Body Alive

In one of my favorite poems, “A Prayer for Old Age,” W.B. Yeats writes: God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone; He that sings a lasting song Thinks in a marrow-bone"

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

(Antonin Artaud, La Révolution surréaliste, 1st january 1925)

In Libro Veritas :: @InlibroV

"And you, lucid madmen ..." Antonin Artaud

[evenasmallcough]

Talk with your body, talk with your life.

- Marge Piercy, excerpt from The homely war

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Takeshi Sumi

* * * *

The soul is the greening life force of the flesh, for the body grows and prospers through her, just as the earth becomes fruitful when it is moistened. The soul humidifies the body so it does not dry out, just like the rain which soaks into the earth.

~ Hildegard of Bingen

[Alive On All Channels]

[bodyalive]

This image represents the sensory homunculus, a visual representation of how different body parts are mapped onto the primary somatosensory cortex in the brain. The distorted proportions reflect the density of sensory nerve endings, areas like the hands, lips, and tongue have a much larger representation because they are more sensitive.

[bodyalive]

The vagus nerve travels from the brain down through the body, connecting with the organs and helping regulate breathing, digestion, heart rate, and our emotional sense of safety and calm.

(Anthony Goldsmith)

+

Your nervous system is always talking to you, and one of the easiest ways to listen is through your breath. Pause for a moment and notice which nostril is more open right now. One side will usually flow more freely while the other feels slightly blocked. This is not random. When the left nostril is more dominant, it often reflects a body shifting into parasympathetic mode, calm, recovery, digestion, and safety. When the right nostril is more open, it tends to mirror sympathetic activation, focus, drive, alertness, and sometimes stress. The beautiful part is that this is not fixed. Your body naturally alternates between sides every 2 to 2.5 hours in a rhythm called the nasal cycle, a subtle nervous system reset happening in the background all day long. On average, about 75% of your breath moves through the dominant side and 25% through the other. A large difference between the nostrils can suggest your nervous system is leaning more heavily into one state, while a smaller difference may reflect greater balance and flexibility. Your breath is constantly adapting to what your body needs, giving you a real time window into the state of your nervous system. Sometimes the simplest check ins reveal the most powerful insights.— at Performants.

[bodyalive]

My favorite animation of the breathing apparatus.

One particular standout is how the integration of breathing affects the endocrine system which is governed by the autonomic nervous system.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

“We cannot experience any entity in its totality, because we are not pure, disembodied minds, but are palpable bodies with our own opacities and limits.” ― David Abram, Becoming Animal

[bodyalive]

Photo by Luciano Paradisi

* * * *

“Bodies are real entities. Surfaces and lines are but fictitious entities. A surface without depth, a line without thickness, was never seen by any man; no; nor can any conception be seriously formed of its existence.” –Jeremy Bentham Memphis Muse

[catchymemes]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

* * * *

Your power is proportional to your ability to relax. ~ David Allen

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Myofascialogie en France & Belgique & Québec Bien Être,Douleurs Chroniques

Jean Francois Brabant ·

Why the "isolated muscle" model is outdated: what fascia science reveals

What surprises me even today is that several approaches continue to want to isolate one muscle to strengthen or reduce tension, whereas modern science demonstrates that the human body functions as a continuous fascial network, not as 640 separate muscles.

The research of the last 20 years is very clear:

Endoscopic work by Dr. Jean-Claude Guimberteau has demonstrated that the fascia is an uninterrupted three-dimensional mesh that connects every muscle, organ and structure of the body.

Réf. : Guimberteau JC., Architecture of Human Living Fascia, 2015.

Research in mechanotransduction shows that when a tension appears in a region, it spreads throughout the fascial network.

Réf. : Schleip R. et al., Fascia: The Tensional Network of the Human Body, 2012.

Ref. : Huijing P. Journal of Biomechanics, 2009.

This explains why tension in the hip can affect your knee, ankle, or even the diaphragm.

Anatomically we separate muscles to draw them.

But functionally, they are woven into the same fascial envelope, sharing strength, tension and fluid.

Réf. : Thomas Myers, Anatomy Trains, 2014.

This phenomenon of “fascial densification” is described in several recent publications.

Réf. : Stecco C., Functional Atlas of the Human Fascial System, 2015.

Founder of Myofascial Release, John F. Barnes added that hardened fascia can develop considerable internal forces (up to 2,000 pounds per square inch, according to his clinical findings).

