Building up joint Impressions

Working with M again today.

Something has switched over in him. I would say that he has recognition- awareness of meeting me in the fullness of his personality and being.

Before he had built up- over the last four years- this somatic awareness of receptivity in his ability to accept and work with therapeutic touch; to redistribute his body schema by putting his attention into the circulatory pulsations of his body as it began to open up through touch.

Then recently there has been this move to use the spasmodic pulsations of rigidity and release as a kind of valve that allows for joint attention and for the moving of his limbs- especially his arms- as I support yet do not implicate the movement itself- more wait to "hear" this transition between rigidity and give-way and to follow through the lead of the limb itself as it softens into flow- a flow that is downwards, across, back and then, through these gravitational pulls, it learns to transmit this into upward motion as well.

Intentional movement then is not simply a mind program that is carried into actualisation by a willing but servile body. It is the catching in of opportunistic falls and dives- more like surfing on the body's own propensity to fall, to redistribute and to catch itself into configurations that pool and condense potential until another surf arrives and the wave - between up/down, side to side, forward/backwards, becomes an encircling embrace and at a certain speed, what appears as interruption or stasis becomes the gathering points to the circulation itself that- accordion-like- condenses into near negation only to unfold as the body stretches out and the organism breathes.

Because we have been working for so long with warming the centre; the belly and lower back as the power-house to this unfurling, the extensor movements through limbs, perception, and voice is now beginning to accumulate depth and speed and- like spring flowers- to literally tumble out across the earth. There is this broad and wide-ranging recognition that is the situatedness of M and myself exactly where we are in the room amidst waves of unfolding significance- that can be touched, heard, sung, seen and alluded to in countless contrasts from week to week. In other words there are story- lines and song-lines; riffing off the tap tap tap of the clock and marking the sound and the absence of sound, the trees with and without leaves, with and without birds; enquiring into their stories and those of the lives of voices and brief incursions that reach us not by any effort on our part- but simply because we are where we are and are present enough for long enough to notice these comings and goings in relation to our own co-witnessing.

I am beginning to "Tell the story" of M  to M; the changes- not in terms of better or worse as a linear progression of increased functionality, but simply in terms of there being more of M present and available for me to read trough his articulated rendering. And yet I am emphasising his presence all the way through this process- the actuality of this presence that can be redrawn back to the centre- core and M's ability to reference the extremities of sensation and feeling states back to this centre- core and so to have the capacity -the willingness- to stay with the pattern as it unfolds. This for me is the core of M's awareness, his intelligence and his clarity of feeling and sensing. At the heart it is the key to his being able to begin to rest his body into mine and that in turn is a key shift towards integration and experiencing his body as one whole in relation to mine and to others whom he is in close caring relationships with.

I am then telling the story back to M of his body; how the two becomes one and the one becomes many over and over again in every person- who are the same as him, yet unique unto themselves.
So that, yes we all have two hands and two knees, two feet and two ears and, yes we all have this one belly. Then I talk about food: nurturing - sustenance- warming intake; chicken soap, gefilte fish, chicken and chips, chocolate and the difference of our likes and preferences; the uniqueness of our nurturing style and yet the undoubted nurturing we are all in the process of acquiring- him and his brothers and sisters, and his parents and me...

Then I tell him later- after having followed through this treatment into the Somatic Touch Education he is so familiar and receptive to, how that, yes the complexity of every movement in his arms and hands and legs and feet is derived and sourced back to his belly. And at this point in the treatment I feel him pouting and collecting his belly under my hand, guiding the depth and duration of the contact so that I integrate this central depository through his chest, his shoulder, his head- esp back of the head and neck- then throat and face- then into his arm and hand and back through into his lower abdomen, hip, lower back, leg and the very particularities of his upper thigh, his knee the sides of his lower shin, his ankle and the base of his foot. And I am feeding through the story of his turning twisting body- according to his responsiveness to this precision touch- as it rises incrementally and falls in pulsar waves to activate this turning upwards movement or this stretching elongating prone movement. For what I am realising is that there is no absolutely static position but rather this gradual translation through one point of reference or in-dwelling and the next that unfolds as it catches into a response in order to create the articulate framing of a mobile body. This mobile body desires this movement at the precise moment as it occurs. And this occurrence is never absolute and finite- as if occurring in a single plane, but is a multi-dimensional unfolding of layered accordion-like gills that power one another through a combined and accumulative momentum; a momentum that suddenly collects along a mid-line where the idea of uprightness is imagined even as it is never totally arrived at but is falling, cascading and rising, flying in counter rhythms as the on-off beat is continually reconfiguring its point of occupancy.

On-off touch and sound articulation, calibrates this same energetic double loop that powers falling and rising simultaneously against the grain of one another. Uprightness- like consciousness- is configured along the mid-line of this double move. It seems to be there- stable and fixed in real matter and situated through the logic of position, but in essence it is this fleeting cross-hatch continuously reshaping against the grain of its counter-part.

Shared attention and shared witnessing is this. Its source of vigour is a renewed enquiry that is a physical kinaestethic touch orientation that transcends its own limits to become the patterning of occurrences that work in counter-point to what has just been.  Alertness and settlement are the two configurations that are never totally stable yet when primed to a certain pitch, become the motivation for a sense of "Just-so-ness". They are experienced as a certain placement- of high finely tuned balance or low widespread letting go into gravity. One is vertical, the other horizontal; together they attune us to ourselves and to one another as an orientation through space and time.

Language and physical mobility, emotion and meaningful gesture, unfolds around this core of growing certainty that is free enough to explore the unknown on the back of what has been established and is a moment later, given up and re calibrated.

I am working with M in the suspended space where he lies cross-ways upon my lap with his head and feet resting in the indents of well-places hard-curved cushions. This allows for minute or sudden shifts in the depth of a given support and this support; my legs under his torso and my hands under his neck and at various places on his body, becomes the touch pads that read and assess his level of contact - or communication into this mobile ground which consequently adapts to give more tonality of support or less- and so he too adapts to rest further into momentary areas of holding or to bounce /stiffen out of those resting enclaves.

