Reception and going free: Session with M

M has red sticky eyes. The lid of one eye is nearly stuck together with pus. He is on his own in his chair, a sea of activity going on around him from which he seems immune or un-involved. Yet this very separation- as if he were in a bubble all of his own- is also a dangerous situation for such a boy.
He is left to his own devices- and his own devices for self-care are to encapsulate himself in his own auto-protection of nurture. It is hard for a hungry boy to feed himself, and almost too painful to witness. He does this by ramming his fist deep into his mouth. He does this soon after we have lowered him down in the hoist on to the mat and soon after he had began crying from the pain and outrage of having his eyes vigorously scrubbed by a well-meaning teacher just before we wheel him into the treatment room.

I feel two emotions vying for attention in M and wrapped tightly around one another; sadness and anger.

There is nothing to say to M about this rather than to acknowledge in simple words this fact. Then the silence of the first phase of the treatment must take its course. His body is bound tight; a muscular tangle of resistance that is writhing up from contact with the mat. Nothing can rest easy and any small descent of a part of his body into the possible support of the ground becomes a trigger for a re-flux motion in his body- as if his whole body were vomiting itself back out from any environmental nurture, trying to  pack itself back into its own support only to then find the "outsider" within as if each  fascia, muscular, bone and organ association were again an intrusion of self by "other" as this self multiplied and separated indefinitely within.

So this was the first impression; a boy divided between need and rejection- who was slipping and hiccuping out of  any consistency of arrival, exiting from any kind of integration; caught between sadness and anger.

There is a sense that this rejection of outer care has gone into a kind of auto-immune free fall that creates a counter-current which is catapulting out any vestiges of his early life tendency for rooting towards a nurturing other. He cannot trust his own needs and repels them in one spasm after another as he reels and groans on the mat with a musculature armour that is like paper scorched in the sun and wind until it is burnt hard. He is weathering this as if he were the only survivor on a desolate patch of land; the sole survivor of a traumatic air-plane crash where the point of collision; the point of impact was still continuing internally as bit by bit he comes apart. To witness a child  writhing in this way, unable to take nurture from two adults so close by, is hard to bare. But  the first stretch of the treatment is simply  to bare it and to give witness to this desolation that he feels.

There is nothing more to say now to M who is altogether not present to receive words right now; as a baby is not ready yet to receive food that has not been partly metabolised and made ready for digestion. M is unable to digest very much and so we remain a basic container in which whatever he needs to act out can be done safely.

This acting out is the only thing that will allow the turgid material of undigested thoughts, feelings and actual food to begin to circulate once more, and it needs to come out in all the gargled anger and dismay of this 10 year old boy. This is a natural reaction I think to the fact that this boy is now tube- fed via his stomach having refused orally the quantity of food deemed necessary for his suitable growth. But a 10 year old child growing on the nurture of food that has been forced in, brings up deep problems of authenticity and of how this child feels his own body to either be or not to be, an extension of his push towards vitality. The tube then does not erase the initial issues of why he refused food and of the need to address ways of attuning to his biological need for food so that it is the end point of his creative and imaginative calling in relation to a wider world of co-dependant growth rather than something again and again imposed as an abstract law is imposed.

So between us Katsura and I encircle the child and create this neutral frame in which he can feel back through into his own sense of disturbance so that our non-reactivity becomes a mirror in which he can know these feelings. Only when shared and heard by other caring adults without it being acted on, changed or disallowed, can such complex metabolic, physiological and emotional knots be held for long enough that they become a real experience. Only as a real and witnessed experience can they have a chance to transform,

We create this neutral frame through our gaze and also through a level open-palmed contact that rises and falls with M's breath whilst creating a kind of porous skin or envelope that takes the self-care role that he assigns to himself away from his own anguished responsibility. It's important in this phase of the treatment that we remain neutral and so not subject to waves of reactive emotion or escalating dramas abut the plight of such an unmet child. For this in affect would interrupt out ability to actually meet him here and now where he is and to give him permission to voice and act out these feelings of being choked by his own unheard voice.

There are different levels of disturbance in this knot. First there is the spasms of pain that M experiences in his bowels and intestines and that create the root of this re-flux so that his breath is rising up into his chest and head with this dry hot wind that is collecting into this redness around his eyes and burning his throat. In comparison his abdomen, hips and sacrum are cold with a muddy turgid feel and  he is arching and lifting his lower back and pelvis off the ground almost like a fish curling on dry land trying desperately to breathe in this harsh and inhospitable climate; literally a fish out of water.

What we  can do  as touch therapists is to create an attuned sense of support so that as he writhes and first this portion and than that portion of his body arches up away from the mat, we are there to meet his falling, catching in and around his lower back, chest or head as it falls back through. This creates a sense of multi-levelled slow descent and so a kind of filtering system is established between the abrupt rise and fall of his hyper-mobility into something where there is an anticipatory glide in being met first here and then there. Space is also given immediately once a portion of his body has touched back down into the mat so that there is this pulsar on-off contact that begins to pace and extend this buckling rise and fall into something that is more like a sweeping through; an articulated undulation that begins to allow for a stretching out and a turning and cohering back within. The polarities of these two positions- of up and down- are gradually merged so that they are threaded through one another and M quickly begins to listen and work with this threading dance; to hear it and to shape it in the moment it is occurring. It is almost as if between Katsura and myself there is this gentle indication; like a catching or holding into shape as a playful possibility which each time after its moment of use is let go of again. This is the playful wakefulness that we are framing and modelling for M  by acting like small moments of punctuation; brackets of safe pause and of human witnessing to his on-going urges towards continual release.

Within the patterning of this gradual circulation there is a rising and falling into uprightness and back down into lying again now on his side. In this position he then tips back and forth between my hands along the bone spine at the back of his body and Katsura's hands at his visceral front, M is beginning to articulate the pain and disturbance through his voice. Again he slams his fist deep inside his mouth almost ramming it into his wind-pipe. Yet as he manipulates this huge bolus that literally will not go down; cannot be swallowed, he uses it to stimulate his vocal chords. In this throttled gargle he is making sounds deep inside his throat, now and again shifting his fist so that more air comes through and the sound suddenly intensifies as if its subject drew closer.

M is now really into something- playing through the blockage and its momentary release through his strangled vocal chords and displaying this sense of stuck-ness and the necessity for something to come through however eruptive that might be, as a psyche-soma indication of his whole state.

There is more work to do now; a combination of the neutral holding frame together with a more physical approach to stimulation so that the on-off contact becomes in these chosen moments, a drumming reverberation on his chest that modulates his body instrument as the groans move into a staccato reverberation of multiple feedback that he begins to play with. There is something like a growling; an animal growl which is that of a wounded but enraged creature who is literally going through the motions of leaping out of their encapsulated skin.This is why it is so important that Katsura and I are there to act as a temporary skin in this moment of leaping out in order to catch this rage and  in a sense to house it so that the call reverberates back and so is witnessed. In that way it becomes a voice worth hearing; a body worth shaping and M in turn hears and feels back this indication of self validation in whatever situation is unfolding.

Even as M demonstrates this enraged sense of  his self-inflicted bolus in his throat; one that is mirrored around his bowels- so that nothing properly goes in and nothing properly goes out, something is shifting in that incrementally, as  Katsura and I become the neutral platform or stage for his performative anguished state, he begins to be able to rely on this ground little by little and to give his muscular contortions into a frame not of his own holding. There is the out-breath heard as a sign for the first time; a lingering of a groan so that it becomes a calibrated hum. I join this hum at a very low decibel and there begins to be a weaving in and out of sound vibrations. Katsura says that she sees what before was grey clearing into other colours that are distinguishable and not so mixed up in one another.

We begin to work at a deeper motor level using the simple on-off touch to create a sense of binding at M's back, at his knee and ankle and at his chest. There is a sens of describing a pattern that is a spreading outwards- a kind of flourishing or reaching out within the clear support and frame of our holding.

