Cross-Training Body Mind Emotions Spirit | Rachael R. Resch

I bow to Nia.

I bow to Nia as a path of body consciousness.  There are many paths of body consciousnes — thank God! —  and the one I’ve been practicing for the last 14 years is Nia.

One way I understand why I got sick and went back into asthma, which I hadn’t had in years but had had very severely at one time, is so the consciousness that has been growing in my body could return to the same place on the spiral but on a deeper level.  So that whatever the healing is for me in this lifetime — healing my lungs, breath, spirit, my body, my heart and my self-expression — it can now happen more, more deeply, more fully more completely.

I’ve had thoughts of, “Oh, shit, it’s all falling apart.”  Yes.  And it’s also falling away.  Things fall away and reveal new layers of consciousness and healing available right inside my body.

When I was sick in the past, I brought the level of consciousness to the experience I had then, which was wholly and beautifully what it was — but it was before Nia.

And it was while I was sick then that I found Nia.  Or Nia found me.

So 14 years ago a little seed of healing was planted in the middle of being ill, in the soil of unmetabolized and unexpressed grief, in the soil of longing, in the soil of hope, in the soil of fear, in the soil of constriction, in the soil of the body expressing itself through illness.

Nia held me, taught me and healed me then, Nia and is holding me, teaching me and healing me now.  This healing is available to us all:  The ability to ever more deeply, with ever more intimacy, love, respect, gradualness, awe and joy be with the complex, mysterious, myriad sensory life of life in a body.  The ability to “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

This is the Nia promise:  Through movement we find health.

Through movement we sense, feel, experience, discover, express, create.  Through movement we live.

The body itself is in constant motion: heart beating, 75 trillion cells respirating, organs secreting, nervous system  humming.  Life itself is motion.

Thank you especially to Debbie Rosas for all the years dedicated to articulating with love and clarity the voices of the body: the voice of the thigh bone, the collar bone, the pelvis, the nervous system, the hand, the foot.

The body itself is continually articulating and expressing itself: heart beating, 75 trillion cells respirating, organs secreting, nervous system  humming.   Another word for the joints in the body is articulation.

Until now, I truly had not realized how steadily and the depth to which the articulation of the voices of the body has been seeping into my cells and changing me, preparing me to be able to move through this extraordinary time with grace.  So that out of the well-tended compost pile of my fear and loneliness has sprouted more and more consciousness in my body.

Thank you Debbie and Carlos for creating the deep, complex and compassionate path of Nia.

The focus of class today, chosen from the basket of foci for 2009, was “to remember my divine self.”

Nia’s practice of the joy of movement is a path.  It is a path to remembering our divine self.  It is a path to healing and love.

The joy of movement is a physical sensation that sits right next to any emotion.  The joy of movement is a sensation that sits right next to any physical state, whether pleasure, pain or bliss.  The joy of movement is a sensation that sits right next to any thought.  The joy of movement is an energy we can circulate in the body to heal and grow.

This is what Nia offers:  Through movement we find health.

Thank you Nia.