12.08.09. I was struck at the end of class on 12/2/09 when the statement came to me (something like), the parasympathetic response is necessary for healing. Very simple. Parasympathetic = healing. And this is not what is happening in hospitals and doctors’ offices. The body basically heals itself, and it requires the parasympathetic state, the state of letting go, to do so. (The critical part of me is piping up: Define your terms! First you said parasympathetic, now you’re saying letting go! Which is it? Are they the same? But … I’ll have to answer that later.) I don’t want to lose track of the central, simple idea: the parasympathetic is where healing takes place. And this is not what Western medicine is about.
At this moment, one could think of all the ways the body's transition to the parasympathetic is prevented in conventional medicine. Of course, one could challenge the very premise that the body heals itself, and indeed there are conditions that overwhelm the body, that make Western practices life-saving, and indeed that brought Western medicine into its current paradigm. In any case, one should ask, What is the parasympathetic response? (Define your terms! With thanks to http://www.medterms.com, we have “parasympathetic nervous system: A part of nervous system that serves to slow the heart rate, increase the intestinal and gland activity, and relax the sphincter muscles. The parasympathetic nervous system, together with the sympathetic nervous system (that accelerates the heart rate, constricts blood vessels, and raises blood pressure), constitutes the autonomic nervous system.”)
Or one could ask what we might be doing here, in Movement InVivo, to bring about the parasympathetic response. For the moment, the idea of letting go gets my attention. It’s a beautiful idea to consider movement-wise, because a person may let go in movement as well as in rest, and either way, there may be a therapeutic effect. And letting go is sometimes, often even, hard to do. It is physical, and it is psychological, emotional, mental. There are states of sleepiness that seem to go nowhere and mean nothing. There are layers of letting go. Sometimes there seems to be a transparent wall separating us from letting go, from a sense of flow, ease, rest, or openness. But perhaps that is because at that moment we are remembering a certain state that we want to get to, rather than following the path that presents itself, however undefined it is.
Here, first, there is the letting go with gravity, to weight, to earth. We amplify it with attention -- attending to the places where the body meets the ground, its support. We are supported, we are always in relationship to earth, and now we just have to bring our attention to it. We can notice where we hold back, and we can consciously let go, feel the muscles release, feel more of our skin in contact with the ground.
Then, there is the letting go with breath, the exhale that allows the ribs to drop, the stomach, the lower abdomen. Then (or almost at the same time as we come to breath) there is the inward letting go -- we notice that we’ve been holding our breath, and we exhale, sigh, lengthen the exhale. We may notice our mind has been held, too. Then other places in the body may release.
You may bring to mind an intention, a prayer. Hold it, focus on it, then let it go as well.
It doesn’t matter, today, whether we let go as much as we are capable of. It is a practice, of providing our system the conditions for letting go, for surrendering to the “inner physician.” Letting go happens by grace, like love, like falling in love. It is freedom and rest, nourishment and curiosity, a sense of timelessness and in the moment-ness. It is never the same, exactly.
Sounding. (Perhaps at this point in your process you have an urge to sound, to evoke sensation inside.) Sounding supports release in part by taking the mind off itself, its thoughts, doubts, opinions, etc., and causing it to focus on the making of a sound, the hearing of the sound, the receiving of the sound, the breathing that follows the sound. Following the sequence, the layers of breath and sounding, “I” am now in my body, identified with my body, watching it, feeling it … Again you don’t have to do it perfectly, just with as much whole heartedness as you can, this day, right now. Maybe today you can let go into sounding, play with it, earnestly, listen to what comes out if you make a change. Why not? What is there to lose?
(Does movement want to arise somewhere? A sideways drift, an arm floating up...)
Breathing and sounding… as Emilie Conrad has often said, the inhale is the taking on of form, the exhale is the dissolving of form … this exhalation is our release of having to maintain form … and then to inhale again, in the freedom that we don’t have to maintain anything, it is just there …
At some point, we may enter the “zone”, a slightly altered state of consciousness in which sensations arise and movement follows. The body itself begins to guide and the cerebral cortex is willing to follow, perhaps seduced, or simply curious. Here, the body displays (to the inner observer, especially), the nature of the fluid system, in a continuous play between gel and sol, form and fluid, being and emptiness, bounded and boundary-less. Ebb and flow. The pause is always available, if the thought-mind starts to take control and direct the movement. The interrupting of conscious intention, letting go of ideas about how it’s supposed to be … returns us to attention, attending to what is, the movement that is actually, already taking place. This is the body doing what it needs to, by its own irrational pathways, that sometimes appear to be taking the longest way, perhaps to some place we never even thought about, a place in us in need of release so that other places in turn may shift, ease, or open.
All this from letting go. From sounding. From listening and more generally attending, to the body.