It is only safe to grow if there is a clear rooting. Between us we trace a pattern that M is describing  to us in his responsiveness and initiation as he lies supported between us on his back. It is a circulatory pattern that roots down through an opening of his groin into his left knee and leg and then deeply planting into the ground through his foot that is now held level. It then rises out the other side and travels back up and through his abdomen, diaphragm and ribs- channelled by the light yielding touch of Katsura as if  this were the side where the plant flowered. It rises into his face and his eyes are now open and mobile, blinking on and off into the pools of this opening as he witnesses being witnessed by Katsura. I support the back of his head and deeply into his upper back. Then trace an opening with my finger pads from the centre of his chest outwards over his heart. I also work lightly as if tracing an embroidery over the top of his head and over his eyes, spreading outwards to the sides of his face. I further work delicately at points either side of his throat and then again warm his chest with my open palm and secure a central still position at his lower abdomen. Now there is some more versatility in movement with an opening of his legs and a creasing and un-creasing of his knees in order to open the groin area which feels to be the root of this circulatory impetus.

Now with this synergistic patterning established, we all of us follow it through between support and letting go only to revisit the support on the next wave of its manifestation. Between this pulsar organic  holding, M is arranging  himself and indicating and communicating through his tightening and releasing of muscle groups and of  breathing phases his capacity and urge to sit up and then sweep back down again into the vertical and then to arch back up and through . He is looking around himself now with upright posture holding his frame in these mobile adjustments so that internally there is a softness to him; a letting go into this natural human exchange that becomes more and more playful.

Finally there is the time of suspension when we all just hang there in the balance of  this patterning - as if internalising it in the stillness of our company, attending together to the sounds in the room and the sounds within our bodies.

There is a sense that M has touched back into contact- filtering down until like ripples on ripples there is this collection of meeting strands and a catching back through. The catapult-release occurred in his vocal eruptions and in the release of his groin that allowed his lower back and sacrum to finally touch down into contact with the ground. He was able then to receive and utilise the warmth of this conjoint holding between Katsura and myself and to float-fly and suspend in this almost embryonic sac, before converging back into his own muscular impetus now fed through from the breath so that each movement was a supported imaginative calling that was heard and adapted in our role as ground, by Katsura and myself.

A sense of smiling came through even in the anguished displays and perhaps because of them.They were allowed and heeded; they were received and so could then go free.

M- agitation and rest- two sides that need to feel joined

M is flustered and out of sorts as he is shipped through from classroom to therapy room, first raised up like a lopsided flag on a flagpole in his hoist, his head and body slumping over to one side, then lowered mechanically from this hoist onto the mat below.

There are various LSA'a learning on the job, shadowing others who are about to leave and slightly rushedly trying to move this "Object" lump that is M from one position to the next. They are really trying- inbetween other jobs and other eruptions from needly children in the classroom.

M is literally jolted out of one kind of inactivated slumber into another entirely different hyper-alert anxious state. Yet his body is still considered baggage to be transported in the least possible amount of time so that scarce hands can return to other committments in the classroom.

K is assisting me today and helping in many practical ways to begin with, because I have twisted my back and certain movements are very painful.

M is now down on the mat and it is a race against time to slot in the adjoining matts to either side of him before he tips and rolls onto the hard floor beneath him. Just in time the mats slotted into place like a jigsaw puzzle to create the level gorund for his eratic first movement. This is a kind of cry of resistance and M is becoming panicky and upset even as he is fostering the momentuum to move against all these forces acting upon him.

It is an outcry of rebellion and an angry rebuff. His feet are still masked inside the plastic splinths that he wears underneath his outsized shoes and that circle the soles of his feet too, binding leg, ankle and foot together as one single contour. This is not much good for feeling the nuanced differences of  the ground beneath; yet the thinking is probably that given he is in a wheelchair, that these nuanced pressure points of standing and walking and feeling into the give and take of  a density of expected ground, is not open to him. I think this is a mistake; an oversight in much the same way as M himself is an oversight in some of his assistant carers' minds; somehting to be done to rather than a person that calls for a doing alongside. Play of course is missing in this one way interaction of being done to from the outside or being held together from the outside; an exoskeloton that denies the growth in every gesture, every thought, every emotion that blossomes up over and over again and splays out into a wide net of holding like bursts of scent.

M is on the verge of dissociating out of the grief of his stolen body. It is too early in the session even to speak of a body for there are body parts that beign and end without seeming to touch into one another.

M's sense of himself; the passing sensations and the waves of pulsations withuin his gut and across his muscles is similarily confused, jerking open and closed like the peel of a shot-gun. There is a startle affect on M's face, his eyes alnmost pinned open and his face blank and  locked, messaging back and forth  like a rapid windscreen-wiper, flickering into near constant vibrations of excitation that never know how to switch off and so go on and on indefinitely creating a waxen mannequin of  a boy startled into freeze by the imposition of crisis-filled operations into the semblance of a boy held together and held apart by an outer frame that seems not to address the child within.

I feel terribly upset- but this is not a senitment to indulge in if this state of waxen alert lifelessness is not to be taken as a continual never-ending state. I know that it is not; that M can come back on-line by degrees, little by little like the filtering through of rain through branches that are almost horizontal to the ground. This filtering emergence of sensation and experience is possible when there is a rooting deep enough to support him remaning with a feeling and letting it play through, meander and cris-cross unseen thresholds that bit by bit release groups of muscle and bone that are allowed to drop through this wider support and settle.

Though I am now holding M, having him propped up in my lap with his head in my hands, the true support is as much in an attitude of witnessing- both the pain and disturbance- and this gradual coming through into a filtration of sensitivity. The pulsing becomes known to itself and plays on myriad levels deep in the breath, blood circulation, viscera and muscles and later in the imagination. The propensity to join this with that as sensation sweeps across into the circuits it needs to take in order to open up pathways and trajectories that curve and splay, condense and redistribute. There is something in this movement that describes the swirling of water as it falls and catches; a sense mirrored gradually in M's face as he becomes again a 10 year old boy playing in the ravines of his own body, jumping from positon to position, sweeping and daring himself to  reach up, hover a little mid air and then cruse back down on the wind or on the backtide. He is an active doing boy not a boy done to. Yet it is his ability to take in feeling states and to stay daringly with this, hovering on the edge of his imminant fall, knowing that within this support of me and K, that this is now possible; like a  surfer who trusts the wave to catch him as he crashes and times his crash in order to be caught over and over again until he anticupates this catching in and does it himself, in the way he  breathes and lightens his body against the downward pull of gravity. It is between gravity and the propensity to grow in the opposite direction simultaneously that begins to describe the living thinking and imaginative body.

K takes M's feet, entirely wrapping her hands around these small end-points and giving them a sense of growth or extension even in this cradling certainty. She goes right down to his level and looks back through into his very centre connecting the extremity with this pulsing tide that cruises right through his centre. I sense his eyes brightening and his fine level of responsiveness; this equisite shifting calibaration from one emphasis to another as he leans his head far back in my cupped hands; a mirror image of what K is doing at the other end, and  rest there as he begins opening out as if through an outfolding at the central seam of his body; at the midline of his chest running through his umbilical and up his back through the mideline of his spine and rising over the crown of his head, then back down over his face- his perceptual orifiecs of eyes, nose ears and mouth turning outwards to face us and the world he is in, like a plant turning to face light and water as an automatic yet deeply thought responsiveness; from encapsulation and concentric shell-like protection, to a flowering in which the full beauty of this boy in all his livingness is apparent.

There is a sense of muscle groupings in his shoulder and chest sliding over one another to give way and release patterns of held tension so that bit by bit there is a lowering of his body into contact upon my body and upon the floor. Simulatnaoudlsy and in resonant dance my body is releasing and drifting down wards into this pooled settlement. As this occurs I feel the vibrant yet subtle push of his head and neck in my hands- like a live wire suddenly ignited and this is when he is able and ready to raise his head to the vertical and truly and fully to look around him.

