Turning with awareness and sensing

TWO: MOVE WITH AWARENESS
Turning around to look behind ourselves.
We are in a human body. In yesterday’s meditation/ activity, we discovered how difficult the game was of keeping attention and awareness (sensing) in our arms and legs and spine.
Hopefully you had fun, too, and will try that many days of your life.
Or all the days.
And for now, let’s take a game/ activity/ mediation from my training in the Anat Baniel Method and the Feldenkrais Method. What are they? Amazingly useful ways of feeling, moving and thinking better by taking advantage of the brain’s plasticity, it’s ability to keep learning all our lives.
What does that mean?
Let’s learn something now. Sit, please in a firm chair or on a bench and sit at the front edge of this, so your back is free.
Begin to easily look around behind yourself to the left and to the right. Do this with great ease.
Then just look to the left and come back to the center. Many times, like six, or eight, or twelve.
Many times with ease and curiosity, what are you sensing in arms and legs and spine and neck and ribs and toes and face and all of you as you do this.
Rest. Just sit and feel yourself in the world, in this moment.
Now put your right hand on your sternum, touching gently, and turn to the left a number of times and with your right hand gently guide your sternum to the left, too. Feel your ribs now contributing to your turning to the left. Do this a number of times, so that each time you feel this more fully and with more pleasure.
Rest.
Now put the back of your right hand on your left check, and turn to the left a number of times, once again feeling your spine and ribs and neck as you rotate to the left and come back to the center.
Rest. Feel your body in space. Feel and sense your arms and legs and breathing and spine. Sense as much of yourself as you can, as easily and as enjoyably as you can.
Give yourself this present of being present to yourself.
Now as you sit on your chair rock your weight slightly to the left side of your pelvis and then to the right. Do this a number of times, with ease and being present and curiosity: what can you sense of your entire self?
Rest.
Now shift your weight to the left side of your pelvis and move your right knee forward and back, so that your pelvis rotates to the left and back to the middle. Get excited and aware as you do this a number of times.
Rest.
Now turn to look to the left using your ribs and your pelvis as you do so. Go slow. Many times. Sense how turning to look around ourselves is a great gift of being in a human body. How does your body feel as you do this? What can you sense?
How can moving like this, slowly and with specific awaring on specific interconnected “parts” of you help you be more present.
Rest.
Go about today experimenting with what it means to turn to look to the left and what it means to turn to look to the right. No longer take these gifts of granted.
Be present.
Be curious.
Enjoy the adventure of lifelong learning.