LOVE YOUR BELLY

We as a generation are obsessed with firm bellies, trim tummies and fit bodies. As a result, our soft bellies take more beatings than they would otherwise from our inner critical dialogue and our outer physical punishments. Take a break this Valentine's to honor our bellies. It is time we re-recognised the sacred power the ancients knew we held inside. Evolve Asia is pleased to present A Cross Cultural Review of the Belly's Sacred Power excerpted from "The Woman's Belly Book" by Lisa Sarasohn

• The Japanese use a single word, hara, to name the belly both as a physical region of your body and as your connection to Source energy. Your hara extends from the base of your ribs to the upper margin of your pubic bone, deepening inward to your spine. 
  
• The Chinese see the belly as a field to be cultivated, a field that provides nourishment vital to life. An ancient chinese name for this point translates as "Gate of the mysterious female". 

• Among the !Kung tribe in Africa, the belly is known to contain the n/um or "healing medicine", the vital life force that shamans stir and heat up with vigorous, ecstatic dancing. This life force boils up from the belly and the base of the spine, moving throughout the dancer's body. The energy is then available for healing others in the community. 
  
  
• The Sudanese understand the life force, semangat,  to the focused within the navel: from that point it permeates the entire body.
  
• In Indian and Tibetan traditions of yoga, the serpentine life force called kundalini lies coiled in the belly-centred kanda. Three major energy pathways or nadis- the sushumna, ida and pingala nadi- rise from this source, spiraling upward through the body and generating the spinning wheels of energy known as chakras. 
  
  
• In Asia, Africa and Europe, practitioners of alchemy aspired to match the potency of a woman's womb. They attempted to replicate women's procreative power, the self-generating source of life, in the crucible that symbolized a woman's belly. 
  
  
• In the Sufi tradition, the mystical expression of Islam, kath refers to the belly's role in spiritual practice. The whirling and spinning of Sufi dances concentrates awareness within the body's center, opening the way to union with the divine.