All this time he has already been playing with my hands and fingers; squeezing and unsqueezing them alnost in readinees for this later flexibilty of head and attention. It is as if even when his whole body is imobile; still shocked into a position of startled yet lucid dreaming in which he cannot move for himself or even imagine the motivation needed to do so. Yet through is fingers and hands he is practicing and keeping engaged this propensity to turn things around- to close and open his grip; as if his hand were a seeing organ that can focus through these minute feeling adjustment of his pulsing opening and closing hand..

Now that  he is sitting more vertically, his spine straightened and his head now aligned through his body posture, he is able to make full use of this playful grasp and ungrasp of his hands and fingers and to, as it were, open out his mind and his propensity to feel and think, through this parralel and equivalent motor activity; that becomes for him, like a neurological pulsing.

I lower and raise my arm and dip my fingers down into his reach and then glide them up again. It is like two birds floating and flying around one another . He connects, fingers lacing through fingers, then slips away, I follow him down then stop and glide up. I hover and wait and he too catches onto the wind and glides up to meet me. In this way sporadically and in stops and starts he is reaching further and further and estsblishing musclie constancy in order to maintina a positon and to wait in the epectation and anticatopn of  the game to folow- a game he knows but yet does not quite know how exactly it will play out until he is rght inside it.

I feel smiling on my face in this natural play and M too is initiating and taking turns in this playfullness as his face becomes more soft and animated.

K is matching this playfullness with light yet continual touch- in order to support and ground M deep into her reliable contact so that he can play from up above without risk of falling forever..

I follow this play with my voice and sing a little, modulating tones from high to low, letting them flicker and hover and then deepen into a steady base reverberation. M is making many sounds himself, Some are anguished- like something locked deep within that is now releasing and espcaping, Others are inquisitive yet lighter and fast moving like he is really getting into something that is both deep in his feeling state but also connected to this outward level of play. The two begin to merge- the anguished cut-off level and the playful moment by moment improviataion like his hands circling one another and circling mine. I think this is how the anguish can be acknowledged and brought into veiw- through a level of playfulness that makes it audible and not simply a sink hole disapearing endlessly into itself or into silent submission. He is literally voicing out his concerns.

I tell part pieces of the story about the tree and the bird- as a way to work alongside this body support telling the story of him opening into a connectivity that circulates from the top to the bottom and from the bottom to the top. With K working from his feet upwards and with me working from his head and chest downwards, there is a natural cross-over like tying and retying a bow at the centre of his body in his abdomen and lower back. I warm these areas again- the areas where I first started the treatment when he was identified completely in an all-conssuming anguish that felt then like an uncontainable panic. Now with his greater resources- as if he is being earthed from both ends so that these immense fiirings of energetic life-force can be held and utilized by M himself, there is a sense of great releif. He can now really go with the dream-state necessary for deep levels of integration- throwing back his head fully into my cupped hands and letting go into this immersive listening and sensing  state, then coming back through and sitting suddenly bolt upright, thrusting his head this way and that way as if not wanting to miss a beat in these moments of full  lucid life. So he goes from one state to the other; from the total rest of a lucid sleep to the high energy state of an aggitated aroused level of consciosuness. Too much of either is a tipping point for M into either lulled unboundedness or into concentrated exlossiveness. Both together become a level of engagement and utilization, and this in turn becomes M' style of walking through the world- of pushing down and bouncing back up again into nuanced and responsive relationship.

*His old LSA enters to help us lift hin back into the chair. Her style of dealing with M is direct and no-nonsense. She doesn't use the hoist but simply seats herself very close to M on a stool, scoops him up and leans him into her body before easing him into the wheelchair. He grumbles a little but quickly recoversd and relaxes with her. She clearly has a soft spot for M and this eases and nullifies any discomfort from the manoevre. She carries him literally heart to heart. There is all the difference in the world between a Carer who clearly loves this boy and is therfore at ease, and one who has not yet had the time, experience or permission within life and within the school setting to sit inside this love and so transmit it effortlessly to this boy.

This LSA has now been allocated a different boy to work with. If she could have worked with the new LSAs to impart this simple attitude of seeing M clearly and so allowing oneself time to be moved by him, this would go along way to resolving his periods of deep dissociation.

It is hoped that what me now together with K can do is to stay with a practice of sensitivity in which to remainin a state of noticing these deep qualities that emerge and strengthen where there is heart to heart contact. This kind of level of contact should not be something embarassing or too removed from the practicalities of a school and its program of education. It should underpin all else as the ground conditions out of which everything else arises.


END

Sparks from the ground; Session with M

There is a fullness to M's body today. Not this as a static mass of  body stuff. More an aliveness that is  an enquiry that we are in together. Even with  the occasional slumping and seeming tuning out, there is a waiting; like a pause-gap where something is filtering through. Some kind of  pulsed impact that is being digested and circulated- spread around in this interaction with the breath, touch and sound-making; levels of impact so that  the way in which I touch M is mediated by many kinds of gaseous, synaptic, visceral, digestive and excretory processes and his awareness of these processes as they are happening. These become the feeling states as they rise and become tangible as a point of contact. This then is the exact point of impact that is received just here and now before dissipating or translating into something else. There are levels that at any one moment are the apt levels of this contact boundary. These rise and fall continually and are gauged between the two of us. Where they settle is not known as a predisposition beforehand. The thing is made up along the way. This is the game; the enquiry; how things settle or how they move on.

Is there sentient sensitivity in the finger pads as I make physical contact with M that works its way right through the neural networks as a kind of distributed body-brain? Any point of contact, immediate or delayed- in the time it takes for it to be received- is this. As I write up these notes the same operation is in process. The impact and the feedback of pressing the computer key-pad over and over again in this rhythmic pulse patterns the text; like a resonance or a feeling atmosphere of that session with M now four days ago where under our joint conjured act something was made. Making something together is this entwining; a kind of delicate knitting that passes in and out and so passes through. Surface and impact go together and depth readings are these probings where sink holes and coverings vie for interest in this constant descent and flotation over and over again. It is the play of gradients that shapes value in an almost tactile image crafted between us.

I have said much without saying anything so far about the details of this particular session with M this time around. What actually happened? What took place? What I am trying to get at is a mood; an attitude; something that has been built up like waves in the sea over many weeks, months and years. This is the virtual relationship between M and I which is never seen or tangible or forthcoming. Yes there are these patterns of probings that we welcome or upset playing off repetition and change and this becomes the play of the meeting in that precise moment and then in the next. A reverie or a kind of passing of wind that has a whiff of something deep, innocuous and unspeakable and also the carefree sense of something being let out, set free within a wider network; allowed a new forum of play. This wider scope is only possible as an a-rhythm of a tightly articulated metre. The frame of this practice is scheduled and repeatable and sequential; the tuning into the breath; the quiet touch both warming and spreading yet from a still beginning. The gradual noting and inclusion of body regions as they gather become synonymous with one another as our attention together is drawn and fine-tuned  back and forth from one to another as a passing through; until there is just the motion, the pattern; the description emanating out of this centre that is always re-traceable because it can be found anew. So a flourishing image of growth as it reaches through expansion and natural amplification from a small invisible start-point. The star point is almost random, simple and unthought out; a direct landing just here or here as M's abdomen rises and falls or his chest heaves and a slight knot or tightening at the right hand shoulder seems to beckon. The contrast between this gathering or tightening and a loosening or unwinding some place else; in the diaphragm or hip or ankle-joint or in  the small tip of his finger or at the outer edge of his eyes. This creates a sense of spreading; a lightness out of a covering. There is concurrently a slight urge or want or inclination to reach out or open up or to make a sounding as a snap unfolding rather than a cause and affect mechanism of motor function or vocal intent. So the movement comes back to front as a release of tension and its unwinding through the body in contact with another body and in contact with a yet wider and wider sense of environmental holding. So like Russian Dolls nestled one inside the other there is this opening up of a wider complex of relationships so that any simple movement or twitch or yawn or burp is nestled within this cocoon of blossoming affect; like a bud budding itself because simply the coordinate conditions give rise to such an affect at this precise moment without thought or effort. Aptly there is a co-witnessing of this happening as it is taking place so that in human terms, an action really did occur because we were present to it in a way that made it something we could feel in the moment together and perhaps even recount and bring up at a later date if we so wished. in this way something could be made of it.

