One exercise in the Shintaido warm-up routine is called hip rotations. All you do pretty much is swivel your hips while gazing in the distance. The first year I practiced, I noticed a teacher seemed to unconsciously do hip rotations when he was guiding other students, and that it seemed to create connection, or heighten his ability to support the sword or karate exercise they were doing. Sometimes he had everyone doing hip rotations between activities, which seemed to create cohesion among the participants.

This will sound odd, but the rotating hips, when walking very relaxed like seaweed, can pull you toward emotional destinations as well as toward people you practice with. After leaving California in 2007, I attended a meditation workshop on Normandy Beach. On Easter, in the process of warming up before the first class, the hip rotations led me to the sand buried remains of a WWII ship, just as the sun was rising. After the workshop was long over, I returned to the beach, and the swiveling hips located the American cemetery, not from the road where there are printed signs, but from the shore where it is scarcely visible. Back in California, it led to an unfamiliar WWII memorial near Golden Gate Bridge.

When your body is very relaxed and loose, there are sudden sensations, as though the destination were a magnet and your hips were a metal powerfully drawn to the magnet. It's as though the koshi, the area of the body cradled by the hips, were activated and becomes receptive to the surroundings.

The last couple of weeks, the walking like seaweed with the rotating hips has been like having a guided tour. (I experiment more inside or in the dark to avoid attracting attention with the drunken-like movement!) The body has divining hips, a rather big, affecting, and hard-to-grasp experience.