More on the Lesser Sac/Omental Bursa

Posted on April 8, 2020 by admin

Many more somatic delights to explore!

This more detailed view above is from Frank Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy, plate 331, if you have your own copy, showing a cross section through T-12. Netter always does his cross sections as if looking from below, so you have to flip your brain to reverse right and left, but the many internal spaces are well illustrated.

This illustration shows yet another perspective, tracking the lesser sac downward, with a great view of the epiploic foramen just below the gall bladder. The pancreas sits just behind, (where the words lesser sac are). Remember that this is not a large volume space, but rather distinct differentiated layers of fascia that ideally are lubricated with fluid to allow the organs to slide around. Think of the plastic supermarket bags for your veggies, before you get them open. Fat can accumulate here, as well as excess fluid in pathological conditions.

The T-12 section in general is one of the more complex and crucial regions of the body. Mechanically, the T-12 vertebrae has lumbar facets (primarily allowing flexion-extension) at L-1 and thoracic facets (primarily allowing rotation) at T-11 which allows it to act as a universal joint; (or not, if it is stuck like mine!) Structurally, we go from ribs/thoracic vertebrae to no ribs/lumbar vertebrae. The quadratus lumborum, the deepest abdominal muscle, runs from the 12th ribs to the top of the pelvis. The psoas (major and minor) has its top attachment at T-12 and connects to the diaphragm through the median arcuate ligament, linking breathing and movement of the legs and pelvis.

The Practice

Begin by dropping into stillness/presence as your ground and let it settle in to your field. We keep coming back when we realize we have lost this. This is step one in somatic meditation, starting in presence, returning to presence when we notice we have wandered away. In presence let your attention/imagination move to the lesser sac/omental bursa and then let go into a state of yin attention. In yang attention, we want to act; to do something, to grab onto something. Somatic meditation is practicing non-doing attention, known as ‘Wu Wei‘ in Taoist practice. Let the subtlest layers of your body be the teacher.

Also, because we have so many choices, if any of the the other areas shown in the diagrams speak to you, imagine/find/feel them in your practice in the same way, Wu Wei. Stay in Awareness/presence even as the subtle energies and insights emerge. It will be easy to become seduced and try to take over the process. Let the yang energy bring and sustain your attention to specific regions in the subtle field, but resist the urge to ‘do’ something.

Remember, in this region of the body we are half way between heart and hara. Here are some other explorations from my current practice. Some are more fruitful then others, but that may be a very personal thing. Find the ones that feed you and stay with them. From presence, you can drop into this any time of the day, not just ‘on the mat’.

Where the epeploic foramen links the lesser sac with the greater sac, directly in front of the inferior vena cava.

Where the falciform ligament of the liver separates the greater sac.

If you look closely at the top diagram, you can find the bottom of the pleural sac and the costo-diaphragmatic recess. Begin your exploration there.

Where the aorta emerges from being behind the diaphragm at the crura or crossing tendons, right in the center of the body.

Any of the stomach – spleen- kidney ligaments.

From the lesser omentum.

The spinal muscles directly posterior to the kidneys, allowing them to soften and melt.

From the psoas – diaphragm linking at the median arcuate ligament.

Please send questions from your practice, if and when they arise, and I can try to answer them in the coming blog posts. (yogarthur@aol.com)

The Dance of Heart and Hara

Posted on April 4, 2020 by admin

Falling Awake

Keep up your meditation practice, with the primary intention to relax into Awareness and let everything flow through you. We can call this resting in Stillness or Silence, with no attempt to inhibit the flow of thoughts, ideas and emotions. There is an inhibition of our reactivity to the stream by shifting in attention from the constantly changing world on the surface of the mind to the inner depths. Then, like falling asleep, we let go, falling awake, dissolving into awareness. Awareness resting in and as itself.

This is not easy to do, or should I say ‘not do’. But if we can open-heartedly accept the reality of your mental states, every once in awhile, we will forget the efforting and, voila, the magic of presence is there, resting as the ultimate stability of the unchanging Ground of Being. This is the ‘Ishvara Pranidhana’ of the Yoga Sutras, (PYS I-23), letting go into Divinity in its fullest sense. We need to practice, abhyasa, with open hearted devotion, continuously, for a long period of time, like forever, to be truly anchored here. (See PYS I-13 and I-14). This is the nivrtti marga mentioned in the previous post.

