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As the butcher packs four angus beef burger patties into a bag, he asks: what happened with the bruises on your arms? I laughed and said, it’s from martial arts. At least you’re smiling about it! I’d barely even paid much attention to the bruises on my arms, large patches of bluish-brown on my elbows, looking frighteningly ouchie. The day before in aikidō, I’d landed on my head multiple times. I am still learning the art of falling safely. During group training, where we rotate without pause to practice multiple techniques, I hesitated before a new technique I’d never done before, involving the dreaded-for-me jump fall (tobi ukemi /flying breakfalls), where you are basically propelled into the air without breaking the fall with your arms. My senpai (senior classmate) reassures me, you can do it, we’ll go slowly. Finally, I strike her, and hesitating, I barely jump as she throws me under her armpit. My body flips, splayed on the mat. I’ve hit my head again for the third time this class, this time harder than ever before. The next round I’m paired with my senpai to do the same technique, I stand before her, shaking my head, my body refusing to go. She calls our sensei over for help. My sensei tells me to strike him, moving as slow as I need. He is teaching my senpai how to throw more precisely and thus safely, as he simultaneously instructs me where to position my body and where to cast my gaze (to the left on the ground). Swiftly, he throws me onto the mat. I roll over safely, relieved I came away unscathed this round. ~ My nervous system picked up on the coherence of my sensei’s nervous system, and without him needing to convince me with words, that if I try again this time, I will be okay and my body will be safe upon landing. This is something I am interested in protecting. Your presence being the powerful loving force in which the world coheres around and not the other way around.Acting from the steady hum of your own internal coherence despite increasing pressure from the outside. Choosing to pick ourselves back up. Resting when we need to. Pausing if it feels too much like the familiar suit of overwhelm. Stand up and try again. And notice how, when you change your body’s relationship to running on survival energy, your immediate orbit responds in kind. Your relationships feel like an exhale after a exhausting day, your creativity hums along like your favourite tune, your approach to world-building emerges from real presence and the aliveness of the current moment, not inherited ideas of what other peoples’s voices have drip-fed your mind of should should should be doing to save the world and everyone else’s problems. You begin responding to the present moment instead of the past imprints of deep wounding reverberating as familiar reactivity. In Scorpio, the watery expression of Mars, it is a felt instinctual sense of: Can I trust the unknown before me? How does my body know when it is safe to finally let my guard down?
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