Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away,
as I do - back to the body, back to life,
that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning.
- Zarathustra, 188

IT SEEMS MYSTERIOUS. Even if we are willing to consider that there is wisdom in our desires, even if we are ready for a shift in our experience that will help us find it, what can we do to make it happen?

Nothing, really. We can't make it happen.

We can, however, invite it to happen by moving in ways that open our senses and draw our awareness into our bodies. We can bring our senses to life.

While there may be infinite ways to invite such a shift, I offer one simple exercise that weaves through this book - a cycle of breaths.

When we practice the cycle of breaths, we attend to a movement that is making us - the movement of our breathing. As we move through the four moments of the cycle, we open four distinct sensory perspectives on our breathing movement: we experience our breathing as connecting us with the elements of earth, air, fire, and water. The process inevitably shifts our sense of breathing. Regardless of where we are or what we are doing, we find ourselves breathing differently, with greater ease, depth, and pleasure, more in sync with the challenges and opportunities at hand. Patterns of tightness and tension appear and fall away. It is as if the opened span of sensory awareness releases the potential of our breathing for supporting our health and well being.

In this way, by inviting a fourfold sensory awareness of a movement we are always making that is always making us, the cycle of breaths helps us discover what is true for us in every moment of our lives. We can then use this sensory awareness to find life enabling, life-enhancing ways to move whatever we are feeling, wherever we find ourselves. We can learn to discern the wisdom in our desires.

I am swimming in a mountain lake. It is green and sweet, shallow enough to warm quickly in the summer sun, and deep enough to hide the sandy depths. There is not too much vegetation to snarl ankles and wrists, and the bottom drops quickly enough that its squishy texture is soon left behind. Then there is nothing to do but swim for miles, in clear open water ringed with mountains. Dazzled blue air floats overhead. The wind picks up in the afternoons, but mornings, when I swim, the mirror surface is glassy flat.

There is a small island not far from shore. I swim around it. Coming around the far bend, I am swimming well, hard, and my thoughts ride up and down in the currents of my stirred energy. I am thinking loosely about being in this water and its magic, about our connection to the earth.

Why is swimming in this gorgeous eye-of-the-soul-opening lake any different than swimming anywhere else? It is. It is. I am doing the crawl. I breathe in, and as I exhale, I allow my moving body to drop into the water. I release the tension of effort and exertion, still moving, but without the force of added will. I breathe out through the length of my body into the water, allowing it to support me. The water is holding me up, as solid as the earth, carrying my weight. Every increment of skin is touched and held, gently. I feel my shoulders release and my arms reach forward a bit further. My neck unfolds. I move my head side to side. My back lengthens and my hips spread outwards. My kick intensifies.

The thought enters my mind. What if I allowed each breath to relate me to an element? What if I breathed each breath using that breath to explore my relationship to that element as it exists in me and in the world around me?

Air, I need air. I turn my head to breathe and imagine the waves of air breaking into my body. It is never so delicious as when it is needed. The air is light, it makes me feel light. I find myself filling with light - a light that releases again into the supportive weight of the water. I experiment with this breath some more. My arms seem to float up and around my head. I can feel an added stretch through my lower back, all the way down to the source of my energy, the fire in my belly.

Fire. I breathe again, this time sending the breath to that fire. I contract the muscles of my lower abdomen - squeezing up from the pelvic floor, pressing in with the lower belly. Hollowing out. I am hollow. Empty. Dissolved into the pure flame of my efforts.

As I pull at my center, my body lengthens again. The top of my head presses forward, my toes reach back, my lower back opens a notch more. I gather strength, preparing to launch myself forward. My shoulders round to protect the flickering. I am about to burst.

I breathe again. Water I think, water. The flames in my belly turn liquid and flow out through my churning limbs. Power. I feel power. My body surges. I am moving faster, gliding on top of the water. I chuckle. I must be leaving a wake.

I can't hold the sensation for long. I fall back again into a slightly disorganized paddling. Why don't I start back at the beginning?

I try again. With one breath I release my body into the earth weight of the waves. With the next I fill my body with airy light. With the next I squeeze sensation into the cauldron at the base of my spine. With the next I allow that kindled flame to flow, as molten lava, rolling out through my torso, back, arms, legs, and head. Again I find that moment of extended release and joy shimmers through me.

