Born into bodies of water and tensegrity, with nervous systems wired for connectivity, our every physical and emotional movement is a dance of relating. With nothing concrete on which to coordinate our senses of self, how do we understand ourselves? In a world swiftly-changing, how do we navigate as each axis of our perceived reality fluctuates, evolves, or disappears?
Navigating Relativity
In exploring the roots of internalized oppression I keep returning to the ways our evolutionary adaptations towards relationship have been hijacked to enforce systems of control. We are built to need each other to know who we are. As children we construct our identities based on how other people perceive us. We craft complex survival maps from the coordinates provided by caregivers, teachers, playmates, and media. We learn how to behave so we can belong.
Our transformative work includes seeing where we have built identities based on oppressive structures, and how we might practice towards modes of interaction that are liberating. One of the ways we can do that is to re-learn how to locate ourselves in the present.
Locating Ourselves
Our egos crave the illusion of constancy, but the idea of permanence is a fantasy. Life is change. We live on a spinning planet in a spiraling solar system in a spiraling galaxy in an expanding universe. It is physically impossible to be in the same place twice.
Because of the pull of gravity, our human bodies evolved to use internal tension for posture and movement (tensegrity - tension + integrity), all of our muscular actions are internally balanced by oppositional forces. An arm lifts not as an isolated incident of shoulder alone, but in a concert of balancing and stabilizing movements that include the calves, pelvis, ribs, and neck.
We are ever-moving and never-alone. And just as the body has subtle and complex webs that enable the feeling of controlled action in an ever-shifting, unstable external environment, our sensory systems can coordinate with cyclical processes for working stability. Rather than balancing on and proliferating tension with outmoded structures of rigid perception, we can locate ourselves in relation to what is life-giving in this moment.
Choosing Orientation
I learned about orientation as a somatic practice for responding to trauma activation (being "triggered") and as a way to stay present-enough in the body in potentially challenging situations. I am finding it a base-level support practice for this work of cultivating true kinship. As a simple mindfulness practice it can train us to return our awareness to the present and respond to what is actually occurring in real time. It can increase our capacity for curiosity and conscious change, and enable us to build more honest relationships.
My poet's heartmind delights at the layered meanings of orientation. Etymologically, orient comes from the Old French and Latin words for east, then "to face the east." This facing to the rising sun and moon, to the transition from night to day, speaks to a place in us that navigates by the light of stars, that delights in contrast and transition. We can never be lost so long as we relate ourselves to the movements of our homeship Earth in coordination with the seasons. As the sun rises in a slightly different location each morning, when we re-orient ourselves to that current intersection between sun and sky, rather than a memory of where it and we were yesterday, we get to become more vital and true.
We do not need to know something permanent, in fact we cannot because all that lives changes, everything is in constant spiraling movement. Every object is only locatable in relation to other moving objects. We simply need to know where illumination first touches us, where the liminal edge between light and dark transits our line of sight, to have a place from which we can navigate. To breathe with the inspiration of the leading edge of new life. Not a fixed, forever knowing, or rather, illusion of an eternal place. Instead a fluid relational coordinate, which we must find again and again, so long as we live.
Orientation is dynamic, evolving, and responsive. We can locate ourselves, and begin to understand our identities, behaviors, and belonging in relation to processes, patterns, and cycles. If we recognize and celebrate our own dynamism, that we are cells within cells, living processes within layers of living processes, then we can never be lost. We are coordinated no matter how the terrain may change. We are not spots on a stationary map, we are stars in a constellation, ever dancing in elliptical evolutionary orbits with each other.