But who made the action? where is the self-determination; the intentional thrust? It is embedded and at once removed from any present focus, continually displaced as the one inclination rides through into its rooting someplace else. This is not like lighting a fire-cracker and seeing it gradually take hold and light up from one end to another. It is more a kind of archaeological tracing where the gesture is the flowering of what has already occurred at a more embedded level. On-off touch; sound and no-sound; contraction and release; an eye blinking open and closed; consciousness and automatic response; falling into contact and pushing away; the thrust and the embrace; the cocoon and the journeying along a disparate road. Holding and letting go. All these are two ends of the same thing. They engine and keep in relief one another. There is this synergy of high tension and floppy giving into ground. This is the contouring of  our landscape in which we are one yet feel ourselves and one another only in relation to our performed difference.

M is falling into resting on me as I raise him up on my knees with the sun brushing his face through the dappled leaves of the tree by the window and his head either in the dip of my shoulder or lent far back in the crescent curvature of the reinforced plastic cushion. Yet I also feel this growth outwards and upwards so that he is pushing out of this very contact into uprightness; a sense of slight disgruntled un-settlement as we awkwardly coordinate this dance of resting back in the fold and leaping out into single verticality. M is between the two states; They cannot be resolved because they are the states of source or nurture and volition or growth. Growth only exists with nurture and nurture only becomes such when there is the possibility of growth. Outside of their contradictory conundrum they do not exist. But wrenched into existence and given form they are like a poem that talks in riddles about something that before us and within us is so simple that it would be ludicrous to try and put it into words. So this wording just like a session with M is kind of ludicrous; awkward and unresolved- a combination of expressions of discomfort and of extreme tender enfoldment. Taken apart and to either extreme there would be a merging into the sea of no experience or a continual provocation into anxiety and restlessness.

M and his pattern right now in the classroom is of falling asleep mid-feeding or mid Physio-therapy session or else a crying lament for all the intrusions of his daily Care regime of which he has no say.  This is a protestation against either extreme or the divorce of one pole from the other in the mimicked pretence of autonomy or of passive dependency.

I am using the touch in relation to his breath as a way into a kind of imagery that plays on these opposites without merging them. The story of the tree, the nest, the wind, the birds circulating the tree, the songs of the children down below and the dialogue in the story now recently emerging  of M and the  younger girl Jenny ( The male and the female) who witness each others' hidden and buried songs; a thread running through from the inside to the outside so that the wider  patterning of passive and active inter-dependency; an ecology if intertwining can emerge. This is the story line that describes the imagery of a body in relation to a wider environment that is brought into being there and then in the moment of this practice,

The positioning of conscious intent is one of rooting that precision-focus in a wider bearing of circulation; like a football game where the ball is only ever in one place at a time yet there is this distributed ownership as the trajectory of a ball in flow that is never actually seen by the players because of their position in the game; where past and future is somehow already given according to the precision of the contact of just that angle of the ball at the side of  a player's foot before it ricochets off that contact and between midair and contact with a new player there is this levitation; this floating amorphous suspension that is yet a spark from the ground from which it has found a momentary resting place and a corresponding impetus or surging forth.

M and his coming into body presence and into the use of his limbs and hands and eyes and ears is yet the same thing. You cannot start from the position of his separate organs or functions  but only see these as derivatives of a wider connectivity that preempts and primes this supposed separation.

Mood then is everything; a kind of effluence that goes beyond the point of any one grasp- of any one contoured action, even as it primes the way for these fleeting movements to occur.

Sleep and wakefulness- Session with M

M is slumped in his chair at the edge of a group activity- there and not there. He has just been fed and as I come into the classroom there is an air of efficiency that this intake has been completed on time and before I arrive. We are all operating so perfectly in sync despite the fact that M at the centre of all this does not really appear to be there. Nor is the class-teacher who is ill; she had a catastrophic road accident about three years ago and ever since then, she is sometimes off work and when she is here, she may suddenly stop mid sentence, waver, collapse to the ground and lie there for several minutes. This seems almost to be a non-event so agile and acutely attuned are her learning assistants who sweep in underneath her, lesson her fall and stay close by until she recovers. At times too she wears dark glasses as since the accident she is highly sensitive to strong light. Nevertheless she performs her duties and her decision goes. She implements a rapid and abrupt pace to take her through these glitches and almost to shock her body back into activation despite this tendency to just let go and fall,

M too falls. I am told that sometimes when he is in his standing frame he slumps to one side as if literally falling asleep on his feet. Of course with the exterior support frame holding him more or less in a standing pose, it is not really his doing; the pieces are loose and uncollected inside; almost overlooked in this posture of normality. And so he literally comes apart on task. Learning Assistants are complaining that as M gains more weight and robustness because of now being gastric-fed through a pipe leading into his abdomen, he resists given tasks set up as part of a series of  goals collated by therapists and administered by learning assistants as part of his daily regime. It is not without poignancy that the very things he is being called to do;  to stand in his standing frame and to pay attention to high intensity light stimuli and track the journeying of  bright computer generated images across a screen, are the very things that his class teacher, since her accident, is sometimes unable to do.  M too suffered an incident of trauma; this was his stay in hospital to get his gastro-tube fitted and the invasive surgery, bright lights and high noise threshold that invaded his immobile body in those days in hospital.

In the days and weeks following his return to school he would cling to my hand like a drowning child in a way that I have never seen M do before,

M comes into  meaningful contact by degrees as he cruises from pre-conscious automatic states of integration where his breath, his blood circulation, and the pulsar rise and fall of  his flesh entrains within a wider and yet wider support network; the atmosphere of  ground and air, of touch and no touch, until by tiny degrees these waves of rhythm shape themselves into starts and stops; into muscle contractions and releases and into a sense of M looking back at this process reflectively. Only from out of this already established relatedness does human relationship have any meaning. It is from this discrete modelling of  a wider atmosphere of going with and into a mood of vibrations that one is both in and that is simultaneously in one, that some kind of rapport develop. Then there is a natural pushing down, a surging up, a spreading and encapsulating over and over again like folds within folds within folds. It is here in this richness of variation that is built up in play, that playful interaction and the discrete area of concern that we call consciousness  may flicker on and off. Without this ideal milieu, there will be no nuance and no accommodation; and a too severe change in circumstances from within the body or without will come suddenly as a gastric pain, a sensory blow of light or cascading and numbing sound and  M will protect himself before he knows what he is doing, by switching off, slumping down, bowing out in order to duck under the wave of impressions that are galloping over him without  seeming to apprehend him in his place of responsiveness.

Things need to be slowed down; really slowed down. The fine-tuning that softens the line between doing and being done to needs to be massaged into a soft pastel colouration where there is no certain demarcation between the one and the other; for the borderline between receiving and initiating is always already playfully in flow; a back and forth banter and a reapportioning of sides until sidedness itself  is the game of reapportioning- without exclusion; without recrimination without avoidance. Sleep and wakefulness are enfolded into one another allowing for flow and moments of precision-like focus amidst this medley. There is then this whispering concatenation that builds until it is charging its own resonances; its own patterning from within. The upsurge and the downward rest are twinned and are crossing over one another this way and that like birds swooping and diving in the late afternoon where sun comes through the hazy sky colouring it pink, orange, blue and purple in this swirling mix.