My heart is full. I never knew I could swim this way, with this sensory awareness, with this level of engagement.

What a gift. Oh, this lake.

Breathing to swim, swimming to breathe, my movement is making me - the universe is creating itself - a cycle of breaths.

To begin, don't do anything. Just breathe. Allow yourself to be in your senses. Notice what is going on. Pay attention to the air entering through your nostrils. Feel the air pass through the back of your mouth, stream down your throat, and into your expanding chest. Every breath enters your heart, passes through your heart, and picks up whatever is there on the way to the rest of your body. Our sensations and desires, our feelings about them and attitudes to them.

Sense your ribs lift and lower, your belly softly open and release. Notice that as you pay attention to your breathing, it changes. Your body changes. Your exhalations grow longer, trailing into infinity. Your forehead releases, shoulders drop, chest opens, even as you continue reading. (And even as I am writing.) Your legs relax, your lower back eases, currents of air swirl around you, through you.

Earth Breath

Breathe in. Breathe out.

Take another breath into your bright white heart, and as you release the air out again, open your sensory awareness to notice the points where your body is connecting with the earth, or at least with the chair or bed or floor that is between you and the earth. Where do you touch down?

As you follow the movement of the air through your heart and into your body down to your points of contact with the ground, rest your consciousness around those sites.

If you are sitting, feel your sit bones pressing on the chair. Feel the chair pressing back. Feel your feet on the floor, or tucked under you. Feel one leg pressing across the other. Feel the small of your back against the chair. Scan through your body, as you breathe, and allow the breath to swirl around and settle into those points of contact.

Take a breath into your heart, and again, as you exhale, send the breath down to the ground. Feel the points of contact together, all at once, as an image of your connection to the earth - as a picture of your dependence upon the earth, a picture of the earth supporting you. As you breathe into this matrix of points, allow yourself to melt into it. Feel how the earth presses up to keep you up. Surrender.

 There is not a moment in our lives when the body of the earth is not supporting us, holding us up, enabling us to stand and walk and breathe and be. There is not one moment where the earth is not there for us as a constant source of stability. The ground may shudder in an earthquake. It may fall away beneath us in quicksand. We may launch ourselves into the water; or propel ourselves high above the ground in an elevator or airplane. But even when mediated through water or air, there is some point of contact where the forces of gravity pin us to the earth. Hold us up by holding us down.

Keep breathing. Stop holding your self up. Allow the flesh to fold around you, to hang loosely on your bones like soft drapes. Empty your thinking, feeling, and sensing, your hopes, fears, and expectations, your wanting, judging, and yearning into the ground. Give it up. Feel the earth as your strength.

Feel the earth in you as your strength. Feel this pattern of sensing and responding in you as your strength, enabling you to become who you are.

Breathing again, shift from side to side, rearrange your legs and back. Put your book into a new position. Shake your head and tilt it in another direction. Notice how the earth comes with you, meets you wherever you go, comes alive in you again, as your rock. Feel this movement of the earth in relation to you.

As you empty all of your efforts to launch yourself up and out of your body into the sky-high world of numbers and letters, know this: you are creating yourself into someone who can find an enabling ground in his or her desires.

Air Breath

Are you still aware of your breathing?

Breathe in. Follow your breath in through your heart and allow your heart to open, unfold, expand in space. White light.

Now breathe again. Sense air, streaming into the nose and mouth, throat, and chest. As you exhale, feel the surface where you meet the outside world. Invite a sensory awareness of your connection to air - of all the places where your skin touches air. Allow these air-touched surfaces to float lightly, buoyed by the currents of breathing.

Breathing, feel your skin as porous mesh, a translucent web of tissue lightly touching and touched by what surrounds you. Imagine each cell filling with light, spilling over with light, dissolving into light. Breathe air into radiant rings of light, moving in ever-expanding circles around the heart.

At the end of each exhalation, remember your connection to the ground. Keep releasing into the earth. Trust it to support the vulnerable expanse of skin. And as you release your weight into the earth, fill your sense of your body's shape with emptiness.

