Practice Log for July 6

Focus areas: heart primarily, with all others secondarily
Duration: 4-5 hours

This session was difficult to write about. It was deeply personal, and it is a challenge to abstract it enough to be communally appropriate. These things are always true, but I’m feeling it especially this week. Perhaps it has to do with the heart centre focus. 

I’m very literally “finding my legs” right now, physically through this practice and through the recent addition of writing about the practice. I have been somewhat concerned that I’m going to manage to turn this beautiful healing gift of an experience into something more like work..that I’m going to, accidentally, “product-ize" it. I don’t want that. 

This is not a performance. This is a journey, very much alive and fluid, morphic. Each week is very different.

Yet I am attempting to record it for some theoretical research purposes. Exactly what that is, I’m not sure, though this week its connections with Applied Kinesiology seem obvious to me. Perhaps someday someone with the right skill sets will want to experiment, test, and cross reference with someone using yoga to accomplish the same thing… external vs internal methods producing similar results. This is one of a multitude of such connections…I can feel them even if I can’t fully articulate them yet.

So I’m writing all this on a hunch. And this week is difficult to know how to write about it without over sharing…

So, I’m going to back up and explain something that happened a while back… and see if I can find there a door into NOW…

I first began to experience and feel ekaggata (one-pointed awareness) via interoception several years back…sensing deeply to an extremely fine point within my tissues. In experimenting with this, I found there were some areas of my body that seemed to be off limits, especially around my heart center.

No matter where I started - say, focused on a point in a hand - when I moved the awareness up the arm towards the chest, I experienced increasing resistance until the “light” would suddenly go out. I soon noticed that it reliably “popped out” on the mirror side of my body, moving fast and away. It felt, for all the world, like some sort of wormhole or gravitational anomaly was ejecting the point. 

Gradually I became aware that the whole region of my chest seemed “dark”, low to no sensation except for actual pain. But no energetic awareness at all. It is difficult to notice no-sense.

Until, one day back in December, during my Kriya practice, the wall seemed to crumble.

Now my awareness can enter this space though it is still fuzzy and indistinct. I cannot yet maintain ekaggata there. Instead the “focus” (though even that label seems too generous) is almost spongy and sinking…thick, slow. I believe it is unprocessed grief, pressurized for decades, putrified, thick and cloying like oil. Now that the wall is gone, this is beginning to break up and move out… The chakra is clearing, or so I’m interpreting it.

So now, 6+ months later, I’m working here in earnest for perhaps the first time. It’s a good sign of progress I think. And with that, I'll return to this practice...

Methods & Movements

In full transparency, I’m withholding a lot here. This practice was so deep…I suspect in the future more of this will find its way out in a community-appropriate way. But in order to not bleed too publicly, I’ll stick mostly to more technical aspects.

Cacao Ceremony

Around 9am I took the hemp, setting the intention towards my heart space - love, opening, joy, peace, and healing. I’ve heard that cacao is known as a heart opener, so I a simple preparation and spent a few minutes with my dog. Dogs in general are close to my heart, so a little time with her acts as an uncomplicated “positive trigger”, bringing into my awareness the feelings of loving heart energy.

I did not know that the term “warm hearted” is so literal…it’s not just a figure of speech! Stunning to experience that for the first time. This sensation seemed to both heavy and expansive, or perhaps oscillating between these states. 

I explored these sensations in an active mediative state as I moved about my home and did a few chores. Working from this open heart, vs my long term closed-off state, feels radically different. The therapeutic concept of “attunement”, which I understand to refer primarily to the way a good parent can “just know” the needs of their child, took on a new interpretation… I felt “attuned” to my environment. Is that a thing? Or was I just experiencing deep safety? Is there a difference?

Eventually I settled into the actual yoga practice. The spontaneous flow is below, though I spent the overwhelming majority of the time in slow, complicated transitions between each full expression, rather than in any one posture.

