Skating Through Life

Skating Through Life

Awareness of movement in relationship to the Fourth Way is to notice and be present to how movement can wake us up or – on the other hand – how habitual, repetitive movement which happens mechanically can keep us asleep. Unlike the Instinctive Center, which mostly is filled at birth, the Moving Center is gradually developed, and movements are learned through imitation as we establish our existence in the physical world. The necessity to move is unmistakable in a newborn baby as it experiments with flailing arms and legs trying to understand the body and its unfamiliar environment outside the womb. Learning a new movement begins with attention and intentionality, it passes through the joy of discovery and gradually gets added to our mechanical repertoire of movements that we all learned in childhood – reaching, grasping, kicking, crawling, standing, walking, etc.

Our aim is to get all the presence we can between birth and death. — The Teacher

Bringing the Work to my Moving Center does not necessarily mean interrupting the useful ways in which my body has learned to move in the physical world. However, I have found a deeper sense of awareness by playfully changing a movement, which can reawaken me and bring more presence to an activity. For example: today I experimented with the motion of my arms while walking. I changed the natural arm-leg coordination at regular intervals for ten steps. Normally, each arm swings with the motion of the opposing leg. So instead, I paired the left leg and left arm to move forward and back in parallel motion and my right side in the same way. This unnatural movement was very awkward and through this simple 10-step change in each block I was able to be more aware of myself walking on the sidewalk.

The Moving Center is a brain of its own and understands how to interact with gravity and balance. Once my experiment was over, I allowed my Moving “brain” its freedom to establish its own rhythm, and immediately – without any attention needed – the arms began swinging with the opposite leg and the movement returned to normal.

Another observation connected to interrupting my mechanical movements was that this also interrupted my mechanical patterns of “thinking.” When I returned to normal movement, I was struck by how quickly I returned to imagination. Just as the Moving Center returned to mechanical functioning, so did the Intellectual Center return to mechanical, uncontrolled mind activity – imagination. Bringing attention to simple little exercises like this can bring presence to our daily activities and can be completely invisible to others. The light of awareness and consciousness can be added on top of the functions of the four lower centers, such as the Moving Center. The lower centers are like a shadow of the sun – always there below, but dependent upon the sunlight.

The shadow on the ground kept itself so still and quiet, that it might hear all that passed: it wished to know how it could get free, and work its way up, so as to become its own master. — Hans Christian Andersen

The negative half of the Moving Center is rest. Often, I think about movement in its positive manifestation: movement – how I intentionally move my physical body in space. In sports, playing musical instruments, dancing, yoga, skating, tai chi, and all physical activities, most of us focus on how to move. When learning challenging and complex movements, I have come to understand the importance of rest in contrast to the physical exertion of an activity. Many ancient spiritual traditions knew about this idea and it took its form in the tradition of meditation, which comes from the Hindu Vedas around 1500 BCE. Movement and meditation teach that the body and mind need balance. This intentional balance supports presence and helps me to remember to slow down and live more often in higher states of consciousness, as the world is speeding by largely unaware of the shaky foundation below.

In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The Skating Minister on Duddingston Loch, Henry Raeburn (1755-1808)