Interoceptive Midline

The second edition of my book, now entitled Body Mandala: Posture-Perception-Presence, will be released this fall by Healing Arts Press. I spent the first months of 2023 reviewing it with its new editor. Reading it now, five years after writing it, I was struck by two things. First was that I was impressed with myself—some sentences were so clear and elegant that it was hard to believe I’d written them. 😉

 But the second thing presented me with a conundrum.  An important theme in the book involves embodiment of a personal sense of midline.  My teacher, Ida Rolf, had represented the body’s central line in a way that had begun to seem too conceptual for me. To be useful, I felt, a somatic feature should be a sensory experience rather than a mental image. A stack of blocks with a line running through it didn’t seem very personal. If my body contained a path between earth and heaven, I wanted to be able to feel it.

Bregma

 My solution, at the time of writing the book, was to propose an energetic polarity between the center of the pelvic floor and the crown of the head. Gently moving those two points apart from each other promoted relaxed upright posture.

I tried to imbue the “crown point” with aliveness by explaining its history as the anterior fontanelle—the soft spot in an infant’s head that allows its passage through the birth canal.  The coronal and sagittal sutures of the crown knit together approximately eighteen months after birth into the anatomical point called bregma.  I tried to make bregma feel personal, sentient. 

The Uvula

By the time the book was released, I had already stopped using bregma to teach midline awareness. I don’t remember how it occurred to me to propose instead a polarity between the peroneal node and the uvula. Perhaps it was simply that it was easier for me to sense my midline between those two points because both are within the body. I’ve received dozens of appreciative emails about this approach, so I gather that I’m not alone in finding the idea useful.

The uvula is the cartilaginous flap at the back of the soft palate—you can see it in a mirror when you open your mouth wide.  When we eat or drink the uvula helps close off the nasal passage and prevents substances from entering the trachea. The uvula is located just anterior to the upper two cervical vertebrae. So, it’s just in front of the joint between your head and your neck (atlanto-occipital joint).

Pointers

Having an interoceptive midline doesn’t mean that that’s all there is to the body’s central line. The two points are pointers—like laser pointers. The perineal pointer can extend down through the pelvic floor into the earth and the uvula pointer can project upward through the crown into the sky.  

The interior midline can extend into space from either point no matter how the body is oriented with respect to the ground. The uvula can point to the north star or to a ceiling fan, to the inside of the oven when you bend down to pull out a baked potato, or to the floor when you fold forward to touch your toes. The perineal node points to the center of the earth when your body is upright. It points to the other side of the kitchen when you’re collecting those potatoes (providing you bend your hips and knees). It can even point upwards if you’re a ballerina in a deep penché. Acrobats and gymnasts tap into the polarization of an interoceptive midline to maintain length through the torso as they twirl, flip and plummet.

UP Right

What is the difference between elevating the uvula and lifting bregma?  The crown, or top of the head. has been a posture improvement cue for numerous somatic disciplines for a very long time. Why change it?  

In dance classes, vocal lessons, equestrian training, physical education—wherever students are required to have “good posture” they are told to lift their heads. When I took modeling lessons as a teenager, we had to practice balancing books on our heads. A basic instruction of the Alexander Technique is “head forward and up”.  Dr. Rolf’s mantra was “top of the head up”.

In the above examples, posture is conceived of as an aligned positioning of body parts. Instead, consider this alternative to the conventional way of understanding posture: let’s suppose that posture is the orientation of an organism to its surroundings in the present moment. 

Posture (upright or not) as Perceptual Orientation

 The sensory-based approach to movement that I teach, and that is embraced by many colleagues in the SI community, encourages uprightness through perceptual orientation. Rather than training alignment of parts, we invite awareness of presence.

In order to make the slightest action, our bodies must have a base of support and a sense of knowing where we are. This is our orientation. We ground ourselves through our relationship with gravity, locating ourselves and receiving support from the earth. We further orient through our perception of the space around us. The word space in this usage implies spatial environment and includes the objects, people and events in our surroundings.

We learn to be upright as young children through the orienting process. We come up into the world because of what we see, hear, taste, and smell. As infants our eyes and mouths seek something in the space around us that will pacify our hunger.

Once we have taught ourselves to stand up (first building strength and coordination through rolling over, rocking, bouncing, and crawling), we realize, however unconsciously, that in order to take steps, we must have both a base of support and a sense of ourselves in space. When we topple over it’s because we’ve temporarily lost one or the other. This is true throughout life, both physically and emotionally. Somatic movement education brings this learning to consciousness.

To locate ourselves spatially, we need free access to our senses. The senses of sight, hearing, taste, and smell are all located in our heads. Our heads must be able to move freely in order to orient our bodies to present situations. This freedom requires mobility at the atlantooccipital joint. We cannot look, or listen, or stick out our tongues, or even breathe freely without motion between the head and the neck. Granted, the movement involved in sensory perception may be tiny—micromovement—but for spatial orientation, movement at the AO joint must be free.

And now my conundrum about bregma and the uvula comes back into focus.

When a head is balancing a book, or the crown is lifted by a skyhook, the atlantooccipital joint stiffens, impeding motor response to the impulses of the sensory organs in the head. But when the top of your interoceptive midline is your uvula, your head remains free to make the micromovements necessary for perceptual orientation.  And for uprightness.

 Conundrum solved?

To sense the distinction between bregma and the uvula for yourself, walk along a street or down a hallway with your head held high to the sky. Go back and forth for long enough to register how it feels to move that way. Then relax for a moment, stretch and shake your body to recover a neutral way of being.  And then find your interoceptive midline between the center of your pelvic floor and your uvula. Sustaining an energetic polarity between those two points, walk again. Compare the two experiences.

If the difference is as clear to you as it is to me, you’ll understand why I so badly wanted to revise what I had written in 2016 for the new edition of Body Mandala. I tried to do this and failed. I found twenty-five references to bregma in the book, but it didn’t work to simply exchange one word for the other. The book was conceived as a whole, so changing that essential detail would have required rethinking everything else.

The midline presentation in Body Mandala remains as originally written. I’m a little sad about it. Because it’s easier for me to sense my uvula than bregma, and because I believe mobility of the neck is a boost to spatial perception, I’d like to have shared those things with more readers. 

Choosing an Upper Pole

Choosing bregma as your upper pole is not wrong. It’s more precise than “crown” or “top of the head”, or a skyhook, or a book. If you palpate for that exact meeting place of the sutures, you’ll feel a tenderness there. It does seem to be a special place.

Bregma is located just above (or below, depending on which article you read) the seventh or crown chakra (energy center) according to yogic philosophy.  This place, represented by a thousand-petaled lotus flower, is associated with higher thought processes and spiritual guidance.  It has also been purported as the location where our spirits enter and exit worldly manifestation. 

For my present incarnation the uvula seems to offer a more responsive upper pole. Perhaps I’m just not ready to head for the stars. 

 © 2023 Mary Bond