Now, back to our engagement with the wonderful world of form, or what Patanjali refers to as Prakriti, as we traverse the pravrtti marga in our somatic practice. The on-going goal of our practice is to continue to open our human energy field to become more balanced, integrated and coherent, within our unique selves and the Cosmos as a whole. This allows the Ground of Being to shine more clearly through the world of form, which makes it easier for the meditation practice to get stronger, deeper and more grounded, which allows the energy fields to become more coherent, which strengthens the human collective energy field, in an evolving spiral of deeper integration on the personal level and expansion of the collective intelligence. This is the evolutionary leap of our historical moment. This interplay of the inner and outer journey, our personal and relational lives, and as we will see, heart and hara, is the natural unfolding of a spiritual life.

Awakening the Lesser Peritoneal Sac

To continue to deepen our embodied integration and coherence, we will return to our Daoist models of the human energy field. (This section is long and detailed, and we will continue this theme, in differing ways, over the next few blogs, but this is the core of what you need to know.

The diagram on the right shows the three dantiens, or elixir fields, as they are described in Daoist practice, along with the yin’conception vessel’ and the yang ‘governing vessel’. On a gross level, the dantiens are easy to access as they correspond to the three bony cavities; the skull, rib cage and pelvis. Physiologically, they represent organizing centers of our psycho-biological life activity, further depicted in much more metaphorical detail in the Neijing tu.

On yet another level they can be seen as the centers of the three means of knowing: through the abstraction of the intellect, the relational compassion of the heart and gut level intuitive instinct of the hara. The abstract intellect is the most recent in evolution, and the most problematic in modern times. It took the universe at least 4 billion years to create this mode of knowing, so we must honor it as a precious and valuable gift, but it needs to be integrated into the older wisdom of heart and hara to not be damaging to our evolutionary journey.

The organizing center of the lower dantien, known as the hara in Japanese, is the center of gravity of the human body, or the energetic center of our movements. The first and second chakras can be found in the lower dantien, and this is also the center of the lower burner as we will see in the diagram below. As a movement center, it helps coordinate the action of two legs and tail with the spine. When our attention is centered here, there is a sense of being rooted or grounded, whether while sitting in stillness, or in movement. It is the place of embodied stability, the sthira in shtira sukham asanam. Further cultivated, its opening takes us down into the mysterious depths of Mother Earth and the 4 billion years of wisdom accumulated by life on this planet.

The center of the middle dantien, the heart center, is our spiritual center, the 4th of the seven chakras, the home of Shen, the Daoist term for spirit, and is also home of the upper burner, as we will see later. It is the source of our relational intelligence and our capacity to know we are one with all of creation, manifesting as love and compassion.

This middle dantien is also a movement center for quadrupeds, as it helps coordinate the movements of the upper limbs and head with the spine. Quadrupedal movement involves linking the lower and middle dantiens, the dance of heart and hara. Dogs when running offer a fantastic example of this coordination in action. In the photo above, (thanks to @William_Nettmann), notice the hind legs and tail (lower dantien) extending backward as the upper legs and head (middle and upper dantiens, reach forward.

In the next photo, (courtesy of Dan Gold on Unsplash), we see the next phase of quadrupedal running, where the energy of the limbs is gathered back to the center, like bakasana, even as head and tail continue to extend out in opposite directions for balance. To begin to embody the heart – hara dance, visualize a dog running; extend – gather – extend – gather, yang – yin – yang – yin, etc. Where do you feel this in your body. I love the fact that most of the time their feet are off the ground, like they are flying across the land. Speed and power arise form this powerful movement integration.

How can us bipedal humans utilize this amazing coordinating capacity? This dynamic integration is a key action in the yoga of B.K.S. Iyengar, and can be seen in how he presents all of the forward bends in “Light on Yoga”. Ardha baddha padma pascimottanasana is just one example, but they all begin with anterior extension by opening the yin conception vessel, which is a posture in and of itself.