So the ground and the space of action becomes a continuously recharged and reformulated interaction- until only the interaction or relationship is there hovering above and around these proximal pulsar meetings. And then I too withdraw- disappear as a strongly presencing entity; fade out yet remain witnessing M as he fills out and claims the space as his; literally fills out and thickens and becomes whole. And I as Caregiver, become pure background;  the ground that speaks only when spoken to. His voicing comes through and his lips begin to pucker and shape sounds. There are different levels of guttural moaning, humming, and more staccato brief shouts. Then all is silent again save for the ticking clock and the birds out the window on the now bare leafed winter tree.

I tell M that it is nearly time to go. I count to three and then prepare him by telling him I will now lift him back into the chair. This is a ritual departure that he is used to and I sense him listening, preparing his body for the jolt of movement. We do this in two stages- so that at the first level he is sitting on my L shaped leg/knee and resting his side and his head into my shoulder. Then I heave him up carrying him in my arms and resting him back into the chair. His arms and hands are responsive and reach for mine as soon as he is settled into the chair- rather like two light balls that when reaching the ground bounce up again. There is a flicker of a smile around his mouth- but it is so brief I  am not sure if I am imagining it or not. Perhaps it does not matter whether it is imagined or really there. For the imaginary if truly entered will  in the next moment be truly there. I in fact wholly believe in this smile and so I feel inherently that it is occurring whether it is manifestly so or not. It is a smile Between; the smile of the one issuing forth out of the two and becoming one; the enchanting contradiction of unity and separation at the heart of all contact- of our languaging made possible through our embodying into relatedness at the point of our feeling exchange.

Space within Moving Bodies

Co-ordinate points that constellate in precision contact out of the movement itself. This dynamic re-settlement in which moving bodies come into brief moments of association and where that very association become axions out of which further movement or "Spin" becomes self-generative, is our joint holding.

To generate movement, the points of relative still contact must be embedded into the tilts and swayings itself where mobile bodies press up against one another or imapct one another briefly.. These still points are not outside the movement or dissociated from it; they are coincidences that reflect and so escalate or intensify the movement that becomes "Read" in these momentary events.

Contact becomes overloaded and pumped up into a self-importance that can not sustain all the add-ons of projective emotion, when divorced from the sphere of moving bodies out of which it arrives. The slight slant or twist of a dircetive takes shape according to unfolding circumstances; of air pressure, internal viscosity, kinaesthethic drag, muscles that are primed or on the verge of inertia, breath intake and expulsion, sound vibrations and how they reach the angling of the ear, nasal in-take, temperature gauges, ground consitancy and the rise and fall of this consitancy, skin sensitivity, throat articulaitons and how they travel over the vissitudes of prolongued or shortened distance and what becomes of them through our varying perceptual frameworks over that distance; light luminosity and the reflective bounce of the spectrums of this light onto surfaces that, like sound vibrations, multiply them in endless cycles.

The movement dimension that is described in the tangents of our living moving forms- and in the spaces between that are shaped and stretched out, shrunk and compacted, fragmented and dissipated in this dance of negative space, becomes the progression of possibilites that are born out of every touch. Touch then is loaded with significance that resides outside of the graspable body; the material of flesh and bone, sinew and nerve. And yet the movements that transcend this physically denotive body are also borne out of it and because of it.

The body over-reaches itself; overstretches its own reach and in the void or the blind spot where the body on turning, seems to disapear from itself and from view, it arises across distance and through time in the transformations that break up any consistancy and at the same time, allow this body to live.

This time is different from the next moment and the next and the next. In this pulsation of breath; this blinking eidetic fluctuation of rhythms that at one speed play back into seizure and at another into running, jumping, smiling or wailing, are brief accounts- sleights of hand and of figure- that are reformulations of an original that never really existed.

So between existance and non-existance we play with our histories, delving for one relief into the next; into spheres of darkness- the shadow moments of disappearance and ambiguity- through which light and contour is given its resounding and momentary glory.

It is in the turning that we come to be; moods and expressions formulate anew on the cusp of the wind.

Points where we hook into a combined point of impact; these can be points of crash-landings; accidents and collisions that kill our vigour and destroy and tear into our bodies.This is because they capture us mid-movement and prevent the resolution; the fall suspended, the turn inhibited is a caustic and brittle entombment. And frequently it leads to death -absolute or partial- as when the cricket-man turned his head at just such an angle that a coursing ball hit and split open his jugular vein which in turn catastrophically flooded his brain and killed him.

Therapy perhaps works in reverse order to such trauma and it does so only by retracing back into movement potentials and completing them.

The points that come up in a Shiatsu//Somatic treatment do so at the points where there is an intensification of vibrations where directives course together and condense into static and opaque areas in the body. These are sign-posts and keys that sometimes lock against further movement when arrived at too insistantly. Yet they are high density signs as well; like the scar tissues on the flesh or the lacerations on the bark of a tree that has been hit over and over again and yet has stood its ground.

Can we in fact stand our ground imaginatively and at the same time yield? So that in the translations from one response to another touch guides us into movement rather than impacting us as trauma?
The movement diagram does not live alone in the intention of an individual but in an environmental constellation where there is a swarming of resources in every meeting and seperation.

As we unfold back out this embedded potential the life stories of our movment patterns begin to unfurl. They are indicated in a treatment session in the emotive points or Tsubos on the body that show up sequentially as a relay of openings and closings; of brief moments of responsiveness that give rise- like the cat's eyes lit up by head-lights on a dark journey- to create lineages of association that criss-cross over the body in order to describe its life-story; its multi-facetted spherical movements which are the adpatations and reformulations that are created in each moment. And these are shaped and influenced out of the very blockages that emerge in our life stories to more direct and habitual routes. The very form of our body is made up and sketched out from out of these cross-hatched lacerations and detours and just as scar tissue or held-breath or muscle contraction sign-post us towards a certain unknown inclination, so our very inhibitions and fault-lines; our illnesses, aches and pains, give us clues into the immediacy of areas of attention. In themsleves they may be seen as problems but within a wider scope of movement patterns they become land-marks that help us release back into a wider sense of our shared gesturing.

These patterns are always embodied. Yet in their very embodiment as they shift from one instant to another of co-adaptation, they give up absolute ownership and open up pockets of space or absence within the mass of the body itself. These become turning points for the body as a joint imagination.