Yoga

• Ardha Purvottanasana | Reverse Table Top - This pose was unusually strong and stable, with good core activation, especially through the back body and along the spine. Through it, the "knowledge" held in the upper body, which can include "wrong ideas" or lies, was opened to influence / correction / balancing by the actual embodied experience of the lower body.
• Baddha Konasana Uttanasana, a.k.a Tarasana | Bound Angle Forward Bend with feet touching top of head - This felt like a meditation on reconnect the crown chakra and the idea of "feet" (actual life experience, embodied, beyond conceptualization and abstraction).
  (I could feel the Body trying to find Kurmasana and Kurmasana Hasta Baddha (Tortise and Sleeping Tortise Poses) but is not free or strong enough in the hips and thighs to get there. This was preparatory, very active, and held for several minutes.)
• Eka Pada Kapotasana | One Footed King Pigeon - This was supported by a resistance band between the back foot and hands, held overhead, to increase the active heart opening. Lots of breath work too. I should learn the names of different breathing patterns because I’m just doing them intuitively so they are difficult to describe. I also used breath retention, directed into areas of internal resistance.
• a version (?) of Utthita Hasta Padangusthana, squatting and twisted variations | Hand to big toe pose - I cannot find the actual pose name for this... it was not standing, but balancing on one foot in a squat and twisted with one arm extended behind.
• Parivrtta Navasana | Revolved Boat Pose - This was interesting in the way it activated my deep core, which I have limited access to. It was as though the energy was able to "sneak up" alongside the core in this position while Full Boat is too "direct", where I fall into compensations very easily.
• Ubhaya Padangusthasana | Both Big Toes Pose - Used breath for balance, entry from one bent leg to allow for more gradual deep core activation, similar to above.
• Utthita Hasta Padangusthana, Squatting | Hand to big toe pose - similar to the time above, but without the twist.
• Ardha Purvottanasana | Reverse Table Top - this full return to where I started at the close was very interesting. I was MUCH weaker in this pose time…it was harder to activate and lift the core, more a "beginner" alignment than the full expression at the beginning. I suspect this has to do with the deep core activation that proceeded it, and that in some ways it is a more "honest" expression of my core, without as much reliance on compensations.

Overall this flow felt like a heart-center activation of above and below (shoulder / neck / arms & deep core / hips / legs, respectively). Meanwhile, several wrong ideas internalized during early childhood came to the surface of consciousness. In turns, each arrived in context of now-time evidence disproving these beliefs and insights into how they act as blocks to deeper connection with my current life.

As I worked through the postures, these mental blocks seemed to dissolve as the upper and lower muscle groups reached for each other in increasing coordination and balance. When I walked around after, it felt like a had a new pair of legs. Much had changed.

Meditation

At the close, I spent some time in a deep meditation using a Heart-Brain coherence method I know.

Insights & Breakthroughs

As stated above much of the content was deeply personal, so for this session I'll boil them down to this prompt:

• What lies have lodged themselves in perception (3^rd eye chakra), blocking deeper self awareness and deeper connection (crown chakra)? 
• How do these lies / wrong ideas express themselves in life, relationships, the way we carry ourselves? What must remain "invisible" or "turned off" to our awareness to maintain the lie?
• What or who is the lie protecting? Is that protector role ready to be released? What will it take to make that safe enough?

Mapping

Once again, I only mapped the first 7 flow sensations. These started at the heart center (#1), first rising up through the throat (#2) and then moving back and forth below my jaw, into my ears several times (#3). As it hit my 3rd eye, the internalized lies / wrong ideas began to become clear, and a good deal of heat built up in my forehead and crown. This heat seemed to blow out of the top in waves through out the next couple of hours of the practice.

The energy seemed to bloom again then from the heart, flowing around and gradually down into my legs in multiple passes (#6). The first six were in active but mostly seated postures. Finally #7 moved back and forth between both legs, lasting for a couple of hours and directing the yoga flow above.

It is interesting that, once again, there are 7 flows. Unintentionally consistent.

Some "Claims"

If I ever find a research partner with the right skills, these are some things I think would be interesting to try to "prove".

1. This yoga practice, all of these intuitive flows, accomplish for my body something akin to what Applied Kinesiology is doing. Intuitive yoga, when Kundalini is roused, is the embodied form...AK is an externalized version of the same thing. This might be testable with muscle testing.
2. This process requires higher than normal electrolytes and hydration as new connections within the nervous system are built up. I frequently need to use an electrolyte packet to quench thirst during or shortly after these flows. Plain water seems to go right through me and never sate.