell it, taste it, and love in it.

Read aloud or write and read your own story about attitudes.

Place visit: Body scan

Lying in constructive rest or seated comfortably, with a vertical spine and eyes closed, begin a body scan. Pass your attention part by part through the body, beginning with your face and skull. Notice any sensation that occurs on this part of your body. It might be an itch, a tingling, or the pressure of your body against the ground. Move your awareness to your neck. Notice any sensation on your neck at this moment in time: the touch of air to skin, heat or coolness. (Repetition of language helps to focus attention.) If you feel no sensation on an area, notice that, nonjudgmentally. Sensations are happening all the time, whether we are aware of them or not. Move your attention through every body part: the back surface of your body, front surface, sides, pelvis, each arm and each leg. Remember, if you feel nothing, just wait, inviting awareness; then move on. Finish by observing breath as it falls in and out of your nose and mouth, moving the ribs, muscles, and skin. Open your eyes, remaining aware of sensation. Is your attitude toward place affected by deepening attention to body? 20 min. Write about your experience. 10 min.

Body scanning helps to develop an equal relationship to all parts of the body, with no hierarchies or areas of avoidance. It is a component of Vipassana Meditation, a Buddhist practice also known as insight meditation.

Photograph by Erik Borg.

DAY 3

Underlying Patterns: Body

Evolutionary Movement uses the metaphor of evolution, from the state of undifferentiated wholeness, through cell, vessel, tube, fish, reptile, and mammal, to open up fluid movement capacity and inspire a sense of relationship with the natural world.

—Caryn McHose, Resources in Movement

We live in a fluid body; our origins were in the primordial seas. If we follow the evolutionary story, derived from fossil record and close observation, we see that our ancestors traversed through various body forms. Through all of these changes, we retained our liquid core. The amniotic fluid in the womb and our blood retain the saline content of the sea. Our skin keeps us from drying up; in fact, a human can be described as a sack of water walking around on feet! Although we may think of ourselves as solid, fixed, or hardwired, we are indeed fluid creatures, with adaptability and responsiveness as key characteristics for survival on earth.

Underlying human complexity is the unity of the single cell. The unique pattern for the whole body is contained in two strands of DNA housed in the nucleus. The fluid cytoplasm of each cell, like the body as a whole, is approximately 70 to 80 percent water. The selectively permeable cell membrane, like our outer skin, both separates and connects internal contents and the external environment. A collection of like cells of similar structure and function is called a tissue. Groups of coordinated tissues form organs that comprise a body system. For example, muscle cells form muscle tissues, which make muscles, which create the muscular system. For our study we will differentiate seven body systems, based on the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and the School for Body-Mind Centering®: skeletal, muscular, nervous, endocrine, organ, fluid, and connective tissue.¹ Although we can look at each system individually, it is essential to remember that the body functions as an interrelated whole and that the systems balance and support each other.

Study for the