Freedom is this; these spheres of emptinness that are enmeshed within the body-fibre- the materiality of matter itself. For they are truly our  one voice; both the sounding and the listened to sound. They are our vibrationary attunement with one another in varying roles of care and dependancy and on into the more spherical realms of play and improvisation. In that evolving dance we are to each other, both figure and ground; a shimmering give and take that gauges and recalibrates responsiveness and position in countless ways in the moment of our holding. This is love.

Falling and catching; the pulse of our being

Catching into a pulse. Movement is the passenger to this momentary falling and sending back through.

Gesture/intake is fastened upon this momentary beat- of touching down and taking up; the first translation.

We utilise our gravitational flux and the stiffness this impinges on our nervous, excitary and muscular system in order to sustain a position and then to move in one direction or another.

Yet this is not a constant thread. It is a continuous on-off pulsation of beats; of catching and falling in variations of depth, pressure, speed.

In this sense there is no single time or place of impulse. It is always this on-going translation just as there is no single limb or brain area in which we rely on a certain faculty or sensation and its execution in motor control or consciousness.

There is a constant relay.

As in M, I sense how the pulsar attunement with the back of his head- where the falling impulse can be directly activated, flows into grasp and reach of his hand. And yet this is not a direct messenger route. Rather it is a catching and tightening and release endlessly; in the throat, face, lips, chest; the fascia below the ribs, into the hips, sacrum and opening through the groin, into the legs and knees, ankles and feet. Through this working arch, the felt dimensionality of a hand rising- supported in mine- becomes the flicker pulsation of this gesturing and unfurling around widening contours and currents activated initially by a non-local falling impulse.

By triggering and harnessing this falling impulse internally, M is learning to activate his hands and fingers and to explore his surroundings by messaging me directly at the level of muscle activation. Through the direct engagement of this contact, his hand in mine, his hand and fingers become the differentiated tendrils of an exploratory organism as a direct flow that is felt in my muscles and nerves. And so with minute degrees of tension and release we move as one. But yet it is clear to me that M is messaging into me in this near simultaneous evocation and resolution in a continuous movement pattern.

We are working below the threshold of conscious activation- of goal and its implementation through a target.

Rather we are working through the falling reflex into patterns of shared expression and consolidation along a mid-line that exists- according to each gravitational situation- as a particular way of being throught he body and is translated into every other kind of momentary sound, visual, tactile resolution. We are channelling into these simultaneous currents- out of our communality of falling and catching. And out of it M is learning to hold lightly- as if flowing in water- his head, limbs and body organs; to rely on a spaciousness emanating through bodies as one.

It is through meeting an appointed connection- in falling fully and then in fully having the support of the ground; or of another, that the falling gathers into the multi-directional context of uprightness and spacial orientation.

Thought, language, memory relies on this pivotal human capacity for uprightness in order to tune into particular positions and to go off-centre without losing in the body-schema a sense of the upright mid-line. This again and again is strengthened and re-drawn by going into these tangents of swaying, rocking, tilting and jolting in order to find in this life movement a cross-section stillness that is made out of every new turn; a floating effortless sense of being and of being lightly with another. Upright, but in the manner of falling.

Falling into Contact

M falls into contact- falls back into a resting on my support as ground. Time passes and the contact is felt- experienced by both him and me. There is atunement- feelings of togetherness. I feel in some vibratory pulse in my flesh, that I want to care for him. I can imagine him in his propensity for growth- adaptation; in movement, expressiveness- yet the fullness for his being is held deeply and safely within his body as he now is. It is this felt sensation- this inter flowing of viscosity that enables me as Carer to imagine him as the condensation here and now of all that his life holds store for him. It is a storage- an autumnal harvest- a seed-pod internalised and it's explosion as co-existing in and through one another. Whether he walks, talks, smiles, laughs, squeezes my hand, an object, plays with another child, makes friendships is the observational and behavioural details of a running life that may or may not manifest. The imaginary holding of capacity is not scripted in the details of how something unfolds; it is in the potential fullness- a fullness that is specifically positioned- right here, right now in the particularity of this moment of actual contact.

And because his body has let go into the support of my holding; the weight has actually and really dropped deep into our shared ground, there is this ability in me- and him? across our differences of cognitive, neurological, muscular, age systems to relate- and to relay- in this global imaginary space, all the capacity before it ever arrives. It is simply this pause-gap- this waiting- this momentary suspension- of dropping down- of touching in, that allows for a buoyancy- a lightness- an effortless floating, rising in the space between- like a light balloon that floats across our shared attention- a visionary nebulous sensate marker- that is continually shifting - in the near distant space that joins us in  each of our wider capacities beyond our bounded selves- yet that depends on- demands- the imperative of a care-nurturing contact that is truly met- an appointment that is kept- where bodies for an instant flow together and remain that way for long enough in order to touch base- to feel  the limit point- the demarcation and point of stoppage as one directive comes up against another and two organisms- the Carer and the Cared For- truly meet and receive one anothers gift to one another- and so in that moment- through the ever-inceasing duration of moments that create time and distance, we know what it means to merge and in that very moment we know how to utilise that greater ground in order to bounce, spin and ricochet out into our individualities in our creative, functional, perceptual and communicative dreams through which we weave an environment of togetherness and apartness.

This splaying apart only to weave and knot together again and then this continual stretchiness as the doubled-up fibres that we build together support more and more Independence and the connective tissue becomes symbolic, playful, transitional- (Winnicot) in our voyaging and return- is what allows for "Affectional bonds" that take us through life. (Bowlby)

What it is I feel; as M lets go the tensile holding of his spasmic body and incrementally bit by bit, like a water fall touching down, is this probing and rooting deep into my being. It affects me and allows me to infitessiminally adapt and mediate to these falling groups of tensile muscle and contorted fascia. And as incrementally I relax and make space for this tempered falling, so portions of his body fill out into their natural shape and capacity, he takes space for himself in the time it takes to land in contact to a receptive ground. And in this receptivity and co-adaptation there is air circulation; the natural rising and falling of the breath and it begins to build into tensile vortices's; to release into sound-waves and to settle again into silent breath.There is anxiety, despair, pain, joy, playfulness, celebration and beauty closely tumbling and and out of one another. Out of this background re verb where we join and counter-point in spliced tempo and harmony, a sound texture grows and I find myself in a song that is not so much improvised or made up on the spot as being simply the audible outcome of  this on-going atunement that is occurring on the level of blood, breath, bone, flesh, hormones, neurological processes, visual circuits, kinaesthetic and visceral  affectivties, smell and touch.

