The focus of support - Part 2
When a mother feels the connection with the earth she is experiencing a feeling of physical existence that she transfers to her baby. *The importance of recognizing support.
Fulfilling our life’s potential within our body has a lot to do with love or with absence there of. Love, and specifically the love of a mother to a baby, which is the most primal and basic, and is the one that determines our physical and emotional behavior patterns. Love has a critical manifestation in our body. When love is present, there are no muscle contractions that cause energy blockages and there’s no collapse (weakness) of muscles. Love, any love (we focus in this article on a mother’s love), expresses connection – connection to the earth (the basis for our support and existence), and connection to any other existence that is around us.
In nature, the period of dependence and helplessness of offspring is much shorter than that of human babies, who for at least a year can’t walk or find food on their own. A baby is dependent on his parents and especially on his mother, and he needs to absorb a lot of information from her during early childhood. I will not focus on the most important information – the pure love that reaches it from a flow emanating from his mother when he was born and is supposed to emanate from her forever. It is important to note, however, that some mothers do not emanate this energy, or only emanate partially, and this clearly has major immediate and long term repercussions on the child’s physical and mental condition. In this article, I’ll focus on the physical aspects of transferring support information and on its importance.
Gravity, resistance, and internal essence
Gravity is the force that allows our physical existence. This force operates on our bodies in two ways: it pulls us downwards towards the center of the earth, and it is the cause of the resistance the earth provides us with when our bodies meet with it. The sense of physical existence lies between these two forces – the pull of gravity and the resistance of earth – and it will cease to exist when one of them is missing (e.g. in a space shuttle where the gravitational force is very weak and the astronauts’ sense of physical existence is highly diminished).
As I discussed earlier, mothers transfer to their newborn child information of love, but that’s not the end of the story. A mother is supposed to transfer another piece of critical information: information relating to the sense of physical existence – the constant resistance that the earth generates vis-à-vis our weight. A mother that knows how to feel that connection to the earth and its support will know how to transfer this experience to her newborn. A mother that is unaware of the connection with the earth and its support will transfer the opposite information – that existing involves tightening muscles and working your muscles hard.
The experience of support is a result of a proper way of organizing the body within the gravitational field. A properly organized body will channel the gravitational force through its center en route to the earth. In this condition, the resistance provided by the earth will flow through the exact same path in our physical structure, which will give us an effortless sense of lightness and uprightness.
How many of us actually receive this information? Who among us knows where that central axis lies in our body? Where does it begin and end? Practically no one knows about this because, generally speaking, our mothers don’t know about this and our schoolteachers don’t know about this. And how is this very basic information related to back pain and to fulfilling our potential? When we internalize this information as the proper way of using our bodies it leads to fulfilling our highest potential – being aware of our complete existence, being aware of who we are internally, and operating from that place. When internalizing this information we re-acquire the possibility to operate from the place of our existential essence, which is within our physical body (versus how most people operate – from our external layers such as abilities, skills, thoughts, wants, desires).
Vibrating, rocking, and releasing muscles
So how do you convey the information that teaches us how to recognize the physical existence (recognizing support) and then teaches us how to live in the entire body, to exist in and sense the center of the body and make motions that come from that center?
The answer lies in the behavior of the mother and in her ability to convey the experience of support to her baby. When a mother carries her baby in her arms she connects him to her body. When a mother experiences the earth’s support she can transfer that sensation to her baby using vibrations (rocking). The essence of vibrations is in gently pushing on the earth to experience the resistance that pushes back on the body and provides a strong sense of physical existence. The feeling that the mother experiences is transferred to the baby and soothes him.
Mechanically speaking, the difference between vibrating properly and improperly is that when a mother pushes down on the earth by straightening her knees it’s the mother that’s moving and not the earth. The baby that is attached to the mother experiences the same thing and is calmed by the vibration just like his mother is.
A mother who can’t calm her baby down is probably not able to recognize the earth through vibrations. She is swinging and rocking the baby thinking it would calm him down. That is how she saw everybody do, and there’s no one to teach her otherwise. It is probably the worst time to teach her about sensing her body through the resistance of earth when her baby is crying in her arms.
So there are two kinds of mothers: the one that is aware of the support and the one that isn’t, and they’re both rocking their babies. The rocking will probably seem identical to an observer, but the quality of it is totally different. The mother that’s not aware of the support is tightening her muscles. The muscles don’t experience the support, and for them the earth doesn’t exist. This creates a stressed out mother and an agitated baby. For the mother that does recognize the support things are going much smoother and her muscles are less tense. She can recognize the support in every vibration, which allows her muscles to relax. When she’s relaxed and loosened up she can be more attentive to the baby and to what he is communicating to her, and she is more available to calm him down with her soothing voice. She is able to solve his distress quicker.
Agony, speed, and sources of knowledge
Our connection with the earth is all too often perceptual and not real in a physical way. Those who construct buildings understand the notion of physical support quite fully. They understand that every building needs support and that any support in the world eventually comes from the earth. The rest is about transferring that support to every point in the building.
In this respect, our bodies are not any different from other engineered constructs, but the information about how to transfer the support from the earth to every point in the body is not taught anywhere. It’s true that our bodies figure out a way to function, but it is usually not organized well and it’s far from achieving its potential. Moreover, the lack of this information can bring us to a life of agony and pain, for example – back pain. Those who suffer from back pain are always looking for a cure and sometimes arrive at a source of this kind of information and start a sometimes long process of learning and changing. However, not everyone is looking for this method and they choose to treat the pain quickly. They are not interested in understanding the full depth of this, and they choose to get treatment at a chiropractor. Those who are weary of this treatment will try acupuncture or treatment with passive touch. Only few will choose to arrive at and go deep into sources of knowledge such as the Alexander method, Feldenkrais, the Paula method, or Rolfing.
*Deepening the knowledge and the learning process are the topics in my next article entitled The Soulful Layer - Part 3
Back to Top