Five ways to awaken your Kidney Consciousness so you can walk, run, balance, and climb stairs, with deep vitality and fluid ease.
. . . our external skeletal-muscular system guides our external movement through space, organs occupy our inner space and therefore guide our internal movement.
Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen
One morning, I awoke unable to walk freely. With each step I kept feeling stabbing pains in my left hip – deep in the front, and depending on my weight shift, to the back and left of my hip. I know specifically that the kidneys are the underlying support for the legs. Here is some other information.
According to Traditional Chinese Medicine and other sources, organs are where we store emotions, our inner feelings often guide us into outer action. Kidneys are part of our elimination system and are responsible for removing toxins, purifying blood and producing urine as liquid waste from our bodies. Energetically the Kidneys support our instinctive alertness. Emotionally, Kidneys store energy about our feelings of progeny. According to Dr. John Upledger, the kidney holds the life force.
The underside of an organ is the support surface. When lying on your back, the underside of your organ is resting on your skeleton and receiving support from the earth. When lying on your front, your organs hang like chandeliers down towards the earth, again giving a sense of weight, volume, and gravitas to your torso. Focusing on the organ, brings it into your field of consciousness and gives it a gentle massage and activates tonicity, thereby increasing its functionality.
1) Hold a water balloon or hot water bottle
Organs are round and have weight and volume. We access flow of weight, needed for weight shifts via our organs. If you don’t have much volume in your torso, or much sensory information around organs you can gain a sense of weight and volume through holding water balloons in your hands.
2) Look at images, Feel them.
Images help orient the organ within our body. The Kidney has a vertical axis, and enables you to orient with the vertical pull of gravity. You can feel your kidneys by putting your hands on your back where your ribs end.
The right kidney is just at the lower border of 12 rib near the third lumbar vertebra and is lower than the left because of the location of the liver. The horizontal difference doesn’t matter for your intended connectivity.
By looking at images of the kidneys, we see their location, form and function. Notice how the Left Kidney overlaps the spleen in front, and its relationship to the stomach and pancreas, and descending colon. Notice the relationship of your kidneys to your rib cage, their nearness to your spine, the location above your pelvis and arch of your foot. See the connection to the psoas muscle (your primary hip flexor).
See the kidney meridian.
3) Connect with the Kidney Meridian
The kidney meridian ends in the arch of your foot. Sitting, reach forward and press the centre of your foot with your thumb, then trace a line from your foot up to your kidney. If you cannot reach your foot with your hand, use the big toe of your opposite foot to press the kidney point. Use your imagination to draw the connecting line up your leg until you can touch your kidney. Create the relationship between your kidney and your leg down to the centre of your foot.
4) Wake up your Kidneys
Through tone, organs begin to resonate and can lose their sluggishness if they are logey. One way to stimulate and energize an organ is to hiss as you exhale.
Intentionally place your hand over your kidney, as you exhale and hiss, imagine you are blowing your kidney up like a balloon. Can you feel your kidney consciousness in your hand? Only “blow up” your kidney about 3 times so as not to lose a sense of your kidney.
Now lie on your back, or nestle back into your chair. Are you more aware of your kidney now?
Initiate from your kidney and allow your legs to drop from your knees from side to side, is 1 side easier?
5) Moving – Balance and walking
Standing on 2 legs. In your mind’s eye see the relationship of your kidney to the centre of your foot – the kidney meridian. As you exhale, initiate from your left kidney and shift your weight to your left leg, aligning your kidney overtop the kidney meridian point in the centre of your foot. Release your right foot, seeing the relationship of your floating foot to the right kidney.
Stand on both feet reconnecting the kidney meridians. Repeat the shift to the right, initiating from the right kidney.
Every step you make see your kidney aligning on top of the kidney meridian point in your foot.
Locomoting with kidney consciousness is an amazing exploration in deep support for fluid moving and balancing. I have been practicing Kidney Consciousness in all my functional activities for a month and a half and I have found that this practice has slowed down my pace, but in so doing, I am pain free, my muscles are getting stronger, and I arrive with ease awareness of my deep internal support.
