Yield to Find Nourishment
Our bodies, hearts, and minds are designed to receive and metabolize nourishment, and we have evolved to need and seek out many kinds of nourishment, from food to social connection to intimate contact. But many of us have established barriers around certain forms of nourishment, often as a result of experiences in utero, early infancy, and/or childhood.
Our capacity to acknowledge our need for nourishment, to seek it out, to receive it, and to savor and metabolize it is made possible only in a safe-enough environment. This fundamental cycle is learned in our earliest moments of life, just as we are forming our most intimate relationship with our bodies and our belonging.
What we witness as we grow up, and the stories we inherit around food, emotional nourishment, what it means to nourish ourselves, and what is and isn’t acceptable nourishment shape our development and likely our current relationship with nourishment, including how we feel about nourishment and our ability to take it in.
Western Industrial Culture and monotheistic religion are riddled with rules, restrictions, and judgments about all kinds of nourishment, carefully wrapped up as ‘morality and virtue’. Depending on what we’ve inherited, if we have not investigated and re-negotiated these earliest beliefs, our capacity to recognize, take in, receive, and metabolize genuine nutrient-dense food, contact, and experiences are likely – if not guaranteed – to be weakened.
Also, when we are collapsed in shame and feeling unworthy, or if we are embedded in a context or relationship that systematically dismisses us, our autonomy or our intrinsic worth, our ability to take in nourishment is going to be gravely compromised.
Without neuroplasticity and the incredible capacity of our bodies and nervous systems to grow and transform throughout our entire lives, we would likely all be stuck in some amount of malnourishment. Thankfully, with the right invitation, encouragement, and commitment, our systems quite naturally and easily reorient to wellness, finding their capacity to recognize, receive, and metabolize nourishment of all kinds.
One way to practice this is to get back in touch with the way we were as infants. We were born with reflexes and blueprints for movements that never had to be taught to us – sucking, curling, reaching, grasping, rolling, crawling, and even walking were natural and instinctual ways to interact and soothe ourselves and to seek and take in nourishment of all kinds. This is the embodiment of Life’s most basic gestures: Expansion and contraction. Reaching and pulling, Yielding and pushing. Opening and closing. Wanting and receiving.
Coming back to these simple, primary movements can begin to release accumulated burdens and invite core-level relaxation. They may also get us in touch with our wanting, the kind that begins deep within our nervous system, rather than our thinking mind’s ideas
Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, of Body Mind Centering, applied her extraordinary knowledge of the human body and of childhood development to create the Satisfaction Cycle, integrating five core movement patterns or basic neurological actions reflective of the developmental stages we intuitively move through during the first two years of life. These movement patterns are: yield, push, reach, grasp, pull, and return to yield.
Each one of those gestures relies upon an integrated experience of the previous one to stay centered and nourished by the action. You cannot push until you yield. You cannot reach until you’ve pushed. You cannot grasp without first having reached, etc.
Beyond physical actions, each of these is inextricably woven into our emotional and spiritual well-being and experience of belonging. Exploring them can help us to find common places where we get stuck in patterns that are not nourishing.
Spend a few moments this week just with yield, the foundation of it all. Yield is not collapse, melting or surrendering. It is the gesture of giving your body weight to the thing that is holding you – letting something else (the chair, the floor, the Earth, the water in the tub, another person) hold you while you stay present and embodied in yourself. Fully offer your weight to gravity, maybe you imagine you’re an embryo in a safe and nurturing womb. You are relaxed but alert, which allows you to consciously receive support, and distinguishes yield from collapse.
It is very common that as adults we need to repair our relationship with the relaxed alertness of yielding. This can show up as excessive muscle tension that resists yielding or we may be habitually sleepy, collapsed, or depressed. See if you can find even 3% more yield right now as you read these words.
As you go about your week, pay attention to this one gesture, and simply notice what happens in the rest of your experience of nourishment as you perhaps yield a little bit more, and a little more, and yes, still, a little bit more. This is the way of growth: one little bit at a time.
