Your Serpentine Spine
A meditation on fluidity
The spinal column undulates in the vertebral canal like a water snake. It actually does this. Bathed in in cerebrospinal fluid it's serpentine movement is the result of your heartbeat and the rhythmic movement of your lungs. I learned this during Gil Hedley’s 5 hour Nerve Tour presentation, a fascinating (and moving) anatomical deep dive into the human nervous system, but also nature, relationship, and so much more.
That our spinal column undulates in this way isn’t a surprise to me. I’ve felt it, as perhaps some of you have, during meditation. If you sit still for long enough at some point you find your body subtly rocking. It’s a tiny, wavelike pulse shimmering through the body. Imperceptible from the outside, yet unavoidable and prominent once you clue into it.
“Bring your mind’s attention that place in your body,” coaches Gil. “It’s a real place in your body. It’s easy to find because it’s inside of you. Just let your mind go there and inhabit that space.”
Turning attention inward can be a deeply poignant experience. At the very least, playing in the realm of interoception often relaxes us. Shall we?
Okay. Find a comfortable place to sit. Perhaps towards the edge of a dining room chair, so that your feet can rest on the ground and your spine is vertical. Sit towards the front of the chair so your back is free. Sit tall.
Take a few deeper breaths, ones that are full and smooth. If possible, breathe in and out through your nose.
For your first moments here, encourage a sense of physical easefulness in your body. Visualize easefulness of the soles of your feet as they rest on the floor. Imagine easefulness in the thighs and the belly. Explore a sense of ease in the area around the low back and the area around the heart. Find easefulness in the area around the throat.
Completely relax your jaw.
Completely relax your face.
Good. Allow for stillness. Take soft easy breaths. Consider approaching a sort of quiet poise —-gentle and curious, yet restful. Listen to the sounds around you. Feel the quality of the air against your skin. Whether your eyes are open or whether they are closed let your field of vision become expansive, as if you are viewing a giant movie screen. Now, imagine you could take a step back from all of these inputs —that you could retreat, ever so slightly away from that field of experience. All of those things you are noticing: the breath, sounds, objects in your visual field, even thoughts, are all simply appearing. They emerge into your field of awareness and then melt away effortlessly, while you simply rest in stillness.
Shift your attention to your spinal column. That sweep of nerve fibers that descends down from the base of your brain, and into the space of your vertebral canal. Your spinal column is just in front of the spiny, marble-like protrusions you feel when you run your fingers up and down the midline of your back, and just behind the large roundish vertebral bodies, that articulate with your intervertebral discs and give your spine it’s structure. The vertebral canal is a real location and the spinal column is a real structure in your body. They inhabit a space inside you that you can find and that you can feel. It is easy to find it because it is inside of you. Allow your attention rest there.
Finally. Consider the possibility the spinal cord is in motion. What would it be like for you to imagine its movement —softly undulating in the vertebral canal, bathed in warm, clear, cerebrospinal fluid? Sense it pulsing fluidly in direct relationship to the beating of your heart. It flows with the soft movement of your breath. What would it be like to actually feel it now, expressing fluidity within you?