Know Your Fluid Self

EMBODY BLOOD | Rich, Dark, Earthy Flow

INTELLIGENT FLUIDS ARE EVERYWHERE

Composed mostly water, as we are, our inner world is a sea of individuated fluids of varying densities and viscosities. Each has its own unique function and movement. Each has its own intelligence. Each fluid brings its unique qualities to our breathing and moving body-minds as a whole. They support, cleanse, and wash tissues. They make connections and transport nourishment and waste. They are differentiated from one another, and yet coordinated in their actions. Our body fluids are in constant relationship and communication with one another.

Each fluid has its own mind. Each contains its own inherent functionality and expertise. Like every cell, each fluid knows what to do…and it does it. It’s smart about how it does all of this. It isn’t random. One fluid is not another. They are not the same. Each one relates to and carries within its structure different aspects of our overall conscious and feeling body-mind.

We can, if we like, explore these fluid aspects of our embodied form and learn about them. We can witness their intelligence and movement. In so doing, perhaps we can assist their freedom and movement. We may even be able to promote more balanced vitality and function in the individuated body fluids. Maybe our consciousness can clear the way for a more balanced energetic flow. 

We may find that delving into the movement and consciousness of our fluid body takes us to more refined levels of awareness in general. We might begin to see with more clarity how our emotions rise from within body and mind nearly simultaneously. We may find that if we look carefully, that this is movement. There is also space in the movement. It helps to know how and where to look for it.

BLOOD AND MOVEMENT
Let’s explore a fluid that we all know. Let’s tune into the sensing, feeling states that are moving within us through our blood.

We are all unique and different. Our experiences will be different. You can't do it right or wrong. Just get in there with what is, notice, feel, allow, and move on. We’re not doing something here. We are just exploring.

Blood is rich, dark, and earthy. It is heavy and relatively dense. Our blood carries grounded humanity through its vessels. Its earthy, watery, and warm. It has a powerful dharma in our bodies. It is basic. It is fundamental and strong. It is not light or floating. Blood relates to gravity and our place on the earth. It is committed to the job of keeping us here, in form, warm and alive. Blood is at the heart of the matter. 

ARTERIAL BLOOD — TAKE LIFE IN
Our oxygen rich blood pulses away from our central to our peripheral bodies. Propelled by the power of the heart and its waving and pulsating vessels, oxygen rich arterial blood surges away from heart to all the body tissues. It spreads everywhere. Its movement is strong. Not forceful but rhythmic, steady and sure. As the oxygen rich blood moves through our arteries to the capillaries, its rushing begins to slow. Its vessels narrow. Slower and slower until it reaches the capillaries. 

Music may be helpful to find the rhythm of blood. Use something with a good soft solid beat. Wait for the rhythm and when it moves you you move. I suggest that you stand for this. At least at first. Blood flow is already a dance. Feel and sense blood’s qualities as you allow them to express within your form.

EMBODIED EXPLORATION ARTERIAL BLOOD
How does it move? Can you feel the arterial blood pulsing and waving through your body? It is moving outward from your heart and core toward your peripheral form. It carries the precious spark of life in its cells.

It is quietly determined. There is a place where it turns. Can you feel where the blood flow becomes soft. Does it even still momentarily as it comes to its own transitional arc? Is there a pulse of life you can feel at that place that is not flow?
Let the surge of the arterial blood pulse through you and move your body with the rhythm of the sound.

CAPILLARIES — RECEIVE AND RELEASE
Entering and leaving the capillaries, our blood transitions from surging and pulsing to seeping and sliding. Blood’s touch becomes soft. As it enters the capillaries its flow becomes delicate and slow. The body cells are right there and they are calling for the nourishment the blood holds. They need it. In the capillaries, blood delivers. Cell by cell, our blood releases its oxygen and absorbs carbon dioxide. This critical exchange is happening in the capillary beds. The place of transformation.

ZONE OF THE ISORINGS — RESTFUL CLARITY
The zone of the isorings, as described by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, is the still point within our capillary beds where blood’s movement pauses between incoming and outgoing. This is a place of restfulness in our circulatory systems. The highly refined structure of the capillaries and the isorings in the peripheral body provide a quiet balance for the activity of the heart at the center.

The isorings are transitional places for consciousness and movement in the capillary beds. The blood’s place of transformation is a resting. Blood is neither arriving nor leaving. It is the still point of transition.

