The port au bras in ballet is one of the hardest things for me to do. This is the motion of the arms through the different positions. Resting near the pelvis, elevated in front of the solar plexis, lifted above the head, and out to the sides. The second position, the one out to the sides, is particularly difficult. It forces me to open my shoulders, chest, and arms in a way that I've never done before. Unsurprisingly, the tendons in my arms are not flexible enough to do this, so staying in second can be a painful exercise.
I was thinking about it today, as I was pushing the arms outward, and suddenly I decided to relax the arms but continue to push, and then I understood the essence of these movements. My arm lengthened out another inch, and it no longer felt force or stress to hold itself out. It was simply strong and limber. In Aikido, they told me to think of Ki, or body energy, running through the arms out through the finger tips. You were supposed to let that energetic flow lengthen the body, and in doing this, it becomes strong. I realized that the same thing has prohibited me from really using the floor when I walk in my jazz dancing. If my legs stay stiff, something inside sort of locks up. The weight of my body is then being supported by these tense muscles. When I can relax the legs but keep them engaged, my body weight sinks into the ground, while my muscles are freed up to do the much easier task of manipulating my body - not hold it up.
In the retreat a few weeks back, we had a night where we all met up and worked on some things. That night, I heard Brenda describe the body in the subtlest and most profound way I had ever heard. She was talking about the body being a self-sustaining structure moving along the ground. I can't remember her exact phrasing, but she said something like the body is able to achieve a state of buoyancy on top of the ground. Buoyancy! Her voice lit up with a certain wonder as she said this, and I couldn't help be filled with it myself. We literally float on top of the earth. It is interesting to think of all life and our structures as things that continually work against the force of gravity. Surprising that we ever stood up at all - why not crawl on the ground and expend less energy in defying gravity? But to think of this rise as a state of buouancy... If I'm not mistaken in my definition of buoyancy - birds are buoyant. Flying is a state of buoyancy. When Brenda said we are buoyant, I no longer felt the urge to fly, because I felt like I already am. To perfect this earthly flight is my goal.
The body functions as a tensegrity structure - that is a structure that is held up using element that cannot stretch (but can bend freely) and other elements that are rigid (think: pipe and rope) - the bones and muscles can achieve efficiency when thinking this way. There are so many ways that we all misuse our bodies and make things so much more difficult than they need be. As I see it, this misuse takes two forms. We can use our muscles as rigid elements (bones), meaning we have excess tension, or we can fail to align our bones correctly, so that the structure cannot hold itself up without excess tension (bad posture).
So the ideal state uses our bones in such a way that the maximum amount of energy needed to hold us up or perform a specific action is relayed directly into the ground. Our muscles, in turn, only perform the manipulation as needed. A clear example is lifting a box with a bent back. It's more efficient to use our spine to absorb the weight, rather than using our lower back muscles to support us.
More thoughts on buoyancy and Archimedes.. Two of Archimedes' propositions - 1) "Any floating object displaces its own weight of fluid." Is this not similar to my body weight sinking into the ground? When I am able to achieve that state of relaxation where my body weight is not held by my muscles, but is sent into the earth. I have not displaced the earth, but that is incidental. That's only a factor of temperatures, right? If the universe were thousands of degrees hotter, the earth would be a liquid, and I, liquid or gas, would displace my weight in that molten earth.
2) "Any object, wholly or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object." This is to say that my body is buoyed up by a force equal to that of the pull of gravity on my body. Or that the earth pushes against my body, so much as I push back on it. O-sensei, when asked how he was so strong, would laugh and answer - "How can you move the whole world?" I don't think this was simply a mystical or metaphysical answer, but he had literally achieved a state of near perfect groundedness, so that any opposing force when sent into him could be relayed directly into the earth. This would mean that the earth would push back the same amount, so that O-sensei did not use his own energy to deflect a blow, but rather the energy of the attack directed into the ground and returned back through his body.
I think this idea of buoyancy may not hold up under science's critical eye, but they are interesting thoughts.
Oh, and by the way, this is what I think about all day.
Addendum: I was mistaken about buoyancy of course. Monica let me know that it was Newton's third law... But still there is a wonderful image in my book of the pelvis "floating" on the femurs as though they were buoys. And one must imagine the water lever dropping or rising to bend or straighten the legs.
