Re-Tuning Instincts

I have found myself re-connecting with many tactile/household activities and crafts that I used to practice much more regularly: knitting, canning, painting, making cards. I re-used some melted beeswax and made candles for the first time and have been enjoying wearing the bead bracelets I used to make on a bead loom nearly two decades ago.

What these seemingly simple, perhaps “pointless” activities have taught me is somewhat shocking: I LOVE them. They feel like they reconnect me to a deeper place of me, like my deepest energetic presence. They bring me into presence… that time-stopping place that we all yearn to feel but instead somehow get pulled out of from habituated, unconscious patterns of daily life and choice-making. They make me feel like I’m connecting into a deeper, ancestrally-connected place that is instinctive and so incredibly human. To do things with the hands… are our hands our earliest “tool” to physically create, manipulate, play, experiment, explore and discover our spaces, contexts, places, and world? It seems that whatever is connecting to my hands feels like a cord into my heart — my true seat of consciousness.

According to the Tantric teachings and traditions, the heart is everything. If we don’t have a relationship to heart, we are not truly alive or connected to the vaster and most true Self. I find that I can connect with this deep heart place through meditation. And, it seems that certain activities that ground me, anchor me, settle me, draw me, also activate that sense of heart-awareness and true, conscious BEing-ness.

I continue to live with a somatic practice that stewards my emotional experiences so that my human body stays, as much as possible, in a liberated and light state, not drudged down by heavy, dense, re-occurring emotional energies which are inherent to being alive on this planet as a human but that don’t have to stay stuck in the body. I continue to notice how INSTINCTIVE it all feels — the natural and instinctive way/s that our bodies want to express and experience to stay in their optimal state. Doing things with the hands that are ancient and simple — moving, shaking the body, also ancient and simple — opening the jaw, sticking out the tongue, grrring and growling and crying or howling, also ancient and simple. All these things care for the human-ness of being human, and simultaneously our spiritual heart is better able to tap into its deeper knowing-ness of pure, divine, heart-awareness/consciousness.

Is there simple and ancient activity that you used to practice on a routine, regular, rhythmic basis? What is it? Write me and tell me what it is. I’m so curious. Let’s reconnect to our instinctive aliveness together. ❤️