Why am I inspired by the weakest fundamental force? Gravity is how I connect and ground myself. Imagining how my body interacts with it on a cellular level is how I create the centeredness and groundedness to do the type of bodywork that I do. It is the way that I keep my energy strong and allow my client’s energy to find its own way to health.
Last year I learned from one of my dance teachers about Deborah Hay, who expressed a deep interest in exploring having no front, but instead dancing as if every single one of her cells was being shown. I read Emilie Conrad’s, Life on Land, and learned about how a dancer could communicate via frequency and vibration to heal bodies and minds.
So, over several weeks last summer I sat and meditated under a silver maple in my back yard. I would greet the rising sun and then close my eyes and try to allow an image of all the cells of my body. At some point, it occured to me that each of my cells was in relationship to gravity and that relationship was permanent and loving. Nothing will ever hold us as long as gravity has held us. To me gravity became a representation of Mother. Meditating on its hold, touch and tether to each of my cells is a way to calm my system, feel a deep connection to life, and create inner strength, without that sense I wouldn’t be able to move forward in wholeness.
Here is an excerpt of a poem about gravity. I love that Nims also shares my sense of gravity as “mother.”
Gravity
By John Frederick Nims
Mildest of all the powers of earth: no lightnings
For her—maniacal in the clouds. No need for
Signs with their skull and crossbones, chain-link gates:
Danger! Keep Out! High Gravity! she’s friendlier.
Won’t nurse—unlike the magnetic powers—repugnance;
Would reconcile, draw close: her passion’s love.
No terrors lurking in her depths, like those
Bound in that buzzing strongbox of the atom,
Terrors that, lossened, turn the hills vesuvian,
Trace in cremation where the cities were.
No, she’s our quiet mother, sensible.
But therefore down-to-earth, not suffering
Fools who play fast and loose among the mountains,
Who fly in her face, or, drunken, clown on cornices.
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