How to Carve our Space for Your Self

We can widen the soles and soften the knees, our first gateways of earth energy into the thighs and pelvic floor- our home of fertility and rootedness and identity. If the ground beneath you is coarse you extend the tail to soften the femurs into their true home, deep in the hip socket, and allow the Psoas to release. The Psoas is the only muscle in our body which connects the bottom to the top and the front to the back. For this reason, and I suppose for many others, it has been called the Spirit Muscle. Thus the whole lower half of the body softens, opening to a funneling of energy from the elegant arch of the heels all the way behind the sacrum, unwinding like kite tails that stream and cross each other as they reach the nexus of energy that is base of spine. Then fingers of fascia ask for space, allow the top of the body to release, the diaphragm has more room to breathe you, it's only desire to spread and wing. The shoulder girdle stops trying to breathe for you and instead descends. The heart yawns awake. The floating ribs gasp delight and you widen even from the nipple line. You breathe out all the way to the pinkies.

On femurs and the 4 Train

Spent a month in the city of subways and rush. Framed in a time that's built on transit. We live in a room that fights for elbows. All the Heads stay down to count the steps taken in a day. Oh but what beauty in the constant of flux.... To the chaos there is a response of tremendous calm, a subtle kindness. Framed in a time that is infinite- beyond the realm of our first layers of recognition, foresight, prodding. And when you live in a room that begs for space, you have to find it on your own; your elbows must protrude and the shoulder blades wing, I'll give you one guess what happens, then, dear one, to the ribcage, and the lungs it frames and protects. Expansion. And when the head sinks down the chin floats toward the chest in reverence. A grounding in descent. And it's loud everywhere outside of ourselves so we lean in closer to find the quiet, to listen to what the heart has to say.
And a corner becomes your world, and the streets sing to you, and your boots mold to you. You become inconsequential and yet everything all at once. When you finally make your way home at the end of each day a new meaning to ceremony is born. You bend as if in prayer to wash the city off your face, you let the coat drape across the back of a chair. The warmth of you wafts away, out the window you've propped open with cedar block, your scent curls around the streetlamp. You welcome this chill because the kettle is steaming, tea is already on its way. When you lift your cup, you may breathe in the aroma. Here fragrant plants are worshipped. Somehow you know that you are drinking a cloud; you are drinking the rain. The tea contains the whole universe. This is how, dear one, you have come to understand the Tao. You learn to exist in the undercurrents of what it means to lengthen energetically, to settle the heads of the thigh bones deep into their home of the hip socket. There is a deep peace when a joint can realize it's full depth and how that feels to rest comfortably in our own architecture. The skeletal structural shift: how to adapt to the city. How you start to look like the building you are living in, the chair that holds your coat, the sink you lean over- with cupped palms, an offering. There are skeletal subtleties to softness. The inherent etching of ease, right there in the indentations of the collar, the curved lip of the iliac crest.