Start with the breath, because this goes in and out and it is a way that living beings synchronise and harmonise as one; the one in the many and the many in the one. The area to begin with for M today and on many occasions since his operation at the hospital, has been his chest. Here there can be a sense of contraction; a preloaded account like an unpaid bill that is mounting and depressing the whole diaphragm, locking and capturing his arms and the free movement of his individual fingers. Opening out the strands that come from the centre of his chest and flow outwards into his fingers like many wisps blowing in the wind; a flag of agile responsiveness, is the natural tendency at the other side of this rigidity. M  imagines and guides or prompts me into his movements of drawing out these wisps into playful filiation. There is a delicacy around his eyes. His throat and neck muscles are engaged and pulsating in a rapid shimmer as these strands are drawn out; stroked out in a soft touch where my finger tips spread in opposite directions from his mid-line just below his sternum and parting to either side through his arms and fingers. This motioning continues long past the seeming end points of his fingers; for these are a gesture of opening; a wide expanse or embrace that cannot be fixed open but knows this openness by  beginning at the  the seam-line at his chest; tracing this heart- line not only on one side but on both sides; a mirror reflection looking back on itself and through the softness of this gaze, melding; closing and blossoming like buds that are explosive and lingering; as if the fast and the slow were superimposed on one another; a touch gesture and a pattern recurring at enough regularity to describe a shape, an image; like the open wings of a bird.

There is a delicacy of touch that reaches now up into the head and across the mid-line of the face, visiting briefly eyes, nose mouth and ears. There is too a sweeping exactitude down the sides of the body, from under the arm-pits down the diaphragm across the pelvis, behind to the sacrum, then back around to the front of the legs, lingering on the knees and supporting the back of the knees, then on and sweeping through to the shin-bones, the ankles which are held in a moment of pause or lingering and then sweeping down to the feet; the soles of the feet held too and then out through the toes and beyond.

All these different ways of touching become one when they work with the mid-line at the chest and reach out through this in every direction; cross-laterally through the arms and vertically upwards to the head and throat, eyes and mouth and downwards to the hips, sacrum, legs, knees and feet. This sweeping motion is like a sudden catapult outwards from an enfolded intensity. Yet this sudden and singular spreading movement is done in slow motion and then with rapid playful bursts amidst this already established slow and regular pulse. M can follow this and imagine it sometimes priming me into the motion and sometimes reading it instantaneously and then taking it into his own patterning. The images of  birds with spreading wings are already in place then long before the story is ever told about the tree, the nest the birds and the song. It is preempted; primed in  the body practices of this opening that is read back from the simple pulsar ebb and flow of the breath; a breath that is one and divides into two -in and out- and then comes back into one again, over and over. This then is the seed; the image; the value that is felt as atmosphere below consciousness at an automatic and intimate level and in this way guides and provides structural integrity for the second-order moments of conscious reflection and emotional complexities that come and go amidst this surface level of involvement.

What we focus on as a shared body practice, in movement trajectories practised over and over again each time a little differently, is only thought-about, made possible, tangible and credible out of these traces of  flow and wisps of extension that first lend themselves to the opening of the breath. Little by little there is a concentration that I am drawn to through M's responsiveness in the tiniest details of his fingers. I playfully take each finger and digitise these separate tendrils that nevertheless start their life as one; at the arm, the arm-pit, the chest, the belly. What is the root of these separations? There are nodes of unity and gathering that can be found just about anywhere, And when these nodes are supported, dwelt into, warmed and attended to then the filtration naturally occurs and M's burgeoning interest creates more and more refined differentiation in the same sphere as does mine.So the practice opens out the interest at first as seemingly random play and then as a root and a flowering that is found and re-found over and over again; in wonder as if by magic; as if for the very first time. So then there is this sense of making anew; of a birth; of enacting the primary birth; the coming into conception and the differentiation process of an embryo or a seed for the very first time. This is what makes the practice live, for it is not a narrative; it is a lived and organic coming into life through and through from the tiniest cells to the muscle fibres, sinews, flesh and organs. The gaseous and the material is performed as a dance of one; an interlocking tango that enfolds and enlivens one into the other. Life exists; interest and vivaciousness, only through this precise medley.

So the dance that we make is gradually this aerial  reaching up and over, with his hand in mine and my other hand supporting his elbow and sometimes further along under his arm-pit or spreading along his ribs, and the arm swoops up and brushes over M's face and across the top of his head, his fingers disrupting his hair slightly like a breeze on a tree. Then at the very apex of this process, just above his head, there is a slight lingering; a momentary hesitation and then a swooping down as if in reverse so that M's hand rests now on his belly right at his centre where again it takes refuge- waits awhile before going on with its upward trajectory.

Who is informing this pattern?. Me or M? This is the wrong question. For at the level of tiny muscle contraction and release; of  the intake and out-take of minute threads of breath that reach beyond any set position and become both imagination and the possibility of filling this void future location in a brief and passing visitation, there is this moving into an incline; as if water were suddenly allowed to fill a dip before, with yet another tilt and incline this too is emptied out on the way to someplace else. Creating  through habit and repetition these grooves and embankments for the flow of gesture is the dance that makes itself between the two of us. We both start to get this pattern together and so M prompts me with a slight muscle contraction in his hand to restart the pattern and I linger or my hand becomes slightly weighted at the apex of the rhythm up by the brow of his head so that there is this lull before the downward ride- like a ski slope that when the positioning is right and the moment's pause is refreshing enough, the action simply does itself as a going into neutral and allowing the terrain already travelled to guide the motion. Habit seems to create the formation that is visible in the act, rather than the act describing and intentionally formulating the habit. The playfulness perhaps comes out of  a slurring of  tempos; a give and take, push and pull of stopping and starting so as to activate momentum or slow down an excess of speed and pause a little. Staying as one even as we separate out as two and communicating these micro details of stopping an starting is the play so that it is impossible to say about the whole movement that I am doing it to M or M is doing it to me.
We are navigating it according to a discipline of acute and practised sensitivity to micro levels of variation that we can only feel and know about together; in  breath, muscle tone and the given lightness or heaviness of the bones and flesh as they are experienced in inertness and in vital surge in each moment. So that all movement and all stillness are an exquisite mix of both in multiple combinations. Life and death, sleep and wakefulness is always already with us and apart of us.


M does fall asleep mid way through this and even begins to snore. I am a little put out. Then I remember my own words and experience on pre-conscious integration. I change positions with him so that he is lying on my lap raised from the ground with his head on the raised hard cushion that has an indent that cups the back of his neck. This position also allows me to  have one hand underneath his upper back and to gently raise and lower the "ground" of this touch so that he is gliding on a sea that supports and inclines at the same time. I feel/hear him listening through the wisps of sleep to these undulations. Is this just my imagination? It makes little difference. The main thing is that my initial affront to his sleeping gesture can be integrated once again into an atmosphere where we are on the same terrain and where there is the possibility to nuance these levels of consciousness and support in feeling-states that are happening right there and then- in the practice- rather than me abandoning the practice and stepping apart in order to jilt him back into wakefulness in more extreme measures that create a defensive shutting down and a pattern of closure in M. This is the behavioural pattern in classroom assignments that is now beginning to build into this impasse between M and his school Learning Assistants- so that there is is frustration along the course of this strengthening divide; a divide that sets itself  obstinately against sleep and pre-conscious levels of integration with a preference for wide awake states and behavioural "signs" of progress.

As M lies like that with his head in the enclave I tell the story as a brief curved pattern; the nest up above, the arms of the tree- like my arms- holding the nest- the ground below and the air above;
The swirling patterns that the birds make as they circle the tree, leaving the nest and returning to rest as they need to. I describe this as a  movement trajectory through the courses and by-passes of M's body- up and down and in and out following his breath as I outline what we have already doen in tis session once again  in touch/movement patterns.

