Visible Woman Gets Her Bones

Visible Woman has her Halloween costume ready!

I am currently reading by Eric Franklin. He asks us to come up with a 6-mongh goal for how we feel in our very body. Visible Woman has inspired me. I see how long her neck is, and how effortlessly that lovely long and strong, balanced and peaceful neck holds up her head. Her neck, nor mine yet, is flexible, though that is part of my 6-month plan.


Here are the questions he presents on page 11, with my answers.

Take five minutes to write a clear profile of how you see your health in six months:
How will you feel? Relaxed, happy, joyful, invigorated, peaceful
What will you be thinking about? My sou's health, my body's health, open spaces, love, joy, fun, creating
How will you look? Tall, open grounded, peaceful, happy
How will your joints and muscles feel? Flexible, supported, fluid
How are your inner organs doing? Jolly, squishy, slippery, funny
How strong and flexible are you? My neck and shoulders are relaxed, therefore long and strong, supple and free. My strength and flexibility come from faith and love.
How will those around you respond to your appearance? They will relax, light up, and smile.

IMG

As part of the Inner Mean Girl Reform School, I made a collage to depict Scissors, my own inner mean girl. You might see that above her mouth are the words, practically perfect, and a pair of scissors create her right temple and eyebrow.

She is sharp and cutting. I have given her a new job: editor. She is helping me cut out unnecessary words. I hope she will progress to cutting out unnecessary thoughts.

She likes to dance. So do I. Peace and love, ease and joy. No must day

Synchronicity

Synchronicity connects what I am thinking about on my inside with something that on its own happened on my outside. Yesterday, after I wrote about the body language of high and low status players, I opened an emailed blog post from Lissa Rankin, "Why Playing Small Is Just Your Ego": If your ego deems you “less than,” you’ll criticize yourself, diminish yourself, and convince yourself that you’re not worthy of life’s blessings or the company of those “better than” people. 

Yesterday afternoon I felt into my imagination and interpretation about my size. I believe that my body has internalized an early intention to be as small as necessary to fit into my ever-growing family. I am the oldest of 5 kids. Early in 2012, I wrote an essay in this blog about my experience growing up in a collectivist Irish Catholic family. It was normal to feel crowded. In fact, feeling crowded felt like love. Once, for example, mom was driving us home from a swimming lesson that had been let out early because a storm was blowing in. One gust was particularly strong, so mom pulled over the car and ordered all 5 of us kids to lie in a ditch at the side of the road and she lay on top of us. Being all smashed together was scary and uncomfortable and supremely loving.

So I have felt safe and loved as part of playing small. However, after detailing the status behaviors and their role in ego maintenance--ways to feel safe because I forgot the world is already always Divine--I realized that I have linked being crowded with the need to minimize the space I take up. This sounded a lot like Lissa's "Playing Small," so I spent the rest of the evening feeling into my edges and inviting the tightness deep inside of me to spread out, to take up more space. For now, I have designated 8 inches as a reasonable first goal for my cells to radiate love and health and wholeness and sunshine. 

I was particularly interested in where high status people let their energy flow into the space around them, including space others are occupying. And I am interested in how empty space can be made free from meaning, then I can just be, like a tree.

 

Impro Changed My Life

Hi Sweet Reader!

Keith Johnstone, author of Impro, talked about his drama improvisation classes:

Suddenly, we understood that every movement and every word indicated status. Status can be a confusing term until you realize it is what one does, rather than referring to who one is. You may be low in social status, but play high, and vice versa. You can even play status in relation to non-humans, objects, rooms, and so forth. Status uses a see-saw principle: "I go up and you go down."  A comedian is someone paid to lower his own or other people's status.Cites Bergson: The source of the comic is the presence of a rigidity in life. Comic situations, such as that of a falling man, are situations where movement is not flexible. Falling on a banana skin is only funny if the person doing so loses status. Tragedy, too, cuts a high status player down. 

As you may have noticed, I am paying attention to information about my physical body these days. This Impro book changed my life in its detailed description of how body language works to indicate, sustain, and so to change status. People have a preferred status, and they will likely be increasingly conditioned to play the same status role as a defensive maneuver. That had become true for me over the years. I had become a status specialist, very competent at playing low status but not very happy or competent at playing high status.  No action, sound, or movement is innocent of status intents. As I made one low status motion, I usually made others too. I began to consciously note when I was making a low status move and so I slowly worked to change my habitual patterns. 

Low status

Add a brief "er" before each sentence.
Waggle my head around while I speak
Move in a jerky motion
Hold toes inward
Keep hands near my face; touch my head
Smile with my lower lip covering my bottom teeth
Sound a little breathless
Cross my arms
Walk with my hands in my pockets
Look at someone and look away, then look back at them
Let others have as much space as they claim
Get out of the way
Fear-crouch with my shoulders raised and torso hunched forward

High status

Begin sentences with a long "er" or an elongated "um," which says, "Don't interrupt me, even though I haven't thought of what to say yet."
Hold my head still while speaking.
Move smoothly
Sit back and open my body language, see Amy Cuddy's  Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are
Keep hands away from face
Speak in complete sentences
Slow down my movements
Hold eye contact
Ignore someone
Look at someone and look away, and not look back
Block others' bids for attention
Claim space for self
Flow into others' space
Employ a cherub posture: turn and tilt the head to expose the neck; turn the shoulders the other way to expose the chest; arch the spine slightly backwards and twisted away from the shoulders to open the belly, and so forth. 
Display a calm, relaxed, and purposive posture
Overpower any challenges, physically or using wit and intelligence
Nurture a group of loyal subordinates
Make decisions for the group
Assume command in times of stress

Shoulder blades

Yesterday I noticed the frontal parts of the two scapulae still attached to their bones tree, in white. The organs are in pale pink. Since the previous owner had glued the back of each scapula to its respective ribcage, I had to wedge in the frontal parts between the back and the ribs in order to glue them into place.

