An Introduction to the Five Rings

These simple movements gently dissolve the layers of tension that maintain old and unwanted habits.  In just a few short minutes, you will feel more balanced and in the flow of life.  

It can be used as an Internal Exercise or a Movement Simulation for cultivating your natural gifts for: balance, harmony, being centered in the midst of turmoil, dispassionate observing.

It is a more active version of the basic Centered Presence exercise, which evokes a sense of "filling out your skin". The expansion of your attention is taken a step further as you fill out your personal space, as defined by the limits of the reach of your arms.

The practice is based on the basic rhythm of life: the muscular tighten and release of the heartbeat and the inhale and exhale of the lungs. Eight Flows is like a T'ai Chi or Qi Gong practice.

In an important psychological sense, this internal exercise activates your innate capacity to know where your "mind" is, from moment to moment. It gently breaks up those layers of habit and tension that were covering this natural gift. In other words, where am I, in my personal world?

“Until you know where you are, you cannot know who you are.”

Wendell Berry

The term Defending Spirits is drawn from the Chinese medicine view of the immune system. It refers to the primal forces that guard our boundaries, resisting danger while welcoming friends.  The way these forces function has a profound impact on every part of your life influencing your attitudes, responses, moods, thinking, imagining, and your health.

These movements work because on a primal animal level, every encounter, whether with a person, thing, or deadline, whether it is happens in the outer world or in your experience, whether real or imagined, activates your territorial boundary sense.

In response to an encounter, I have freedom/choice.  In order to do so, my entire system of energies in the forms of thought, feeling and movement reconfigure in a simple and predictable way.

It becomes natural and easy for me to access the qualities of mind, heart and muscle we associate with being versatile, balanced, flowing, centered, in control.

Beyond and under the words, your feelings are muscular shapes with different centers of gravity. Viewed this way, your feelings are gateways to wisdom, power, and compassion.  All feelings are important. Feelings handled well are our allies. Handled poorly, feelings can sabotage everything and anything.

Feelings are voices of your organs, your animal heritage, and the habitual structures of social and professional identities. They are your allies in the work of accomplishment. They are necessary for your physical health, for successful relationships, and for spiritual alignment.

The Shapes of Feeling Internal Exercise offers a method for loosening the glue that binds you to your moods thereby freeing you to have new experiences and interpretations of what is going on, within and without you. It will help you to cultivate the inner strength to accept, express, and control your emotions.

This practice goes underneath the stories you tell yourself about how you feel -- to influence the muscles, postures, and energies that sustain them. You will have the opportunity to breathe and relax into shapes related to ten very important and powerful feelings, both “positive” and “negative."