Centering in Vitality
A regenerative somatic practice guided by the Vitality Triangle
How do the principles of the Vitality Triangle live for you?
What does it feel like when you experience reciprocity? Does awareness of the gifts you are receiving and giving cultivate a sense of being well?
What does it feel like when you experience integrity? Does awareness of being one essential part of a larger healthy whole inspire a sense of beloning? Does the possibility of aligning your actions with your vision contribute to your aliveness?
What does it feel like when you experience liberty? Does awareness of your breath, flowing in and out of your body, give you a sense of being free?
Although the three principles of the Vitality Triangle may sound abstract or obtuse (or even triggering, given the way words like liberty have been used to justify harmful actions), for me, the more I bring these principles into my daily life, the more I get to experience being alive, well, and free.
To help myself along on this pathway to vitality, I developed a somatic centering exercise in 2020 that I began incorporating into every day life. This practice is inspired by centering practices shared by Staci Haines and Prentiss Hemphill, two practitioners of generative somatics,[1] and guided by my embodied experience of key principles of vitality in living systems — gravity, integrity, reciprocity, and liberty. I have found that the more I incorporate this practice into my daily life, the more I experience vitality and show up in life as an enlivening agent of change in community with others.[2]
Hoping to share this experience with others, in February 2022 I developed a guided meditation with my Jodi Lane to experientially introduce principles of vitality to others through a workshop hosted by the Presencing Institute and Elef Trust on February 25, 2023. We designed the exploration to help us center in our bodies, inhabit them fully, and tune into our own True North. I offer a written version of this guided meditation inspired by my daily centering practice here, knowing that these words will fail to bring the practice to life, yet trusting that you will “take the best & leave the rest” as you go forth with your own tools and practices.
Overview and Guide Map: Grounding in Regenerative Vitality
In this written meditation, we will move through four principles of vitality in living systems, one by one, exploring how they live fully in our bodies in four dimensions. For each principle, I offer an image, a quote from a luminary practitioner of regenerative vitality, and a meditation. As you move through, I invite you to sit with each principle and consider:
What feelings do you notice in your body — and where do you feel them?
What thoughts, stories, or insights bubble forth?
Setting aside judgement for the moment, what might be possible if we all embodied, embedded, and emplaced this principle in our every day interactions in our institutions and ecosystems?
Gravity: A Meditation in Center
From the beginning….
We have had gravity to hold us,
We have had breath to inspire us.
We have had beautiful bodies to inhabit; human bodies, earthly bodies, celestial bodies.
Gravity is one of our first teachers,
Holding us, even as we resist her,
as we strengthen our core,
as we take our first steps,
as we discover our sense of balance,
as we come into awareness that we matter.
We are matter, after all;
Made of stardust and earth seed,
the pinnacle of 3.7 billion years of evolution,
we have arrived.
We are home.
Here, together now.
Here, at home in your body, notice your breath. As you breathe in, feel your inhale. As you breathe out, feel your exhale. Without needing to change anything, simply begin to notice the sensation of your breath, its rhythm and tempo, in this moment.
Here, at home in your body, bring your attention to your feet. Can you feel your feet? Wiggle your toes and feel all the sensations inside your feet and against your skin. Feel the ground beneath you. Feel the support that’s being offered. Feel the Earth supporting you, supporting your whole body. Now. Again. Automatically, moment by moment, like your breath.
Here, at home in your body, standing with your two feet on the ground, place you hand on your belly. About two inches below your belly button — feel into your center of gravity. Drop your breath there, at your center.
Breathing into your belly, feel your center of gravity. As you feel into your center, make very slight movements left, right…. Slightly curl your spine… Straighten again, lean just an inch forward, now back…
Try playing a little with your balance, moving your hips around, dancing with gravity. Take a moment to delight in your ability to return to center. You know how to work with gravity, since you were a baby…. Go ahead, rely upon it. Feel what it feels like to resist it; Now, I give into it… Allow it to be there.
Now, like a tree, plant your roots towards the pull of gravity, stretch yourself towards sunlight.
Like the roots and stems of a tree.
Gravity teaches us how to work with tension.
Integrity: A Meditation in Length
Now, again, feel yourself being supported by your feet on the floor…
Feel into the full length of your spine, as you send your roots deep into the ground, and feel your shoots stretch toward the sun…
As you feel into the full length of your body — lifting up toward the sky and grounding down into the earth at the same time — invite space between your vertebrae.
As you take a deep inhale, notice the spaciousnes of your elongated spine. As you exhale, feel your body relax along your supple spine, and the miraculously dynamic nervous system it supports.
As you continue breathing in and out, what feelings do you notice, scanning from the tip of your toes to the top of your head? Where do you notice tension, or pain? What does it feel like there?
… What does it feel like in your body, as you allow all sensations to belong as part of your whole body, right now?
