I’ve been contemplating movement and stillness as we move from fire, to earth, to air, from summer to late summer into fall. I’ve been sitting with my Jin Shin Jyutsu practice, to listen more closely to my shoulder. Deepening my awareness into the patterns locked up in there, messages yet to decipher or integrate. Sinking into my body, I start noticing tightness here, and there. A little stiffness in my neck I’ve attributed to the new bed and pillow. A little heaviness on the side of my waistline. Breathing more deeply, I feel those spots expanding into release. From stillness, I sense movement.
Late Summer Grounding
Governed by the earth element, late summer is a time to ground into ourselves, to tend to our digestion and support our Spleen and Stomach function energies. What we take in, whether we are conscious of it or not, requires us to digest and assimilate what we require and eliminate what we do not. Digestion, with still-increasing awareness and education of the gut flora and stress, is a common health concern. We often neglect the energetic and emotional aspects of healthy digestion. Or that perhaps what we are taking in or the circumstances in which we digest are incompatible with us. Here’s a dimension you may consider about how each of us is built to digest.
Another contemplation for late summer – where have we so depended on another’s stability that we have collapsed our own structure? Does our foundation still have integrity? Where have we pushed our way through, chasing emotional highs and fulfilling others’ dreams and expectations of us, that we have overused our body?
The Stomach and Spleen energies are also about structure. Holding in place. If you experience prolapse, try supporting these energies. Sometimes it may be that other energies are first stuck, creating a dam. There is no formula, just a starting place. Start with holding your thumb daily for a period of time.
moving in time
This is also a season to take stock of where we are, moving into the last few months of the Gregorian calendar, into the end of the elemental cycle with autumn and winter. These seasons of letting go and inward communion. Of course it’s not only these seasons that we may be releasing and withdrawing. Each day we experience seasons and cycles. Different ages also correspond to seasons. And we have our own cycles, informed by the degree of our surrender.
In the last several years, we have all been through tremendous change. I know I am not alone in this. What I have learned moving through something that took years to resolve is that at some point, we shift gears. Being in an acute crisis is a very different environment than a longer-term situation. Seems logical and even obvious though it’s not obvious it’s a crisis or that it’s become more long-standing.
Have you checked in with yourself lately? Have you exhaled? Not just those little out-breaths that your body take to live. Take a moment now and let out a long sigh and sink into your body. Feel your breath leave every cell, washing out what’s stagnant and toxic.
Do you trust your body? Do you follow your inner guidance and life force? Perhaps our habits have moved us into not feeling into all the parts of our body. This default setting that keeps us locked into a pattern. Moving out of an acute crisis into a more stabilized circumstance allows us to look backward, to pivot, reset. Sometimes movement can be scary. Because, movement is a form of freedom, of moving energy and moving in life.
Movement
In the Human Design System, I am a Manifesting Generator, an aura type that has a defined sacral centre. I’m here to respond. Response requires an awareness of our body, a connection that deepens in trust over time, atrophies from disuse. I witness my body leaving the room and getting into bed to lay down and down-regulate for sleep. Or gravitate toward certain food. Or step back.
The body is intelligent and has its own consciousness. It’s rather fascinating, especially for people, such as myself, who inhabit the mind so strongly. I see and feel the confusion of minds, my own included. We are told eggs are good then not good. Egg white healthy or eat your eggs raw. Same with butter, meat, veggies…everything we care to look into, there is a binary, with experts on both side backed by research. The mind can measure, can take a look at the cons and pros. However, the mind doesn’t know what’s actually correct for us, for the body. Following the mind, that part which has been distorted by decades of conditioning, leaves us frustrated, angry, bitter, and disappointed.
Part of following body consciousness is to decondition, to become aware of conditioning influences and let go of our coping mechanisms. This changes our trajectory, the movement in our life.
Stillness
The reason I am in my Human Design experiment is it gives us a map. We can see where we are most open to conditioning and the themes of these energy centres operating from trauma and adaptive strategies. For most Generators and Manifesting Generators coming to Human Design, they have likely been dealing with conditioning forces for decades. They have learned some way to cope, ways to hide. They have probably internalized a lot of frustration and for Manifesting Generators, anger as well.
To the point, they are disconnected from their sacral response. The sounds they made as children before children were taught “use words”. Polite and educated people do not grunt. The sacral grunts, sounds. Sometimes we have ignored them long enough to not hear them.
So we start from stillness. We sit and sleep in our own aura. We stop initiating. And wait. Wait to hear that response. The question then is do you have the courage to follow your body.
