Opening Meditation: Sitting in Silence: Accessing the Source

Primary Theme of Weekend: Fluids, Fascia and the Living Matrix
We explore, through movement, visualization, breath and postures, our billions of years old liquid intelligence. We are blessed to live on a ‘water planet’. This miraculous substance, infinitely mysterious and yet immediately accessible to perception, is the foundation for life, aka movement. What happens when it begins to awaken???

We begin the second half of the course with a quick review of first half of the course:

Continue to clarify, differentiate the two perspectives available to the human mind, and integrate as Non-Dual Understanding:
1: Resting in Silence/Purusha/Now/Pure Awareness;
2: Monitoring and modulating flow of energy/information/Prakriti, as it manifests through: the three bodies, gross, subtle and causal, and the ongoing unfolding of Karma, at all levels of the cosmos.

Gross body awakening:
1: Find the deep front line, as articulated in Tom Myers’ “Anatomy Trains” model.
2: Continue to practice the three primary movements of the pelvis turning over the femurs, and the spinal column: mammalian flexion/extension, lateral flexion/extension or ‘fish body’, and rotation or spiraling; through the practice of the standing poses and dog pose sequence.
3: Refine upper limbs: wall tadasana, dog sequence into inversions: Learn to protect and stabilize the vulnerable regions of the shoulders.
4: Beginning back bend sequence and variations: sphynx, cobra/up-dog/, bent leg spynx and cobra, ustrasana, dhanurasana, salabhasana
5. Setu bandha on blocks to refine cranio-sacral action and open liver/kidneys/spleen
6. Breathing: Viloma to differentiate ribs and diaphragm: ribs-opening-inhalations; sustain and diaphragm stretching-lifting, abdominal toning exhalations: sustain
7: Anything else that inspires you…

Subtle body awakening:
1. Work with imagination to support perception when awakening new areas
2. Develop sustained and flexible attention: wheel of awareness, attention moving in and out of portals of perception, resting in stillness/awareness of awareness in between.
3. Get to know the voices/parts that are aspects of your ahamkara/self sense. Let “Higher Self” integrate, organize, mediate, etc.

Causal body awakening: Practice imagining/feeling the toroidal field of the heart.

Review of voices: Any new ones emerging? Any old ones re-emerging, re-organizing?

New Material: Working from heart energies: Visualiizing heart center and navel center as origin points for spheres of energy and organizing intelligence, and then moving/supporting the body from these sources. We will starting from the beginning, as a cell, as an embryo, as an infant discovering inner movements.

Finding Fluidity: Rolling and Pouring:
Saturday: Explore ‘rolling and pouring’ from “How Life Moves” by Kevin Frank and Caryn McHose, pg 29,
then play with the spiral transitions to standing and walking.

(Sunday: Same as above, only add ‘hu breath’ from Emilie Conrad, to amplify fluids and proprioceptive sensitivity.)

Bringing this liquid awareness into asana practice:

Any and all standing poses, plus: from ardha chandrasana, to one leg dog, to one leg uttanasana, to hand stand and sirsasana, coming up from extended leg, to one leg setu bandha and urdva dhanurasana, finding inner extension and lift through flow rather than outer muscular contraction. Add any poses or sequences from above to your investigation.

First Video: Saturday PM
The Four Fundamental Layers of Fascia by Frank Willard
(from the 1st International Fascia Research Conference, 2007)
1. Superficial or pannicular (tube, just under skin, surrounding all other tubes)
2. Axial, including epaxial and hypaxial ( from notocord – surrounding muscles of front and back body, extending into limbs. Does not extend over skull as superficial does, but stops at base. Menningial extends inside skull
3. Visceral (from mouth to anus along midline and extending out around each organ)
4. Menningial: From inside of skull down spinal canal to root of spinal column

Take home points:
1. These fascial layers are continuous throughout the body and not divided into separate parts, as the anatomy books imply. Find them as fields of perception/proprioception.
2. Key areas of the body where the layers overlap include sacrum and cranium
3. Visceral fascia connects with Deep Front Line and is crucial in our asana explorations

Second Video: Sunday PM
“Strolling Under the Skin”: also (Part 2) French hand surgeon uses ‘in vivo’ micro camera to capture the water-collagen matrix in its amazingly complex dance of balancing stability and mobility through tendons, organs and all tissue structures, demonstrating ‘tensegrity’.

Take home points:
This ‘microscopic and molecular level view allow us to see, and thus begin to visualize, the inner world of fluids and collagen fibers that make up the lattice/3-D spider web we call the ‘living matrix’. Keep finding/feeling, exploring from this level, 24-7-365.

Topic for next session:  Embryology