And it is the beginnings of this translation from the arrived-at-touch that lingers on through time into sound waves, and feeling emotions, calibrating as facial expressions and then as gestural pulsations; opening and closing the hands bringing them together at the chest and apart again and then the gradual and playful interaction of our limbs as mine; through the mediation of my hands,  hold, support and wait for this touch arrival; for a slight contraction and then for a release out into movement as the patterning and co-patterning of imaginary diagrams that simply open into actuality out of the held propensity of a system present to itself.

This propensity for movement is always resting on the near invisible ground of a Care Connection that attunes and adapts making the propensity to move form out of a need; for comfort, nurturing, warmth, support and the demarcation of self at the firm holding border of another, a reality because it is met in the moment that it is thought. Like Winnicot and his work on baby and mother early interactions; where the breast is always angled in just such a way that it reaches the pursed lips of the baby just as its hunger wells up in this act of pouting and probing outwards with the lips in this rooting activity- so this is extended endlessly into every other gesturing out. And so the imaginary space and the actual space of contact merge and co-formulate around and through one another.
The actual and the virtual;  the heavy and the light are always co-influencing in our every gesture, posture and manifestation as patterns of becoming (Deleuze) that grow and die like sparks from the embers of a fire that are procreating out of one another in a continual feedback loop.

To be free is to experience this ground support fully and to let the body in its materiality then float above that - like the neutral gear of a vehicle that is primed and alert- clear yet rested in this propensity to move effortlessly and  as the fulfilment of the last piece of a pattern; where the tensile energy of contact builds and builds and then releases like the falling of a water-full into the happening of an action. Action, capability, movement, dance, music, is only ever that; simply the letting fall naturally out of an apt and fully congruent meeting; a touching in and in this way, a clear positioning out of which buoyancy and lightness in the world can effortlessly flow.

So it is with M, that as he sinks into the contact I feel him primed  for flow- resting really on nothing but believing in the ground and so light and ready- his limbs no longer meshed and bolted into place around a riveted torso but a recalibration of  each part in versatile  connective patterns of redistribution- that are alive, awake to  changing conditions and reformulating on each new pulse of breath; a breath that is flowing into a wider sphere of patterning.

Through the body and its release into contact the imagination is set free and so the limbs become articulate. Sound follows and the heart opens wide because it is aptly placed in the widening space between this safe contact. The world opens up from out of this single point and our perception flourishes on the journeying of our bodies set in motion and deeply able to rest with another.

Touch as a wider Positioning

Touch as a wider positioning.

What is its trajectory? It's circulatory routes?

Touch- staying for long enough to receive impact of touch- and for it to begin this journey of translation- articulation though the body and into a wider set of relationships; an environment that we are a part of.

Sense impressions: Hot/Cold, pressure/release, compression/relaxation, Heaviness/lightness- position; enclosure: place/movement, distribution, re-distribution.

Then colour, sound as atmospheric intensities- felt through entire body- qualities of immersion that the body becomes.

Moods,emotions- felt affectivities.
And imagery, symbolism, imagination, aesthetic art/music, architecture-- language

In common with others who also feel through this body sensing

Empathy- to stay long enough to co-attune.

Not to be in fight/flight mode and so jolt continually out of contact.

Then felt impressions, shared immersions- become shared journey.

Circulatory systems- internal and organism-environment- as co-evolving single system that homoeostatically self-regulate.


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Therefore Touch- Spacial distribution/composition through Time

Health-Art-Environment as one-

Our shared body redistributing in ambient sensations, atmospheres of resonant sound, colour velocity, shape, speed, dynamic, viscosity

Into visionary forms as dreams, images, stories, songs, pictures, sculpture, buildings, landscapes, rooms, parks, nature reserves, factories, waste disposal sites, ships, shops, museums and community groups, political parties, wars, social parties, groups, exclusions to groups; what is seen/what is prohibited form being seen

Attention- non-attentiveness- patterns of inclusion and exclusion.

Therefore any rights movement must address health: Art :Environment as one.

Because perception is based around sensory permission- and where this staying long enough to experience true contact has been prohibited or abused creating fear, anger, blocking, there will be a knock on affect to perception, imagination, symbol making, empathy, and verbal and non-verbal communication.

A system of careful attunement needs to be an on-going practise  not to redress the wrong and normalise/cure a person but to align into a sensitised sensory, perceptual, emotional and neurological system so as to utilise this abundance and propensity of unbridled affectivity.

Not therefore to numb the affects  but to utilise them in connective attunement.

as Health- in Touch Therapy
as Culture- in utilising ambient sound, colour, viscosity, weight, speed in imagery, music, stories etc
as Environment- in the placement of people and objects in real-time and in real space and the dynamic movement and transformation of these brief positions as part of a trajectory that harnesses and holds lightly in a tensile set of movement possibilities, neurological, occupational, play and artistic patterns.

These patterns to become communicative styles that is a real practise built up and mediated, navigated through co-responsiveness- so that this culture becomes  workable according to  the neurological , emotional, perceptual , communicative patterns as they NOW are and in that way creates a valid tenure out of which real and authentic contact is truly felt and so patterns of movement through the body, through the environment, into symbols, support networks and communicative styles can be realistically built.

This as preferable to imposing a bench-mark of Health, Art and Environment out of which all bodies- seen as functional or dysfunctional- must more or less- as best they can - adhere to.

No. Rather it is the moment by moment real responsiveness  and the recalibration of affects- of touch, sound, temperature, speed, light, pressure, and the intervals between these various depth readings that build up as accumulative layers, a nuanced reading that is apt in the moment; Truly a co-witnessing.

Only this to be a true meeting- where both adjust int he very momentum and pacing of that meeting.

Upon this rests the resources to build up imaginative worlds that are not split off as fantasy but relay back into the felt body as the container and containment through which symbolic worlds weave in and out-  as metaphors of the body- through; imagery capacities, utterance capacities, verbal symbolic meaning. These are second order layers resting on the secure foundation of truly nuanced holding of care-giver to cared for ( Health) and more and more the coming into active responsiveness of the cared for as a co-interdependence with carer who  becomes a foundation for later relationships of equal co-witnessing; where  there is a sense of dynamic articulation  and circulation even as one stays still within a nurturing contact or moves independently playing, making, building and imagining.

