Keeping Daughter on the Mountaintop Simple

My main emphases when I teach Daughter on the Mountaintop are: 1) synchronization of the feet and hands, and 2) keeping the fingertips pointed upward for most of the hand motion.

Besides using Justin’s wording that the movement starts low to go high, I often comment, “The hands start rising only when the weight begins to shift forward.” The focus on the feet – where the attention should be – also gives the sense of the lower body (legs) leading and the upper body following, even though both parts operate simultaneously. The hands reach their highest point at the top intersection of the circles when the weight is completely forward. They only begin moving downward as the weight begins to shift back.

To avoid what Justin calls the elbows aiming outward like arrows, I remind students to keep their fingertips pointing upward for most of the movement, with the wrists gently cocked and without tension. Fingertips begin to point downward to start the next set of circles only when the bottom intersection of the circles is reached and the weight is nearly all on the back foot. As we begin shifting the weight back, I say, “Up, up, up” in reference to the fingertips. This keeps the elbows close to the sides of the body and again reinforces the concept that the hand movement is almost entirely wrists and fingers, with no upper arm involvement.

A Torus* Inside Daughter on the Mountaintop

Carmen commented on the torus as connecting the energy between things and between phases within the self. This movement mimics what we are at the atomic level. Let the whole being be awake so it works in harmony. Cross your hands until you make an “X”. Feel the polarity between the hands all the way up. Can you simultaneously feel the circle going around the waist? When the hands are in a line at the high point of the movement, just before they cross, feel the dissolution, no-thing, perfect clarity. Then the hands cross, a reconnection comes, clarity moves through your whole being, and new energy is created. Energy pours down after your hands cross and the hands follow it. According to Dr. Karl Pribram, “We only know this world in relation to movement.” If you imagine the hands tracing a Kyoto-brown colored jug, what do you feel at the base of the jug? Follow the energy up; follow the “fountain-up feel” between the hands the whole way up. What do you feel when the hands cross? There is a marriage between the self and the Divine; hands then cross and create anew. In your stillness, you are found.

*Torus: 1. A surface generated by rotating a circle about an axis that is in the same plane as the circle but does not intersect it. A torus resembles a donut and is a subtype of toroid – The American Heritage® Science Dictionary, copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

For more information on a torus, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torus. To see how a torus moves, see http://www.dr-mikes-maths.com/4d-torus.html