Feels So Good to Move Different

Spider Breath 4, Feeling In

This post on the spider breath will introduce you to key body areas that we work with in this practice.

I am not going to teach you in a linear fashion... so the next Spider Breath post may seem unrelated to this one. My advice is to just stick with each step until you feel comfortable with it, as you will be laying the foundation for things to "gel" on a magical future day.

Here's today's Spider Breath activity... First reaffirm the intentions for the practice. Then lie down and become aware of your breathing. When you start noticing that it's pleasurable to breathe, close your eyes (if they aren't already) and bring your awareness to the following places in your body.

1. Tune into the large, knobby vertebra at the base of your neck. In your awareness, travel deep into the joint between that bone and the one immediately below it.

2. Now bring your attention to your spine at waist level. Explore into the joints between the vertebrae in this area. We will locate a specific point in this area more precisely in future.

3. Next, bring your attention to the joint between the very top of your spine and your skull. If you were to draw a horizontal line between the centre of your two ears, you would be at the level of this joint. 

4. Now take your awareness deep into the centre of your knee joint, where the bones of your upper and lower legs interact.

5. Next, bring your attention to the outside edge of your shoulder blade bone… the edge closest to your arm. As you follow this bone from top to bottom, let your awareness rest at the center of that vertical trajectory. 

6. Bring your attention into the joint between your fourth or ring finger and your hand. Moving the finger will help you find it.

7. Take your mind into the ball and socket joint where the top of your thigh bone meets the pelvic girdle, in your pelvis. Can you actually feel (or at least imagine you feel) how the ball at the top of the thigh bone fits into the socket of the bones in the pelvis?

8. Bring your awareness into the joint between the big toe and the foot. Moving your toe may help you find it. Feel your way into the connection between the bones that form that joint.

Where On Earth Are You? And Why?

I finally did something I've wanted to do for years... get an astrocartography reading.

An astrocartographer maps out the relationships between Planet Earth and the other planets in our solar system at the time of the client's birth. To me this type of practice is another way of consulting natural/physical/biological intelligence. This information revealed by this exploration of the heavens is used to show a person what kinds of support and challenges they are likely to receive when living in various areas on Earth.

I've decided to relocate as a result of my reading.

I'll be heading first into a zone that's a much more wild/natural area than where I live now, and where Pluto's influence is more pronounced in my chart. According to some of the text supplied with my map: "Total alteration and new directions in life can be taken under these lines. Exposure to, and concerns with death, regeneration and mortality are common.... Personal depth is gained, but what is old and outmoded in life will be stripped away, so that complete rejuvenation and rebirth are possible."

Okay, so that's the next year of my life! Time to get down to brass tacks. I know what I need to do in terms of my personal healing. And I know where I'm headed on the other side of this Plutonically inspired journey...

I'm going to one of my Venusian zones: "Here, self perfection and growth encourage relationship... Beauty, sensuality, luxury, money, ease and artistic interests dominate; self esteem and appearance improve. Dangers lie in consumerism, laziness, superficiality, objectification of people and in an immature, make-believe attitude." 

I want the beauty, artistry, and luxury, so I'll need to avoid the dangers.

I have practice in dealing with danger, though of a different sort than the Venusian kind. I've spent much of my life living under the influence of a Saturn line: "Fierce personal independence and perseverance develop in the face of difficulties in health, power struggles, poor finances and solitude... Challenge, maturity and hard work are met and accepted." Yes, that's a great description of a lot of my life, summed up in a few words! I'm ready for something different, and so I'm going to learn a new language and move to a new country to get it.

Many people offer astrocartography readings. I chose to do mine with Elliot Jay Tanzer. I found Elliot to be warm, supportive, and very thorough and attentive to details.

Spider Breath, 3 Meet Spider

In the first two spider breath posts, I asked you to reflect on your own feelings, attitudes, and thoughts towards the creatures we call spiders.

Today I offer you the invitation to come into deeper intimacy with spiders.

1. Please begin by reflecting on and reaffirming the intentions for the practice. Click here to review them.

2. Become aware of your breathing, and continue to witness your breath until you notice the pleasure inherent in breathing.

3.  Consider that no life form is wholly separated from another. To give one dramatic example, I recently read that mushroom and human DNA are 80 percent the same! It's probably more accurate to think of each life form as a particular eddy in a rushing stream, or a particular wave in a vast ocean. Where does the eddy begin, the wave end? Both the discrete form and the undifferentiated water exist, simultaneously. What this means in practical terms is that you as a human being can choose to swim through the undifferentiated medium of biological life and aim yourself towards communion with any one of the beings that emerge within that medium. Society may have conditioned your thinking and relationship patterns towards denial of this faculty. However, there are layers of the body that never forget how to do what I am describing here, and eventually, by working with the body layers that remember, the thinking and relating layers can become realigned with the truth.

4. In consideration of step 3, simply state, "Body, I give you 100 percent permission to feel and express the spider." 

Put your thinking and relating faculties gently to work as you do this. Your mind can focus on simply witnessing whatever happens when you make this statement. Your relationship-making faculty can hang back and refrain from making assumptions about how this new relationship may play out. Think of it as meeting a potential date at a party and deciding you're not going to make any quick decisions till you know this person better.

Remember that the spider is both exquisitely sensitive and a powerful survivor. Approach too fast or rough, and it will skitter away... or bite!

5. When you feel complete with witnessing whatever happens when you make the above statement, thank your body, thank the spider, and thank your courage. State, "Body, I give you 100 percent permission to return to your everyday relationship with the spider and to fully integrate the experience  of meeting the spider more closely."