Then the song of the child down below, now figuring the little girl who is shy and needs to be witnessed and encouraged by M. How she sings with more confidence and the song she sings is now a song about M's movements; the movement we did together earlier with his hand reaching up over his head and down again to his belly. This she sings through my voice in simple words and it is the very first time that I have sung words in the many songs we have had in the sessions together. Somehow it seems important that the words are being sung by the little girl in the story to M as he appears alongside her in the story. Then M's deeper belly song that he sings back to the younger girl. So that now the  girl and M are fore-figured in this story/song with an implicit understanding that this fore-figuring of their  growing conversation as they witness and hold one another in mind and value is pre-positioned in the wider ground of the tree, the nest and the children playing in the playground.

After the quiet part of the session where both M and I listen to the sounds in the surrounding classrooms and corridors and the sounds in the room- the clock ticking - and the sounds within- the breath and the blood, we  end the session and M stretches and enlivens just before I talk him through sitting up in readiness of going back in his chair. I feel this vitality momentarily coursing through his body as he first contracts and then pulls himself lengthwise taught past the reach of where now he lies- into the imagined space of this play. When he relaxes from the taughtness of this extended stretch, his body is soft and relaxed in that moment just before being lifted back into his chair.

Session with M- In lightness and rain

There was something easy and light in M today as if he began the work of clearing, opening, recirculating; letting pass through even as me and the learning assistant were lifting him down on to the mat. This sense that he hit the ground running so to speak; and that this has nothing to do with the fact that he began the session lying on his back as always felt palpable. This running, circulating, dissipating and clearing is a state of mind and it runs right through the body; is the work of the body and is the reverb that opens a portal between minds and body which are one when in on-going transformation. The idea catches in like a living image; a growing tree; a flourishing from within to without and in again. This folding back and forth so that the outside boundary dissipates and stretches out and the inner core moves out to become the boundary -a porous skin- that then also dissipates whilst also folding inwards. This is the synergy of stretching and releasing- a concertina push and pull that in its rhythmic hum is effortless- like waves. The imagery that I come up with when working with M in this state is about the ripples in water, the warm honey collecting and dissipating through his body beginning in the belly and reaching out into the tendrils of his arms and legs, hands and feet and this imagery spoken is then received to inform both movement and stillness in M who  takes it  into himself thereby clarifying the pattern still further.

M almost from the first moment was indicating this need- a vital need- to stretch out his arms wide to either side and  slightly above his shoulders over his head. His fingers were active and individuated, like pulsar undulations of  the ribbed structure of a leaf or a fishes' fin or the feathers of a bird. I felt that his arms.hands were in some medium -like water or air-  and that they were structured and made sensitive by the natural resistance of the atmosphere to their probing and thrust. I was drawn to the spaces between his ribs at the sides of his body and  to supporting and creating a stable anchorage in the pit of his arm especially to begin with on his right side. This created a sense of deep rest and relief in M. It led into my  supporting his shoulder, sternum, neck and throat and later to delicately holding areas on his face around his eyes, the sides of his nose and the back of his ears  by cupping these areas with my open palm This deep support allowed him to further release congestion and a blocked heavy feeling in his chest- to literally cough it up and discharge it as vocal utterances- somewhere between  anguish and concern that then became a mark of exuberance- an exclamation loud and clear.

There was this inquisitiveness that reached back through into the visceral depth of M's body and out again into his face and into the growing sensitivity of his eyes and ears and the vocal range of his voice strengthening in each moment. All was a reaching through- a thrusting outwards- a catapult unfolding as if from a central core that when released showed itself in one single evocation. This was a reverie, a reverberation, borne from an atmosphere of  in-dwelling in the moment of each showing. He and I and the ground below and the air above were operating as one single synergy; a give and take of explosive energy contained and pulsed according to tiny degrees of resistance so that there was a sense of holding and containment that was nevertheless living; vibrant; adaptive- sensible. This then was a conscious state yet borne out of the depths of pre-conscious pre-verbal feeling-states and affects in the rhythmic patterning and the incidental shapes that these gave rise to.

It felt to be like being on the brink of a wave- of a falling and catching in- just at the tipping point when there is nothing to do but let go with a sense that this will not be oblivion but a giving into a pattern that is already doing itself. To get this pattern effortlessly is to release into the movement and to rest on the wave of stillness within and without.

So I felt myself primed by M into the imagery and stories as I was primed into this patterning of unfolding. One became the other and both were different levels of the same process; one of falling and catching; of expansion and enfolding over and over again.

I simply dwelt more obviously in the patterns and predispositions of M's body-mind rippling in and out like following the veins of a living system- a river whose banks are already cut and so where the movement is already invited to shape still further this groove. In this sense the mark and the mark- maker were inseparable- simply the outside and the inside of one tendency. M invited me into this pulse and it became a living pulse- a celebration in which I could sense this boy smiling through even where the smile was not evidently there on his face. Yet there was this glancing back and marking of a dance in which I witnessed him and he witnessed me witnessing him and allowed for this to happen.

I sung a song about being awake in the light and dark, in the sea and in the sky. The story about the tree, the nest, the eggs, the chicks and the song- heard and sung down below in the playground by children, was re-told in summary form yet in full; the full life-trajectory. There has recently been the introduction into this story- called into being by M's readiness to engage in real spoken dialogue in his silent imagining- of a girl age 5 with blond hair and blue eyes; a shy girl whom M persuades to also sing her  sweet feint version of the song and whom he supports in this first singing;  stays alongside- convincing her quietly of her own worth. Once seen and heard in this way she asks M to sing back his version of the song- his deep belly song that comes out of his ten years of age and the far more ancient reverberation of the great tree above him. He does so and she listens; witnesses this telling along with all the other children. Yet it is  first the girl and M who share this soft-spoken dialogue in which they attend to one another in a delicate and nuanced way and so become a bridge into the external world of  the young excitable children who otherwise would  disrupt the showing and telling in this quick-to-startle pair.

In the middle of this telling a door slams and M jolts. I weave this into the story and we wait together as he settles.

The last part of the session becomes more about integrating body-awareness as a  reverb of the story's image; a tree with all its parts growing and integrated, sprouting up and out and enfolding back into the centre- in the nest; the belly.

We go into the silent listening  part where I stay with M but quietly so that we both are noticing the sounds without and within. I look back again at M's face; it is totally different as is his entire body, open and rippling, as if being touched and stroked by the light coming into the window through the leaves of the tree. There is this infinite softness and openness- as if all sound and light and touch were being received and apportioned just in this apt moment and then the next- so that there is infinite room and time for everything to be held and received.

I am drawn to a strong connection around his heart in relation to mine. I am stroking open this area from the centre to the sternum along the arms and fingers and back around into his chest in small encircling movements with my finger tips. I talk through M's body as this open expectant receiver- like the tree that accepts the wind and bends/adapts to it. I see the quietness and  maturity of this ten year old boy. I have a welling up of feeling which I hold in this sensitivity of shared perception. I tell him that it was been so enriching to witness him growing up and coming into his body and his sensibility-  into waking up . Sometimes his eyes look back at me  momentarily, flashing blue and then closing again. He is in this attentive easy state between wakefulness and precociousness integration.

I rest in this state with him but hold the space for his arrival and retreat in pulsations and waves that ebb and flow.

I am touched by his beauty; the beauty of his fully emerging awareness in every moment.

A moment later I talk through the end of the session preempting together with him the sequence where he sits up before returning to his chair. I say that since his body is light and active today I will carry him on my own to the chair because  I feel that he will  allow this and lighten into this return together with me, helping me. He in fact does do this. But once upright his body begins to contract as if imploding in slow motion and the exquisite muscle tone and alertness is fused into the body of a disabled child  being fitted into a wheelchair once again. Yet even in this limp contraction, there is a re-growth at the same time as if for every collapsed cell or muscle fibre there is a re-rooting outwards somewhere else- between imagination and somatic inhabiting- between the gaseous and the material matter that are filtered through and through and never do exist independently.

