The alarm goes off, a hand goes sideways, finds the phone and stays there. Eyes are still closed, and already you know who wrote overnight, what happened in the world and how many tasks are waiting by eleven. Your legs under the blanket have not moved once.
Between sleep and the first thought there is a short window in which the body is still open and responsive. In most women it is occupied by other people's news. What that costs, and what to do with those five minutes instead, is explained by Peruquois, a leading World Music performer in Australia, musician, composer, and the author and facilitator of personal development trainings for women, who has worked with the female body and voice for three decades.
She is blunt about the phone: “That is the worst thing you can do. The body needs love, it needs touch.”
What the skipped window costs
“We stop feeling ourselves, we move from the world of dreams, where the body was asleep, straight into the world of thoughts, without connecting to our body,” she explains.
The practical consequence is simple. The whole day is then built on shallow breathing and decisions made in the head. The body works as transport in that arrangement: it carries you, it gets fed when somebody remembers, and it gets noticed when it starts to hurt. A woman who lives that way for years reaches forty and cannot answer the elementary question of what she wants. The signals are being sent. The receiver has been off for a long time.
There is a second side to it. A body that gets no attention stops feeling beautiful. Not looking. Feeling. No amount of mirror checking substitutes for that, because the body senses beauty from the inside, and only when it is handled with tenderness.
The morning practice, step by step
The practice is so simple that the first time it feels like you did nothing. It is done lying down, before you get up.
First the palm passes softly along the throat, down to the center of the chest. The jaw lets go, the mouth relaxes. This is a slow, loving stroke, four times, and it releases what collected overnight in the throat and the chest.
Then the right palm rests at the center of the chest, and you simply look for the pulse under it. “It is wonderful if, on waking, we can feel our pulse, our own inner rhythm of life,” says Peruquois. The pulse may not appear straight away, and then the warmth of the palm is enough.
The left palm rests low on the belly, below the navel, on the female center. Then the breathing starts. Inhale through the nose into the lower belly, deep enough that the belly rounds and pushes the palm up. Exhale through the mouth, free, with sound if you like. Four times.
Then four breaths into the ribcage: the ribs open sideways, the chest lifts, the right palm rises with it. Exhale with sound again, so that the chest feels the vibration.
Then the two parts join into a wave. The inhale starts low, the belly fills, the air keeps rising, the chest fills. On the exhale it reverses: the chest lowers first, then the lower belly. A few waves like that and the body wakes up whole, rather than head first.
If you want to add to it, there is one more movement: on the inhale gently gather and draw in the yoni, the female center, hold for a moment, and on the exhale release it completely, letting the hips soften. Three times is enough.
Why the belly and the heart
The two points are not chosen at random.
The lower belly is a woman's ground. Breathing into it tells the body a simple thing: I am here, I am inside myself, I am alive. Without that lower point any morning begins with a slight hovering above your own life.
The heart governs sensitivity, how much sensation is available to you across a day. “The heart is born for love,” says Peruquois, and if the connection to it is not built, it cannot pass on its signals. Then everything a woman feels in her chest is tension and tightness.
Together the two points give the thing the practice exists for: a day lived inside the body.
What the morning sets up
It can sound like a pleasant little ritual, something on the level of tea by the window. The difference is that the morning sets the register for the entire day.
A body woken by touch and deep breathing is already breathing low by nine. It reacts more slowly to anything abrupt, holds its calm longer in a conversation, notices tiredness earlier and asks for a break before the strength is gone. A woman in that register makes decisions from a different place and spends far less on reassembling herself after every small unpleasantness.
A body pulled upright by a news feed enters the day slightly wound. That becomes the background and it does not go anywhere: by lunch you are irritated by a line at the register, by evening at your own family, and before bed you pick up the phone again because calming down on your own no longer works. The circle closes, and the next morning starts in the same place.
What women notice after two weeks
Women who try it usually report three things, and none of them is about spirituality.
The back and neck hurt less by evening, because the body remembers to breathe downward several times a day. It becomes clearer what you want, and that applies to entirely ordinary matters, from food to who you spend the evening with. And the most unexpected one: the morning rush disappears, even though there are now five minutes less to get ready.
The explanation is simple. Rushing usually comes from a mismatch. When the head is already inside eleven tasks and the body is still in bed, everything inside starts pushing. When both are in the same place, there is nobody left to push.
If you want more of the body in your mornings, Peruquois has a course called Special Women's Morning Dance Practice. You will find it on her website under Courses.
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