Moving in Spirals

“The path isn't a straight line, it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.”

~ Barry H. Gillespie  

I like the idea that the path isn't a straight line. We experience something, learn something new, and then sometimes years later we find ourselves back in the same place, facing a familiar lesson, question, or challenge. If we think about moving in a spiral, we certainly do revisit the same subjects, experiences, relationships, and parts of ourselves, but we are not the same person we were the last time we encountered them. We've grown, changed, experienced more, and can now see things from an entirely different perspective.

It's like reading a book you didn't quite understand years ago. The words haven't changed, but you have. You may pick up the book to read it again perhaps years later, and suddenly it hits you. Ahhh... now I understand what I couldn't understand before.

Movement works in much the same way. Our bodies are full of spirals. The spine doesn't simply move forward and backward; it rotates, twists, curves and spirals. Even the way we walk involves a complex set of spiralling movements. There is an exercise in Qigong that I do in my class from time to time called the Swimming Dragon.With the palms pressed gently together, you make a spiral motion with your arms, leading with your fingertips. This creates a beautiful ripple of spiralling movement throughout the body in one continuous fluid motion. I like to imagine I'm a coiling dragon pushing through water, or flying in the air in happy, swirling motions. It is one of my favorite exercises in Qigong because it moves the body in congruent circles, in spirals, and it just feels good!

If you continue to practice and move, you will revisit the same movements again and again. When you are first learning a move, you are often thinking about how to do it. Where do my arms go? How do my legs move with my arms? Am I doing it correctly?

Then, with repetition, something changes. The movement becomes more familiar and you begin to feel rather than think through it. You can then be open to subtleties you couldn't feel before. Same movement, different experience.