Blood’s state of awake stillness in the isorings is akin to the pause between inhalation and exhalation in our breathing. The isorings hold the space between action and action. They provide a still place that underlies movement. They are spaces in which something will happen but has not yet begun. This is the consciousness and the structure of the isorings.

When experiencing blood in isorings, our consciousness pauses too. It's the same stillness that underlies everything, all levels of body and mind. We notice it here in the isorings because we pay attention. It's the same as the space between perception and response, the space of contented non-craving. Going nowhere, doing nothing. Just presence.

VENOUS BLOOD — RELEASE LIFE AS IT IS
Coming out of the capillaries blood has changed in constitution and movement. The carbon dioxide rich blood that leaves the capillaries is the same blood, but now it is different from the oxygen rich blood. It has been transformed. 

Slowly, our blood washes back to the heart through our veins. Our veins’ peristaltic action along with their valves, keeps the blood steadily returning to the heart. It feels no hurry. In our embodiment we notice more restfulness when we attend to our venous blood flow.

EMBODIED EXPLORATION — FULL CYCLE
Find a comfortable seat and place your hands face up on your thighs. Look at them. Imagine your arms and hands to be blood vessels.

Like your arteries transition to the capillary beds, your upper arms are larger and narrow progressively as they become your wrists and morph into the palms and your softly spreading fingers. In this exploration, your fingers are the capillary beds.

Notice the speed of the flow. It is stronger and faster as it comes from the upper arms and slows progressively as it reaches the fingers. It may even seem to disappear in the fingers — a tiny silent space in time and movement — only to be pulled into the small veins of your hands and arms and drawn all the way up, as it returns to the lungs and heart. Take time to feel. Wait for it.

Now, bring both softly bent arms up so your fingers can touch comfortably out in front of your chest. Imagine your arms to be your blood vessels. One side is arterial blood flow. The other side is venous. The center where your fingers can touch or hover with just a tiny space between them, is the zone of the isorings. Imagine, notice, and feel.

Our blood flows through its vessels in a continuous loop. It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t really change direction. It is always the same blood (constantly renewing, of course) within the same same continuous system of vessels as it spins its way through the whole body. Like a moebius strip, around and around it goes, giving, tending, and nourishing life.

Find the dance of this cycle within you. Move with or without music as you explore the waves of consciousness, sensing and feeling of the looping flowing blood

BLOOD, BREATH AND CLARITY
We find the same movement principles expressing in our breathing processes. The same rising, releasing, and pausing phases are there. Inhalation is naturally stronger and a little shorter—like the arterial blood flow. Exhalation is naturally more relaxing and is the longer phase of our breath—like the venous flow. Our inhalations and exhalations have similar pauses at their moments of transition. They too contain a moment of quiet transition and presence. The systems are intimately intertwined. A moment of stillness and vastness can be found and felt in each of them.

When you practice pranayama or when you are resting and feeling very relaxed, see if you notice the qualities of mind and body that can be found in the breath suspensions – the pauses. Look for them. The pauses can be cultivated in breathing by engaging a relaxed state of mind and curious attention.

These pause moments are right at the very heart of pranayama practice. The ultimate goal of pranayama is to find your way to the place where the breath stills, we are present and alert, and we dissolve into the deepest comfort of space. There we may get a glimpse of the vast nature of life. All other pranayama practices are basically skillfully honed progressive means for arriving at this place.

This is not deep breathing as we normally think of it. This very quiet and easy.

EXPLORE THIS IN THE BREATH
We are looking for breath suspensions that arise naturally from a calm and curious attentive mind. Clarity and restfulness live in the pauses. They are not separate. They are one. We find them resting together there, in the ever so slightly cultivated pauses in the breath’s stream. You needn't fill or empty your lungs to find this. Don’t try to make the pause long.

Allow the collective ease of attention and restfulness to lead the process in its own time. Yield to the desire of the breath. Let it slip in and out in anyway it wants. Pay very close attention without trying to control. Take it easy. Let it play.

• maybe allow an inhale to come

• allow a soft pause to happen

• maybe finish the inhale

• softly release breath outward to any easy place for another pause…

• maybe suspend the breath in the pause for any amount of time

• do nothing — pay attention — no hurry

• sip a little more breath in if you feel like it

• pause again

• continue to play with it as long as it is comfortable

• when you detect discomfort discontinue the process and try it again later

Enjoy.