Ref:

Bowlby: Secure attachment
Winnicot: Playing and reality
Merleu Ponty: The Phenomenology of Perception
Klein: Love, Guilt and Reparation
Intensive Interaction: Phoebe Caldwell

Movement Currents

An array of possibility- on the cusp of every aggravation- every dead-end. In the extremity of a solo direction there is a necessary inertia- a running out of fuel- an abrupt atrophy. This limbless torso rolls in on itself probing into a depth for a slight flicker -a sign-  a provocation at the febrile level of nervous excitation- on the verge of nervous exhaustion- on the very verge of giving up- of reconciling to a self-referential that self-soothes in the habitual loop of oblivion. Can we use up all our energy in this way? The death-wish- either unto ourselves or by cascading and imprinting aspects of self on to other who simply play the part of this double enclosure? How to break free of this doubling and redoubling unto ourselves? The locked-in space outside of relationship.

It is scary to move out of this- risky- at the edge of need and abandonment- longing and betrayal. How to open up the relationality bit by bit on the cusp of an interior affect? At the very point where inertia and atrophy spasm into a ricocheting of distant echoes that seem then to break off from the main body- to go their own way- to become Other and to push the interior more and more in onto itself as a defencive blockade- a wall of circuits that keep travelling beyond the moment of touch into  the evasions of images of self and other that cohere and burst by their own excess.

How then to keep the tensile resolve on the edge of aggravation at the border-line where new growth- new proliferation takes place?

A body- what is that? A body curtailed in a wheelchair - in an excess of affect- in an assault of sensory impulse that hits it like flotsam from the sky onto its passive surface- and marks it here and then here. Psychological markings are abundant because the capacity for movement- for absorption and integration goes missing. The articulation is set in limbo-  in a vacancy of space where there is no definite ground- nothing to push against or pull towards. The gravitational flow of  drawing towards and away has become dismembered from action. And the thought about action- even the idea to act- which is a form of deep imagination flowing from body impulse to action- is curtailed in the body restricted from both internal and external response.

The border as interchange between different levels of affect; its very depth reading as co-existing in  the milieu of an environment is not foretold. There is no reading- no literacy at all which when it occurs is the exquisite delicate exchange between affect and manifestation. Without the clear signs of behaviour, there is no signs or impulses drawing towards potential care-givers, educators or play-mates. And so isolation ensues. Deep aloneness in the midst of the overwhelming bombardment of affect.

So there needs to be an intervention- a slight warp or waver in the line of demarcation. Where skin packages and enfolds flesh, blood and inner organs, then something, anything; just a slight indentation, needs to give. There needs to be a flicker, a ripple, a hesitation, the momentary holding and release of breath so that in this detour- this minuscule de-railment of habitual patterns of self-enfoldment, something catches in,  something splays out and in this minuscule roll, a slight questioning is opened; the gap between self-reference and co-dependence. Here time begins to move as and from the moment of each new affect. In the slight lapsing of time- into the neutrality of a pause, new life begins to configure at the interface of what before was a border of exclusion.

How does this actually look or feel in practise? Practises may be diverse- Gardening or farming for instance, building or demolishing houses, parks, schools and roads. Or the accumulation of marks and colours on a piece of paper. Or the excess sounds that interject and rise up through one another into un-foretold harmonics. Nobody summoned these up out of a set plan. They emerged in the relationship of beats and tones to create an exegesis that excelled the input of this tensile system to overflow into a new kind of adaptation- a new life-form- that is not representational of something outside the system but is the very composition of a life-form struggling on the verge of its own possible extinction; its own possible adaptation. Every line in a sketch is this- a limit point of a certain kind of pressing down- a certain type of temperature reading- only to bounce out of that deposited trough into an explosive rebound that configures as mark-making into a new area of whiteness- soon to be undone. So the image fashions itself out of the limit points of its own tolerance for touching/for any kind of contact; its own provocation where paper becomes skin and feels itself out from the inside into a face; an exposure face now flickering through. Individual lines and dots that ricocheted on and off of one another in the making- with no mind or plan of overall features or expressive content, suddenly bounce out and cohere as a unified expression; a configuration that is born out of non-local, non causal synchronic explosions. These are self perpetuating affects which tell back the story of how that face, diagram, map or territory was brought into formation through countless affects beyond the content and frame of what is there depicted. The viewer- and there may be many from all points of view- is the relational absentee partner of this facing whether human or non-human; not now a mere surface but a touching through into what is deferred- can not be directly apprehended or seen- out of the exclusion zones- the dead-ends; the curtailments and abrupt endings that any frame demands.

Can we use these frames; the frames of endings- abandonment's that we make of others and that others make of us- to tease through into a relational identification?

The lived body of a boy in a wheel-chair taken out and held briefly in my arms; laid down on a mat. The treatment is already there from the first apprehension even before touch. The touch a mere touching in, in order to release out. And I am reading through into the mobile body; the capacity for movement; the recollection of organs, these channels and neuro-circuitry leanings tilting into a totality that builds and dissolves like sands at the edge of the sea. The provocation becomes an accepted part of the internal milieu as warmth pervades and settlement ensues. The interior bulk of the body settles and lands and the torso begins to spasm - to lift minutely off the ground and to settle back down each time a little more.  This incremental re-settlement is sending through into atrophied limbs that curl and infuse back into the interior as M thrusts his whole fist deep into his mouth. And there is nothing for me to do; no sense at all in un-doing this knot through even  minimal force even with the best of intentions. For that is simply reinforcing the separation and the need to defend an interior self-referential system against an outside attack. Rather as the interior warmth pervades and the ripples of excess and redistribution escalate and release through the belly and spine, the neck and chest, the  face and the temples, the top of the head and the feet, something seems to tighten and then unfold in the hips and pelvis and this ripples out into the chest; it flows down through the arms and into the fingers that are sensitised; linked to the flickering questioning eyes that follow internally this visual, kinaestethic and visceral journeying of the senses. Organs uncurl out of the very spasm deep at the core of the body provoked and released in these first touchings.And then much later and as if of their own volition, fingers and hands uncurl and tap into the space just above the body- clasp my own hands in pulsar waves of holding and letting go. The rhythm builds and there is a playfulness of heightened contact that leads to a light spasm or rigidity and then its instantaneous release and unfolding into movement. Movement patterns begin to fashion themselves out of the sensorial   compression and relaxation that occur as waves and now become configured into a communicative link that is nearly play. This is on the edge of imagining the body in action that it then shapes itself around. Limbs, hands, feet, head, neck, throat and voice literally grow out of these imaginings.