I am walking on the hill behind our farm. The sky is bright blue. A few lone clouds graze on the horizon. The air blows. A wind from the north, a local farmer said. The air does not seem cold. It is sun-filled. Compared to winter squalls, it feels balmy. I walk up to the crest of the hill. The wind blows freely here, whipping around my head, blowing off my hat. I close my eyes.

A felt sense of the wind appears - a buffeting against my cheeks, a pull on my hair, tendrils of air weaving through my fingers. I didn't even notice these sensations when my eyes were open. I follow the currents of air along the surfaces of my skin, around to the other side. I block the wind, but it circles me and continues.

I practice an air breath, breathing myself light. I imagine the wind blowing right through and emptying me out. My face dissolves; arms, torso, legs dissolve. All that exists are the soles of my feet, pressing down against the ground, and up against the light. My thoughts clear. An impulse to run grabs my heart. I lift my arms to the sky and allow the wind to blow me. I run. I turn and plow into the wind, air roaring in my ears. My self is streamlined by the current. Buoyed in blue, I fly.

Sensing and responding to wind in these ways, another sensation sweeps through me: freedom. I taste and touch, hear and smell this freedom as my movements create me wind-blown, wind-strewn, wind-gathered. I am the air that is breathing me, blowing right through my bright heart and back into the world. Breathing, I am creating myself as someone who can find this soft in-spiring freedom in her desires.

Fire Breath

Are you breathing? Follow that breath into your heart, and through your heart to the places where you are touching the ground, to the surfaces where your skin dissolves into air. Feel your weight against the earth, your light oneness with space.

Now as you exhale, release all of the air out of your body. Empty yourself down to the very bottom of your belly. Push the air out for a second more. Wait in the emptiness until the urge to breathe opens you again.

Breathe all the way in and exhale again. This time, follow the breath out even further, sinking your awareness deeper into your internal cavity, the bowl of your pelvis. At that moment of greatest emptiness, push your diaphragm down and squeeze the muscles along the bottom of your pelvic floor up. In this pulled circle of muscular sensation, light a fire.

Release the effort. Take another breath in through your heart. As you exhale, activate that same muscular sphere, sending fuel to the burning fire. And again. Feel the fire blaze. Feel its vitality, your vitality, coming to life.

At the root of our spines, in the cradle of our bellies, is the source of our life energy. It is where the pulse of living ignites. This fire not only warms our skin and soul; it radiates through our pores and projects. Yet even more than that, the fire, if strong enough, provides us with a center or core of our being that can support an ever-expanding array of sensory creativity.

You want to hike up a mountain. It will be a challenge, but you have confidence that you can do it. As you begin, your mind starts to wander through all of the things you left behind at work, to the plight of a family member, or the state of the world. Your leg hurts. You notice and honor the complex texture of sensation and coax your body forward. You breathe and feel tightness in your chest. You plow on. Movement will help.

For a while you have some energy to burn, congested though it is. Then it runs out. You feel tired and want to sit down. You notice what weighs so heavily - a comment someone made to you last week. You focus on your breathing. You breathe deeper, reigniting the fires in your belly. Burn that thought there. Let it go.

You continue. Your mind still wanders and your limbs still ache, but your core - your breathing belly core - is now aglow. You feel its pulse within you, propelling you up the mountain. You feel yourself coming alive. Your mind darts to and fro, but spontaneously returns to your movement which is now as compelling as any other phenomenon. The force of the energy through you is aligning your faculties - thinking, feeling, sensing - in a singular arc. You move more easily and gracefully, your cells falling in line with your desire - that it be good.

When we move we burn. In every cell, we are aflame. Our ongoing fires feast on the fuel we provide - oxygen and calories. But if our cells are not being exercised to their potential, these fires smolder. Our energy pathways grow cloudy and clogged. We move less, need less, consume less. Our temperature cools. Our ardor wanes. We are less able to mobilize ourselves in the pursuit of any goal or the satisfaction of any desire.

When a fire-breathing breath bursts alive in us, it burns away materials we don't need. It restores our sensitivity, and opens us to farther reaches of our mobility. We not only spend energy, we create it. We find freedom in the possibilities for movement we unfold in ourselves.

Inhale, and breathe into this cleansing, creating fire in the cradle of your belly. As you exhale, allow the muscles contracted around it to explode. Feel the warmth in this opened region of sensation.

