I have been drawing up some lesson plans designed to fit with the concept of cybersomatics: information and exercises which bring more consciousness to the balance between the right and left sides. I thought they might be of interest to some of my friends.
Lesson One: Introduction to Ritual Time
Suggestion: On Youtube, watch the Sioux Dance filmed in 1894 by Thomas Edison.
More information: Mircea Eliade’s “The Sacred and the Profane.”
A ritual is Sacred Space, or Sacrum in Latin. It was originally the space surrounding a temple. In the body, the Sacrum is the triangular bone at the bottom of the spinal column, from where the hips pivot, allowing the body to move in any direction.
You open the ritual by some conscious decision: You might for example bathe yourself and put on special clothing. This signals your intent. The beginning of the ritual is a signal to yourself that until you end the ritual, you keep everything outside which is not part of the ritual.
You stay inside this space, as sacred space, until you consciously end the ritual.
When you come back to the ritual, the energy you put into the first ritual will still be there. As you do the ritual more there will be progressively more of the specific energy you are putting into it. This Sacred Time ritual is the basis for rituals such as the Sioux Dance referenced above. They are considered to be outside of profane, or linear, time. In tribes, the dance ritual is always the same and the energy extends over generations. The idea is that because you go into a timeless state while doing the ritual, the ritual exists outside time. So when you go back to it, you are in the same space as your ancestors when they did the same dance with the same care. The same theory applies to rituals one creates and practices on one’s own.
Here is a sample of a body awareness ritual:
1. Practice being present in the sacrum, noting how it is the pivotal point of the body. Feel your muscles and release any that are holding against gravity. Close your eyes and imagine gravity as a waterfall of energy coming down and you are going with the flow. To provide a reference or balance, point, imagine you are suspended by a string from above. Using the imagination, pretend that the left and right side are perfectly balanced on each side of the fulcrum.
2. Begin to imagine one side heavier than the other. Pretend the right arm is made of lead. Then slowly, very slowly, shift the weight into the left arm so that the right grows lighter and lighter as the left grows heavier. Once you have begun to feel how to operate muscles from your imagination, try imagining that an invisible wire is lifting up on the lighter arm as the weight goes out of it, and it will lift all by itself as you get more focused into the process.
Notice: Muscles can do just two things. They can contract and extend. When you imagine the arm to be heavy, muscles extend. When you imagine it light, they contract. Imagine it light enough and it will float in the air like a balloon. Practice moving at a very slow rate, which is the speed of the unconscious. The way to do this is to use the respiration as the rhythm, or tempo, and begin to move the energy in the body with the imagination. This brings consciousness into the body, or to put it another way, it brings spirit into matter.
Now be aware of the connection between the Sacrum and the base of the brain as being a snake, one which over a great deal of time evolved into all the different kinds of mammals, connected by their having a vertebral column. As you use your imagination to become more conscious of the snake at the center of your physical body, consider why a serpent was considered evil in the Bible. What was it that caused the left brain to become so powerful that the hand it controlled was called “Right”? (The serpent was reviled because it was the power symbol of the old matriarchal societies. The left, patterning brain rose to power with the invention of the alphabet. As the alphabet moved from one culture to the next, it was accompanied by a myth of a hero slaying a serpent. Without the alphabet there would not have been the facility to write and distribute law and demand mass compliance, and no basis for monotheism.)
