Blooming For Beginners
More lessons like this can be experienced by attending Balancing the Nervous System on Sundays at 4pm EST.
You can sign up for that class, as well as all other offerings, on the ‘classes’ page.
The act of opening is an ancient ancestral wisdom.
The jellyfish knows this pulse, used for propulsion and filtration of food. The dandelion, bright organ of replication, opens with the sun, to the clumsy dance of bees, then closes again at night. The infant’s hands, too, open and close, ready to latch onto any form of love it can find, while whole forests bloom, fruit, and wilt with the cycle of the seasons. All these cycles create a kind of music, an anonymous opus forever playing for those who care to listen.
The nervous system also has a pulse, between sympathetic (fight/flight) and parasympathetic (rest/digest). When we lose our sensitivity to this balance, we can get stuck in one side or the other.
The hands can be a gateway into this pulse of life, present in our own bodies. Living asks so much of our hands: to communicate, to create, to make no mistakes, and because of this, our hands take up a huge amount of space in the sensory-motor cortex. What if we gave our hands a chance to speak through us? What wisdom do the hands have, not just in ability, but in the simple act of holding on and letting go?
In the bell-hand lesson Moshe Feldenkrais describes such a movement of the hand, saying:
“It’s almost like moving the eyelid close and open… so very slowly there will be a feeling of lightness permeating the entire musculature…the entire self.”
When I practice this movement pattern, I begin to remember my place in the symphony of life; my hands slowly blossom through my entire being.
When you lie on your back and follow the movements of your hands opening and closing, what seasons pass through you? What eternities become do you contain? What peace do you find, in the never-stillness of living?
“You don’t have to exercise in order to improve. You only have to be your own self.”
This wondering was inspired by a poem by Paul Celan. Read it here: www.poetryfoundation.com