And the boy becomes adept in playing through from passivity- to provocation- to tightening- to spasm- to release- to movement pattern- to functional use. And so he fashions his limbs and body- parts as composite growths out of a core reflexivity that is induced at the border between his body and mine and brings us both into this composed relationship where we are together with one another in the treatment room- and where I talk with him casually and he understands and gives me signals back. Or I hold a limb; an arm in a neutral floating position and I wait. And he shows me because he waits with me for long enough to have a sense of this limb hanging there in space- supported-as if in water- very lightly; almost invisibly. And then he spasms-really just on the edge of spasm- and releases the spasm into counter-flow, showing me the direction in which his arm begins to swim with a new-found volition all of its own- like swimming up-current against the tide- as I lightly support it but do nothing to direct it- for the direction is internally given- now beyond both his and my thought-about volition-and yes he has manifested this action- not by some prior intentional goal but by listening acutely to the impulses at the border of the contact and then using the provocation of that contact- not to habitually ward off the feeling of the contact and enter instead a recursive loop of continuing rigidity, but to use the initial rigidity in order to release into a movement current. This is how he sets his body free- incrementally- through use; by imagining it to be so in each particular detail of its manifestation. And so it becomes this to him- out of his own experience made possible on the very cusp of an inhibition- a fright- that would threaten to push it in the other direction, towards rigidity and inertia. This is the contact interface and by keeping open with awareness this place that is equally the place of curtailment and growth, limbs are imagined and are given life-vigour in the freshness of these imaginings. They are always linked to actual sensations; real provocations, real adaptations according to each emerging set of circumstances, describing  through affect the situation as it is unfolding. This is our felt experience; our pain threshold and its new given use into life-energy- into a sharing. The fear of abandonment, of betrayal has been reconfigured anew on each occasion into the use we put ourselves in according to our on-going relationship to one another and to the ground. This is love. It is at the basis of our capacity to communicate. This is based on us seeing and feeling the relevance of this communication in order to come more fully into being ourselves as a way of being with another. it evolves out of a continuity which is always changing in form yet is unbroken, whether we are physically near or further apart.

The contact then becomes a way of configuring these changing intervals and the space between becomes our grammar of continuing contact; always reconfiguring from moment to moment between Independence and dependence. A better way to put it perhaps is a continually up-dated style of interdependence. This is the playfulness of imaginings- grounded as always in real events- real experiences- real kinaesthetic and visceral movements of being drawn in and out of different levels of clarity and discharge.

It is the ability to alter the focal range or intensity that allows us to stay present with ourselves in relationship to other. This is a continuing attunement and it is durational - long-term-  through every interval that in a sense holds over and makes valid the point and intensity of each contact. This is how it is put to use floating and moving effortlessly, lightly configuring between the charges of more intensive contact. Movement is the natural overflow and discharge of this contact intensity. Where it is prohibited or disallowed it will create psychological repercussions. This is how physical contact, movement and the psyche are all interdependently linked. It is the imagination that links, transgress and translates one aspect of experience into another linking the physical and material with the virtual and transitory. Language and communication is the sign; the marked residue that points not to itself or to its representational aspect of denotation but rather to the apt placement of touch or feeling contact and its exchange into the realm of movement discharge. Language naturally fashions around this right consolidation of focus and its release into energy. This is also the pulse of  the in-breath and the out-breath continually replacing, replicating and re-composing one another into a unified presence whose aspects are inseparable but never fixed.

The Dam Release

A session with M today at the school. He is coming into contact. Getting stronger- I am feeling his presence. He is using his own jerks and spasms as brief excitations - just before release. I am using this same pattern- high-lighting  the blockage like a small dam build-up - then to let go- give space and let the pattern flow out as if from a nebulae that splays cylindrically all the way out. Shiatsu/Seiki touch is this- it is  the precision intervention of a blockage- not in fact a circulation or balancing act. For in and of itself it can do nothing- or perhaps nothing other than provoke and heighten a compulsion that has become a habitual gaurding into an interior. By piggy-backing on this same pattern it flips it back out- provoking the halt or seizure at a precise juncture then as the liquid flow builds up and builds up, it creates this momentary swelling- like an over-flow- and then as the contact is released there is a vacuum that immediately is flooded with a charge of substance that goes in a multi-directional way from centre-point both centrifugally and as an outwards dissipation. This double-move creates a momentary suspension- like a line drawn in the sand- a marking- an indentation- which is timeless, spaceless. Thereupon this void arises a back-swell back into livingness and - like a man choking whose channels are filled with water, there is a sudden eruption and the passages clear themselves out by the kick-start engagement  that this provocation and turbulance creates. Out of the ground-swell there comes a magnetic pull the other way like the pull of the tide back towards the ocean current and into its dark depths- sucking back into its own integrity and force from the sandy shores where it ceaselessly comes and goes.

So with M he is learning to orientate his limbs, his internal organs, his breath, his bowel movements, his heart beats and his voice all from the same source. This catching in and exposition out that occur simultaneously as a double-take that is extensive and recursive- that is manifest and deep within the fold; that is the point of contact- of communication- and the point of seperation; of reliance and independance, joy and pain, elaborate through one another becoming the play of one another; a dance of up and down, in and out that together create a small insertion- a pause-gap through which we glance back at ourselves with humour and kindness, then let it go and sow the seeds of this merging with other, as  the preliminary of our aperception of another.

Only in this unity where we get to feel the biting in of force and counter-force curling in and out of one another; upon the banks of one another- do we then have the imagination to interact with another- as a part of ourself that we hold apart - and then leap over through this man-made gulf to create emergant patterns- signs and symbols- communication networks- soundings and vibrations; the pulsar on-off vibrations of  muscular contractions and their instantaneous release. It is the release- the letting go- the streamng through which is the journey of our seeing/feeling/kinaesthethic volitional action. Yet it is set on the banks of a seizure- a near-death interiority- a contraction that seems endless- leading towards oblivion- until miraculouly it stops- glances back at itself like a mirror gazing at its reversed image- and then unfolds back into exposition. For this miracle of reversal is life- it is health- it is well-being.

