a center for
personal and planetary
awakening

Mystic River Yoga
196 Boston Avenue
Suite 3900
Medford, MA 02155

781 396 0808
info@MysticRiverYoga.com

Introduction

12 Principles of Awakening

Spiritual Foundation

Scientific Foundation

Embodying the Practice

Collective Awakening

                     3rd Practice Theme:

                  Finding Gravity and the

        Role of Alignment in Yoga Postures

    We are immersed in the wholeness of the Universe and gravity, the cosmic glue, is what binds us all together. Cosmologist Brian Swimme, in "The Universe is a Green Dragon", calls gravity the macrophase expression of love. Scientists do not really know what gravtity is but can describes its actions with amazing depth and subtlety. We do not need to understand the mathematics of gravity but we do need to feel gravity's effect on our body.

  We embody gravity in two ways. The first and most obvious is a downward flow into the earth, grounding, rooting, stabilizing, and increasing density. Our bodies are attracted, like iron to a magnet, to the center of the earth. Our bones, our fluids, our limbs feel this attraction as weight or heaviness.

   The complementary expression is an expansion into space,  as openness, lightness, expansiveness, freedom.  Here gravity also draws us out into the universe, as the moon, the sun, the stars and galaxies, each exert their subtle call for us to receive the embrace of the wholeness of the universe.

 We will begin with an exploration of the felt sense of weight as our attentional field shifts to the gravity receptors in the body.

Standing: Stand comfortably, feet hip distance apart, and relax your weight downward by slightly flexing the knees. Let the toes and feet spread out, relax the ankles, and allow the body to gently, subtly move over the stable base of the feet. Allow any part of the body that wants to drop down, including shoulder blades, spinal muscles, arms, and notice any sensations of yielding, melting, softening.

 Notice how the weight shifts from right foot to left, from the fronts of the feet to the heels, and see if some parts of the feet feel strain or compression, strength and grounding, spreading. How many different foot bones can you feel?

Sitting: Find a comfortable seat, on the floor, on a chair, on a blanket or cushion. Your sitting bones at the base of the pelvis are now the 'feet' of your pose. Let you sitting bones be heavy and then roll back and forth as if your sitting bones were the legs of a rocking chair. Feel how the rest of the body responds to the changes. From where in the body can you drop more weight into the bones. If the weigh doesn't quite drop into the bones, you will feel compression where the dropping stops.

Geometrical alignment: relationships in the body of weight and mass, of muscle and bone.

Subtle alignment: integrating organs, organ systems and energetic flow with structure.

Causal alignment: Awakening new cognitive pathways as cosmic forces are further integrated into the organism.

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