The Realm of Muscle, Connection, and Resource is an Embodied Realm that’s active and potent within the collective consciousness. It’s a space that can provide incredible growth, but often, that growth comes through breakdown.

Think of how your physical muscles are built – through the slight tearing of muscle fiber so it can knit back together stronger.

The Muscle Realm is often experienced the same way.

This is where you create rupture and repair – within yourself and with others. Get it wrong, then get it right, and then get it more right. Connect to people, communities, places, and resources, and learn to trust in safety and stability. Stretch, integrate, and embody your capacity to be with instability.

The good news is, you’re made to stretch.

Growth in the Muscle Realm is not always comfortable, but it will keep stretching you toward a more loving relationship with yourself, others, and resources (reciprocal sources of support).

The Muscle Realm is steady and intentional, just like stretching and building physical muscle. When you’re curious about or called to work with the energy in this Realm, you have the opportunity to radically transform your:

• Capacity for connection, not only towards sources of support but with people and in the community;
• Safety and security in relationships and with resources;
• Ability to accept and steward the resources you’re in relationship and community with.

This post is a guide through the Muscle Realm and an invitation to explore the possibilities of this Realm of your energy body.

Healing Attachment: Tendons and Ligaments

Physically, your tendons and ligaments are bone-to-muscle and bone-to-bone connections, where your foundational (bone) energies become relational.

This is where your Realm of Muscle, Connection, and Relationship meets the Realm of Bone and Foundation. Working with your tendons and ligaments helps you connect to resources that will support your foundational energy as it moves into relationship. 

This part of your Muscle Realm is your foundation for attachment. It illuminates your attachment style to a specific resource and how you feel about your relationship with it.

Holding Steady: Stabilizing Muscles

Stabilizing muscles are not a specific group of muscles but ones that serve a particular function; these muscles engage at one joint to support movement in another.

On a physical level, they’re the most critical muscles for support and holding your body upright — they hold you steady while other muscles move you.

In the Realm of Muscle, Connection, and Relationship, this group of muscles energetically performs a similar function. The stabilizing muscles create the potential for shifting by providing a sense of safety and support. They’re what you lean on to keep you stable when your connections and relationships change.

Awakening Discernment: Guardian Muscles

Four specific muscles (and groups of muscles) play a huge role in your capacity to make decisions that impact relationships and connections to resources. It’s your tongue, rotator cuffs, diaphragm, and psoas muscles.

They called themselves the guardian muscles when they came forward as a group, and it’s quite fitting for their role and responsibility within the Muscle Realm.

When your guardian muscles are awake and energetically regulated, they support your “responsible adult” and Warrior archetypes. When they are dysregulated, they can be energetically overly responsible and will express themselves as the archetype of the Martyr and the Victim.

These muscles sense the secure attachment and stability within your energetic musculature and move energy so you can show up with wisdom in relationship.

Intuiting Correctness: Primal Muscles

Primal muscles are your ring muscles or sphincters. These are a series of internal and external muscles connected to the most primitive part of your brain, responsible for the most essential functions of the human body.

Every ring muscle contracts and relaxes simultaneously when working intuitively.

Your ring muscles connect you energetically to your primal response regarding relationship with resources: open or closed, expanded or contracted, moving towards or away from.

It’s important that you witness each of these muscles as a separate entity, and also understand that these muscles will activate as a group to help you feel a primal sense of what is correct and right in relationship.

Trusting Connection: Smooth and Cardiac Muscle

Smooth and Cardiac muscle knows itself as the “unconscious movers” of the Muscle Realm. Physically, your heart is made of cardiac muscle tissue. Smooth muscle is present throughout your gastrointestinal, reproductive, urinary, vascular, and respiratory systems. Because of this physical arrangement, there’s a large overlap between smooth and cardiac muscle and your Organ Realm.

These visceral muscles connect to your subconscious brain and autonomic nervous system. Their movement, energy, and relational patterns of connection move under the surface, often outside your conscious awareness.

The relational patterns and connections energetically held by your smooth and cardiac muscle feel automatic and so deeply embedded that you don’t think to question them or even notice them. Listening to your unconscious movers often requires building trust in the rest of your Muscle Realm so that deep fears and uncertainties surrounding releasing long-held subconscious patterns decrease and you’re able to shift them.

Moving With Life: Skeletal Muscle

The skeletal muscles in the Muscle Realm perform multiple roles. They can be stabilizing muscles, which hold you steady as your relationships change, or guardian muscles, which lend discernment, or simply know themselves as “conscious movers.”

Your conscious movers (as opposed to the unconscious movers in your cardiac and smooth muscle tissue) are the skeletal muscles that do the heavy lifting and big moving. The energy of these muscles activates when you shift your physical and energetic body from potential energy to kinetic energy. This is when you activate your skeletal muscle’s ability to move, or as we like to say energetically, to shift.

Your conscious movers rely on the energetic work you’ve done with your tendons and ligaments, stabilizing muscles, guardian muscles, ring muscles, and smooth and cardiac muscle to go from “having the potential to shift” and getting yourself energetically ready, to actually doing the work of moving. This is the place in your Muscle Realm where tangible results in connection, relationship, community, and resource show up.

Creating a New Shape: Fascia

Fascia, like tendons and ligaments, is unique. It’s not muscle fiber like most of the tissues we’ve talked about; instead, it’s connective tissue. And in fact, it’s not really a component of the Muscle Realm at all.

Fascia is a meta-system. It doesn’t belong to one of the Realms of Embodiment, it belongs to all of them. At the same time, it encompasses all of them and belongs to none.

Energetically, your fascia is your physical connection to the Field. Here, you embody your connection to all there is within you and all there is outside of you. There is no beginning or end and no linearity. 

As a physical structure, it is a complex weaving of layers of fiber in multiple directions. It holds the shape and the movement of the muscle and viscera. Fascia is also the interstitium and reservoir of fluid in the Fluid Realm and creates many of the places and spaces your organs occupy in the Organ Realm.

It’s a web, a network, that holds the shape you’ve put yourself in, and holds your connection to The Field in that same shape. To hold the shape of your relationships and connections differently, you have to shift your connection to The Field, and vice versa. This is omnidirectional and omnipresent work, but oh so important.

The Realm of Muscle

You have a core organicity within the body, which means that when given a chance, your body will naturally organize toward health. With the understanding that “health” looks and feels different for each and every person. There is no one goal or destination.

The fractal arrangement of The Realms of Embodiment demonstrates this organicity, both within the Realms and between them. Each Realm or part of a Realm plays an integral part in the health of the whole, but none are more important than any other. None sit at the center. It is the sum of all of the parts and, at the same time, none of them. It is organicity itself.

Within the Realm of Muscle, Connection, and Relationship,  each component piece — the tendons and ligaments, stabilizing, guardian, primal, unconscious, and conscious muscles, and fascia — is integral, but none are most important. They build upon one another and simultaneously facilitate shifts in each part that couldn’t exist when viewing this work linearly.

As your shifts in the Muscle Realm are embodied, the Realm will unfurl towards organicity. The other Embodied Realms will also feel what you’re unfolding toward. No Realm is more important than any other; each plays an integral part in the health of the whole. In the health of your energetic anatomy.

Explore more regarding the Embodied Realms on this blog, including a similar guide to The Bone Realm, and The Fluid Realm, and subscribe to my email list for the most timely and collectively relevant discussions in the Realms of Embodiment.