The forward bend then emerges in the opening/yielding of the yang, back body, governing vessel. These are not spinal muscle actions but pranic/organic releasing in the deep interior structures of the body. Iyengar makes advanced actions look simple, here heart and hara in perfect harmony. But they are not, unless you are a dog!

All yoga beginners know the cat-cow pose which, like the forward bend process of Iyengar, mimics the running action of the dogs through the spine. Unfortunately, as humans, we have less than helpful tail and challenging connection from core to neck and skull. Because of this, and cultural reasons as well, in extending, instead of opening the yin anterior body, we tend to overly contract the ‘yang’ spine (the Governing Vessel or Du Mai), especially the lumbar and cervical regions. Correspondingly, in flexion, instead of softening the yang spinal muscles, we tend to compress the yin fluid body (conception vessel – ren mai).

We must learn to awaken the intelligence/dynamic presence of the organs and connective tissue structures in the core of the body, where the coordination in running takes place as our primary support system for the human upright posture. From an evolutionary perspective, this is where the oldest embodied wisdom is stored. We were a gut tube long before we developed a spine and limbs.

A Detailed Inner Anatomy Lesson

We will include both Daoist and western anatomy in the presentation. The key region for integrating flow between the middle and lower dantiens, known as the middle burner in Daoism, includes the liver, gall bladder, stomach, spleen and pancreas, as well as all of the ligaments that hold it all together. These organs are below the diaphragm, but inside the volume of the ribs. The upper burner is the torso above the diaphragm, the lower burner the rest of the abdominal organs including the kidneys. Sometimes the small intestine is included in the middle burner because the upper part, the duodenum, is intimately connected to the stomach and pancreas. We can visualize the three burners as the process that organizes and balances the fire and water elements in the body.

The diaphragm and heart are the primary movers of the energy flow through this space and the diaphragm especially in the movements of the body through space. The diaphragm is intimately connected to the psoas muscles thus linking the legs to breathing. (The integration of breathing and walking is a basic principle in Ida Rolf’s work). So, surprise, surprise, breathing is primary. In the dogs, and other quadrupeds, the diaphragm and organs are vertically suspended downward from the horizontal spine by ligaments and have tremendous freedom of movement. The diaphragm is ligmentously linked to liver, stomach and spleen below and the heart above. As bipeds, we humans carry a lot of vertical compression in our spine, diaphragm, ligaments and organs, inhibiting energy flow. Finding our vertical plumb line, sitting and standing is a key component to helping the relieve compression.

A subtle approach to softening and opening this region uses the breath and comes from Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s explorations of the Daoist ‘Embryological Breathing“, and this will be our practice. Watch this video clip and hear how Bonnie describes ‘allowing the breath to emerge from behind the stomach in the omental bursa’, also known as the lesser peritoneal sac depicted in turquoise in the diagram. She contrasts this with more traditional abdominal breathing which primarily engages the lavender greater peritoneal sac. Observe how the lesser sac divides the greater into a front and back, so it puts you in the center portion of the abdomen. Bonnie also refers to the epiploic foramen, where the lesser and greater sacs are linked, which can be seen below.

Now it is very important to know that the volume of the peritoneal spaces depicted in the first diagram are greatly exaggerated. The organs take up most of the space. This is more obvious in this transverse section, taken at the top of the region. What is difficult to see is is that these sacs are the micro-space between two layers of the peritoneum, the continuous membrane which lines the abdominal/pelvic cavity, covers the abdominal organs, and links with various ligaments to provide them a structural support.

The two layers are the parietal peritoneum lining the inner side of the abdominal wall and the visceral peritoneum which has turned inwards to surround most of the abdominal organs. The organs that are surrounded are called intraperitoneal and include stomach liver and spleen. Organs not surrounded by the visceral peritoneum are called retroperitoneal and include kidneys, pancreas, duodenum, oesophagus, ascending and descending colons, and rectum. These greater and lesser sacs, actually very narrow spaces, are usually filled with a small amount of lubricating fluid to help sustain the mobility of the organs in relationship to each other.

