Union (Part 2)

Recently I was having an impassioned debate with a friend about pragmatism versus optimism, and which one is more effective in achieving goals. It got me to thinking about a post I made this summer called Union, Part I. I intended to write a part two but alas, the dog days of summer came and went and so too with it, the spark of verbally cohesive thought.

So this conversation couldn’t have been more serendipitous for the New Year to once again explore the concept of embodied creation. If you haven’t read Part I, you can go there first .

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Ok, so let’s first play a little semantics by recognizing the debate with my friend was using the wrong words. Pragmatism and optimism aren’t opposites. They aren’t mutually exclusive. They don’t even get to the heart of the debate. Instead what I believe to be the basis of this discussion was what Part One of this article was touching upon: that the male energy (the fiery, doing, accomplishing aspect of self) is somehow more effective in dream attainment than female energy (the quieter, connected, receiving, allowing aspect of self). But as we discussed in Part I, the reality is we need a balance of both in order to get what we truly want. We need both the ability to hold the FEELING of our desire as if we already have the physical attainment of it and the ability to take proactive steps towards the goal. And moreover, we need to be able to recognize that the place of feeling (again, feminine aspect) is needed in every moment where we generate our goals and motivation to take action… in order to be harnesses effective pragmatism.

Perhaps a better way to look at this is by understanding that your emotional, mental, and spiritual bodies are the house in which your physical body exists. (Read that again.) Your physical body is housed within your subtle ones (i.e - the gunas in yogic terms). This is probably a discussion for a different day but suffice for today, this perspective switch, coupled with our discussion in part one, can fundamentally change the way we manifest desires. For to get what we truly want, a full-bodied approach is required. In other words, by acknowledging all parts of the Self are present and needed at all times, we become an embodied expression of that which is intangible. We take something from an idea (our desire) and create the tangible (our manifestation).

Ancient cultures have recognized this concept for thousands of years. Indigenous tribes, use song and dance to illustrate, exemplify, or work with these different aspects of self. For example, in a North American indigenous tribe, male dancers can be seen hopping on one foot before repeating the exact moves on the other. This is an intentional act of balancing meant to elicit the balance of nature and life as it is reflected in the body. Other indigenous female dancers can be seen moving much more gently, where the goal is to move slowly and deliberately. These dancers feet are barely seen moving off the ground, emphasizing the feminine energetic connection to the earth.

Of course there’s also the chakra system, which in western cultures has primarily focused on just seven that reside along the spine to the crown of the head. Each of these energy centers are linked to specific characteristics that many of us would more easily correlate to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The root chakra is our sense of safety, the heart and throat chakra aids in our ability to have heart-based connection and expression, and the crown chakra equivocating to the ability to receive ideas from that space that seems outside of our body.

When a lower element in this process is blocked or overactive, we cannot embody a higher state of creation because our energetic and mental aspects are essentially too preoccupied. If, for example, we are too consumed by where the next paycheck is coming from or where we will sleep tomorrow, we have little bandwidth left for dreaming big or believing the dream can manifest into our physical reality. Or, if we’re always off in dream land, skipping from one idea to the next, or creating “The Plan” to solve a problem in our life, we’ll be stuck in the upper chakras with no way to ground that energy into physical reality.

Yet we don’t just have to look at these cultures to understand the concept of alignment. Gabrielle Roth, a world renowned dancer, traveled across the globe to study physical expression across cultures. During this study she understood that all movement could be boiled down to just five different categories: Flowing movement most aptly addresses the body’s needs, while staccato patterns can better express the heart. Chaotic movements better suit the mind’s needs as it often quickly skips from thought to thought (the ungroundedness we talked about earlier). Lyrical movement patterns are softer as it more accurately reflects our soul - our true self’s natural state. And stillness - or lack of movement - is the culmination of the spirit, the constant state of being we find in nature. Gabrielle Roth’s 5 Rhythms, a dance system which tries to connect the whole body through movement, is the outcome of these studies.

Even if her system doesn’t resonate for you, there are still plenty of ways we can identify when the full body is out of balance. Your energetic body, for instance, can become listless and feel depressed and/or anxious. One antidote for this is a warm salt bath, which connects us back to the physical elements of water and earth. Similarly but distinctive from our energetic body, a mental imbalance may look like racing thoughts, being too much in your head, and a sense of feeling un-grounded. A great solution to this is to go outside in bare feet or eat raw vegetables, particularly root vegetables. Your emotional body becoming overwhelmed is a by-product of both the energetic and mental imbalances, and so we take care of the latter to come back into emotional equilibrium. And lastly - perhaps more obviously - a physical imbalance can look like lethargy, dullness, or weight gain. A fiery, energetic yoga flow can adjust this. Likewise, hurriedness and weight loss is better met with a slow flow yoga class or a walk.

Hopefully you can now see how interwoven each aspect of Self is with the next and why it is so important to develop our awareness. We practice mindfulness, yoga, meditation, etc., because we need to have a relationship with the embodied Self...because we need the union of all parts to create the whole story. Not doing so is ultimately an act of self aggression by means of self rejection. Not doing our practice makes us lazy to our experience and gives our sovereignty away to others and to those we admire to tell us how to live our lives better. And in this way we can also blame others and external situations for why we aren’t living the lives we truly want. It’s an action oriented life versus a reactive one.

We practice to prepare for the moments when the rubber meets the road so that when something gets difficult we know how it shows up in our bodies. We know how to care for ourselves. Or when we are presented with a choice - even a good choice - easily identify which direction moves us closer to our whole Self.

As you move into 2020, trying to get to that next thing or place in your life, think of yourself as the professional athlete or performer in your own life. Practice and practice again so that when game time or show time comes, you’re not only equipped to handle it but able to ENJOY the fruits of your creation.

Happy New Year and happy manifesting, friends.