in touch with your reproductive power requires that you dive a little more into the dark, mystical realm where you don’t already know everything and where it can be difficult to draw conclusions. You may feel confused. Things may not make sense. However, once you journey into this magical, primal space, you can clear a pathway for being receptive to the ultimate creative endeavor.
Going Deeper into Your Body
Once I was adjusting a yoga client as he held a pose for a long time, and he said to me, “Is it fucked up that I want things that are bad for me?” My heart sank. I felt his contrition, and at the same time, I knew I was guilty of this, too. Our minds oftentimes override a healthy, natural decision in favor of what we think we are supposed to do, and we’ve been trained to do this from a very young age.
It can be confusing to discern what is an urge of the body and what is an urge of the mind. The body sends feelings — sensations, emotions, and the like. The mind has thoughts. Your body feels something and then your mind tells you a story about it, and vice versa — when your mind tells you a story, your body feels something. Finding your truth can be difficult because sometimes your mind is confused or missing very important information.
It’s time to tap into the wise lady that lives within you. You are very smart when you pay attention. You cannot fully tap into your intuition if you are distracted by your thoughts. Intuition is what happens spontaneously when you have connected the two minds.
To tap into this power, you must begin to observe both your thoughts and your bodily responses. If you listen closely, you will see how your body reacts in certain situations — sometimes unexpectedly — and can begin to try to understand these reactions. The body is great at telling us that we need to make a different decision: allergies, digestive issues, energy depletion, irregular periods, and sleep or skin problems are a few examples of this. However, sometimes you may not heed the body’s call, and the solutions your mind comes up with when the body is experiencing discomfort are not so effective for relieving it.
An example is drinking more coffee or exercising a lot to get over your tiredness from either lack of sleep or not eating well for your constitutional type. When you don’t resolve the root cause, it ultimately is the source of more stress and anxiety and sabotages sleep even further, which then creates the stronger dependence on caffeine. Then you realize that you are getting headaches when you don’t have your caffeine, and the addiction persists. When you finally wake up and realize that such excessive amounts of caffeine are damaging your body, you have to go through withdrawal headaches, so then you have to take some sort of headache medicine in the process. What your mind prioritizes is sometimes not beneficial to your health or aligned with what you truly desire for your life.
To dive back into the primal, not only must a woman pay closer attention to her mind and body, but she must also learn to trust that the body knows what is best. The Ayurvedic approach to health requires that whenever there is a conflict between mind and body, the cues of the body win. The body is biological. The mind is fleeting.
Whenever you feel torn because of a battle between your head and your heart, it is really this battle between your thoughts and the sensations and emotions being felt in your body. Even while thinking, you will often find that your body sends you a signal. If you listen to your body’s responses with a finely tuned ear, you will move toward a place of health. If you follow your thoughts without listening to your body, a healthy way of being may elude you.
Connecting Mind with Body
To connect the mind with the body, most people today need to learn how to sense the body more. You may be used to doing yoga, dance, or fitness exercises, which is a good way to develop a deeper connection with the body. Any study of one’s movement, will, and actions is a worthwhile endeavor in understanding the self. There is, however, an additional dimension to connect with that can provide a good bridge between the mind and the body. This is the energetic layer, and the yogis throughout history have done a pretty good job trying to paint a picture of it.
The base of the spine is considered the seat of kundalini energy, known as primal serpent energy. This energy can be either dormant or awakened — the serpent coiled or rising — and if awakened, will travel upward and activate an individual at different levels and dimensions. This upward-moving energy is the crown jewel of those individuals looking to awaken their whole being, and it can occur for many reasons — either spontaneously or through guidance from a teacher. The chakras are the body’s seven main energy centers, which are oriented along the spinal column, from the base of the spine to the crown of the head. When kundalini activates the chakras above the heart, much of the energy goes toward communication and thought, whereas the energy in the lower chakras is more primal, fueling digestion, sexuality, and excretion.
With so much emphasis on thought and intellectual activity in our day-to-day lives, many women today have too much going on in their upper chakras. The prevalence of head-forward body postures is largely due to this overuse of the mind, reflected in the habit of sitting in front of a computer or staring at a mobile device, reading, viewing, thinking, and achieving through thoughts and communication. However, a healthy person will have balanced energy throughout the body and will not be dominated by one chakra center or the other. What this means for a lot of us is that we need to let go of our overuse of the mind.
Focusing on any one of the chakras will redirect awareness and energy to that center. For example, focusing on the lowest chakras brings awareness to the pelvic basin, and focusing on the center of the chest brings awareness to love and the rhythm of the heart. Focusing on the center of the belly will connect you with your willpower, and focusing on the throat brings energy to the voice. When you notice that certain chakras feel blocked or overactive, which can happen when the mind, physical body, or emotions have gotten out of balance, you can focus on the other chakras to shift the energy, or you can choose to go deeper into a blocked chakra to understand its mental-emotional-physical components.
In addition to chakra exploration practices, there is a spot you can activate that will bring you back to your primal energy: a point at the base of the skull that yogis refer to as mastaka granthi, or “head knot.” Mastaka granthi is located at the site of the brain stem, specifically the medulla oblongata. We know from modern science that the brain stem is the relay system between the brain and the rest of the body, and is also the control center for certain fundamental functions of the autonomic nervous system, or primal body, including consciousness, breathing, cardiovascular activity, and the natural, reflexive urges like sneezing and vomiting. It is a regulating center of a whole bunch of stuff that the intellect isn’t necessarily involved in. Mastaka granthi is the gateway between the head and the body — a space between — where the intellectual dimension surrenders to the primal, biological, animal state of the body, and vice versa. This is a useful spot to know about because while it is great to journey on the path to motherhood with balanced chakras, it’s even better to deeply get in touch with your basic biological functions.
Figure 2: Kundalini rising through the chakras, harmonized with mastaka granthi
Next, I offer a practice for you to walk through this primal doorway before we dive into some Ayurvedic health principles in the next chapter.
EXERCISE: MERGING THE PRIMAL AND THE INTELLECTUAL
As we begin this journey to align your mind, body, and spirit and improve your reproductive health, you can begin by connecting your mind with your body.
With a neutral, nontilted chin, take your left index and middle fingers and begin gently massaging high on the back of your neck. As you move your fingers around with very soft pressure, you may notice a small valley in the top center of your neck between the
