Bearing Load in a Time of Trouble

My granddaughter watching the sunset across Little Assawoman Bay, Delaware.

The beach is a great place to get a clearer look at human anatomy! While scanning the crowd on Bethany Beach in Delaware, I noticed a man, probably in his 40s, who looked strong, but his gait was discombobulated. His knees were bowed out, and he waddled side-to-side when he walked.

The surf this year was extremely powerful due to the beach being refurbished over the winter. In this process, the sand is pulled into the beach from the ocean to slow erosion, creating larger, faster waves. I was somehow not surprised when the man I’d noticed was fished out of the water by the lifeguards with a knee injury.

Our capacity to bear load is always the issue, whether that load is a wave crashing over us on a beach or the loss of a loved one crushing our heart. Life is difficult, and there are no signs of the pressure letting up anytime soon.

What are the tools we can use to interact with and manage these loads? This fall, we’ll begin working with a new book called Bodyfulness: Somatic Practices for Presence, Empowerment and Waking Up in This Life by Christine Caldwell. I’ve just returned from a week at Chautauqua Institution where I took daily classes from a yoga therapist who is also a psychiatrist. The class was called "Mobility and Meditation." Every class focused on joint mobility through oscillation, one of the most elemental movements in nature.

“Everything that has mass oscillates, from subatomic particles to whole organisms. Oscillation involves going back and forth between two positions or states, back and forth across some point of equilibrium. Think waves on the shore or a pendulum swinging…the body oscillates constantly: our heart expands and contracts (heartbeats) and generates oscillatory waves of electromagnetic pulses, our breath goes in and out (breathing), our brain cells generate their own electromagnetic pulses (brain waves)…these oscillations repeat on the cellular level as well.”
– Christine Caldwell, from Bodyfulness

​Our capacity to oscillate with life as opposed to getting stuck in the muck is the magic that leads our way on. Consider the Makhuwa people of northern Mozambique. Chautauqua speaker Dr. Devaka Premawardhana, a cultural anthropologist from Emory University, spends time with the Makhuwa for whom mobility matters more than stability. He says migration is essential to their culture and that the tortoise is their mascot because the animal wears its house on its back.

“The Makhuwa put their faith in flux,” Dr. Premawardhana explained. “The point is to pursue life wherever it takes you.”  Dr. Premawardhana said the concept of tribalism, traditionally ascribed to African people, doesn’t allow for this flowing sense of community on the move, which he feels more accurately represents pre-state Africa than the fixed, tribal notions with which most of us are familiar.

​Can we find our rhythm to root down while everything is on the move? Can we find our center even when we’re unsure where we’re heading?

I hope you’ll join me this fall as we oscillate our way in and out of our center.

​Peace,
Anne