On Sunday, November 4th, Caryn came to The Watertown Center for the Healing Arts to present a somatic workshop”Explorations in Sound, Movement and Breath”. With over 40 years of experience in teaching creative movement, Caryn’s unique approach to somatic awakening dives headlong into the sacred feminine to reconnect students to the oldest and most cosmically aligned regions of their body/mind.

All cultures have traditions around collective movement and song and we began with an enquiry into group movement. There is something powerful about moving in unison in a group, of dissolving into a larger field in flow, rhythm and harmony, of discovering individuality while remaining in a multiplicity of relationships with the other bodies and the surrounding space. The sacred feminine is about expanding into relationships while strengthening a healthy sense of self.

Then we explored the relationships to ground and space to awaken the gravity response system, a primal, pre-cognitive experience of ‘where am I’ quite different form the ‘who am I ‘ mind state. Gravity or ground is found as a felt sense of weight, through bones and fluids, organs and cells, and always orients downward into the center of Mother Earth. Its cultivation leads to what Patanjali calls ‘sthira’, stability, in his classic description of posture, sthira sukham asanam, posture requires stability and freedom. (Later in the day we focused on feeling a deep sense of grounding through two of the tarsal bones, the navicular (‘the navigator’) and cuboid, to bring even more stability to standing. For most these bones are un-felt, un-conscious, un-moving.) The felt sense of weight builds a healthy sense of self the is able to surrender to the ‘no-self’ field of the living cosmos.

The complement to weight is the felt sense of space, of lightness, of levity that allows us to move out into the world, to be in relationships, to feel spacious and open. We orient to space through ‘vectors’, an extension of energy or intention in a specific direction, with a specific magnitude of energy. Reaching out to pick up a pencil with my hand is one example. B.B.S. Iyengar in trikonasana is demonstrating a multiplicity of vectors. The obvious ones include each arm, each leg, his fingers and toes. But also, his eyes are vectoring upward, his head and tail are extending in opposite directions, his heart is coming right out of the photo to the viewer. This helps explain the nature of complementary or opposite vectors the allow a centered stillness amidst the intensity. Head and tail, right and left arms or legs, and front and back are three obvious possibilities.

Although we did not work with this on Sunday, here is a clip of Caryn demonstrating using vectors in movement in an exploration known as the flight of the eagle, which,as you yogis will recognize, comes from suryanamaskar. Notice how space invites her to move through knees, eyes and skull, fingers, arms, legs and kidneys.

In class we used knees, elbows, different arm bones to experience the sense of reaching out into space from many areas of the body, sometimes working with a partner to ‘entice’ a movement with a direction. Most interesting for me was using the various sensory modalities to experience both reaching out into space and receiving sensation as ‘weight’. This was especially obvious in listening to the sounds of the bowls she was using in the afternoon session. If the sounds came to me, which was the familiar, I could feel the sounds coming in and grounding. If I ‘reached out’ to the sounds with my sense of hearing, not with tension, but with an expansion, I found my skull bones opening sideways and me ‘ears’ becoming huge. This was a total surprise and utterly delightful.

The continuing theme was to release all sense of effort, the ‘gripper/zipper’ state and feel how pure perception/sensation, evoked by orientation to space and ground, allowed movements and openings that were truly effortless. Nothing extra needed. We used this perception/extension process to liberate the hands, arms and shoulder girdle, and feet legs and pelvic girdle, to discover our ‘fish body’. Detailed explorations included differentiating radius and ulna  and tibia and fibula to find the inter-osseus membranes. By reaching radius down into the hand and the ulna toward the elbow, the forearms expand and new channels of energy emerge in all arm movements. By rotating the tibia and fibula in relationship to each other, first opening the front compartment in plantar flexion, and then the back compartment in dorsiflexion, the feet and lower legs awaken in new ways.

We also discovered the angle of the rami connecting the pubic bones and the sitting bones are diagonal and in women this angle can be quite large. This creates more vectors when coming into forward flexion of the hips. In finding balance on one leg, stability can increase when the ramus of the standing leg is drawn into the midline of the body and the cuboid and navicular bones release downward. (see above)

(In part 2 we will visit the afternoon sound explorations into organs and the third ventricle of the brain)