Lie on your back on a comfortable mat, knees bent, feet flat on the floor. You can rest your arms alongside you or rest your hands on your belly. Close your eyes. Be at ease. Connect your attention to your breathing. As you breathe, let your bones, your muscles, your organs, your fluids sink more and more heavily into gravity. Let you skin become tender. Let your skin breathe.

After a while, draw your attention to your breathing. On the inhale, inwardly hear the sound ‘shaaaaaaaa….’ Let this sound slide softly into you. On the exhale, inwardly hear the sound ‘fi’ (pronounced ‘fee’). Let the sound ease out. (If you are unsure about the actual sound of the chant, do the breathing and sinking into gravity without the sound. It is important that you hear internally the correct sound.) Inhale ‘sha’. Exhale ‘fi’. Draw your wandering mind to what you are doing. Nothing else matters right now. Just this sound and breath, just this feeling in the body. Just the simmering of energy within. You’ll see that as you continue your breathing will shift. And your energy will shift. Inhale, letting the sound and breath gently lengthen. Exhale, letting the out breath take you more fully into gravity. Again and again bring your focus to the inner chant, the breathing, the awareness of your body softening, the inner state developing.

If this is the only practice you are doing, continue for 20 minutes. Or do breath & movement for 10 minutes then do 10 minutes of the ‘Shafi’ chant. Then relax your concentration and rest.

Once you have done this practice and rested, write in your journal from the experience or about the experience. Let your writing be relaxed. Stay with your breathing as you write.

Shafi is one of the Names of the Divine in the Sufi tradition. It is in Arabic.

Pain has been the signal letting me know that I’ve reached the far extent of my sensory world. Pain has been my containment: I can go just ‘this far’ before it hurts. It is very definite. I know where it is. Pain is a strong message, and though it has many colors and dynamics — sharp, achy, round & thick, zing-y, hot, (there is a long interesting poem in that) –  it is always indisputable. I obey immediately. I step back, but then re-approach, just to see if it is still there. Then I joust, turning back and going again, over and over, wallowing penitentially in this perimeter guardian.

To know where a world ends is comforting even when the messenger is unpleasant. With pain as my border guard making the reach of my movement clear, I have had my world comfortingly well-framed.

Painlessness on the other hand is vague. It is fog. It is mist. It is faint. Muffled. It doesn’t hurt, but where am I? It is this discomfort that challenges me now, even though my body, tired of a lifetime of flagellation, heaves a sigh of relief.

Afterward, standing so still.

In me, a certain, activated stillness, a holding-ness throughout my body, a taught sail bellied with wind. My mind pure black, my breath a flame steady in the lantern of me, Karuna’s hand in my left hand — my unconscious — and Krys’s hand in my right hand — my persona.  ‘No me’ flew, with two handmaidens, torpedo-ing through still space that is ‘no space’, no duration, no friction. My feet were open and solid, the arches banded. At the end of time.

Then a gentle stirring at the edge of the circle made me know it was the moment to squeeze the held hands, break the ring, and say “rest now’.

I’ve gone back to unfurling the mat to begin and furling it up at the end. This is the right amount of ritual. A gentle transition.

How about you? What gets you started?

1. Select rhythmic music. Drumming is always wonderful but choose one that isn’t hectic. Human hands and arms  are better than the mechanical steadiness of electronic beat tracks.
2. Close your eyes. Bring attention to your breathing. Feel it come and go. Hear the rhythm and feel it seep into you.
3. Connect your breathing pace to a tempo in the music. It can be fast, medium, or slow.
4. Begin to move, letting your movement emerge from your breathing. Let this breath and motion rest fully on the rhythm. Don’t force your body. Let the music carry the motion.
5. With the eyes closed, observe yourself as you move. As you continue, the pulse and breath will more fully direct your movement. Don’t let the momentum of the movement distract you from breath & rhythm being in the forefront of your awareness.
6. Continue for at least 10 minutes; longer if you wish. Then relax your focus and let your body move however it feels for a while longer. Afterward, lie down and rest.

Rhythmic Breathing facilitates micromotion. In Spiritual Bellydance, Shimmy, or Vibration, is a micromotion; it is one very small motion done over and over quickly until it turns into a large idea of Vibration. Resting one’s shimmy on a rhythmic breath pattern is dynamic and healing.

Low Space
Low space, motion on the floor, can supine (on on your back) or prone (on your belly) or your side. Large swathes of body surface touch the ground. Gravity acts directly on arm or spine or foot, etc . We are more like a snake or a reptile–horizontal creatures. Our fluids flow easily back and forth like rivers. Our distant vision is limited but sensation is heightened.