I explain that we will meet for three more sessions and then there will be the summer break and then I will return to work with him again. I say I will see him next Tuesday. I take his hand and say if you are happy for me to come next Tuesday please squeeze my hand. He does in fact squeeze my hand; how much this is a direct answer to this specific question matters not so much. The feeling of his on-going presence through his breath in relation to each adaptive state that we form together through out the session; this is of deeper significance. It is a shared reverie- an atmosphere of the song sung together; a holding space that breathes and that is self-living- self-generative;  the hope in a life that is living itself and living the world too. This is joy.

Session with M; absence, meeting and being met

After the holiday break I am back seeing M. Last week didn't happen though  school was back- because the family extended their break and I was not told. I can't help feeling continually out of the loop. But then I think everyone is out of the loop to one another; the parents do not communicate with the school and then the school- in a state of blurry not knowing, does not pass on the absence to me.

So the question; how to create a communicative link with M in the centre of all these short-circuits?

Perhaps the reason why I feel so strongly about this work is that it puts the wider system of missed meetings in the context where the child- who is always the one diagnosed with the communication problem, at the heart of responsiveness. Communication is re-earthed through a far finer mesh of interdependencies that run through bodies, through neurons, through veins and flesh and in the in-pouring and out-pouring of breath in the most unlikely of places. This creates a porosity that runs through boundaries of skin and walls and social and cultural institutions- to the passageways through which mind is somatized in the here and now- in each minute response and initiation. Action and passivity then flow together- the give and take as hands or minds clasping and unclasping. This has the possibility of changing humour- from the driven seriousness of goals and therapy programs with specific aims and outcomes, to  the wider and more inclusive play of seeing how we meet and the precise moment where an amorphous kind of numb procedural routine becomes alive to itself and to others; how a smile breaks out and disappears unregistered but there; an event so rapid it is not marked in any outcome though it happened because it was felt.

Because it is raining all the children and their learning assistants are piled into the sensory room that I usually use for the sessions. So I agree to use the small adjoining room and set up with two blue mats, a pillow and a small blanket. The class teacher helps me lift M onto the mat from his wheelchair.

I feel drawn to stroking the top of his head and  back over away from his face drawing his hair back to the dip of his neck where his spine begins. I talk to him. His teacher is pleased that he has put on so much weight. Yes I feel this added bulk at M's centre and a kind of thickening of his chest and upper back. I wonder how this will play out in terms of his awareness of his body in contact with mine through the sessions. This is something he has always been so finely attuned to right from the beginning even in illness and discomfort and in his many years of failure to thrive.

M quickly relaxes as always. Yet I do sense a slight withholding- as if the added bulk were a buffer in which his autonomy could be ensured. This is not a bad thing- but it is the slight sluggishness of response that alerts me- a very subtle kind of pushing out at the same time that he receives the touch and the relaxing affects of it. It is somehow as if he received these things a bit on the sly- a back-handed gift that is swiped under the jacket as if stolen and so not fully received. I wonder if he is able right now to fully enter into the event- this kind of dance of life we used to do where he would throw himself into the atmosphere of this co-patterning and use it to go deeply into somatic experience and the feelings/emotions these brought up- his head far back, his throat opened and guttural sounds emitting and dissipating like bubbles from his chest or farts from his bowels. All  this exigenesis seemed to me a kind of passing- like a passageway from hand to hand and from one person to another so that nothing remained too rigidly set and there was an easy exchange and so a patterning of a totality out of each detail visited. In other words nothing remained a detail alone unto itself but become a visit point in tandem with other locations and other intensities of depth. This translation of one point to another as an equivalence allowed for movement in the light mismatch, torsion or adjacent leap- and in this was a playfulness of the spherical turning body even as he lay there mostly still yet somehow with me imagining these torsions and loops in the point of On-Off contact; of embrace and release; of constriction and expansion over and over again.

Was this still in place? I felt a dryness and lack of humour in M and this was the very first time I`d sensed this in the five years I have worked with him. A kind of "I don't need you any more".

The session progressed in silence in that tiny hot room with the blinds down and the constant chatter in the corridor outside of ebullient teenage learning assistants in their excitement and haste and good humour and acting out in relation to the children under their charge.

Yet at another level I felt a deepening into contact and a re-envisioning of the ground rules of this contact- dealing with a more mature more independent and self-sufficient 10 year boy who would now act on choices of attention or of shutting down. I felt the beginnings of a kind of repression of feeling and feeling back; a slight hesitation to create this buffer zone just outside the moment of impact. A way to discharge the excitement of the contact or hold it in abeyance; a kind of self-consciousness that comes with growing up- and of not needing. Yet equally a deep sense of neediness to enter the more somatic patterns of experiencing his body; this basic need so often denied to him when he is buckled into his wheelchair.

How to re-navigate this different kind of boy where food is mostly now automatically implanted directly into his gut with no say-so from him. How to give him choices in the going-with an event and the sense of his mutual co-integration in this patterning?

Somehow the session did pick up and, as I began to sense his second skin and deeper resilience I found myself working more in dynamic patterns of cross-lateral torsion; movements where attention through the head then followed into the body twisting and stretching and the hand extending to feel and feel back his face and at another time to bring two fingers into the mid-line chest area to touch one another and then fly back outwards. To create in other words games and stories out of his more sophisticated attention based on his capacity now to execute gestures and body schemas that mirrored and reinforced these flights and flurries of his now more evenly firing attention.

As this became a game of repetition and invention that scuppered the routine as soon as it became a predicable pattern (but not so much that the pattern was totally lost),  a sense of cohesion through his body and mine acting as one came into play. This acted like a lever that juxtaposed two systems in order to capitalise on traction and volition, I felt M catching into this new level of a game and playing it with me; pretending we were one and then becoming two again.

Then the soundings re-emerged and his head flung back on some cushions so that his body tilted downwards and his neck and throat released. Now some more vigorous ricochetting movements through his feet and into his chest, neck throat and head- and widening into his perceptual areas; sight, hearing, and smell.

That is when M suddenly- or so it seemed to me- opened his eyes; both of them, and with a squinting slit of light filtering back and forth in this allowed-for light-shaft, he looked directly at me- and seemed to discern me- fully - with all my imperfections and areas of awkwardness.

It disarmed me and it was hard for me to meet this directness after all these years of obscuration in which direct perception seemed to be scattered into a myriad of fragments of different states of consciousness; of wakefulness tinged with sleep and sleep tinged with consciousness.. But in this moment I looked back at his looking and so the circle completed itself; just for a fraction of a second.

I feel we will revisit here and that the psychic complication of meeting and not being met or being met but not being able to meet with this or -fractionally- meeting and being met, will play out at a different level now that the somatic material has been so well established. It seems so utterly clear to me that without somatic earthing- which after all is a form of being met- to oneself by oneself in attendance to a wider environment; of ground, of being cared for and deeply received in that moment, no perceptual and psychic honesty is ever going to be possible.

M will fight now to stay in contact or to equally at times refuse certain kinds of contact and handling where this handling feels to be an invasive dismantling of his psyche. He will fight tooth and nail between being awake and being asleep and his right in this eidetic episodic flicker to modulate -like the beating spectrum of light itself this on-off exchange with entering and retracting that is life and death itself as they are wrapped around one another as one in our human living.

Session with M Play of Life

M is gaining weight- more present- more visible- more real? I am not sure. It is by degrees. The presence of a filled out body is not proof. The graspability of a functional clasping and unclasping of the hand- no it is not that. The thrust of the legs and the protrusion of the feet probing beyond the edge of the mat. No not exactly this either. There are the sound-makings- a head thrown far back and a range of octaves I have never heard before tuning and cascading over the birdsong, the cries and shouts, admonitions and laughters into the corridor.

Yes maybe this chiming-in is a sign, like cruising a similar cut in the stratosphere. It becomes colour, opacity, movement, sound; the squelching of organs; the rumination of food and thought. Yes there is the anguish. The markers of a cut dug too far; inserting a feeding tube into the abdomen of a 10 year old boy may have repercussions way past the process of  regulated nutrient intake. There is a squashing up of digestibles with undigestibles. A queue to the exit route and the compactness of stools that leak and belch; turn acidic and toxic within the gut complex, discharge into the blood- stream, confuse the pure from the impure.

