Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [75]
More specific ideas along this line can be found in the “Spatial Medicine” section of the www.anatomytrains.com Web site.
If we are indeed looking down the barrel of environmental catastrophe, as the question that launched this book project assumes, the depth of that barrel is the degree of our alienation from our physical selves.
How to Live Now
Here’s a little advice from the point of view of thirty-five years in the somatic therapy craft:
– Get out and move. All forms of exercise are helpful, though walking, running, swimming, and singing carry the longest evolutionary history in terms of healing. “Walking your blues away” is more than a line in a song. Four million years of upright walking have ensured that this exercise has many salutary benefits to the body and its minding.
– Take on a bodily practice—Tai Chi, yoga, Pilates, chanting, meditation, martial arts, rock climbing, and any of a hundred more now on offer in your community.
– Reconnect with your gut feelings, your hunches, your subtle feelings, your physical trust, your hungers, your blood dreams, your bitter tears, your gasping sobs, your laughter, your heart’s desire, the smell of possibility, the taste of success, zero at the bone, even the voice of reason. That which is most reasonable in us is the part that does not reason—the part that is growing your hair, repairing your liver, and digesting your food. Teach your children to trust their gut.
– Use your movement to explore your genetic history, your future possibility, your capacity, your alignment, your balance, your power, or just the sheer joy of the ability to shapeshift.
– Somatic therapy (bodywork) involves someone else’s eyes and senses on your body, to help you find “lost” parts of yourself, areas subject to “sensori-motor amnesia” that only an outside pair of hands can help you discover, because they have fallen out of your body image. Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, Structural Integration, and any of a hundred more—the practitioner matters more than the method—can help you recover your complete self. The best decisions are made when all of you participates.
– Make sure your children are getting more and more in touch with their bodies, learning to rely on their authentic feelings. Move with them: roughhouse, wrestle, hug, rest next to each other. Monitor the physical education that they are getting in their school. Keep the bodies of your children growing in their KQ, their capacity to feel and respond to the challenges around them. Help them not to succumb to sedentary slavery to the electronic world or the numbing alienation of false gods, consumer goods, and outer goals that will do little to make them truly happy.
And then, fully mindful (which we now know is “bodiful”), get up and get to work! There is so much to be done at every level, at every turn, on every face.
Tom Myers is the author of Anatomy Trains (Elsevier, 2001, 2009) and numerous trade and journal articles. A student of Ida Rolf, Moshe Feldenkrais, and Buckminster Fuller, he has practiced integrative bodywork for thirty-five years in the U.S. and Europe. Tom lives with his partner Quan on the coast of Maine where he directs Kinesis, which offers training in manual therapy and the anatomy of movement worldwide. His Web site is www.anatomytrains.com.
Earth Rights
DR. VANDANA SHIVA
The collapse of Wall Street in September 2008 and the continuing financial crisis signal the end of the paradigm that put fictitious finance above real wealth (which is created by nature and humans), profits above people, and corporations above citizens. This paradigm can only be kept afloat with limitless bailouts that direct public wealth to private rescue instead of using it to rejuvenate nature and a public economic livelihood. It can only be kept afloat with increasing violence to the earth and people.