Groove

Your pelvis is a bowl.

This bowl is a vessel that does much more than just contain organs and muscle. It holds you energetically and spiritually, too. It is designed to hold you so that you can groove, swing, and screw.

Humans hear harmony. Feel music. Humans sing from their root, breathing into the bowl and singing from the soul. Humans swing with rhythm, moving the bowl, cupping and guiding the energy it contains with all the poise of a ballet dancer. Music makes us move, groove, connect. Music transports memory through time, and all the while our container goes with us.

In the bowl of the pelvis, polarities combine: earth with sky, left with right. The stick of the spine stirs the waters of the bowl, generating vortex, pulse, and spiraling swirls that make you want to twirl. With the beat. With rhythm. With soul. Shake, rattle and roll. The stick sticks to the prehistoric beat.

Evolutions spiral on the groove of music.

The vibe, the rhythm, the beat awakens your vibe, your rhythm, as a different drummer.

Stir Your Pot

Issues that arise in the pelvis arena when the hips are tight: lower back pain; constipation; problems with fertility, menses and menopause; problems with the prostate; poor mineral absorption. The yogis relate the base of the pelvis to the first chakra, the foundation of feeling safe and at home in yourself; and the sexual organs to the second chakra. Issues below the belt often arise from stagnation. This simple exercise opens the subtle channels so you can move vibration lower in the bowl of your pelvis.

To stir your own pot:

• Go to the floor on all fours (hands and knees)
• Place your hands beneath your shoulders, your knees beneath your hips
• Use your tailbone or lower spine to move in circles, in one direction
• Reverse directions and repeat for a few minutes

After stirring your pot, notice what you feel in your belly and lower back.

Swing

After stirring their pot, many of my members start their day with a dance party to connect with their groove. The right music will get you moving, and buoy your mood for the day. Dancing releases oxytocin, the pro-social or social bonding hormone. A beneficial hormone like this will replace cortisol (the distress hormone) and so we want to encourage more of it.

The hormones we want to exchange cortisol for are:

• Oxytocin, the connection hormone
• Serotonin, the easeful hormone
• Endorphins, the pain-relief hormones
• Dopamine, the reward or eustress hormone

Dancing as a lifelong habit outperforms all other forms of exercise. Dancing also stimulates the production of your brain's connective tissue, known as "white matter." Dancing stimulates white matter, no matter your age. When a tune inspires you to groove, you follow a rhythm, varying your movement intensity.

Developing your style and moves has obvious psychosocial benefits. Humans can dance longer than any other form of movement. You've seen the guy who trades his walker for his partner's supportive arms on the dance floor.

Sing

A powerful singer resonates sound through their entire torso, using all of the subtle energy centers from root to crown (see Channels). Humming can turn into singing. As you sing, bring your awareness lower in your body to play the energy centers in your torso.

Your body is the instrument, your emotions vibrating feelings from your heart, given wings by your vocal cords and tongue, pulling power from your lungs.

The vocalist gives expression to the human experience, directly and viscerally. Whether in chorus or solo. The song sung with honest emotion, vocalizing meaning, emanates a vibration that purifies and fortifies, reorganizing you through beat, rhythm, emoting tempo in time.

Good vocals call forth transparency of emotion, courage, humility. Good lyrics are packed with archetypal life lessons, breakdowns and breakthroughs. In Fugee's hip-hop hit, "Killing Me Softly with His Song," Lauryn Hill nails it with the line, "Singing my life with his words."¹ Singing gives voice to the highest-ranking human qualities... with a beat for good measure and organically architected for remembrance by the human mind. You know the song when you remember exactly what someone said... and how they said it... and can sing a few lines with your whole body, and feel better. More connected. More uniquely human.

Singing empowers your vibration. You become the flute. The vibration tunes your energetic body into alignment. Find a song that moves you, learn the lyrics, and belt it out on your way to work.

Screw

Speaking of stirring the pot, let's talk about sex. Sex is a pro-social habit that builds intimacy, synthesizes oxytocin, and generates emotional support that shapes health and relationship identity. Who you are sleeping with defines, in part, who you are. Unsurprisingly, those who get it on regularly handle chronic and acute stressors better.²

We can get closer to each other by clearing up issues that may block the flow of energy between us. Adam Lane Smith, in his blog post How to Have WAY MORE SEX in Your Marriage, offered a simple formula:

• Share your problem
• State your feeling about the problem
• Explain your solution
• Ask for feedback on your solution³

Being turned on reflects interest and receptivity. Becoming receptive to sex, to physical connection, body-to-body, involves thought and emotion.⁴

And, of course, inflammation screws with our sex drive by making us less connected, less attractive, less horny. For women,

Inflammation can interfere with synthesis and activity of estrogen and progesterone, reducing their potentially stimulatory effect on female sexual desire and arousal.⁵

Inflammation reduces your sex hormones while multiplying your stress hormones. The body shuts down the reproductive instinct (and desire for sexual play) and focuses on the urgency of survival.

As you wild your habits, the good news is that you rekindle your connection, first with yourself and then with the one you want to screw.

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Notes

1. Fugees. "Killing Me Softly With His Song" (Official Video). YouTube, uploaded by Fugees, 27 Mar. 2011. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKOtzIo-uYw.
2. David Morris Schnarch. Constructing the Sexual Crucible: An Integration of Sexual and Marital Therapy. WW Norton & Company, 1991; Ein-Dor, Tsachi, and Gilad Hirschberger. "Sexual Healing: Daily Diary Evidence That Sex Relieves Stress for Men and Women in Satisfying Relationships." Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, vol. 29, no. 1, 2012, pp. 126–39.
3. Adam Lane Smith. "How to Have WAY MORE SEX in Your Marriage." 4 Feb. 2021, adamlanesmith.com/2021/02/04/how-to-have-way-more-sex-in-your-marriage/. Accessed 23 Apr. 2022.
4. I. P. Spector, et al. "The Sexual Desire Inventory: Development, Factor Structure, and Evidence of Reliability." Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, vol. 22, no. 3, 1996, pp. 175–90. doi:10.1080/00926239608414655.
5. Tierney K. Lorenz. "Interactions Between Inflammation and Female Sexual Desire and Arousal Function." Current Sexual Health Reports, vol. 11, no. 4, 2019, pp. 287–99. doi:10.1007/s11930-019-00218-7.