This is a Barnes clinical estimate, not an instrumental measure - but it does illustrate the intensity of the internal forces of a solidified fascia.

Since the body works according to a model of tension (balance between tension and compression), any local intervention necessarily influences the entire system.

Réf. : Levin S., Biotensegrity: The Structural Basis of Life, 2006.

Isolating a muscle does not reflect the biomechanical reality of the human body.

The new scientific understanding leads to a clear conclusion:

It’s much more effective to treat and train the fascia as a whole, rather than trying to isolate a muscle independently from others.

This is exactly what Myofascialology offers:

work on the quality of the fascia, its fluidity, its mobility and its ability to transmit force harmoniously... rather than trying to build one muscle at a time.

Segmented anatomy is a thing of the past.

The global facial model has become the modern reference for understanding, treating and accompanying the human body.

Jean François Brabant

Myofascialology therapist & trainer

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Photo from Ken Burns excellent PBS series “The War”

* * * * * *

THE WALL WITHIN: “Delivered at the commencement of the National Salute II in Washington, D.C. on November 10, 1984, as part of the official activities prior to the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (“The Wall) as a national monument.

It honors the personal list of love and loss that each American has marked in his/her heart. Poem entered into the Congressional, January 30, 1985.” Johnny’s Song: Poetry of a Vietnam Veteran. Steve Mason.

 (May 1986). Bantam Books.

Most real men hanging tough in their early forties would like the rest of us to think they could really handle one more war and two more women. But I know better. You have no more lies to tell. I have no more dreams to believe. I have seen it in your face I am sure you have noticed it in mine; at the unutterable, unalterable truth of our war. The eye sees what the mind believes. And all that I know of war, all that I have heard of peace, has me looking over my shoulder for that one bullet which still has my name on it– circling round and round the globe waiting and circling circling and waiting until I break from cover and it takes its best, last shot. In the absence of Time, the accuracy of guilt is assured. It is a cosmic marksman. [MORE]

FULL POEM HERE.  TAKE A MOMENT TO READ IT. 

IT’S AN EPIC TESTIMONY.

[le-dernier-soupir]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

* * * * *

 LIKE NOTHING EVER HAPPENED I didn’t know love couldn’t break  down the walls of everything Come singing home to daughters  of the blind blue eyes I didn’t know that it couldn’t crumble  the walls of Auschwitz and Buchenwald That our fathers couldn’t burn down  the stink in a day That World War II couldn’t come home  to roost That our fathers couldn’t come out  the same men in love with our red-lipped mothers I didn’t know that the smell of dying japs  even over a whole century of air   in bombers above the small island country  would stink in our fathers’ pores That the army was the only traveling  they would ever do  never come home the same men That the pain in back of their eyes  was lost in the folds of family I didn’t know that a heart could go out  and still keep beating Stare at TV for long hours  knowing your wife would never believe  what you saw  The filth in the eyes of men at war I didn’t know time could stop at World War II  never grow in tomatoes in future summers I didn’t know our fathers died there  even if they never lay there  on the fields with their breathing gone out That my father 35 years later  on the porch in the midwest  could say in dark-eyed stupor of evening  “I could re-enlist and kill kill kill!” I didn’t know  these men flooded our land  down the highway of three decades  with war banging their brains  silent unseen and tortured  like grain milled down by stone I didn’t know  we were the daughters of night guns That our blood fathers were killers That the hearts were torn out of us  in World War II Came to graze in ice cream parlors quiet cricket streets years later like nothing ever happened    –Natalie Goldberg

[quidnunc]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

“The lesson taught by the war was clear: to be human is to be small, powerless, and subject to the forces of randomness.” ― David J. Morris, The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

+

“Trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy or bouncing like a rubber ball from now to then to back again. ... In the traumatic universe the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas.” ― David J. Morris, The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

+

“The act of writing, especially of putting pen to paper, has always had a sacred quality. The process by which one creates a paragraph-of conceptualizing, framing, and sequencing a moment in time-is the same process that governs some of the most sophisticated psychotherapies.” ― David J. Morris, The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

[bodyalive]

Women of Depth Psychology 

The aching discrepancy between what the mind understands and what the body can actually tolerate.

The gap between intellectual understanding of our internal processes and our actual bodily integration is an important one, but it is rarelt talked about.

