For most of us, our bodies are like black boxes. They record data, but we don’t really know very much about them. We go to the doctor to get measurements about what’s happening. We know pain. We know what feels good. But we’re mostly on auto-pilot.
It’s like our bodies are a soft machine. Parts. Systems. Functions. It’s like that. But we are so not a machine with parts, systems and functions.
We are more like an ecosystem, where every aspect is alive, interdependent, interactive.
They say we come from the ocean. That life emerged as watery cells from the ocean. And we are still fluid. A living, breathing sack of life, in the best of ways, where every part lives and thrives in the moist environment.
Just as we listen to the shell to hear the waves of the ocean, so too, if we listen to our living being we hear the waves of the ocean. Our very breath is the ocean. The waves. Rising and falling. The in breath, pulling back into the ocean, the out breath rushing onto the shore of the world.
While studying structural integration with brilliant bodywork pioneer Tom Myers, and receiving structural integration myself both in class and out of class, I woke up to an extraordinary experience where I felt so integrated, so unimpeded, that the movement of my diaphragm in breath felt like it was stretching my whole being. As my diaphragm stretched downward with the in breath, I felt my whole upper body stretching along with it, and as it released with the outbreath, I felt my whole lower body release with it.
I lay in awe while I experienced this integrity of breathing I’d never consciously known before – while the concepts of the class swam about my mind – and I coined the phrase “Oceanic Breath”. The date? Around 2006.
We freeze as humans, more than we know, ten times more than we know, a thousand times more. Mammals that we are, we have instinctive responses that have served to protect life, as simply, as protecting the ability to reproduce. Freezing in the face of apparent danger or threat is a core element of survival. Our humble and too often maligned possums demonstrate that with drama.
With humans, our freezing could look like being frozen into stone by Medusa, but more often it is a frozen layer – as if we were thousand layer cakes, or ten layer lasagna – one or more of our layers of being – skin, faschia, muscle – stiffens and stops, hardens like dried spaghetti, able to be softed by warmth and water.
We can smile, move, act as if we are fine, but inside a little part of us, and sometimes a big part of us has frozen – in some level of immobility.
The best, the primary, the most powerful and accessible resource we have to restore our vitality (and with it, our ease, flexibility, resourcefulness) is our breath, our oceanic breath. The quality of breath that rocks our being like in a cradle, that rises and falls like gentle ocean waves, unceasing. Our breath has the ability to touch, move, stretch and enliven every living element within our oceanic beings.
—
A. McGaha, LMBT 5886 first studied massage and bodywork in 1977 in Northhampton, Massachusetts, with various teachers including Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. in 2005 she completed a one year training program in therapeutic massage from The Body Therapy Institute in central North Carolina.
Thank you to all of you who have come to Apex Massage for Women over the past four years, and the previous 5 years before that to Whole Heart Hands on Therapies.