In my online college management classes, I have taken to assigning Amy Cuddy's Ted Talk, Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are. I ask students to note their own and others' body language in order to estimate their level of engagement and optimism with current circumstances. From there, they can make better, more aware, and more informed choices about how to manage themselves in order to achieve their hearts' desires.

I am not as far along as i imagine the students to be, in that I find it hard at times to remember that I have a body at all. Having a female body has put me socially and economically at risk of being off the bat inferior, not to mention physical disparities should I come to blows with anyone. So I am completing the Visible Woman not only to have a better grasp of anatomy in my teaching of yoga, but also to help me notice and remember what lies beneath my own skin.

And to love my bones. Shoulders and all. To contribute to my own development where I think society may have left off. For example, I have recently found a lot of stuck energy near my tailbone. It feels both like shame and like peanut butter. It is hard to love place where shame has lodged, so I have invited the light of inquiry to gently melt the tension of my lowest pelvic self. I wonder about the location and the power of the sludge lodged. I guess it is an earth-like journey from the outer space to the denser atmosphere and so on into the deep close realm of gravity, pulling space, air, fire, water, and earth into its core, its peaceful corps.

So, if there are lessons in our bodies, ourselves,what might shoulders say? For this, I suggest they ask us to let them speak for themselves, rather than adding in "shoulds." As Christine Arylo says, we can learn to be okay with learning. We can catch ourselves when we hear ourselves say, "You should do a better job!" and we can reply with "I am doing the best I can and it is enough" or "I am learning and it is okay."

Plastic models; plastic brains

It has taken me a few weeks to get going on assembling the model. The kind of glue now used is an interesting product, but cannot be found at Target or even Toys R Us. I finally made it to Hobby Town, where the nice man showed me which was the bottle of Styrene glue to get. Even now I am going slowly with the thin plastic. I have glued together the fronts to the backs of the larger bones. I haven't yet tried to insert the pins that will attach the bones to each other.

Funny to be working with a plastic model as I am currently reading about neuro-plasticity in The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Dodge. Now we are talking about a power of imagination, focus, and variety!

My interest in plasticity has come out of a lifelong interest in having better posture. A couple of years back, I was reading how musicians used the Alexander technique for musicians to gain ease of movement through efficient action: "What appears as lazy or stiff posture is really a lack of central coordination: some muscles work too hard while others barely engage. Alexander Technique lessons will change how you perceive and experience your body's support system.You see that it functions not in segments but as a whole" (http://www.alexandertechnique.com/articles/posture/). 

"The brain is also capable of changing these areas or developing new neural pathways, and this amazing capacity is known as plasticity" (http://markjosefsberg.com/alexander-technique/alexander-technique-think-outside-the-box). Similarly, sticking to ingrained habits reenforces them. So, plasticity refers to our ability to set and to alter our thought and action routines. Using the least amount of energy necessary for our thoughts and actions is the definition of efficiency.

If I only had a brain

When I got the box home and began to explore the contents, I realized that the previous owner of the Visible Woman had already glued the back ribs to the spine, and the scapulae to the back ribs. The pelvis was already attached, too. The eyes were glued into place, and the jaw was set under the skull. My son Will pointed out that the top of the skull had been glued on, too, without having first installed the brain.

I showed my new toy to the yoga class, including the fact that the skull had been glued shut without a brain. I joked that that must be in homage to our yoga studio, aptly named "Quiet Mind."

Visible Woman

I first saw the Visible Woman in the Divine Design, a local consignment store at the loop here in Mobile, AL. There was another box with the Visible Man, which had been sold by the second time I went to check. I have a wonderful young friend who is interested in anatomy, and so I had gone back to Divine Design to see what the age range for the toy was.

I read on the box that my friend was still too young for the plastic set with many small parts. And the plastic, both the clear plastic "skin" and the bones and organs to be glued within felt flimsy. So I left the store without it for a second time, thinking I might google it sometime and see what others thought of its construction materials.

I found some okay reviews of the Visible Woman online. I teach yoga and I have promised myself I will learn anatomy, so I went back the third time to Divine Design. Once again, the plastic seemed thin. And I didn't know if she even had all her parts. But, I reminded myself, I did come back a third time. I went to pay, and the salesperson said that the Visible Man had been sold to someone who wanted to use him as a model for a wellness training--maybe for the UCP (http://greatnonprofits.org/org/united-cerebral-palsy-of-mobile-inc). I said I would use mine, therefore, in a yoga class to demonstrate anatomy.