And for M this is his big axe to grind. What to incorporate; to receive and what to eject- to push away? Yes the thrust of the hand can now be a display; the moment of execution of this cut between welcoming and pushing away seen by all, and the drama continues deep within his bowels and is uttered in guttural hymns somewhere between exuberance and lament.

My history with M  and the Therapeutic Touch sessions I have been running with him goes back five years now. So we have a long-term practice established together; of my touching with a hand which is not a hand but is a reaching through; an admixture of this corporal body that stops the touch here and here in pools of muscle tension, spasm and contortion and yet also allows the touch a transit route through our co-attunement of breath, like a revolving door that we time until we are together operating the doorway just at the tipping point. And beyond this level of permission and timing structuring the contact together as a pattern running through and between our bodies, there is a yet finer and more subtle level of reaching through and this is simply movement; the movement of imagination that begins in a simple holding and regarding of touch variables, breath variables, sound variables and the gestures and expressions that emanate out of  these harmonics, Then the dream- story;song in images that grows out of this holding frame as it buzzes and revs, spinning and finally taking to the air. No coincidence then that our prime shared story is about the tree, the nest and the birds and the belly song that grows out of M as a direct resonance to this natural gathering and setting free. And this too is the link-piece in the communicative web that joins non-speaking with speaking, able-bodied with  disabled. It is a rhythmic turn-table that is faster than any one cultural fixative. It is the free flow movement of the imagination- the spirits that come and animate us when they are welcome and have a place to reside.

My role with M is to ensure that together we make  possible that welcoming place of residence.

It felt tortuous- difficult- an insult of all insults when the tube was fitted- under the bright lights and busy hands of a hospital and its personnel. I felt infuriated and incapacitated on M's behalf- as if together we were on a crusade- against all the incursions, insults and mismanagements of  rushed handling- untimely proceedings. But it is not entirely like that. It is not so black and white.

For it is true, M is putting on weight. I feared  that the trauma of the proceedings would scar him beyond the invasive surgery; the actual wound to his body. I feared that the neediness of grasping my hand was a fear response; a neurotic seizing onto a possible lifeguard by a drowning child. It brought up many things for me. I felt I needed to protect him; to save him; to be the one.

But it's not entirely like that. My role is less magnificent. It is simply continuing as before.
The strength of the connection is in nothing new I can bring to the table. No antidote or special measure. Simply a reinstatement of what went on before albeit with the adaptations needed to avoid unsettling and so causing a recurrence of pain in the affected area.

If anything the more robust M becomes in body size and motor functioning, the more I become background; the support against which his pushes off from; the contour for his continual re-shaping as he plays with enclaves of resting and bounce points for leverage and thrust. He is learning to flay and hit- to extend and recalibrate in a way that he has not done probably since the freedom of movement experienced in the womb. The emaciated and semi-conscious state that made rumination and movement a cellular activity and made our sessions the detailing of precision placements between warming and cooling; the on-off contact and its subtle shifts of depth and emphasis playing out like an orchestra that would dissipate and "play dead" on the first slam of a door in a distant corridor; the too exuberant accelerator of a far of delivery van. And always this sense with M that he was close to death- hanging in on tender-hooks; viewing the scene of life through transparent blood-veined eye-lids; listening, deflecting, breathing and thinking between outsider looks; between the operations of having food put into him and faeces cleaned off of him.

Of course I swam in the currents of  his eidetic flickering consciousness as little by little, between the spasms, areas of reflective wondering like birds suspended on an air current before diving or climbing out of sight. But I am sure that I was not the only one who saw these special moments and who felt them. I know that family members and some of the more thoughtful learning assistants who took the time to see and feel these things also did. And M would have let them in too- because this letting in is so basic to survival and M knows this whilst his body system and medical sensitivity thrusts out and slams closed from even a millisecond of missatunement that begins to feel like invasion. Far safer in these conditions for M to self sooth; the one hand feeding the other hand to himself. But even this self made do-it-yourself feedback loop was prohibited by well-meaning OT's
(Occupational Therapists) who advised for year upon year the wearing of weighted unbending arm bands. This somehow to me seemed more brutal than all the other therapeutic recommendations; the standing frames and light invasive machines- since these arm-bands avoided completely the root anxiety need of this action of self-feeding; that is for human soothing and contact.

So..is M more present then before? No he was always there and continues to be there. Only the repertoire of showing and enacting this has changed since his musculature has increased and his intake of nutrients has darkened to red his watery blood. So yes there is more thrust into life- more capacity to demonstrate a vitality of life. But outside of regular human contact this must only lead to demonstrations of anger; a pulling away or pushing away yet with more vigour- more capacity than before. Only inside the holding look of positive regard; I will call it Love, can this point of definite contact be utilized so that something can be made of it. It can be be the bridge to environmental support and M can ask for this or not in just the way he needs to. It can be astutely calibrated and recalibrated and so the connection can be maintained, a link unbroken. With the volume turned up on his signal box more people are "getting " his messages- that before were simply small shifts in his breath; taken to be metabolic processes so that they went unheeded. Now they are sound utterances, movements of his limbs and head and eye movements, they attract attention like a radar which is what every new-born who cries and gesticulates summons up  in his/her caregivers in this first breath of life. But for M the breath came first; the human signalling took ten years.

I work with M in exactly the same way as when he appeared non-responsive. I simply give feedback to what he puts in and allow it to stay and shape itself as a mutually held pattern that we both see, notice and validate. This may come out in very quiet and still periods of touching lightly two areas; say his chest and his lower back or belly and keeping this steady for as long as it takes for a small shift or transformation of emphasis to be felt- through my body- through his body; this will then direct me to the next areas of emphasis of two handed placement and so on. For these two areas- where the hand goes in deep in once place and is bounced out in another place- the Kyo and Jitsu- becomes the turntable of all levels of movements and settlement as two becomes one and there is a synergy; a light almost transparent floating feel between these two seemingly oppositional qualities for a brief  revolution of time. Then the session may suddenly crescendo up a notch into joint vocalizations, mobile stretches and leanings, swivels and resting points and in turn may recalibrate into the shared story; the tree, the nest, the birds, the song etc.. And then once again fade back out into a quiet silent resting and listening reflectively to all the sounds in the adjoining and interim spaces- through the body, through the corridors of the school and beyond. This coming through of the experience of attention or joint attendance is the vitality of life; a kind of subtle messaging faster than the imprinting of those journeys into shapes, images and symbols. For these come later, as the residue trace-marks of a swift curvature.

This is how gradually a kind of perspective can be built up and through out of tiny fragments of noticing and being inquisitive of jut that point of contact into a gradual sense of the relatedness of myriad points as they come up as being significant in just that moment and then recede from view whilst still remaining present. How it is felt, accommodated on both sides- by me and by M; shifted and recalibrated. How we decide those recalibration wordlessly, in flux like breeze filling a void, impacting and pressing out this space from within into a contoured shape and then repositioning- letting that shape go and reshaping over and over again. This can't be explained since there is no process of decision making. It happens all of a piece when  just in this way there is the urge to move and immediately it is there, done.

So this is the work- the practice- and within this practice there are moments of balanced well-being- like the soft-spot on a tennis racket in a dynamic and on-going encounter. These are not abstract points- they are relationship configurations that feel good because there is correspondence- a turning of the turn-key-made possible in that exact meeting; the swivel reconfigured so that the lock unlocks momentarily and free passage is given.

This is all that can be hoped for. How it occurs and at what level of complexity or simplicity; at the level of the cellular, the metabolic, the visceral, the muscular, digestive, kinaesthetic, vocal, symbolic, cultural, architectural is all there is to play for. It is the transit-points between these shifting cascades of levels that create depth-perspective- wholeness; support within a complex interdependent organism -environment. |The key is relationship practices that operate as one and are re-enacted countless times in countless variable ways. This is the play of life.