Gorgeous.
Let's switch it up again.
No dance floor visualizations today.
It's just you
and me on a journey to understanding.
We will begin with a happy sigh and a joyful heart.
Close your eyes and feel that joy.
What does joy feel like?
For me,
It's like pop rocks
buzzing and popping on the surface of my skin.
Okay,
Let's just let joy have its way with
us for a moment.
With each exhale you take,
Open.
Maybe even lay down on your back and
starfish.
Take up some space and get comfortable.
Open your mind beyond your school,
Beyond
your room.
Explore its vastness.
Imagine with me,
Undergather society.
We are going
to use it as another way to understand masculine and feminine qualities.
Think about the relationship
between masculinity and the hunt.
Not because men were the hunters and women were the gatherers.
That isn't always the case.
But because hunting and masculinity are both directive,
Results-oriented,
And achieved through assertion.
You will recognize the hunter in you just
as you will recognize the gatherer.
The hunter's mind screens out all superfluous stimuli and
focuses its single-minded direction on the object of its hunt.
This awareness is intense,
Focused,
And filtered.
The hunter's mind disciplines the body,
Commanding it to obey
and submit to the demands of the hunt.
The hunt is highly logical,
And the hunter is
a planner,
Responding not to the environment at large,
But the prey.
No matter what conditions
occur,
The hunter must push forward.
The objective is inalterable.
A modern-day example of this
is shopping.
Let's say you go to the mall with the hunter.
You go shopping for shoes
and on the way,
You find a shirt that would look really great on the hunter,
Would really
accentuate those eyes.
You are excited and show the shirt proudly and the hunter goes,
But that's not shoes.
The hunter's brain is hunting a pair of shoes,
Focused.
When
we are engaged in a focused,
Single-minded directive,
We are using our hunter brain.
This can be solving a complex equation or problem,
Competing in a game,
Or looking for
a pair of shoes.
The gathering body is feminine and open,
With no focus,
Pure awareness pouring
in every direction.
Unlike the hunter mind,
Which screens out the data it takes in,
The
body absorbs everything from the environment.
This awareness is just as powerful as the
hunter's mind,
But it is everywhere and expansive.
The body becomes a powerful dispensary
of memory and somatic knowledge,
Remembering and storing a vast library of visual and sensory
information.
Scanning for potential threats and opportunities is first nature to the gatherer,
Whose senses are highly attuned to the changes in the environment.
Gathering is opportunistic,
Spontaneous,
And intuitive.
We wander the grassland to discover and explore.
We are
not bound by time or fixed in a specific result.
To be a human comes with biology.
We are essentially
embedded into our environment.
Both the masculine's hunter mind and the feminine gathering body
are aspects of our beingness that are still encoded into our very cells.
The world where
our instincts evolved looks nothing like the world you and I are familiar with today.
But
our brains are still remarkably similar to those early humans.
After all,
Our ancestors spent well
over 99% of our species evolutionary history living in hunter-gatherer societies.
That is
a thousand times longer than any other way of living.
In comparison,
Our modern society is
the blink of an eye from an evolutionary perspective.
For 10 million years,
Generation
after generation,
Natural selection slowly sculpted the human brain,
Favoring instincts
that were good for our hunter-gatherer ancestors,
Surviving in a complex,
Dynamic environment.
Our emotional brain was handed down to us by our ancestors,
Who lived in a harsh environment.
It
is their lifestyle and the dangers they encountered that our instincts are designed
to address.
The same instincts that helped our prehistoric ancestors to survive and eventually
thrive are with us today.
Our memory reaches deeply into the past and our bodies remember.
Bring your attention back to your body.
Feel its connection to wandering and exploring.
It is boundless.
Feel your body in rhythm to life itself.
Experience the flow.
Mold with it.
Hear the melody of flowers in the wind.
There is a natural rhythm to all of life.
Everything moves to that rhythm.
Everything goes with that flow.
Wise is the one who understands
this.
Clever is the one that uses it.
Stay with your body for as long as you desire,
And open your eyes when you are ready.
