Day 233 – For the past two days, I have settled into a movement, as well as meditation, practice.  In Day 18 of Meditations on Intention and Being, Rolf reflects on our culture’s constant need to spend the “bulk of our time…telling our bodies how they are supposed to form and look.”  The first step is literally more of a “leap of faith out of a fear-based belief system where the body is a means to an end, into a system of belief and behavior based on love and trust.”  Just so, I am skepetically entering a second session in my medical study/nutrition experiment which is plant-based.  I am told to eat intuitively this week, and I chose a practice to do mirror this, floating and moving in and out of postures gently and mindfully.  As Rolf puts it:  “Sweating away trying to fix something that is forever broken, we cannot imagine how we are ever going to feel into something that is sacred for more than a breath or two before our old fears creep back in.”

Intuitively so, I picked a practice to build stability in the body.  Rolf shares the words of the visionary anatomist and body worker Thomas Myers, writing:  “The collagenous net (connective tissue) is to animals what cellulose is to plants–the scaffolding around which everything else is built, hung, or inserted.  The major difference is that plant cellulose maximizes stability over movement, wherease collagen (connective tissue) favors mobility…our stability requires near-constant maintenance.”  So, instead of focusing on strength or flexiblity these days, two things I work in other ways, I am cultivating stability, and I feel this also cultivates mindfulness–habits of the mind such as presence, perseverance, resilience, compassion.   Thus, Rolf writes:  “The demands of stability will create strength, and the peace of stability will encourage exploration, equanimity, lenth, and surrender.”