Notice how deep into the core of the body this lesser sac space is, and also how it is right in front of the aorta and inferior vena cava. Notice the retroperitoneal kidneys are even further posterior and very close to the outer spinal muscles. A lot of tension is carried in the kidney region because of our overuse of the large spinal muscles just behind the kidneys. We will comeback to an important kidney-lung relationship in a subsequent post. One more thing to note in the cross section is the green costodiaphragmatic recess. This elusive space separates the ribs and diaphragm and all subtle work with the breath has to eventually flow through and open this to further liberate the diaphragm.

Speaking of the diaphragm, (phreno comes from the Greek root word for diaphragm) there are more ligaments that connect this middle region to the upper burner and these are shown on the left. The phreno-cardiac ligaments connect the heart to the sternum, diaphragm, spine and these are continuous with the ligaments below the diaphragm. If you look carefully at the transverse section, you can see the diaphragm looping around the spine right where the aorta passes through it. These pictures are here to help you navigate/visualize these deep inner spaces when we dive into the practice. Much thanks to the web site, Teachmeanatomy.info and Caryn and Kevin for the drawing of the ligaments.

On to the Practice

The secret is to embryological breathing is to eliminate all effort and tension. It is a letting go into a natural softening and opening that takes on a life of its own, like the embryological development process, outside the will power. Sounds a lot like meditation practice! Begin lying down with legs supported in any of a number of ways:( knees bent-feet on the floor: knees lifted with bolster or blanket: lower legs up on the seat of a chair). Relax and allow a few regular breaths to settle the system. Notice if abdominal breathing is your normal breath. Ideally it is, as this is relaxing, like a baby breathing. Chest breathers often have a constricted diaphragm and some level of anxiety as the norm. (Pranayama breathing is a whole other ballgame.)

Visualize the space behind the stomach (the lesser sac) and allow the breath to emerge from and through here. This is much quieter than abdominal breathing, with much less effort. Allow the breath to take on a life of its own. It is not about controlling the breath willfully. If you find yourself tensing through effort, back off and wait a few minutes. Then begin again. Like our sitting meditation practice, patience and a quiet presence are the key. As you allow the breath to flow, it may start to subtly move in all sorts of directions, through all sorts of tissues, through the spaces between layers, in anywhere or everywhere in the body. Let your attention be on the sensations, without trying to manipulate or control them. This is a very yin practice; feeling, listening, noticing and letting go more and more. Patanjali, in his second sutra on posture, PYS II-47, says “keep letting go of effort and allow the cosmic wisdom to flow”.

Once you get a feel for this, you can take the practice into any pose where you can stay alert and relaxed, allowing the pose to flow. Restorative postures are perfect. Supported bridge pose, in any variation, is excellent as it helps you experience the inner opening of the chest as a flow from within, rather than from spinal/muscular effort. Imbalances in the neck and throat, as seen here, can be explored as well by allowing the oesophagus to soften away from the trachea. Some extra height under the shoulders might be helpful here.

Seated twists also work if you can quietly sustain the double spiral action (right and left). Supported backbends, supported forward bends … be creative. Just remember Patanjali’s instruction: “keep letting go of effort and allow the cosmic wisdom to flow”. Finally, take it into your sitting meditation as another ‘seed’ of attention. By resting in stillness and simultaneously being present to the subtle breathing, the breathing begins to teach you. Both of the spiritual instincts are present, informing each other. Feel the radiance (heart) and the stillness (hara) embracing each other, moment to moment, in the timeless dimension of your True Nature.

Vulnerably Grounded in Spaciousness

Posted on March 25, 2020 by admin

Patanjali’s definition of posture, sthira sukham (asanam) desribes the embodied state of being in harmony with both the force of gravity and the natural spaciousness of the Universe. The feeling is that you are floating, which in many ways is true. Internally, there is a release of compression in the blood vessels and nerves, allowing the blood and qi to circulate and flow more freely. This is more easily felt in movement, where the ‘sukham’ or fluid flow through spaciousness is more obvious. In the non-movement of a yoga pose, the sukham is felt as the harmonious flow of blood and qi, even as the outer body remains still. In referring to meditation, Adyashanti describes stillness as the complete absence of resistance to the flow of life. This is another way to describe sthira sukham.

