Exploring Openness and Groundedness
When the pandemic shoots out a new tendril to hook my soul and pull me down with disappointment or anxiety, when I feel thrown off by new restrictions, missing loved ones and longing to hug them, I find myself judging and separating myself from others. I find a target and call “them” names as a shorthand, anti-maskers or worse - I’ve got a list - but these are insults that drag me further down, leaving me heavy, contracted and inward-focused. Not connected and not where I want to be.
Time to regroup. Today I apply the lesson from yesterday’s virtual Aikido class where we deeply explored openness in a simple move. We felt the physical sensations and relationship of openness to groundedness, the two working together in service of full presence. Openness moves through me; I can feel expansion in my chest and spaciousness in my joints and I expand through the space around me. Groundedness keeps me firmly rooted.
I bring this sensation back to the thinking part of me, my judgements and the act of separating myself from others who are different from me. Openness allows me to connect with others’ energy, to suspend judgements and move with them instead of against them. Staying grounded allows me to explore while not losing myself. From here, who knows, maybe there’s a chance to influence. At minimum, there is opportunity for greater understanding. In my mind, I know we are all looking for similar things: physical and financial safety, connection to loved ones, respect and belonging within our communities. The exploration in Aikido class is light and curious, and as I bring curiosity to my judgements of others, I begin to feel lighter and less contracted.
The practice here is the exploration the relationship of openness in the body and in the mind. Those of us raised in Western cultures have more easy access to our thinking selves and, with the possible exception of the realm of sport, less body awareness. We rely on our minds, we think things through, we plan, analyse, assess, evaluate. We frequently overlook our bodies, depending on them to do things for us and scolding them when they don’t work. But the body is a walking wireless receiver, picking up on huge amounts of data and processing it, frequently without our awareness. This is why when we slow down, for example, to feel openness in our body, we discover sensations – perhaps an expansive chest, or a smile, or a taller, more upright stance. There’s not one thing, it’s a personal experience: oh, this is what openness feels like.
Why would we bother to develop body awareness? It’s more than an interesting exploration. The neural pathways for conceptual self-awareness, that is the thinking part of us through which we observe our thoughts, stories and beliefs , these pathways are different from the neural pathways for embodied self-awareness. Embodied self-awareness allows us to experience, in the moment, our 5 external senses (e.g. the taste of sugar, the feel of the wind, a child’s voice) as well as many internal sensations (e.g. butterflies in the stomach, radiating pain, pressure, cold feet). Embodied self-awareness also includes the ability to sense ourselves in space. For example, can you close your eyes and touch your nose?
One of the benefits of increasing our capacity for embodied self-awareness is that it gets more neural pathways in the brain dedicated to the task at hand. An embodied sense of openness can support me in staying open in thought, open to ideas, to being more creative. An embodied sense of groundedness offers a physical sense of standing in my truth, of holding my boundaries.
Back on the virtual Aikido mat we pick up the pace, add some movement to our simple drill and I am back to the beginning, clumsy, slow, unbalanced. Once again, I need to discover how to find openness and groundedness in this more complex maneuver. The pandemic feels complex too, conflicting information, fatigue, fear that it will never end. Challenging viewpoints, so common in our polarized world. It’s a good place to practice staying open and grounded. Both on and off the Aikido mat, the learning continues.
