Alternative POIS Forum

Keep breathing as you circle your pelvis first one way then the other, try large circles andvery small ones, fast and slow movements; centring on one hip and then the other. But keepbreathing! Notice what you feel while doing the movement, and while standing still for amoment or so afterwards. Where else in your body are you aware of sensations?Tension in the pelvis is likely to set up the conditions for ailments of the reproductive andeliminatory systems - piles, constipation or diarrhoea, thrush, cystitis, cervical cancer, periodpains, and problems with the change of life.Grounding, Centering, FacingThis, then, is the body in pieces: the body split up, in self defence, into watertightcompartments. Some segments are empty of charge, some overfull, some sour and stagnant,some at boiling point some frozen, some yearning, some hidden and fearful, Before we moveon to look at how character assembles itself out of these fragments, we want to suggest someunifying themes for the whole bodymind.Three issues identified by David Boadella are Grounding, Centering and Facing: threecapacities which help create our health and openness to the world. Grounding, we havealready mentioned: this is our capacity to take a stand, to get a purchase on the world, toanchor ourselves ready to put out effort. Bodily grounding, a strong and flexible relationshipwith the earth and with gravity, corresponds to emotional grounding; one will not be foundwithout the other. The grounded body says 'Here 1 am'; it takes a middle way betweenanxious stiff uprightness ('uprightness') and slumped inertia - a springy, reciprocalrelationship with Mother Earth which draws on the depth and solidity of the ground for asense of nourishment and belonging as well as for physical support As Stanley Keleman putsit, 'if our relationship with the ground is tenuous, then our instinctual life and our body willalso be tenuous. Our connection with the mystery of life will be tenuous.'At times we need to ground ourselves in other ways: in relationships; in groups; in principleslike loyalty and truth. The basis for all of these is a degree of freedom from armouring in feet,legs and pelvis; also in the buttocks, the back and shoulders, and in the head and neck. Themore we look at grounding, the more we see how it involves a fundamental stance of theentire bodymind.The same is true for Centering, which is a capacity for wholeness and singleness in ourbodymind. For most people the centre - or its absence - is around the solar plexus. If thediaphragm is too frozen with fear, then there will be a conscious or unconscious emptiness, avacuum where the centre should be.An armoured diaphragm splits the body into an upper and a lower half, cutting through unity.Like ungroundedness, it may relate to the severing of the umbilical cord - a sense of being cutoff from the sources of nourishment and meaning.For many people, there is also a sense of division between left and right sides, or betweenfront and back, accompanied by deep, subtle twists in the posture. Thus grounding andcentering are fundamentally linked; and we need both in order to face the world and otherpeople, which we do with the whole front of our body, face, heart, belly and sex.Facing is incomplete if our navel area feels empty and vulnerable, say, or if inadequategrounding puts a twist in our stance. If the eye segment is armoured then, as we have already
 
39indicated, there can be a sense of unreality and fragmentation. You may feel that you have nocore or boundaries, that you are open to being invaded, swept off your feet, or leaking away.Thus these three capacities are very much intertwined with each other. We can only feelsecure enough to open up and face the world if we are confident of our strength, the capacityto defend ourselves, which is embodied in our backs, shoulders and buttocks.Then we can face things as they are, rather than as we would like them to be, and respondappropriately by opening or closing, reaching out or fending off, advancing or retreating. It isthis capacity for appropriate action which armouring damages or eliminates entirely: itrepresents one form or another of compulsive defence. We are now going to look at thedifferent blends and combinations of strategies for self-defence which make up the individual character