The process and practice of Developmental Movement reflects a profound layering of our evolutionary consciousness. We move through these layers of developmental experience on a personal level, within the wombs of our mothers, as infants being born upon this earth, and through our own body and life experience.
We also move through these stages from an evolutionary perspective ~ as water born creatures, shape-shifting into amphibian and bird like formations, into mammals galloping across the plains, and culminating into our upright two footed human experience.
These developmental patterns represent separate layerings of understanding and embodied awareness. Each layer of bodily patterning and connection ~ including the Breath, Navel Radiation, Spinal, Upper/Lower, Body Half, and Crosslateral connections - corresponds to different stages of our biological evolution, as well as states of our consciousness and being.
For example, the Breath Pattern reflects our fundamental connection to Spirit, as spirit moves on the wind and through the air. The very first movement of the body is the pulsation of breath.
The Naval Radiation Pattern reflects the consciousness of the starfish, a water born creature who expands and contracts from the center of its form, building upon the animation of the breath patterning, relating to the world through this incredible water prism. This consciousness brings us into the somatic memory of being in the womb, attached to the life giving pulsation of the mother cord, directly through the navel of ones being.
The Spinal Pattern reflects the serpentine movement of a snake, traveling seamlessly from water, to land, and back again, undulating with its pure understanding of the incredible mechanism of the midline.
When we come into spinal consciousness, we come into the experience of head, heart, gut and root connection. Through this spinal consciousness, we connect to the profound possibility of human ascension - weaving together heaven and earth through the midline of the human form.
The Crosslateral Patterning reflects a culmination of these developmental sequences ~ and the movement into an upright land living creature, able to shift about freely upon the earth. This is a state of consciousness, as much as it is a state of embodied experience and somatic understanding.
Each of these developmental stages lays the groundwork for the next stage.
Each of these patternings, like the natural unfolding of evolution itself, reflects an accumulation of awareness. The layers build upon one another, spiraling upward in a never ending crescendo of flowering life.
Each movement pattern in of itself is a miraculous state, mirroring a beauty and natural order which is both mysterious and numinous.
When I imagine the human web of development on the physical, subtle and spiritual levels, I imagine a spherical net of almost infinite connections that we are weaving through the unfolding of our consciousness. This web forms an auric field, and is animated through the activation of the great energetic centers along the midline of the body, which radiate as an ever unfolding kinesphere of expanding human awareness.
But in order to experience the full symphony of the this web ~ and the numinous nature of Self ~ in order to sense the embodied beauty of the integrated life, each of these patterns / states of being / layers of consciousness ~ must be integrated back into the constellation of the whole person, after they have been fully explored and individuated.
Without this step into integration, the layers of the Self remain fragmented, disjointed, separate, as isolated stars within a galaxy, without perceived interrelationship and felt meaning.
When we are trapped within one of these fragmented developmental layers or stages, we are not able to experience the full freedom of being that is our birthright, reflected through all layers.
We are bound into particular ways and states that limit the expanse of our own body and consciousness, and our own embodied awareness. Through tethering ourselves to the fragments and isolated pieces, rather then the wholeness of the spirit, we seperate ourself from the cosmos herself.
We become, in this Is way, spiritually homeless, unable to intuitively perceive the larger organism that we are an integral part of.
I relate this sense of fragmentation and the corresponding suspension of consciousness that it causes as being interconnected to the experience of the mis- identification with the wounded aspects of the self.
The wounded aspects of the self reflect the hidden ancestral stories and traumas which are our portal into liberation, when we allow ourselves to take that path. They mirror our struggles with developmental movement and experience, and provide the resistance needed for true growth to occur. Without this resistance, without the suffering, there would be no fundamental desire to transcend.
But most are simply unable to walk through these portals. We have not been shown how to pass through such threshold experiences in our culture on any level. Most of us do not have the proper psychic and spiritual support and community.
Without such support, most understandably fear what might be found through the unraveling and deconstruction of such deeper ancestral and somatic patterning, and the shadows hidden within the embodied experience.
In this way, the shadow begins to hold sway over such individuals.
Through identifying with these suspended stages of development, we arrest our expansion, and disconnect ourselves from our spiritual power. We attach ourself to external labels, which have become ever smaller and more particular in our current time. Through total identification with the form and label, we cut the invisible wings of the spirit, no longer allowing it the ability to soar. We chain it’s majesty to the soil ~ relegating it to crawl upon the earth, eyes unable to perceive the heavens above.
Imagine if we were captured in the starfish pattern, destined to experience life only from this perspective?
Imagine if we were trapped in the consciousness of the Body Half left/right paradigm, and everything could only be seen and experienced through this prism?
The whole picture is entirely lost.
This reflects such arrested consciousness.
Much of humanity is now held spellbound by these wounds, prisoners of developmental stages of being that remain in exile to the essential Self.
Much of humanity seems at times unaware that by identifying only with these limited aspects of the self ~ by defining ourselves only through our wounded-ness and separateness, we limit the experience of our being and consciousness, and relegate ourselves to a life of isolation without greater meaning and direction.
Meaning and direction come only through the process of integration, and through the somatic experience of our wholeness. This wholeness aligns body, heart and spirit with the very wisdom of our evolutionary intelligence.
Without this shared sense of the mystery and the beauty inherent within the circle of humanity, we cut ourselves off from the life giving force of the cosmos herself. We victimize ourselves, creating a limited prison of our own being, refusing to allow for the very natural process that is the movement into wholeness, traversing all patterning into cosmic integration. We forget the circle of our humanity, we forget the evolution of our species from water to air to earth, spirit weaving it’s way through each and every stage, unifying every life.
This is the larger circle that I seek to integrate through, which includes every Human Soul, every sentient being whether it be rock, mineral, flora, fauna, starfish and bird, and all in between. Each being is engaged in the incredible process of becoming ~ a mysterious and miraculous unfolding of luminous ever expanding awareness, all pulsating from the same divine source.
I teach Developmental Movement within my Movement Medicine class for Women - which meets every other Monday