The Posture of Kindness
From a presentation made to a group of clinicians at the 9th Annual Winter Workshop of the Association for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues in Counseling of Alabama, given on February 20, 2015.
The following is a variety of mindfulness practice that focuses on the immediate experience of the body, thus providing a gateway to our current mental/emotional experience. Focusing on the embodied aspect of attitudes, beliefs, and emotions helps us contact the very material we have tried to repress and deny. It suggests both a way for us to work with ourselves and also a way to become more sensitive to others’ unspoken experience. The “Posture of Kindness” is the type of posture in which we can become most sensitive to our subtle physical sensations. In meditation, being more keenly aware of, or listening to and accepting our physical experience is an act of kindness toward ourselves. The following 3 videos detail each aspect of the posture: alignment, relaxation, and resilience. For more information on posture and meditation, see Will Johnson www.embodiment.net.
https://youtu.be/lxWVnV_qkMM
This first video provides instructions on working with ALIGNMENT as a key element of psychotherapy. In good alignment we have shaped our body such that the major weight segments of the head, ribcage and pelvis have their centers right on top of one another and therefore in a line that’s parallel to the direction that gravity is acting on us. We are therefore in harmony with gravitational force. Our body is stable, our mind is stable, and we are able to stay in the present moment.
https://youtu.be/-r6aiFvXIXU
If, and only if our alignment is good is it possible to relax, which is the second aspect of this meditation. RELAXATION, meaning letting go of the weight of the body, is a kind of surrender. What are we surrendering? Our constructed, false self.
https://youtu.be/XAK3Ugs11J8
When the alignment is good, meaning our mind is stable, and we can therefore relax, meaning we can surrender, we may discover the naturally-existing RESILIENCE of our bodies. Resilience is the experience of motility, the subtle movements that accompany breathing, circulation, and all the other activities that represent the life of our bodies. Psychologically, it is the experience of life energy that need not be manipulated, the awareness that we participate in the great dance of the cosmos, from which we are not separate.