Middle Space
Middle space is anything between standing and lying down. It can be sitting, or on hands and knees, hands and feet,  or on the knees. Gravity is funneling through several systems. We experience complex counterbalances on all fours. Sitting we have a stacked spine. This is a stable plane with many options for balance and effort.

High Space
High space is anything standing up. Here we funnel gravity through spoon and hips and legs and feet. A lot depends on our feet. So much weight and balance is being handles by the tiny ankles and delicate bones of our feet. Our fluids are pump up and down. This verticality is hard work. We see far distances, and orient ourselves through hearing.

In any day, it is best to spend conscious time in each of these levels. Our tendency is to stand to move through space (walk around), sit for many hours to do work (i.e., computer or driving), and lie down to sleep. In order to  break this habituated behavior, try the following simple focused ‘untanglers’.  (You can think of untanglers as any sort of practice that gives your body an opportunity to explore pathways daily routines don’t engage.)

1. Take a half hour. Spend ten minutes letting the body move on each of the three spatial levels being aware of how it feels.

2. Take three days in a row. Spend a half hour each day letting the body move in just one of the spaces.

3. Take three days in a row. Spend a 20 minutes each day letting the body move in one of the space, then rest in another space.

She let her breath sink oily and heavy into the bottom of her pelvis, then drew it up, hand-over-hand, along the center of her body. It made its quiet way into her head. where it spread, tickling the inside of her skull. Her breath touched its tendrils gingerly along this membrane, fine veiny lines of sensation, filaments or root hairs.

Her breath seeped out, drained down her neck and throat as if drinking itself. It whoosed down the tube of middle-ness, down, down and down into a deeper, dimmer space, behind the stomach, behind the fat, slick ropes and globs of guts, the underbrush of organs, those shades. She swam through snaky reeds, following her exhale that was emptier than common everyday breaths. It reached into a basement of itself. Empty. Beyond the urge to suck in.

She lay fallow. Hollow, dry. Then, not wanting to keep on endlessly breathing, she roused from stillness anyway. She lifted the gate a tad, let air ease in, like a secret, like an Unknown. It drew her embers from beneath ashes, took the tiny heat curled in her tailbone, tugged, tugged, as if digging up a resisting root, and swelled with sudden freedom upward, the warmth billowing on a rise of air.
Up the center, up and up the column, up into the winged lungs that fluttered, happy about breath returning sweetened with dark earth and volcanic fire,  thick with organ murmur. Breath scattered into alveoli like puppies running on the heath. The chest, from front to back, shouted, “Hello!”, a trumpet of sensation echoing from rim to rim. Finally came a fluting through the throat. Fine notes, swollen with oxygen.

This was a true breath, a felt breath, not a mechanism, but a poem, not survival, but a flourishing. Breath delights in this castle, she knew, in the ornaments, the halls of splendor, the trick wall in the library that opens to a dark back corridor. She followed that story, the spiraling stone stairs. We were breathing there together last night, laughing, trembling, turned in on ourselves. It was an uncountable place, unspeakable. I was lost for a long time. I loved it. I’ll love it again.

The physics of getting going might mean,  for an early morning practice, being tired or sleepy. Launching out of bed for me is a bit of a foggy period.  My body has been in another condition: sleep. If I dance and breath a song first thing, I feel sluggish, but that’s okay. Just an observation. If I dance and breathe a song in late afternoon my body has been through various unconscious experiences of sitting and walking. Getting going into awareness of sensation and gravity takes a moment or two, or ten or fifteen. Fifteen minutes to really wake up inside my body. So there is more than will or attentiveness involved here. We have the physics of the body.

Wake Up Inside my Body. I might be awake in my breath, or my mind, but to be awake in my body takes a little longer. How interesting to be in a body all the time and to be so unaware of this obvious fact. Even those of us who practice conscious embodiment regularly find this reality challenging to maintain. Yet is a reality, and reality returns us to sanity. Whenever I feel ungrounded, I simply put my attention into my breath and feel where my body is touching a surface, be it floor or furniture.

Right there I encounter The Crust. It takes a a period of time to switch from wherever I was—caught in anxiety and disconnected from my embodiment, for instance—to being awake inside my body. When I am in my body, I can then go on to listening and being in my body, reading and being in my body, writing and being in my body, thinking and being in my body. The Crust is that rim of surface tension, like water just before it boils. Pop, and we’re through.

Being awake inside the body entails getting through The Crust. It is easy, but it takes a little patience. I remind myself of this. I give it a chance to happen.

A harpsichord plucks precisely because it has no lingering. No sustain, as musicians say. I love this need to play note after note in order to keep sound pouring into space. Today the music’s insistence dug inversions out of me. My body scratched and crosshatched the space above my rug, music rubbing visibility out of invisibility. When I finished, I rested in my summer sweat as the music dribbled softly on. Until it stopped sharp, on a stroke.