The animal in us needs to be awake…the cultural part of us needs to be awake…so the Spirit can be loose in the field…
Fluid power is learned from pleasure.
Our cultural conditioning is, ‘No pain, no gain’…but if you want your animal body back you must alter the figure/ground of your perception and discover, ‘No pleasure, no leisure’.
Learning from pleasure instead of pain is the way of fluidity. Muscles experience pain to grow. The lactic acid in the body hurts until it can be metabolised. Fluidity follows the path of pleasure. The endorphins feel so good until they are metabolised
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.”
– from Mary Oliver’s ‘Wild Geese’.
Pandiculation
The reawakening of this animal sense develops a sensitivity to the ecstatic nature of cells when they align with one another. Hence the pleasure when doing a yawning stretch – the way that animals stretch…they ‘pandiculate’..!
They don’t stretch like a yogi. They stretch under tension. So you will see when a cat reaches out its paw, it’s … stretch …. and relax. And this kind of stretching is called pandiculation.
This is what animals do. This is how animals stretch. They do this 50 times a day. There is such joy in a good yawn and stretch, there is pleasure in it.Pandiculation resets the fascia, nourishes the nerves and resets the tension/relaxation response of every individual muscle cell. Without remembering this natural response to tension, relaxation will always be partial as the body harbours its myriad stored tensions…
Tremouring
Shaking off tension is another animal skill that gets lost with the socialization of civilization. All animals tremour after a tense situation, immediately shaking off the tension in the body. We don’t do that anymore, we collect it, like misers hoarding gold. And get sick…indeed the whole society has this sickness of tension; goals, goals, goals… the masculine response over everything and the calm of the feminine is lost under the load of ambition and social morality.
“Culture is your operating system” – Terrence McKenna
A mind begins to mature when it takes responsibility for its own conditioning. If we do not program our own mind we abrogate that responsibility to our childhood, and never grow up. Coming into one’s own authority is an awakening to power.
Our animal body naturally pandiculates out of relaxation and tremours out of tension. It is so easy to relearn, we had it as kids…and the vitality that comes gives us the juice to penetrate our cultural armour; to dissolve the layers of cultural conditioning that drive us. It is the power we need to learn to drive the culture instead of being driven by it…Relaxation
We tend to think of the animal body as one which is capable of total ferociousness or wild love-making. Yet the thing that animals do best, is rest…all these other activities are only the fruit that is born of the tree of rest. Animal rest is an activity. It is not the lack of activity. The parasympathetic nervous system does not simply cancel the sympathetic nervous system, otherwise it would just be an “off” switch. It activates relaxation.
Nor is chilling in front of a TV restful. The mind is constantly creating all kinds of emotions and thoughts that are impulsing the organs and the muscles and nerves in response to the stimuli of the television.
”Rest is the basis of all activity”. Sadhguru
The hara is the energetic centre of the core strength. When we are totally relaxed, animal relaxed, we are naturally centred in our hara. Conversely when we are in our hara we are animal resting. So all Tanaiki movements are hara distal. That is, movement is both through and from the hara.
We also need to release stored tensions and complete unfinished psychological business. We use breathwork and trancework to help complete our psychological, unfinished business so that we may grow more fully into our maturity as human beings, coordinated in body and mind…
So we learn from the pleasure of the body, pandiculate, tremour, relax, and breath and trance through our yesterdays…and waken back into the animal body…responsive to the moments…
