Birdie Transformation Program
Week Eight
Grounding, embodiment, shame and pleasure
This week’s investigations seem huge
1) Look it up – grounding:
Find out what people mean by grounding. The grounding that is referred to here is when you hear: ground down, usually associated with taking a deep breath, getting out of your head, getting into your body.
How do YOU ground yourself? How do YOU know if you are in your body or in your head?
There is a form of grounding used in healing that means to touch the earth/dirt with your skin, usually your feet, to allow for electron energy exchange. This is not what is meant.
2) Sense what is going on in your body:
Take time each day this week to sense yourself, your body or part of your body and give the sensation names, like tingly, hot, cold, full, pressure, tight, soft and so on. No labeling like angry jealous, irritated ….stick to the actual physical sensation.
The deeper background of this beginning exercise is the inhabiting of our bodies. The being intimately aware of the body’s sensations, this sensing of your physical vehicle. This getting to know your body and ultimately to actually fall in love with this vehicle we inhabit and are one with.
It is through our bodies that consciousness comes alive.
This process might bring up images or judgments of some things that we feel ashamed about.
3) Get acquainted with shame
Maybe you already are fully aware of the things you hide and would not want anyone to ever see or know. Maybe you have not really looked at it.
In this next exploration, be gentle with yourself! Take some time to think, or even write a list, of things you are ashamed of.
It is possible that you might even be of the opinion that there is nothing you are ashamed of in yourself.
Think about it this way then: what are the things about you and your life you don’t want to tell anyone?
Why is that?
The force, the life energy, the breath – the spirit that moves through all things and cells knows no shame. It is something we acquired from our human and societal environment.
Our essential self and our physical manifestation are intimately linked. We are the embodiment of our soul, our essential self. You will not ever live here with true freedom if some part of you has to remain hidden from you, and others.
4) Explore pleasure in movement
Watch this video of yoga movements.
Try out something similar. You might first notice tightness or pain or tension. Keep exploring. Notice when your physical movement feels pleasurable, when your body feels good. Just notice.
If you don’t speak enough English to understand what is said in this video, watch it anyway – open to the feeling of the movements. If you are male and can’t quite relate, try it anyway. There are masculine and feminine currents in each one of us, and while each individual has a centrum of gravity on the spectrum, we all have both energies and at times we all need to occupy the opposite pole. We want internal flexibility to do that.
I am including this quote:
True change and advanced human adaptation are not made on the basis of any self-conscious resistance to old, degenerative, and subhuman habits. Change is not a matter of not doing something. It is a matter of doing something else — something that is inherently right, free, and pleasurable. Therefore, the key is insight and the freedom to feel and participate in ways of functioning that are right and new.
The tendencies and patterns of your earlier adaptations are not wrong. They were appropriate enough in their own moment of creation, and there is no need to feel guilt or despair about them. Likewise, efforts to oppose and change them are basically fruitless. Such efforts are forms of conflict, and they only reinforce the modes of egoic “self-possession”.
What is not used becomes obsolete, whereas what is opposed is kept before you. Therefore, the creative principle of change is the one of relaxed inspection and awareness of existing tendencies, and persistent, full feeling orientation to right, new, regenerative functional patterns.
Adi Da Samraj
from “The Secret of How To Change”
in The Enlightenment of the Whole Body (October, 1978)