6. You may want to do something expressive to anchor your experience, and your thoughts and feelings about it, in your memory. Journalling, drawing, moving/dancing, singing... enjoy whatever works for you.


7. You will likely meet more spiders as you go about your daily routine. Notice your immediate reactions to them. Just notice. Don't try to change these reactions. Witness yourself, and when the initial reaction has run its course, notice what happens next.


Meet the spider three or four times, and you will notice many interesting changes taking place in your life. You will also be ready for the next step, the "spider breath warmups." 

"When You Gonna Love You?" Finding My Way Through the Strange City

I made the CD, Feel the Love, Get the Respect: From Nature, For You, With Music, for many reasons. One of them was to help people access love and respect straight from the source in our world—Nature.

My reasoning was that when we start understanding these qualities—love and respect—as they exist in Nature, we can learn how to offer them to each other, human to human. And that we could learn how to offer these qualities to ourselves, from the inside out, and the outside in.

Ever since making that CD I have been challenged by the lack of love and respect in other humans and by the rips and tears in the fabric of my own self-respect and self-love like never before in my life. Challenged enough that I would say I have been living in a kind of slow-motion, perpetual crisis for two years now. I guess I'm receiving my own medicine!

I laugh to myself sometimes, thinking, "No wonder so few people actually want to buy that recording! If it does anything in their lives like it's done in mine, I don't blame them!" I am sincerely laughing as I write that. I'm not trying to pitch you here. I'll never, ever regret making that album. And it has for sure pitched me into deep waters, where I'm learning so many things I thought I already knew: about the lies I've lived and the lies I've experienced in those close to me, about what actually makes for loving and respectful relationships and what doesn't, and about the Divine complex grace that happens when a person decides they want to live in truth no matter what.

I recently had the good fortune to come across this video made by a Tori Amos fan. It's really helping me find my way through this strange city I find myself in, the world of humans, teeming with beauty and pain.

Link to this video here: http://youtu.be/Y0nX_oXNnmY

Spider Breath, 2... Intentions for the Practice

From my perspective, peacock spiders are fairly cute, even if they do sometimes gobble one another up.

For clarity's sake, I do not think that spider behavior is necessarily a model for human behavior. Spiders do eat one another, they do poison one another, and in their webs, they do ensnare one another. For a human, being bitten by certain spiders can start a serious health crisis.

The spider's social habits don't strike me as appropriate for humans.

And—what I do experience from the spider is tremendous instinct, power, agility, uncompromising connection with their sexuality, and enormous creativity, both within individual spiders and across the evolutionary path of the spider.

We humans are related to all other life forms, and each animal, plant, fungus, and element on our planet can teach us a lot about how to be a more whole and effective human being—if we understand how to properly integrate into our human selves the capabilities and perspectives of the other beings.

To meet the spider and its cosmos through the spider breath practice, the intentions that inform your actions are an absolute key to happy success.

The following are the base line intentions for the Spider Breath practice. Feel free to add your own. Know that if you don't respect the following intentions while doing the practice, you do so at your own risk—and this is a powerful practice.

1. I expand my ability to express and contain love.

2. I heal myself through coming into a state of inner wholeness and unity with all beings.

3. I expand my creative ability.

Every time you begin the spider breath practice, reflect on and reaffirm these intentions... that's your appropriate starting point.

The Spider Breath... Background

The Spider Breath is a meditation and movement practice that I created in the early 2000s in collaboration with Nature intelligence and Lynn Dueck. The Spider Breath can bring a person into deep states of communion with the Earth, with the creativity of the galactic center, and the intelligence and wisdom of your body. Simply put, the Spider Breath is a pleasurable way to expand your capabilities in every area of life.

I've long thought of it as a "Tantric" practice that can center us deeply into the doings of natural/physical/biological intelligence.

Over the coming months at this blog, I'll be presenting step by step instructions, Saturday by Saturday, for doing the Spider Breath, in a series of numbered entries titled "Spider Breath."

Along the way, I also plan to compose and record some music that could serve as accompaniment to your Spider Breath practice.

Here's a popular youtube video that graphically demonstrates the power of the spider. I empathize with the person in this video, he's expressing feelings I think many of us have... plus, I'd be cautious of this creature too., unless I felt extremely confident in my communion with it. And getting to that place would require a lot of inner work on my part.

Respect

To the best of my ability, I respect myself.

To the best of my ability, I respect you.

When I feel respect well up in my heart, it makes me want to sing. I've learned that just in the last week... that I sing out of respect.

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Today I caught myself saying to myself how stupid one of my past decisions was.

The truth is, even though following through on that decision didn't work out fully the way I wanted it to, I put a lot of effort into making the decision. I put a lot of effort into keeping my word and following through on the decision.

I now choose to respect myself for my sincerity and effort.

Dialogue with Natural/Physical/Biological Intelligence About Respect

Every wild creature, plant, and element (water, fire, earth, air) respects itself 100 percent. As humans, we get to choose whether we will align ourselves with that dynamic or not.

I invite you to learn what respect means from the Source!

1. Breathe with awareness of your breath until you notice how pleasurable it feels to breathe.

2. State, "Body, I give you 100 percent permission to feel the way you feel when I am respecting myself 100 percent."

3. Sit quietly, and witness what happens.

4. When you feel complete with the process, say "Thank you" to your body.

5. In daily life, how often do you feel the way your body felt during this dialogue with your bodily/natural/physical intelligence? If you want to feel this way more of the time, what will help you get there?

This video by David from Texas has advice for "How to Gain Peoples' Respect." Thank you David for your refreshing attitude...