If you’re receiving this via an email, coming to the Substack app or its website will give you a much nicer viewing experience! From your email, clicking on the Audio below will enable that, I believe. Narelle x
Practicing Yoga is part of how I know myself.
It is both my Dharma, and my ongoing self enquiry.
The reasons it fell away from me for a time - or I from it - are many.
What I reference below, is the result of a constellation of traumatic events.
But it is not the whole Story . . .
Yes, you can Listen to me reading this Post to you, or read for yourself below.
And enjoy the images of spine, reflected in Sand Language.
December 24th, 2022
Quinoa and Rice Cakes, topped with something soft. I’m sitting on the couch, laughing with my best friend who’s cooking in the kitchen, slapping things around, in a good imitation of the 3 Stooges. He always does this. Waggles his hips and slapsticks the saucepans. It always makes me laugh. And, five years on from the hide and shrink and self abandonment required to survive a (different) clinically psychopathic abusive relationship, I treasure these laughs. This joy. This spontaneous delight. With the man I’ve known for near half a century.
I’ve come home.
And then it happens.
Slow motion. I bite into a hard bit of rice in the ‘cake’. And suddenly there’s something loose and rollicking in my mouth that shouldn’t be there.
My back tooth. Lower right. Down to the gum.
My laughter stops as the chill sluices through me.
‘I think I’ve broken my tooth’, I say.
Sometime in 1972
'Stand up straight' she tells me for the umpteenth time,
pins hanging out of her mouth.
I look in the mirror in front of me, the fabric of my dance costume draped
over my body, all a-swirl.
I look straight to me . . . or do I?
'I am, Mum’ . . .
Silence.
I am 13 years old.
January 2022
I’m rolling in seagrass. This being whom I love and with whom I experience intersentience and interbeing. My best friend is filming the lovemaking of undulating viridian fronds entwined with my body. I am in the kaleidoscopic state of consciousness that is the everywhen. Until I roll off the seagrass roots-sand-mud shelf and onto something Hard. Shell? Rock? Who knows. But my left ribs are fucked. Yet: I keep on rolling. Semi oblivious. Not wanting to cease this tidal interweave of human and Other.
January 31st, 2023
Breathe in, h o l d, breathe out. Repeat.
Penthrox swirls through my alveolar spaces and the delicious drug crosses the two cell respiratory membrane in my lungs and into my bloodstream to enable me to be present here, whilst my gum is cut and my tooth excavated.
Six months later, I’ll be told my facial bones - and teeth - are demineralising. Seemingly dissolving.
It might be time for that DEXA scan . . .
It might be time, to check on my spine.
My spine is a long curving river. In scoliosis, and indeed, in all spinal terrains, it is important to sense the course of the river, the riverbanks, the surrounding country. To encounter the inflow of the tributaries of the limbs, and observe their impact on the course of the river-spine.
this tumbling calligraphy of my strong, fluid spine
Present Time
When the river floods its banks and seeks to return to its fluid field of Source
I was diagnosed with AIS (adolescent idiopathic scoliosis) at 13 years old. An elite level dancer and already a dedicated yoga practitioner, I was fortunate to find an orthopaedic surgeon back then, who thought my best bet, was to ‘never stop dancing, never stop doing yoga’.
Except, of course, I did. At least, periodically. Particularly, in the last 8 years.
Trauma will do that. Shock catapults the relational field of psyche and soma into fragmentation.
I had two extreme traumas. One generational and familial. One relational.
More than five decades of deliberate and conscious cultivation of what is now trendily called ‘embodiment’, diffused and later evaporated. Became foreign and unreachable to me. Where once the ecosystems and architecture of my body, were intimately and directly felt and known in their entangled relationship with the tissues of the land and sea, there was No Thing.
Gone.
2018
The rebuilding of my visceral sense of myself was initially disorienting and slow. How could I have become so lost to myself? So unreachable. So un-sense-able. Self-abandonment to the degree of cognitive dissonant dis-embodiment. A relational requisite. My work mocked, actively undermined. My self vaporised. Smokes-and-mirrored.
How did I find my way back? Locate myself, my precious body, my fabric re-membered re-cognised with Earth? With infinite self compassion. With tenderness. With Love. With Walking, (probably thousands kilometres by now as I consider), walking, and more walking. Breathing. re-learning porosity of the human and the All.
On the mat;
Press into the heel, spiral the force up through the shafts of the long bones of my legs, into the coxafemoral joint (hip) and into my innominate (pelvis), cross the sacroiliac joint, up into my lumbar spine. Through the pillars of my large intestine, the tropical forest of my lungs riding atop, through the central hilus of the lung and r e a c h through the spirals of the upper limb, letting that reverberate and impact the delicacy of my rib basket and into my thoracic spine.
Sweat pours.
Tears stream.
I’m back.
There is more to this Story.
Much more to the burgeoning journey through a lifetime of significant spinal asymmetry (scoliosis) and its current osteoporotic expression.
I have much to share with you from a lifetime’s Practice and Teaching in yoga, breath, embodied anatomy, developmental movement patterns. And information to speak about this that is my circuitous meandering bony midline and its seemingly crumbling cliff face.
Please join me, walk with me.
You can read a little about Yoga for Scoliosis via the button below. That will take you to a curation of 8 Articles.
There are also a few Presentations on back pain, and on yoga within spinal asymmetry via the second button.
Narelle Carter-Quinlan is a Master Teacher with 50 years experience presencing students in the songline of eco-somatics, yoga, dance, scoliosis and Consciousness. An Elder in the everywhen of eco-relationship, she expresses her life through body-land photographic image, the transmission that is written and spoken word, and deep movement. Her lineages include decades of formal biomedical academia and research, Iyengar yoga, Dance, three decades formal walking through Transformation with her Spiritual Teacher, and over six decades deliberate immersion on Country. She is Australian. Foundress and Steward of The Saltwater Songlines Project, Narelle is devoted to the loving woven fabric of all sentience.
All images are Copyright ©Narelle Carter-Quinlan 2023
Copyright is an acknowledgement of the sacred.
Thank You