I was walking around Ruth's neighborhood in San Francisco today (which happens to be very near Zuni Cafe, one of my favorite restaurants here) and I was doing what I tend to do mostly all the time these days - trying to be conscious of my body. Today I was working on lengthening the spine by lengthening the muscles in the front of my neck, relaxing the muscles in my lower back and hips, and trying to get my legs to track correctly.
At one point, as I relaxed my beck and hips, I felt something deep in my pelvis engage and my spine lengthened upwards with internal support. I think this was my pelvic floor - that elusive muscle people always talk about. The idea, as I understand it, is that the muscles on the outside of our body should be used to move but not to support our body. Mostly I use my abs and back when I'm trying to align my pelvis, but the pelvic floor is the muscle that should be supporting this position.
I can't seem to find it again, but it should come back.
In other news, after reading more Tony Robbins, I'm changing the language that I use to refer to the patches of tension through my body. "Tension, shit, blocks..." All these words have negative connotations to them. Using these words puts me in a state where I am judging my body instead of feeling compassion for it. I was experimenting with different words, images, and mantras, but my favorite is to call that tension "armor." I think this is a good word, because I developed all that tension from the issues of my life, because I didn't know how else to deal with everything. Now it's time for me to shed it and move lightly through this world. The metaphor continues to make sense, because I think that the perfect defense is not made of obstructions. The perfect defense is permeable and harmonizes with an attack. This way, the attack is neutralized and conquered before the attacker knows what has happened. The perfect defense conquers before any attack; it succeeds by its nature. To create obstructions is to invite attack. Likewise, calling my tension a word with a negative connotation makes me want to attack and destroy it. This only serves to increase tension. So now I'm thinking of shedding my armor - armor put on for good reason, but no longer needed, as I'm developing a much stronger defense.
