Educational Feature

Moving Into Standing

In the previous issues we introduced you to The Body’s Way education and the Five Stages of Self-Healing – Embryonic, Creeping, Crawling, Standing, Walking. We took you through the first Stage Embryonic–the beginning, the stage where you are nurtured and fed and where you let the beginner’s mind be your guide. Then we moved into the Creeping stage where you become conscious of your body and the world around you, and then on into the Crawling stage, where you expand your conscious awareness and guide your changes by connecting to the systems of the body that keep you alive.

Now we take you into Standing. In Standing you move into a vertical design for the first time, and you are free to reach up and out.

Begin to explore Standing from the foundation of the first three stages. Use the principle of The Body’s Way Demands Simultaneous Mobility and Stability in the Standing stage to create balanced mobility and stability in every part of your life.

Review the aspects that make up the Voices of the Body to become clear on the messages they hold for you. The aspects–Cognitive, Symbology, and Sensory–help you develop an intimate and interactive relationship with your body and bring to life the wisdom and healing power of The Body’s Way in your day-to-day world.

Learning The Architecture of Standing

Standing actually begins with squatting. Moving from Crawling to standing moves the body and the spine into vertical alignment, and exposes your body’s energy centers in the front and in the back, making your physical body more interactive with all energy fields.

In Standing, the body is supported on two feet, rather than two feet and two hands as in Crawling. The body is stable and less mobile. In a squat the legs slightly fold and the spine lengthens up, the arms and hands are free. From this first Standing position you can now look up, and reach out into life.

As the most challenging stage of the Five Stages of Self-Healing, learning the fourth stage – Standing–is best approached by understanding what it means to move from a horizontal design where the feet do not touch the earth, into a vertical design where the feet touch and where the downward pull of gravity compresses tissues and joints.

By design, the architecture of Standing is a tetrad, a geometric shape of four corners. This shape can be viewed as a design, where the four corners of the universe and the four faces of your body–the front, back, top, and bottom–connect.

Unique to this architecture is that the body is no longer supported by two hands and two knees, but by two small feet and there is a diminishment of lower body mobility from Crawling into Standing and a shift from horizontal energy flow along the spine to a vertical flow.

To learn the architecture of Standing, begin by slowly moving in and out of the third stage, Crawling, gradually moving into the first moments of Standing. While in Crawling, notice the moment you feel ready to move into Standing, that moment when you curl your toes under, and wait. Rest in Crawling with your toes curled under and sense the entire width of both of your feet and both hands connected to the earth. Rest in this shape as a way to prepare and get ready to push with your hands moving onto your feet and into Standing.

As you move in and out of Crawling into Standing, feel more relaxed, and begin to stay longer in Standing. Sense your breathing, and if it is irregular or strained, go back into Crawling and use your hands to push onto your feet and settle into the downward pull of gravity. Let this natural force seduce you into resting into on the earth. Rest onto both of feet, and let them and your thighbones point in any direction to allow you to sink into the downward pull of gravity.

Depending upon your body you might find that you feel more relaxed and comfortable by shifting your body weight onto one foot, to one side, keeping the other foot’s heel off the ground. This will help to open up your hip joints and it will allow you to settle fully down into gravity and into base, while keeping the spine extended and lengthening up and out to what is above you.

To help you energetically get into Standing, imagine yourself as a Monkey and feel animalistic and human. It is normal in this stage to feel somewhat stuck because you are much less mobile than in the other stages. After Standing, when you feel the desire, you will move into the next stage and “rise up and Walk.”

The Voice of Standing

I am the voice of Standing — the tetrad. I bring the four corners of your universe and the structure of a third-dimensional reality together. I represent the four faces — front, back, top and bottom.

I teach you to rest upon and in your base, feet, legs, and in the hip joints — movable balls that will eventually give motion, freedom and power to you. Sit in me and you will experience the sensation and the depth of your universe. Crouched and ready, I am a geometry found in organic and inorganic structures.

My corners are the mystery of equal distance from the other. Vertical, I make it possible for you to transmit internal light and frequency. My architecture allows volume and space to dance in a structure that is firm and reliable. I understand the underneath, the down, the bottom, and the sink. I connect you to earth and water, air and rest. In me you can quietly wait.

I make it possible for your physical body to become curious about the up. I am the one that seduces you to interact with the above. My freedom of sight turns what was two-dimensional into three-dimensional. I teach you the art of flexibility, stability, and agility.

Now emerging upright, I open you to your body’s energy centers and prepare your base, feet and legs to power and support your upper body. I am the one who helps you engage with life through all your senses. I am the one that frees your arms and hands to reach out, to reach for, to receive, to hold, and to grasp. Spirit in waiting, the call to be, to be you, in life, in body, in mind, in emotions, and in spirit, I wait for the impulse that when sensed, brings you into the unbearable lightness of being, as a human being, upright, ready to walk.

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