Day Two: Refreshing Fluidity      

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2

Refreshing Fluidity

Humans are mostly water, reflecting our oceanic heritage. How do we cultivate responsiveness and resonance, rather than rigidity?

Lying comfortably on the floor, eyes closed:

-Engage the theatre of your imagination. Visualize your body as a giant water balloon.

-Begin rolling the balloon by pouring its fluid contents. Dissolve your boney joints and tight places. Sometimes it helps to move slowly, feeling the continuity of all the tissues.

-Now imagine being moved by a fluid context, an ocean wave or river current moving the volume of your body from outside—propelling, rolling your skin through space.

-Now move from the skin itself—the mutable membrane. Shape-shift your body through the container of the skin.

-Explore the fluid body on your own: skin to depth inside, skin to depth outside. What does your body dream up next?

-Pause, noticing all the fluidity that is happening in what we call stillness.

Rolling the three body weights

-Starting with your head, begin rolling the globe of your skull. Notice that you have to move your whole body to touch all the surfaces.

-Roll the basket of your ribs. There are over two hundred joints in your resilient ribs; let them touch and be touched by the ground.

-Roll the bowl of your pelvis. Feel its roundness. Explore the circumference of your pelvic bowl, receiving the impression of the ground.

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-Now, roll the three body weights together. Explore a log roll, like a child rolling down a hill—moving the body as whole around an axis.

-Rest.

-Starting the roll at the head, allow a sequential spiral through the spine.

-Initiating with your tailbone, notice how the spiral reverses. How does this change your experience?

-Pause, returning to omnidirectional awareness of the fluid body.

-When you’re ready, with eyes closed, roll your body into a seated position. Pour the pelvis first, then the ribs, and the head is last.  Can you retain fluidity in verticality?

-Slowly open your eyes.  See or imagine someone seated across from you. Sustain the inner sea of your fluid body as you add vision and relationship to other.

 -Dance your own dance. Fluidity underlies all styles of movement. Any reach in space is a stretch, connecting fluidly through your fascia to the entire body. If you move one part, another responds.  Flow through the weave of your structure.     

 Every quality found under water is found in us. Our bodies remember.