On a cosmic level, all forms in the Universe floating. This NASA photo taken from a million miles away shows our moon gliding past Mother Earth, a big blue ball floating in space. If we look deeply, we can see that not only are we floating, but we are very vulnerable. To us tiny beings on the planet, the earth seems immense. But in a more cosmically oriented reality, it is tiny. Life, and the conditions that allow life are rare, precious and vulnerable in the vast Universe. Covid-19 is here to remind the whole planet of this reality and to encourage us to open our hearts, which know vulnerability intimately, more completely.

Vulnerability can lead to deeper opening through an embodied sense of compassion and tenderness. But is also can create the contracting effects of fear and anxiety. This is true both personally and collectively, as we can see in our personal and collective responses to the covid-19 virus. Our responsibility, that is, our ability to respond, to this amazing historical moment, needs to honor the fear appropriately, (social distancing and rigorous hand washing everyone). But we also need to be present to all that arises in the collective field, with compassion and tenderness, to ourselves and others. This is where our practice can hopefully pay off. I remember Iyengar, many years ago, both playfully and seriously describe the need to practice even more diligently when things are going well, quoting the old proverb “make hay while the sun shines”. We’ve been training for this for a while, and now is time to really bring our ‘sthira sukaham‘ vulnerability out into the world, in whatever way we can.

For those new to meditation, ‘vulnerable grounded spaciousness’ is not an easily accessible state of embodiment, as the energetic field holding together the fluids, fibers, organs and tissues of the body carries unresolved and unprocessed wounds and traumas, embedded as patterns of holding and tension. Humans, being expressions of the vulnerability of life, have had to develop survival strategies to remain alive. Implicit in ‘I am vulnerable’ is ‘the world is dangerous’ and ‘I need to defend myself against ‘other”.

Our life experiences, beginning soon after conception, are inevitably filled with moments of pre-verbal fear and anxiety. Continuing through infancy and childhood and on into adulthood, these experiences have the possibility of being resolved and dissolving back into the infinite. However, when very young, even small traumas can overwhelm the immature nervous system and become repressed before they can be resolved. They embed themselves in the tissues as patterns of tension, and remain in the background, unconscious, but influencing our behavior. Over the years, more and more wounds and traumas can accumulate, some being of major intensity.

The ideas and beliefs that evolve along with this survival process create a set of mental processes we call the ego and these become the dominant on-going story of our inner world. (The skandhas are a useful model to describe aspects of this development.) Our innate sense of Wholeness is repressed into the deep unconscious. In the Christian world, this repression is referred to as the “Fall from Grace” or original sin. We all know the feeling of separation and alienation from ourselves, and we are all on the journey back home, awakening to our always and already present Wholeness or True Nature.

Depending on the quality of our parenting, our capacity to self-regulate, and eventually resolve, these internalized states and energetic threats to our vulnerability can range for pretty good to very poor. We all enter adulthood with a some layers of unconsciousness, undigested trauma. Important to note is that the unconscious holds not only our own personal wounds, but also those of our ancestors, passed down through parental patterning, our cultural collective field, and the collective wounds and traumas embedded in the whole human collective unconscious. Meditation practice brings attention to the these unconscious patterns as they arise in the mind field. Awakening, or bringing the light of loving compassionate attention to these layers of the psyche, is what expanding consciousness means. As these traumas arise in our field of awareness, we need skillful means to manage, transform and heal them.

In meditation, when our attention is hijacked by our thoughts, there is usually not a large energetic charge to the process, and we can settle back into some level of stillness relatively easily. However, it is a different story when the hijacking involves trauma. Even outside of mediation, in daily life, we have all had the experience of our attention being hikjacked by some anxiety or fear and feeling the fight or flight mode of survival kick in. Because Covid-19 is activating everyone on the planet and triggering their unconscious, unresolved issues, this is a great time to work on healing both our individual and collective traumas. These powerful energetic states are looking for resolution or transformation, but without conscious skill and attention, we can end up feeding them with more fear energy.

