Position Influences Function
How Shifting Our Position Helps Us Change Our Story
Position influences function. I heard our national treasure, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, say this the other day. She was referring to the body but, this is true on so many levels!
Understanding the depth and breadth of this truth is to understand ourselves beyond the confines of the positions we hold in or about life.
Your body posture shapes you as much as you shape it.
Where do you still carry your position in your family as you were growing up ?
What in the whole ecosystem of your life supports you now?
What does the soft, gentle organism-of-you need more of? Less of?
Everything is inter-related.
Everything is dynamic, alive, constantly interacting and changing one another all the time.
This is true on every level of our existence, from your tissues to the cosmos to the quantum field.
This does not mean that just because with every interaction where I am changing you and you are changing me, that it comes down to a game of who can overpower whom. Nor does it mean that there is no divine order, on earth as it is in heaven. Things have a way of balancing out.
What I take it to mean is that, no matter what you've been led to believe or how bleak life gets, we have been given a tremendous gift in these insane times we are living through.
When the towers fall, what is left standing? You are, your core values are, these are values of your soul, your North Star and the hill you are willing to die on.
Was it the desire to live out these values that called you into life in the first place? Is this the original fire that ignited your embryonic self-creating?
This the multipotent stem cell consciousness lives inside you now. It is what gave rise to your fascia an you can call up its revitalizing energy anytime.
Many of us are becoming more and more aware of this now. Do you feel it stirring inside you? Does the feeling come and go or do you know how to cultivate it? There are many ways but all requires a crucial first step.
That step involves developing a method of conscious embodied relating or what I like to call Sitting with Life. Sitting with Life is not witnessing. Witnessing is objective and to be objective, there must be an object. I mean feeling, sensing with the heart.
Sensing with the heart connects me into me as well as my ecosystem. It enables me to see/feel/sense the patterns, ruptures and connections that were there all along but my conscious mind could not perceive.
It has the power to shift my nervous system out of the polyvagal loop of fight-flight-fawn-freeze into a more embodied, parasympathetic sense of calm coherence that comes from a more attuned exteroceptive connection to the ecosystem of my thriving.
Remember, eighty percent of our fascial system, our body's largest sensory system, is sensory. Only twenty percent is motor. As we awaken our capacity to sit with life, we are changing and so is life. Rather than having an agenda going in, I am fueled by my intention to follow my core values and the attention of sitting with what is arising. Action that arises from here is very different than action arising from my prejudice or fears.
What is arising is a new way of moving through life, from coherence instead of chaos. What is arising is creativity, happiness and play. What is arising is the fire of vitality and passion that was always here, in this crazy mix of darkness and light. May we become big enough to embrace it all as we morph our positions and unfold more attuned functions that support the ecology of our world.