O keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From your prayers and work and music
And from your companions’ beautiful laughter
And from the most insignificant movements
Of your own holy body.
Hafiz
Jun22
Category Archives: the body
Jun20
beneath the surfaces
What I continue to learn is that it is important to look beneath the surfaces of whatever is showing up in my life. Not in an effort to complicate things more, but in order to see more clearly, notice more detail, get clearer and appreciate more.
Sanne the Lily of Holland, my beautiful horse, is a great example. If I listen carefully, get quiet and take time to feel into the texture of his body, my hands, his mouth, I can feel that he is always looking for and offering an easier way. That is what has been happening this week in the Aikido/Horsemanship clinic. Mark Rashid is helping me to clear away a lot of my own clutter: physical habits, unconscious tensions, general unproductive busy-ness. Doing that helps me to feel Sanne better, to blend with him, to start riding our ride, not just mine.
His wife, Crissie, offered this piece of homework a couple days ago: Blend with something or someone. I encourage you to try it. Besides blending with Sanne, I did some blending with my waitress at dinner the other night, with the current of the stream I visited today on our day off and with my morning tea.
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Jun20
what do you want?
Brandi Rivera riding Sanne; Photo by Jeffrey Anderson
Day 3 of the Aikido and horsemanship clinic with Mark Rashid in New Hampshire. It is interesting to me how “Abrahamic” this work is. By that I mean, Mark is continually reminding us to focus not on the problem, but on what we want. This from Abraham:
Anytime you feel negative emotion, stop and say: Something is important here; otherwise, I would not be feeling this negative emotion. What is it that I want? And then simply turn your attention to what you do want. . . . In the moment you turn your attention to what you want, the negative attraction will stop; and in the moment the negative attraction stops, the positive attraction will begin. And—in that moment—your feeling will change from not feeling good to feeling good. That is the Process of Pivoting.
So today, instead of focusing on the discombobulated feeling in the downward transition from canter to trot, he asked me to picture the transition I wanted, including breathing, and feeling the rhythm of going from a three-beat gait to a two-beat. After a few times, I could feel the ease and flow of that transition beginning to come through. He also pointed out that I had been doing “my” transition, not “our” transition, meaning Sanne’s and mine. When I shifted mentally and physically to blend with Sanne, things began to open.
I think that is a problem with a lot of riding (and relationships in general). We are doing our ride, and the horse, the softness, the harmony, the opening is either absent or inconsistent. Mark teaches that consistency leads to dependability, which creates trustworthiness, leading to peace of mind and finally softness. THAT is the training pyramid that I want to pay attention to. Aikido is teaching me more about flexibility, awareness and also about developing fluidity and even-mindedness in my responses to whatever arises. This morning, I was stiffening my arms to protect my shoulder. I found that if I softened, I was far less likely to get hurt, and that it also began to dissolve that habitual fear-based reaction.
Here is what I want: to be a helpful, soft, consistent, even-minded, kind, connected, joyful rider, lover, mother, friend, being. Is that too much to ask? I think not!
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May11
midlines
Sensing and feeling the mid-line can be a challenge when most of us feel out of kilter and out of balance a lot of the time. A couple weeks ago my lovely Amadeo had a nice big buck while I was riding. I was feeling fragile emotionally, and so not quick enough to come up out of the saddle to protect myself. The result: a coccyx sprain. I walked around feeling rotated, disconnected and fragmented until my next osteopathy appointment. It was frustrating and interesting to feel that off my mid-line. Andy Goldman, my osteopath, encouraged me to ride my mid-line in sync with the mid-line of the horse. So on my next ride, I paid attention to my newly centered tailbone, feeling it connect to the horse’s tail, and sending my energy up my spine through the center of the occipital ridge while seeing/feeling the horse’s poll.
The result was a surprising deliciousness and sense of connection and balance in the ride. I also noticed that Deo’s crookedness tracking right was connected to the way I close the space between my right shoulder and sternum (shifting my mid-line too far to the left), effectively closing the door to his ability to open to the right! When I opened that space, with a feeling of widening and softening, he began to straighten and soften!
Revelations!
Then today, while coaching a performer (the lovely Sari Max), I asked her to notice her mid-line with a couple somatic exercises of moving away from and then back onto a centered mid-line. Then I asked her to move from lying down to standing pausing along the way to look at where her mid-line was in that moment, The result was that her movement from floor to standing was beautifully effortless and grounded. Then we took that same sense of mid-line into the text of the play, connecting a physical sense of center and balance to the emotional through-line of each line. The result was a deeper authenticity and groundedness in the language and movement. Brilliant and transformational!
