Organicity and Movement

Years ago, I remember being in awe of my nephew as I watched him run, fall, scream in startled delight, and then unwind his whole body from the fall like it was the most natural thing in the world—because it is. The movement of energy through his little four-year old body was a torrential flood of joy. He did it without a thought. He didn’t wait to see who was looking, or how he should react, or blame anyone, or think it was his fault. Nope, he moved through it like a dancer and a martial artist, his joints and muscles perfectly moving the force through his form.

The concept of organicity refers to living, self-organizing systems that have natural impulses toward growth and change. It is easy to see these natural movements all around us—this is how animals move, how kids play, how plant buds bloom, and zooming out we can also notice the dance of seasons, climates, and planets. Almost every human that has ever been born has had this organic process thwarted in our awareness due to the traumas and stressors of life. We have these powerful thinking brains that do so much to survive and function in the world, but we are usually not conscious of the organic movements of our deep animal bodies. This is something that we have to return to, and we cannot truly heal until we come back to these natural impulses.

Something I find interesting is that despite all the gym memberships and yoga classes and running and hiking and all the wonderful ways we move our bodies, we most of the time are doing these movements in a state of nervous system activation and not necessarily in an organic movement from our deep nervous system. Most of us are managing necessary life stressors and we save the relaxing for when we have our addiction of choice or when we sleep. I too did years of intensive yoga training with wonderful physical conditioning and kundalini events, but it wasn’t until I dove deeply into the world of craniosacral therapy that I truly found rhythm and alignment with my nervous system. It is difficult to describe how to find this—often I use the prompt of imagining the spine is like seaweed drifting in the ocean. When we turn toward these deeper rhythms, they are just that, a fluid and flowing force moving through us, instead of the movement created or denied by our will. This is the language of our autonomic nervous system, the language of our cells, the Breath of Life. And once we begin to feel it we can’t unfeel it. A switch happens in our awareness, like how we can spend so much time in meditation forcing something to happen, but when we simply shift our awareness to receiving the world, then the alignment with life begins.