I want to write about rhythm today, specifically Rhythmic Movement.
The whole pandemic, remember the pandemic?--I studied Rhythmic Movement and reflex integration.
What did you do?
Alone in a room, I lay on the floor on a couple of layers of yoga blankets and rocked up and down, side to side, one arm outstretched--feet against a wall on the right side the
onto my belly for the drumbeat of repeated shifts of the hips laterally.
the left side, and then onto my belly for the drumbeat of repeated shifts of the hips laterally.
What did you do with your aching hours of emptiness?
I lay in the bunker-As I called it-the life-saving room above the garage but on Zoom-remember Zoom, the descending eaves of the low sloping ceiling seemed to frame me as if I was calling in from an outpost in an unlisted war.
Were we at war?
It seemed so. People pulling each other from cars virtually to hate on them for being different.
And Who isn’t different from you?
Even Winnie-the-Pooh, calm, erudite, had the grace to question his reality-but not us at war in a pandemic with ourselves and each other.
You might say people were afraid and got to dumping the bodies they killed with their fevered thoughts on the internet.
Sometimes I put my hands over my ears when rocking. That way I know who is moving.
I did everything in the bunker. Smiled, gave virtual trainings, listened to people as anxious as I, and moved my body in between the hours of shoring up the unknown. I had faith that sharing it was better than not. But that was all I had. That and rocking.
Before the vaccines came out isolation was a fortress. My partner and I made our wills out in case both of us died simultaneously and our immune-compromised son was left without financial support and our love. I Will You, my love. There should a clause for eternal love. I would have made a million copies, just let the printer run in the bunker. I love you I love I love you forever--fluttering across piney sloping floor.
To make it interesting, because of the pandemic lockdown, we lost our health insurance. My partner was laid off from his job along with millions of other people. Then I got cancer. Then I got better. But it makes you think that you don’t matter. Because you cannot get conventional treatment without insurance. So, people die.
For-profit medicine means people die. It’s the Aids-lack-of-care crisis continued. Preferential treatment for anyone else but the people with the highest risk factors. As if the illness is the person’s fault. Enter Piglet to explain faulty cohabitation of cause and effect.
I might be wrong. I am not a studied AA Milne scholar.
But I am not backing down from what I said about the inequality of the medical system.
Heroes of the pandemic, medical care providers, and teachers. For sure. And so many others. It truly was a group effort and we saw the best of people helping to keep everything going. And we are here today because of them.
When I rock, I remember this---I can imagine the connected supersonic powers of human beings—the biological need to share and care and foster goodwill.
I could choose to move different body parts independently.
Just move the feet which in turn moves the whole body if the legs are lengthened.
Or lying on the right or left side with an arm extended, knees with a fetal curl, pushing against a wall, a ball, or the baseboard of a bed--side sliding.
Or rolling over on the belly, and rock-sliding the hips side to side.
There are also a couple of new favorites, the ribs sliding from one side to the other, or the ever-so-gentle fingers adjacent to the navel and sliding-back-and-forth, with perhaps another hand on the sternum, ever-so-gently-rocking-back-and-forth.
There’s the effect: more calmness, more connectedness, and increasing awareness of your body and her relationship to gravity. We call that “tone”. You can tone your body, so all the body systems work together. Wish we could rock the world.
With this harmony, we start to clear. Lymph is released, people cough up what’s in their lungs-productively--so to speak. Emotions emerge, thoughts focus, heartbeat and blood flow regulates--rhythmically.
We are in time.
We are on time.
We will continue.
To be continued next week.….