Focus on the Body

This means that you want to be moving your awareness in your body in a three dimensional fashion. For example, let’s say you have recurrent pain in the left side of your chest and associate this with an unpleasant state of mind. A good starting exercise would be to place your awareness at the left pectoral and move your way into the ribs, lungs, and heart; after staying there for as long as you need you can slowly move into the posterior quadrant of your left side, then to the right posterior and finally back around to the right anterior, making a full circle with your awareness. This is a kind of modification or addendum to the Inner Dissolving Technique.



Why is this important and what does it have to do with empathy? Empathy is merely an expanded, or even narrowed, sense of awareness with someone or something outside your system. The real question you have to ask yourself is: once I get grounded and centered, and can move my awareness freely, what am I going to focus on? You can choose to focus your awareness inside your own system or outside. There is no real answer to say which is right. The only problem with focusing outside is that those states cannot be maintained over the long term unless you anchor them or can find correlate states inside your own body. Even so, it is highly unlikely that it would be good for anyone's system to constantly be tripping out. After a certain period of being high for so long, in a state that is not from your system, you enter a threat response mode. Of course I am not saying this is a bad learning exercise -- it just isn't where I'd want to be all the time.

Very few people are going to tell you that inner exploration, cleanup, re-programming, and overall work is going to take you months or even years to get results. No one would be able to sell any products if they told you that.

Learning anatomy and the hows and whys of your movement is essential. There is no time at which you are not moving; and there is no time at which you are not meditating. Meditating is merely using your awareness. So if everyone is enlightened the question becomes -- to what degree are you acting consciously with awareness?

Something I have just learned recently that is very important is not to over focus on certain parts of your system to the detriment of others. You do not want your consciousness to become fractionalized because you over focus on your heart and spend no time meditating on your tongue.

Any time you cannot move your body in a particular way, either because you are stuck in some painful pattern, or because you have simply lost awareness of part of your body, your system has to create neural workarounds for the lost awareness. This is not mumbo-jumbo science. If you lose awareness and the ability to move your levator labii muscles your body will have to create new neural pathways in order to restore that movement. It is possible for you to restore movement to this muscle; this is a great exercise to do as it only takes a few days to accomplish. What the hell is the point? Well anytime you can't move part of your body means you have lost a corresponding internal and external awareness -- no matter how subtle -- and part of the picture will be missing for you.

Yoga, Pilates, Z Health, meditation, awareness techniques, NEW Energy Ways, weight lifting, swimming, bike riding, and so on are examples of movement practices -- they are tools that can help you, but no single tool is necessarily the entirety of your tool box; you need to come up with your own integrated practice. Doing yoga without any awareness is not going to help you. Just doing a movement without awareness is going to create more imbalance in your system by strengthening already strong muscles and further weakening already weak muscles.

Movement Pattern Exercises and Diagnostics:
1. Create a list of problematic (habitual) mental patterns. Work on eliminating or changing these patterns to your liking.

2. Create a work log of problematic physical patterns. Identify tight, numb, or painful areas through stretching, movement, applied pressure, massage, etc. Make sure to include self massage and explorative or what might feel like novel stretches in your analysis and do not overlook stretching your fascia. Identify nasty, problematic, or numb states through meditation. Notice how your movements and states are related. A very slight shift or re-alignment in posture can create a huge shift in consciousness.

3. Identify which movements are good for your system; merge or place your awareness into a pose, stretch, or movement and notice how it shifts or changes your consciousness or state of mind. How does it make you feel, better or worse? At what level does this shift occur? This is in fact more of a long term practice than a single exercise.

4. Connect problematic areas with metaphors and terms of the body planes and various body parts. An initial list of terms can be found here. I plan to add more terms later. The basic idea is to connect your physical pattern with your overall movement in life. If you constantly find yourself over-reaching for glasses of water or when picking up things around the house then you would ask yourself, "How have I been over-reaching in other areas of my life?" Ideally it would be best to connect both mental patterns and physical patterns through body term metaphors, but it may be easier to start with physical patterns.

5. Look up the problematic physical areas in the Trail Guide to the Body book. Learn anatomy. The book Yoga Anatomy is a good book for learning which muscles you use during a pose.

6. Be around people that can help find your own customized process and who also know anatomy well.

7. Write everything down.