The Fire within - Getting Unstuck ... Finding Fire, Drive and Direction in the Body

It's a strange thing.

We walk around every day inside our bodies, mostly oblivious to the vast scope of what it means to actually have one.

In the modern world, the body has become a measure mostly about how it looks.

Do I fit in?Am I acceptable? Am I attractive? Worthy?

We judge it also through the state of our health … our pain, our energy, whether the body is working properly.

But there is another, more subtle dimension of the body that we often miss the part that makes being human so interesting and life so exciting.

The body is not simply a lump of meat carrying the brain around.

It is an extraordinarily complex living sensory system:electrical, chemical, mechanical, responsive … even imaginal …one that is constantly receiving information from inside itself and from the world around it.

We are not separate from nature. We are not just IN nature. We ARE nature.

We are a moving expression of nature: earth, water, air and fire; a living organism sensing and interpreting its environment while simultaneously sensing the changing world within.

This perspective changes our bodies into something incredibly exciting and useful.

Our bodies become a kind of map.

Through interoception — our capacity to sense what is happening inside us — we can begin to recognise the different states and currents we move through.

And human beings move through many. We contract and expand. We become frightened, energised, exhausted, excited, angry, open, withdrawn, determined .We are like a sea, moving through storms and calm sunny days.

And the body changes with our moods, reflecting them within like an inner landscape mirroring the outer landscape of nature.

So when something in our lives needs to change, perhaps we don’t always have to begin with the mind.

When You Feel Stuck

For instance, this is how the body map can help us with thevery common experience of feeling stuck.

When you are stuck, you often know what you need to do.

But somehow you cannot move.Something feels frozen.What we tend to do is try to solve stuckness with the head.

We go around in circles trying to find the solution —or even begin beating ourselves up:

Why can’t I just get on with it? Why am I procrastinating again? Why don’t I have more discipline?

And all that mental circling can become exhausting.

The brain is already one of the most energy-demanding organs in the body, consuming around 20% of our resting energy.

When we keep wrestling with the same thoughts, we can feel increasingly mentally depleted …while adding frustration, self-criticism and stress to a system already struggling to move.

Sometimes the answer isn’t more thinking.It is changing the state of the body we’re thinking from.

Because motivation isn’t purely cognitive.

Our readiness for action also involves bodily state — arousal, attention, breathing, muscular readiness and the nervous system’s preparation for movement.

Drive has a feeling.

Instead of trying to think yourself out of stuckness, you can ask:

What does unstuckness need?

What does it feel like?

Drive.Determination.Confidence.Courage.

For me, the answer is fire.

Not wild, explosive fire.

Concentrated fire.

A gathering of energy and direction that can be felt through the upper abdomen and lower chest.

A sense of:

Here. Forward. Go.

The Architecture of Drive

There are some interesting physiological reasons this part of the body can feel powerful.

The diaphragm separates the thoracic and abdominal cavities and plays a central role in breathing and pressure regulation.

The abdominal wall, diaphragm, ribs and spinal musculature work together in breathing, trunk stability and physical effort.

The thoracic and upper lumbar spinal cord is also the region from which the sympathetic nervous system’s spinal pathways originate.

I find that anatomy fascinating because it echoes a somatic experience:

The middle of the body can feel like a place of mobilisation, concentration and strength.

That doesn’t mean there is a neurological “drive centre” in the upper abdomen.

But it does mean that when we change breathing, muscular engagement, posture and attention, we are doing something physically real.

We are changing the bodily state from which we are trying to act.

Giving the Fire a Voice

Sound gives us another way into this.

Rather than simply breathing deeply, we can experiment with sounds that create resistance and require a more controlled release of the breath.

A long OOO, for example.

Or friction sounds such as ZZZ or SHH.

Different sounds shape the vocal tract and airflow differently, creating different patterns of pressure, muscular engagement and vibration.

You can feel some of these sounds strongly around the ribs, diaphragm and upper abdomen.

So rather than saying:

Come on. Get motivated.

We can work physically.

Breath.

Sound.

Muscle.

Attention.

Imagery.

Imagine the fire within gathering there.

Feel what determination feels like rather than merely forcing the shoulds or ideas of it.

And sometimes that is enough to begin changing the state.

Sekhem — The Body of Power

The ancient Egyptians had a word for power and potency:

Sekhem.

We see this force expressed magnificently in Sekhmet — the great lioness goddess, the powerful Eye of Ra.

Fire. Solar force. Ferocity. Protection. Power.

The Egyptians understood human experience through embodied images of force and relationship.

And thousands of years later, that image of the lioness, the feeling of fire, the breath, the voice and the physical architecture of the body can help us explore what power actually feels like from the inside.

Shifting us from thinking about ourselves

to inhabiting ourselves — which is what the somatic arts are ultimately about.

And returning us, at the same time, to ancient images and our relationship with nature — reminding us not only who we are, but where we are.

We are nature.

And sometimes the forms and forces of nature can help lead us home.

To breathe.

To sound.

To feel the muscles gather.

To sense the fire. And then —move.