The process of training the nervous system to handle emotional overwhelm is known as self-regulation, and is a primary aspect of parenting, psychotherapy and meditation. A grounded, spacious and loving nervous system can hold the field for another so they can learn to sensibly monitor and modulate their own their own nervous system responses to the moment. A child feels afraid and the parent holds and soothes, allowing her calmness to permeate the nervous system of the child. A therapist remains grounded and calm in their own heart and nervous system, guiding the client to become present, to navigate their inner feelings without being overwhelmed. In meditation, we become a parent to our traumatized inner child, healing ourselves from our own connection to unconditional love.

This is the healing power of the relational field and we can take it out into the world. Not by imposing anything, but by just remaining vulnerable, grounded and spacious as life unfolds around and through us, the collective field is soothed. Of course, the more of us soothing, the more powerful the effect.

The relational field flows both ways of course. Anxiety and fear in the parents also imprint on their children. Demagogues prey upon the fear and anxiety in others to whip up a frenzy of paranoia that they use to further their own ego-driven need for power. This is why we humans, individually and collectively are so emotionally complicated. We often cannot tell where the fear is actually coming from, and thus cannot heal it.

Fear is a healthy expression of our survival instinct. Without it, animal life would not have survived. (Plants do not have nervous systems, so I’m not sure how they internally deal with vulnerability.) Vulnerability is the ultimate expression of life. In the non human world, fear arises in response to a real threat, the nervous system shifts gears and the organism flees, fights or freezes.

Evolution has presented a challenge with the human because we have a nervous system that has evolved to respond to the reality of the present moment. But we have also added new neuronal circuits that can jump back and forth in time, totally losing track of the present moment, and confusing the older structures. The human mind can conjure up fear when there is no danger at all in the present and the flight or flight response triggers. We can project an imaginary scary future and get all contracted inside, now. Or something triggers a chunk of stored, undigested fear or anxiety, stored in the body, and we feel terrified as if there is a real threat happening now. When a real threat like covid-19 appears, we often over-react because the unresolved fears of the past also flood the system, and it is unclear what responses are appropriate and which ones are not. We can act ir-response-ibly when emotionally confused.

Practice

In your sitting practice, or even when standing and walking, take time to trace the flow of gravity downward, allowing your attention/imagination to travel all the way through, to the other side of the earth and beyond. Notice that you end up moving into space. If you really allow the earth to hold you, spaciousness spontaneously arises as a natural expression of the cosmic order. This is sthira sukham, or grounded spaciousness. Begin to notice that all the non-human beings on our planet are continuously expressing sthira sukham. Time for us to join the party.

However, as wonderful and important as this is, this is still a grounded-ness in the world of form. It leads to a relaxing and opening in the nervous system and this can be a portal to true stability, or should I write True Stability, which is Self Realization, or total identification with the Ground of Being, or True Nature. Nothing more stable than the ‘unchanging unbounded Presence. This is why True Meditation is so important.

True Nature, ever-present and yet hidden, cannot not be discovered through thought. We have to feel our way down and in, through the layers of our psyche, into the unknown. Thought can only regurgitate what it already knows. It knows not of the unknown. When we can create some level of outer silence, to eliminate distraction, and our attention can turn inward, thoughts and emotions throw up more distractions. They are neither good nor bad, just distractions. Practice is patiently allow these distractions to come and go without reacting.

The habitual grasping and avoiding really want to do their thing, but we can develop patience by training the mind to stabilize on a seed form, (see previous post). As the seed matures and takes on a life of its own, holding the energy field of the body/mind in a state of integrated coherence, we can feel/listen even more deeply and allow True Nature to reveal itself. Awakening cannot be willed, but received, as Divine Grace. As Richard Baker Roshi, one time head of the San Francisco Zen Center once said, ‘Awakening is an accident, but practice makes you accident prone.”

Keep practicing !

Addendum to the previous post: More Japa:

OM
the ultimate mantra

Pause – Relax – Open – Allow
From Frank Ostaseski. any and/or all of the words work

Metta Phrases: Feel free to use ones that have the most meaning for you.
May I (We) be safe.
May we be healthy.
May we be happy.
May we be filled with loving kindness