Marion Woodman captured a universal friction here in this passage from her book 'Bone: Dying Into Life' (2001).

It is entirely possible, even common in deep analysis, for our intellectual insight to skyrocket ahead, while our somatic, physical self lags behind, anchored to the familiar architecture of old defenses.

The mind can shift in a flash of lightning. An insight arrives, a pattern becomes conscious, and we think, “Ah, I see it now. I am therefore free."

But it doesn't happen that fast for the body.

The body does not speak the language of intellect; it speaks the language of regulated tissue, nervous system pathways, and deeply grooved survival strategies that were utilized for years if not decades.

The body is inherently conservative: it holds onto old eating patterns, codependent people-pleasing, or hyper-vigilance because those patterns kept us alive in the past.

Woodman’s final admission- "I know this is true, but I have to keep saying it to myself" feels incredibly validating.

It reminds us that honoring the slow, sometimes frustrating pace of the body is a daily, conscious discipline.

It is an act of deep compassion toward the "Volkswagen chassis" that is doing its absolute best to carry the immense energy of transformation.

Integrating intellectual insights into our lived, bodily reality requires a fundamental shift in how we relate to knowledge.

An insight is merely a map; integration is walking the actual path and terrain.

If the intellect has run far ahead of the body, the path down into the cells cannot be forced through more thinking.

It happens through slow, deliberate somatic choices.

Marion continues:

"I am trying to be as faithful as possible to my own evolving process. Sometimes my process is radically out of balance—my spiritual knowing is far beyond my body’s capacity to incarnate it.

Body is much slower to give up the past—old fears of not pleasing others, old eating patterns, old patterns of relationship.

I have a Jaguar engine in a Volkswagen chassis.

The images that come from my spiritual womb hold the energy that can destroy or heal.

They hold the transformative power that connects body, soul, and spirit. Internalizing the images, breathing, dancing, writing them into my body, giving them time to radiate my cells with new energy—that is healing.

I know this is true, but I have to keep saying it to myself."

— Marion Woodman, "Bone: Dying Into Life" (2001)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

photo by Tim Walker

* * * *

3. Taoists and Buddhists both observe the intimate natural connection between breathing and mental state. When the mind is excited, the breathing accelerates; when the mind is calm, so is the breath. The practice of resting mind and breath on each other makes deliberate use of this relationship to calm the mind down and gradually bring it to a state of stillness.

—  The Secret of the Golden Flower, Turning the Light Around and Tuning the Breathing. Author Unknown. Translation by Thomas Cleary

[Alive On All Channels]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[Piotr Binkowski :: @piotrbinkowski :: "The world blinked, and the frame no longer fit."

* * * *

“The core function of the memory system could in fact be to imagine the future (…) The system is not designed to perfectly replay past events. (…) It is designed to flexibly construct future scenarios in our minds. As a result, memory also ends up being a reconstructive process, and occasionally, details are deleted and others inserted.” Tali Sharot, a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London, Optimism Bias: Human Brain May Be Hardwired for Hope, Time, June 6, 2011 See also: ☞ The Optimism Bias and Memory (via amiquote)

[Alive On All Channels]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Izis BIDERMANAS Foire du Trône, Paris, 1962 - Trone Fair Paris, 1962 Vintage gelatin silver print, stamps " PHOTO IZIS Bidermanas 28, Rue Henri Pape 75013 PARIS" and "Mention obligatoire Photo Izis", annotated "Tirage IZIS Manuel Bidermanas"

* * * *

THE THIRD NOBLE TRUTH

The third noble truth says that the cessation of suffering is letting go of holding on to ourselves. By “cessation” we mean the cessation of hell as opposed to just weather, the cessation of this resistance, this resentment, this feeling of being completely trapped and caught, trying to maintain huge ME at any cost. The teachings about recognizing egolessness sound quite abstract, but the path quality of that, the magic instruction that we have all received, the golden key is that part of the meditation technique where you recognize what’s happening with you and you say to yourself, “Thinking.” Then you let go of all the talking and the fabrication and discussion, and you’re left just sitting with the weather—the quality and the energy of the weather itself. Maybe you still have that quaky feeling or that churning feeling or that exploding feeling or that calm feeling or that dull feeling, as if you’d just been buried in the earth. You’re left with that. That’s the key: come to know that.

~ Pema Chodron [Alive On All Channels]