1st Gear II

Looking over last week post on my 1st gear concept I find myself unsatisfied. It touches upon many of the points I wanted to express, but in hindsight, I realized I omitted the emotional component that all too often bubbles up when we attempt to embody stillness.

So let's start by exploring what stillness is. Stillness can look like yoga poses where we are holding difficult positions that strain our muscles for a short time. It can also be where we place ourselves in a comfortable meditative state for a longer period, which for me at least is far more difficult. Despite always feeling refreshed from my daily stress, and more efficient in my tasks afterward I will go out of my way not to simply sit and breathe for reasons I will soon go into.

When we are attempting stillness in what I call gear 1 we should be accepting of ourselves. When we are in gear 2 there is more of an intention to relinquish our harmful, inefficient, and cumbersome movement habits. It is there where we engage in neuromuscular genesis, creating new lines of muscular engagement and new patterns to move in. Gear 1, in contrast, isn’t about change or improvement. It's about acknowledging what is. Aside from breathing deeper, fuller, and more fluid, we just observe and accept. This is the work here.

So what is happening when we step out of our routine drama and simply breathe and observe our breathing. Whether we are in a seated meditation pose or contorted into a human pretzel we simply breathe. We oxygenate the body feeding it the energy, the prana, the chi, the adenosine diphosphate,* the whatever you want to call it we need to live. In this gear, we take time to observe this process. We notice where our breath is freely accepted into the body and where we are restricted. As we put ourselves in different poses we can utilize our muscular differently creating different lines of stress. Breathing through a greater variety of postures can bring up awareness of a greater number of restrictions we have.

Out of all 4 of my gears, I feel this one is the hardest despite being physically the least demanding. There an emotion component to whatever stillness we find. Those mental monkeys I talked about last week show up for a reason. They are trying to protect us. While this may go beyond our current scientific understanding there seem to be a growing consensus that trauma is stored in our bodies. Culturally we seem to be learning whenever we experience a trauma (physically, psychological, emotional or any combination) we hold those painful emotional memories in our bodies. Bodies being physical in nature needs exist in a particular shape. The shape our bodies happens to be in at the moment of trauma is formed through lines of muscles being engaged by our nervous system. Those very same neurons that engage our muscles form countless webs with other neurons throughout the body. Our body blurs memories, emotions, within our muscle tissue. Trauma seems to stop our ability to release the muscles that are engaged at the moment of impact keeping us frozen in our most vulnerable moments.

Wild animals have been observed shaking after they are attacked. This is now thought of as a way they reset their nervous system. Too often human have not the ability or have been served from there instinctual wisdom to do this simple ritual. It is thought by many that when we don't engage in this primal technique for shedding trauma from the body it becomes entwined in our neuromuscular system. When we engage in any stillness practice it is these unprocessed emotions that need to be experienced for a true release to happen.

Anthony Bruni

*Adenosine Tri Phosphate or ATP is a is a molecular compound that our cells fuel themselves with. TO me it seems like the scientific analog to ideas like prana, chi, or spirit that have more spiritual connotations