Happy Tongue: Happy Body

/ New Posture Workshops/

Sensei. His first appearance was in Your Body Mandala

Rain that fell steadily through the night continues as I wake up on New Years Day. The quiet patter invites me to loll about, letting my body come to earth in its own sweet time.  As my eyes open, I realize that my tongue touches the inside of my mouth on all sides, my lips are softly sealed, and nasal breathing is easy.  I’ve spent years searching for the best resting place pace for my tongue and for effortless breathing through my nose.  For several months now, my tongue has found its happy place. (See this post for more about tongue posture.)

Containers and Drumskins

Listening to the rain, I muse about other chambers within my body that might reflect the way the tongue rests omni-directionally within its oral home.

  • My lungs within their pleural sacs.

  • My abdominal organs within the peritoneum.

  • Brain and spinal cord within the dura mater.

  • My whole body, its countless functions humming, gurgling and throbbing within a seamless suit of skin and superficial fascia.

Breathing, I marvel at how the sealing of my tongue against my soft palate reveals a latent passageway for respiration.  At how my diaphragm now silently pulls the air through that passage into the negative pressure chamber offered by expanded lung cells. And how the diaphragm’s relaxation so powerfully pushes the expired air back out.

Appreciating the effortless play of my diaphragm, I notice how its excursions echo in my pelvic floor—a diaphragm of its own.  And in the floor of my mouth, the palms of my hands, the soles of my feet.  As if all these diaphragms are drumheads, taut and resonant with the slow beat of breath. 

Turning Points     

Awareness meanders to the spaces between my bones. They, too, resonate with breath’s rhythm. The spaces between my bones glide out and in and around with every breath, multi-directioned.

I doze off....  floating wihin my skin.  As breath uncurls my diaphragm, the rounded top of my right upper arm curves wide in its scapular socket... a nano movement only, but so very soothing.  Exhalation brings another cascade of pleasure as radius and ulna separately sink into the mattress... and my hand, gentle at its wrist...

A sudden crack jolts me awake and still.  At once I am all eyes and thighs. 

But Sensei slumbers on, undisturbed by the complaint of an old house as its foundation adjusts to damp earth.  

It takes time for the buzz of sympathetic arousal to dissipate. Even mundane urgencies can make my body disappear like that.  I can morph into a Penfield homunculus, present only from the ears forward and wrists down. 

A sense of humming, swirling wholeness is so much more comfortable, and generous.

Tongue as Teacher

All of this gathers into a New Year’s... what?  Not a resolution, not a project... a possibility.  A Remembrance.

Sensing a happy baby tongue is a key to the volume, the mass, the fullness of myself.

Remembering the soft totality of my tongue helps me know that the rest of my body, my being, can also soften and fill, can hum and flow.  Can dance.  

© 2026 Mary Bond

Thanks for reading, and for sharing.