On Waiting as doing.

This tensile wait is an end in itself. Leaning through from potential to outcome it is neither. More delicate it is the straw bridge between these poles strung out between these erected pillars that are so convoluted with expectation, yearning and disappointment that they are compacted into substances; blinded in the realness of that accumulative dream.

But between landings and before the flight where is anyone, anything? How are we locatable? Not in and of ourselves. There is this pervading sense of settings infinitely and minutely adjustable as co-ordinate points that is this Waiting. And the Waiting becomes a verb "To do" no longer a position to take up. It is loaded- both compact and spacious- impacted and yet transparent. It's the circulation of air - the wind currents, the temperature shifts, the atmospheric pressure and humidity gradients. It is the rising and falling of particles of dust that hang and drop or are taken up on wind currents to be dispersed far and wide. It's the glint of the light onto and off of the bark of a tree, the buildings, the reflective backwash of a window. And also the humming drone of chanting cloaked religious men that pervade this area of the park on this Saturday morning; a Shabut, interlaced with bird-calls as they take up morsels of bread in their beak, swoop up into the tree foliage and drop back down again as the morsel slips from their beak. It seems not to be marked as a mis-hap, a loss, an altercation. Rather it is the pulse of sensing matter, following it through into movement and pressing it momentarily with the lightest of grips into matter once again. This is the heart-beat, the breath and the eidetic blink of our eyes that like the tree foliage lets in and screens the widening rays of the sun. Warmth can be felt on my skin where before there was a coolness and a light breeze that dissembled that gathering of warmth so that it did not linger for long enough to be experienced as such.

The birds on the lawn plateau, this plateau now strewn in loose tiny white feathers, are angling towards the brink craning their necks into the same direction, quaking and cawing with guttural throat sounds. Yet where I am now,  that sound is almost lost on the wind until I am more imagining it or transplanting it from an earlier experience when I was then closer to them.

These birds are waiting,  lulled yet infinitely alert in the threshold gaps between tiny leaps in atmospheric pressure, cool and warm interpenetrating swathes of air, slight breezes and their instantaneous dying; sounds that come and disappear as if around tangible corners as their passageway is eased or erased in concordant and discordant air-bands; light frequencies squeezed like bubbles through a hoop to intensify and bounce back and forth like an agile ball  in an impossibly small space. Or else thrown to the skies, the universe beckoning until light becomes a soft stroke that is no different to our experience of our skin;  not a division but a contour through which signals are forged and made meaningful as if in a wide and improvised artist studio. 

These birds are held  in these cross currents. More they are forged in this way only out of these particular vectors. And what appears to be inclinations, decisions or complex programs of coordinated movements based on unknown communication networks; the submerged signals of intelligent flesh, are simply the coming into fruition of all these movements. These do not stop at the border of each feathered bird but rather run right through these bulky squat bodies tainting them with the same brush, colouring them simultaneously from the outside and inside as if the birds were doorways; valves that sense invisible discrepancies in the pressure and speed of air currents, light flicker and sound resonance. And as a certain decimal of frequency is reached in these multi modular currents the birds simply take to the air. They find themselves airborne not because  they have made the move towards flight as if collectively following a good fact by fact Manuel on flying, but because they are no longer landborne creatures; they have become airborne and the relationship between these two states is not simply the galvanisation of skill sets; of muscle collectivity's and metabolic shifts. Rather the ability to imagine flight belongs to all the atmospheric vectors that make it so. And the birds simply lean in to that possibility made real; they simply take a ride on the currents that have informed them of that possibility. They are lulled into this new state much as a new-born is lulled into comfort by the singing voice of its mother or the falling into the nurture of a milk-filled breast that offers up its riches as soon as it is touched and seems in turn to touch back with the very essence of life.

In this sense to talk of the organism-environment is more than to say that the environment attunes to the organism's needs. It is to say that the environment- whether wind currents or the real or imagined solidity of
the mother or the mother's breast, lends itself to the idea of being harnessed in the very way in which it presents itself. "Use" then comes from this merging momentarily into the swell and surf of a sea that carries us and into which we let ourselves be carried. Yet somehow in this carrying we wake up, nearly die from the shock of being truly alone and separate from the object of our merging and then if we are lucky reconcile the mis-match and communicate to one another out of this new dream of a volitional encounter. Holding delicately in the balance between these two states; a merging with and a separating out from- so that we are neither engulfed nor spat out, is the ambiguity out of which the Waiting occurs. And we can truly listen into and sense the conditions in which this waiting occurs so that when we give our trust out into the idea of being carried and of having our weight borne through space by forces other than ourselves it is already brought to us out of the environmental conditions that make it so. It is in the action that we imagine the possibility that is emerging through us into this action at that very point in time.

Imagination is nothing more than this. We are given into a shape and form momentarily out of the tensile currents that offer up precisely this and no other possibility. Where we can lean into these forms lightly and gracefully and then as conditions change, re-formulate these imaginative shapes to a more updated Use, this is how we come into health and connectivity with our environment and with others who like us are manifesting into and out of these same environmental conditions.

In Therapy or between Therapies, this active Waiting: the tensile interim space that is not foreclosed into goals and objectives, is the place of Health. Wherever this loose tensile connectivity remains, there is Health. If the Therapist can be this kind of loose Environment then the child can move into action and move simultaneously into the idea of action as the imaginative rising and falling of brief forms.This is freedom and it is the basis upon which connective presence is felt and a relationship becomes possible.

On not taking hold

At the tipping point; a threshold. The backwash rinsing through.

At the extremity of a situation; an action; a contact situation; out of speechlessness, rigidity, incapacity; a coming undone, this spontaneous backlash to all that we keep on a tight meter unfurls and in its exquisite display it is unbehold to anyone, even to the personality of the person doing the action.

It is an exegesis into a wider pattern of relationality and an admittance of affect in this co-dependency.

However bizarre, ritualised, repetitive it may appear it is loosening the strings that hold us tightly into and onto ourselves.

In this case purposelessness is the catapult unfurling of our improvisation that knows itself in the doing. It is of the moment and so despite appearances is more real, more apt and more appropriate than the tight edge of choreographed learnt gestures of social mores.