Breathe in again. This time, without contracting any muscles, activate a sense of them. Feel the strength and the length of the lower abdomen, its width and breadth and depth. Feel that fiery core rooted into the ground and warming the airy volume of your physical space. Breathing, know that you are becoming someone who can find this enlivening fire in her desires.

Water Breath

Earth, air, fire, we are also water. Mostly water. Lapping around our island eyes, beneath our lips, everywhere under our skin, in our blood, our lymph system, our flesh. We are like sponges. Squeezed out, all that would be left is a small pile of dust.

The water we are is warm water. Water warmed in the fires of our cells and center. It is this water that washes through our bodies, streaming through shapes of sensation. It is this sense of our watery selves we seek to awaken through the last of the cycle of breaths.

Breathe in through your open heart. See the air, feel the air, streaming in, and illuminating the heart. Exhale, sending air down through your points of contact with the earth; out through the surface of your skin, and deep into the fiery hold of your pelvis.

Now breathe in again and as you exhale imagine the glimmering warmth from the fire in your belly caught in waves of fluid. Imagine this light-flecked fluid flowing thickly from your center through your arms, your legs, and out the top of your head.

Breathe in again, filling your heart and awakening your sensations of ground, skin, and core, and then breathe out, spilling the fire of your desire through your extended self. Feel the flowing, warm, air-suffused water moving through you, moving you.

Whatever you are doing in the moment will flow. Even if you are sitting and reading a book, your spine will straighten, your eyes open, your attention clear. You will sense yourself creating yourself as an open conduit for the forces of bodily creativity - of sensing and responding - coursing through you.

Allow this luminous breathing to open you to yourself. Trust yourself. Trust what you sense as a guide to your own unfolding.

Practicing the cycle of breaths in stillness is a good way to begin. Try it when you are alone in a quiet place. Standing, sitting, or lying down. Allow yourself to stay on each breath until you begin to feel a shift in your bodily awareness. Explore it, then move to another breath. Go back and forth among the breaths, doing one and then another. Allow the sensations opened in one to enter into the experience of another.

After a while, try to cultivate an awareness of all sensations in the rhythm of one breath. Inhale through your heart, and as you exhale, focus on your connection to the earth for two counts, the light buoyancy of air in you for two counts, the fire in your belly for two counts, the flooding flow through you in the last counts. One day you may feel like practicing one kind of breath for a long time. Do.

When you are familiar with the cycle of breaths, you are ready for a further step: to practice the cycle of breaths while engaging in some form of rhythmic bodily movement. As you move through the cycle of breaths while doing this activity, each breath will call your attention to different aspects of that same movement. With each breath, you will find yourself making that movement slightly differently. You will sense possibilities for adjusting the movement - the wisdom in your desire to do.

Pick some movement activity that is familiar to you, one that you do regularly and easily, like walking, running, biking, or swimming; doing yoga or shoveling snow. Remind yourself of what the doing of the movement usually feels like. How do you feel as you begin? What happens when you are moving? What do you notice? How does the session end? How do you feel when you are done?

The next time you begin your chosen activity use the cycle of breaths to help you find play in the movements you are making.

© 2009, Kimerer LaMothe, All Rights Reserved
Excerpted from What A Body Knows, by Kimerer LaMothe, © 2009. Reprinted with permission of O Books, Winchester, UK and Washington, USA. Available at all bookstores or online.

This has been just a short excerpt from this remarkable book;
there is SO much more that we are unable to share with you here.
If you are interested in learning more about the body's natural wisdom,
be sure to add this book to your library!

What A Body Knows will be available from O-Books the end of May, 2009.
Click on the cover image below to learn more.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kimerer LaMothe is a Harvard-trained philosopher and scholar of religion, a dancer and choreographer, a life-partner and mother of four children. After teaching at Harvard for 6 years; receiving two prestigious fellowships; writing two books and many articles, and performing two original solo dance concerts, she left the academic world for a farm in upstate New York, where she founded Vital Arts Media with Geoffrey Gee. The Vital Arts mission is to support the practice of art as a resource for generating life-affirming responses to the challenges of our time. She has also published Nietzche's Dancers (Palgrave MacMillan) and Between Dancing and Writing (Fordham University Press).