…How does it feel to allow these sensations to simply be offering additional information, as you honor the integrity of your body, and the regenerative universe of which you are part?
…What does it feel like in your body, when you trust the power of your dynamic integrity, your capacity to return to wholeness, once things break, or wounds arise?
…What does it feel like in your body, when you feel your supple backbone, trust your stance, and remember you are capable of playing an essential role in a larger, beautiful, integral whole?
Reciprocity: A Meditation in Width
Now feel your belly expand on the next inhale, when you exhale feel it contract, feel your breath flowing in and out of your nostrils…Now, feel your ribs stretching out into the full width of your body.
Breathing in, allow yourself to feel the fullness of your width… How much space can you stretch into?
Breathing out, feel how your width contracts…. How does it feel to notice your body acting as a bellows, moving the gift of vital energies throughout your body as your lungs expand and contract?
With an appreciative gaze, allow yourself to connect with the life-giving beings around you… As you breathe in, offer thanks for the trees and plants nearest you for giving you the gift of clean, oxygenated air to breathe. As you exhale, consider the life-giving gift of breath you return. What does it feel like to remember that more-than-human beings have been giving the gift of oxygenic photosynthesis for 2.3 billion years, allowing for the co-evolution of complex, multicellular lives like ours?
…What does it feel like in your body, when you are free to give of your own gifts, and trust that you are well supported by gifts freely given by other beings in the web-of-life…?
Liberty: A Meditation in Depth
Continue to breathe, feeling life force move throughout your body with every inhale and exhale… Allow your breath to fill your body, from your back to your front, feeling the expansiveness of your depth. Allow yourself to notice the feeling of your clothes on your back… Can you feel sensations on the back of your knees? As you move from the back to the front, can you feel your heart beat? Can you feel what’s happening in your gut? How does your skin feel on your chest, against your clothes?
As you feel into your depth, stretch your attention behind you… What choices have you made over time that brought you to this very moment? Who are the people who’ve had your back in the past? Whose shoulders do you stand on? What skills and experiences have you gathered along your journey that you bring with you to this moment?
Moving your field of attention from behind you, into your center, open your gaze — what possibilities are bubbling forth within you? From this place in the present, with curiosity, compassion, and courage, what creative yearnings are arising? Allowing your gaze to move forward, what possibilities are revealing themselves on the horizon?
…What does it feel like in your body when you are fully present, free from cynicism and despair, and open to new possibilities that want to emerge through you?
Returning to Center in Regenerative Vitality
As you breathe in and out, return your hands to your belly, just below the place where a cord connected you to your mother, and her mother, back through generations upon generations. Drop your breath back into this creative center.
Reflect for a moment about the miracle it is to be alive in this living world, in this moment. The universe labored for 13.7 billion years to bring you to this moment… You have arrived. You matter. Now, what matters to you? What possibility beckons your vitality? What possibility makes you come alive, and calls you into action? Take a moment to center on what it is you are committed to… Consider closing with a declaration, “I am a commitment to….. “
As you center in your deepest desire, your sense of commitment, let it fill you up. Where does this energy want to move next? What is your next embodied step?
Having moved into a 4-D experience of regenerative vitality, notice, how do you feel in your body?
Take a few moments, again, to breathe and stretch into the fullness of your body, your home. You have arrived!
Ask yourself — what if the world needs more of me to be alive, well, and free? What’s next for you, now?
Breadcrumbs, Footnotes, and Thanksgiving
[1] For the theoretical foundations of generative somatics, see The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice by Staci Haines.
For guided exercises see Haine’s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77EJgznvqLc, or a 2020 guided centering practice offered by Prentiss Hempill, https://www.instagram.com/tv/CBjcr9_gED3/?hl=en.
You may also appreciate Hemphill’s reflections on centering practice offered on January 6, 2021, https://www.instagram.com/tv/CJt4MSCgfPU/?hl=en,
[2] Beginning on 2021, I created stickers of Compass of Collective Powers with the Vitality Triangle at its heart and placed one of them on the back of my phone case as a regular reminder of the opportunity to practice liberty, reciprocity, and integrity. Although I routinely engaged practices of compassion, gratitude, and presence, I was less disciplined about bringing the regenerative somatic practice into my daily life. This changed in 2022 when I participated in “The Somatic Experience of Healing Justice,” a community of practice led by Asia Dorsey within an “Enlivening Change” course offered February 26th — May 22nd, 2022 in Denver, CO.
As “homework” in this applied course, Asia invited our cohort to design and enact a somatic practice for our own daily lives. In this time, I worked my regenerative somatic practice into my morning routine, along with a 4-minute aerobic exercise. These signifcantly supported my vitality, but the regenerative somatic practice was particularly helpful to me as I navigated a cross-country move at the same time my roots felt deepest in Denver, CO. It was such a gift to engage my practice in community with others called to similar adventures in the pursuit of vitality.
