Aliveness: Coming Home to Ourselves

Life is experienced through the body. Experiencing our body is more than sensations, movements, or the state of our nervous system – it is the deep feeling of being alive. Whether we call it life force, chi, energy, or vitality, the aliveness of the body is the governor our existence. We are animated by the need to contact this inner vital source.

Life is a liquid structure. Structure without liquid is not life. Neither is fluidity without a form. Like a river and its banks, the form and flow of life mutually express each other. In this way, moment by moment, our inner aliveness fulfills itself through an outer form just as our bodily form is constantly renewed from the energies generated within.

This is not an esoteric or new age concept. If you pay attention, you can recognize when you feel vital or depleted, aroused or depressed, excited or dull. It is in the excitement of anticipation, the glow of love, the heat of anger. When inspired, we are lit up with energy. We feel more buoyant, flowing and vibratory when vital. Conversely, we feel more dense, heavy and slow when the tension, compression and solidifying of structure predominates.

Energy moves via pulsation, and the vibrations, pulses and currents of the soma give rise to our thinking, feeling and behavior. These excitatory states are reflected in the vibrancy of our tissues. When our bodies are open to the wellspring of life energy, we feel it naturally streaming. To be open is a receptive, elastic malleability that can vibrate, swell and resonate. When our tissues are in this state we are able to flow with change, let go, adapt. More movement and flow, more life and regeneration.

When we close down or contract, flow diminishes and life energy stagnates. The less inner movement, the more deadened inside. Tissues congeal, stiffen or atrophy. Consequently, we become fixed and stuck in our attitudes, thinking and behaviors. Conversely, under extremes, form can break down and we can become uncontained. Here we become flooded and overwhelmed by the flow of energies. Again, structure and fluidity are a dynamic balance. Imbalances in life can happen from too much fluidity just as much as too much form.

Our emotional and mental states are therefore connected to the dynamic pulse of energy and form. It takes energy for the body to sustain itself, to heal and to grow. Dealing with the challenges of life takes energy. When our energy is flowing we feel we have the capacity to handle things. When we shut our body down in stress or overwhelm, or we are ill, our contact with ourselves is disrupted, diminishing the flow. What’s more, sustained patterns of tension or overactivation siphon off even more of our energy. It takes energy, however unconscious it may be, to sustain patterns of worry, stress, vigilance, or fixation. So It’s a twofold problem: we both have less gas in the tank and burn off what little we have even faster. A vicious cycle ensues.

Undoing patterns of stress, also, is in essence a twofold process. We must address the imbalances in how we have shaped ourselves, in how we carry excess tension or contraction or where we are atrophied and stagnant. We have to open ourselves where we have closed off physically, emotionally and mentally. It is not enough to relax to do this, for we also must make contact with ourselves, to reconnect movement with energy, awareness with action. We have to plug back in, as it were.

Our bodily form - the present way we use ourselves, our emotional stances, our habits of movement and expression – is the gateway into how our vitality is received and shaped. This isn’t just awareness, it’s how we open our tissues to allow the vital currents to flow more fully again. When we learn the language of movement, of pulsation, we speak our body’s mother tongue. We can then influence how energy and movement, body and mind interact in us.

This process brings into relief and participation the everyday ways we close or open ourselves to life. Psychologically, you can see how this is a different orientation: for the essential question is not just why you are mad, sad, afraid or frustrated. The question is how those feelings are embodied and expressed. Does expressing it create a feeling of satisfaction, completeness, restoration, nourishment? Does understanding it lead to felt shifts in your vitality? Or does it further feeling stuck, drained, depleted? Does the process temporarily relieve you or deeply revitalize you?

Working with ourselves somatically concerns not only our outer form and appearance but the whole attitude towards oneself and life. Put another way, work with how you are present bodily and you work with how your soul seeks expression.

Experiencing this cannot be grasped by the intellect, by standing apart from it and trying to fix it in understanding.  It must be felt, sensed and immersed in. To be immersed is to join in the dance, to move with it and be moved by it. We thereby come closer to experientially understanding our true nature, to tasting life rather than conceptualizing it. When our inner life and outer form are coherent, we are at home in ourselves.