Licensed Teacher Content | August 2006
Educational Feature
In the Crawling stage, you are guiding your students to explore, venturing into new movement territories and taking occasional minor risks. Guide them to gently change the range of motion, discovering new skills, that help them to move more effortlessly, with less pain, and more pleasure.
With or without music, lead your students in this Crawling Meditation, either as the FloorPlay cycle, or as part of a Workshop.
Suspend yourself in Crawling. Sense the power of balancing on three pillars with one pillar able to move freely to direct your motion. Understand that this is what makes it possible for you to begin to move more freely through your world.
Recognize that you are a self-supporting and self-sustaining structure. Sense the horizontal wave-like flow of energy along your spine. Sense how it is a deeper wave of energy than you experienced in Creeping.
Move with a soft paw, like a bear. Look out and sustain your sight into future. Move your chi along the twenty-six facets of your spine as you move about and sense your balance. Feel your belly hang — the umbilical cord of life into Earth.
Use the pull of gravity to become strong, so the weight of your viscera, your organs will help you to develop the right curvature in your lower back. Use your curiosity to look out in future to develop the right curvature in your neck. Release your jaw.
Spread your fingers and allow your heart to fall into the grace and into the power of gravity, so there is a hollowing out between the shoulder blades, beginning to make space for the emergence of wings.
Play with the subtle movements of your shoulder blades squeezing together and apart, deepening your breath, preparing to sprout wings. Each placement of the hand, notice, is a representation of completion and also beginning. Beginning and end. Ending and beginning.
Use my form to acknowledge what it means to resolve opposite tension—left and right, right and left. Notice how my architecture demands that you divert the weight of gravity that is pulling down on you by pushing down to rise up. Dance my moving triad and I provide you with great strength, balance, and efficiency. Begin to define who you will be.
Know upon my surface, your back, is the place for you to create, and sense things that you cannot see but you know are there. And the space that I provide, the distance between your belly and the Earth, make it possible for you to recognize that you are separate, but connected. Crawling, I suspend your heart and your soul. My four pillars momentarily give rise to a balancing act that awaits your attention to detail and your willingness to balance, your willingness to notice, your willingness to be conscious and to take one step at a time.
My architecture, an energy flow, calls you to notice what is happening around and to the opposite side of you, from fours, your moving triad begin to take you and ready you for a world that is three-dimensional, where energy, matter, mind, body, and spirit dance to find harmony and peace. A harmony and peace that now calls you to rise into Standing.