Pelvis
Power – What Power???
During a yoga session with a buddy this morning we were talking about a man’s pelvis – I was thinking about why men are so afraid of the power in their pelvis. And it IS powerful. Often I find men hold their pelvis in a discharge position so that the pelvic bowl cannot hold all of their fierce, passionate and intense emotions – they merely leak out if expressed at all, or reified in the body.
Holding the pelvis in a charge position, creating a curve in the lower back, means that we are coming from a more grounded place and are much more able to lead with our hearts and not our heads. It is very difficult to do both leading with a charged pelvis and your head. I brought up the fact that since the 80’s or even before that, men are portrayed in the media as buffoons and incompetents – very powerless beings that need the women in their lives to set them straight. Try watching TV for an hour and really look at the commercials – I really detest the way men are represented AND it is not the type of man I want to become. In this culture we get our role models from the media (yes, it is sad!!!) and the message they are sending us is that men are weak. NO NO NO – I will have none of it. We are a growing movement of men that are creating change one body at a time, empowering men to take charge of their bodies to become self-referent and NOT extero-referent (in other words, not defined by the external world).
The Holder of all that is Sacred
I’ve been mulling over in my mind about the idea of convergence – the concept that eventually, when looked at with a wide enough lens, all things can be distilled to a foundation, a set of ideas or beliefs that inform our basic nature, how we can live in balance in our bodies. Wilhelm Reich, the grandfather of Somatics, knew this. In 1961 he published the Function of the Orgasm, a seminal piece of work (please no puns), studying the connection between the mind and body. Here he commented on how a men’s pelvis can get locked in place by both circumstance and emotion, how a man lived his life including thoughts, choices, decisions, experiences could shape his sinew and bone. He designed cathartic experiments to free the body of blocked energetic bands running both horizontally and developmentally. Alexander Lowen’s Bioenergetics in the 70′s and Feldencrais’ Functional Integration all looked at the importance of the pelvis as a repository of all that is sacred and profane, our deep feelings of sexuality and our rage, tapping into our very life force.
The significance of the pelvis is not a new concept by far. Ancients in the East developed the system of yoga thousands of years ago after observing the vicissitudes of nature, how all beings seek out balance. I’m referring to the free-swinging forward and backward rotation of the pelvis as integral to our health. Think of it this way – imagine that your pelvis is a bowl of precious liquid (and indeed it is in Bioenergetics). In a forward rotation, the liquid would be spilling out over your feet while in a backward rotation your butt sticks out and you’ve got a nice curve in your lower back.
Certified Massage Therapist and Yoga Instructor David Burke of Sensory Energetics.
