As we explore, we find that the body is full of layer upon layer of extraordinary, ancient, ancestral power – four billion years of adaptation and embodied knowledge – and we start to anchor this understanding of shared ancestry and vast evolutionary timescales in the actual feeling of the body itself. Our perception of time and space shift: we feel the fact that we are giant organisms of mind-boggling complexity, made of water, rock, and air; and more and more we sense and feel the immensity of past eons right now, in the present moment. Our deepening sense of ourselves, our minds and our bodies, grants us a deepening sense of the living world and our continuity with it, and eventually, at a certain point, we come back to a very simple and natural form of worship of life itself.

The purpose of this work on a physical level is simply to become a properly developed human being. To undo much of the conditioning we have received from our overly bio-phobic culture, and to pick up the process of physical and cognitive development where we left off sometime during childhood. We have been gifted – by the hard work of our ancestors – with the keen eyesight, grip and pulling strength, agility and spatial skills of a primate; the undulating spine, powerful neck, arms and explosive hind legs of a quadruped; the grasping fingers and toes, and the contralateral “opposite-arm-and-leg” locomotor pattern of a reptile; a fishy torso wrapped in thick sheets and cables of spiralling muscle. A segmented body structure built around a peristaltic central tube, and the fundamental existence as an oozing, quivering, rippling, pulsating, breathing bag of mostly-water. Each and every aspect of our inheritance is a great strength that can be developed if we choose.

Becoming familiar with patterns we share with other creatures also helps us discover and appreciate the many great abilities we have that are truly unique to human beings. Gesture, mimicry, dance, and theatre; ritual, music, song and language; storytelling, myth-making, play and endless creativity; a lifelong ability to learn, a brain that can change itself and a mind whose potential is still largely unknown, and which most of us barely begin to realise.

With a basic understanding of comparative anatomy and the neuroscience of body awareness and empathy between species, we can begin to link the modern body-based spiritual traditions like Yoga and Daoism with older traditions of ancestor worship and animal mimicry practiced by indigenous cultures throughout history all over the world. We can recognise that the sense of the body is the fundamental seat of the self through which we feel the rest of the world, and that this sense is “plastic”, and able to be developed throughout our lifetimes. We can then consciously develop this sense in ways that improve and enrich our lives and our appreciation of who and what we are, where we come from, and where we might go from here.

In the womb each and every one of us had gills, a tail, webbed fingers and toes. We are the descendants of microscopic worms! Of ancient fish, that learned to walk and breathe air. Beyond health or rehabilitation or anything else, the main purpose of ancestral movement is just to help us remember.