It is the unwinding part on part felt sensation as it is happening in real-time. So it is an enquiry- facing a deep fear that to act and look out of this consecrated norm is to risk everything; to break down the borders of identity.

Yet it is a necessary loosening in order that the components may shuffle and truly relate through a feedback of holding one position in relation to another.

This accountability; a kind of intricate bodily accountancy where the mind is deeply imbued into the minutiae of each felt sense whether pleasant or unpleasant and hovering there like a bird resting on an egg, it has the patience to wait so that the discomfort, the pain, the impossible yield is held in this suspension warming yet not crushing until of its own accord the light shell of the egg cracks just at the point where new life might emerge.

It is a risk but because the breaking apart happens from the inside; as a new birth and life-form, and not from the outside as an intervention or theory for a better kind of life, it is authentic and there is self-reflection in and through every cell from core to bone, ligament and breath.

Sensory atunement rests on this apt placement and timing so that an accuracy, a settlement, a gesture or impulse however small and seemingly inconsequential, becomes the axis around all else and in that moment may turn and so thrive.

This is a way to value what is there whether a silence, an incoherent utterance, a beckoning or a rebuff.
All are the pieces upon which an atmosphere of coherence gradually evolves. Yet the coherence is infinitely spacious, not packed tight with a mission or a judgement of its worth but simply allowed to rest as it is.

In this sense it becomes part of a wider whole just as each person however seemingly rigid or monotone they appear as a cut-out figure, in a wider connectivity they become too the axis around which all else turns. In the supposed vacancy of these figures, the hollow spaces between one breath and the next, the compulsive and the person in transit- between gestures, moves, steps, sentences, there is a silence loaded with feeling; a wordless message that draws all into conviviality where not knowing is our shared human experience and making it up according to the deep respect of intervals and pauses becomes the grammar and meter of our life together.

Flicker

What is absent? What is missing? A deficit? A link broken? Can we jump over the absence? Scale the deficit? Where are the footholds- between one nothingness and the next? Our markings are the visitations we once made. The places we left behind. The time-spans we no longer fill. This is our trajectory, and our expectation into what has yet to arise; our gesturing through is this premonition between an imaginary past and an imaginary future. We are the bridge here in the present in which we eat up what we trail behind us and what we lean into. We are the missing link of our own gesturing. The hoped for into which we keep pouring ourselves and the mourned for and missed object always askew from where we actually are. In the actual gesturing there is a virtual object which is nothing but this absentee past, this not yet arrived at future. 

It is here in this catching of breath; in the stutter, the momentary delay, the deja vu or regurgitation; it is in these habitual slippages through which we pass our time and consolidate in this evocation of a pause, enough intensity- enough contraction- that like a spring-loaded lever we flip back out into another bearing. In other words we unfold and we do so only because of this folding in. In invisibility, unatainability, in the lost cause, the missing beat, the catched phrase, here is where we gulp back down our pre-aranged words so that they regurgitate into an unknown form; an unknowable consolidation. This is the factory in which our bodies mix. Sensations stew, cook in their own juicies, multiply and converge, warm into one another and fracture apart into the cooked up particles of new planets. We are not the object of our thought; we are the passing object of an idea that is propositioning us in movement- in transition as the on-off eidetic flicker of a light sensitive eye that registers everything without seeing.

Leaning

Every leaning is a proliferation. Yet is keeps to the centre. Or refers through the centre out and in again. It is not a bipartite bitten off bit that grows into a separate unity. It is not an equation to be set against an ulterior additive or negative. It is a bridge. A splaying through in the tendrils of separation- a proliferation of spindle-like limbs- of catapulting fibrous growths through which the thing itself - our selves- gathers cohesion buffeted and held in suspension on all sides from these invisible threads. The rocking tumultuous sway of our movement is drilled through and through from out of our core bodies into the earth, and form out of the core earth into our bodies, rising up into the space above us. We take shape between these ulterior tensions that are seamless because they go unseen. But what is seen is this instance or that instance of a sighting between one leaning and the next. We go up and down, tilt back and forth, seem to accelerate forward or hold back receding incrementally into the vacuous atmosphere. Yes we seem to appear and disappear in the blink of an eye. We wipe our brow, feel the feint breeze upon our lips in the still clear morning sun.

Birds ready themselves for flight. They stand erect on the plateau, necks long and beaks all pointing the same way over the lean of the hill into the hazy moisture of  a dew-filled Nature Reserve. Runners have began to gather. Dog-walkers are calling their dogs to heel in the excitation of morning smells- of marginal signs on the edges of what we are able to see, hear or smell. A man calls "Lady...no...". The ears prick up for an instance then fold back barely a break in the pattern of movement. We too are trailing directions, limbs giving way and holding firm-over and over again- the fall is captured in the proliferation of steps. We walk, sit down, dawdle in the the near companionship of others seated elsewhere in this early morning vigil where recognition is held in the balance- the approach and the retreat excruciatingly tipping forward and backwards, wavering on the brink of something... The birds take off, wings flapping, throats croaking over the horizon. But we are already down below awaiting their arrival which is always somehow held in abeyance as their flight is prolonged even as they do not seem to make headway. We too are between the take off and the landing- between steps; between moves.

How do we feel the movement? Let unfold the idea of movement in the actual movement itself? Let it be the premonition- this launching out into the faintest of sensations that do not know where they will land. They have no plan but yet each point in the trajectory is precise, gathered out from across these fibrous tendrils that tease out the sky, press into the mounds of grass, squeeze between blood vessels and fascia lining;  ride down the inner tubing of our guts and change places across the thresholds between one cell and the next. Air becomes blood, blood becomes carbon dioxide. Food and wastage change places- and we look into the eyes of strangers or hold apart those we have known all our lives.

Habit is a killer. Can we remain alive in the fall- where pain resides? I cry quietly behind my sunglasses in the early morning gathering of a man with his three dogs on a far off bench and an older man with a walking stick and a bag-full of old bread that he is chucking teasingly at the dogs. We all have our own tables spread out on the grass verge some little way back from the canal and the bridge. They both have their backs to me. I am looking out beyond them into the haze hearing the rumbling of distant commuter trains. None of us our moving.  But we are breathing here together in the fresh morning sun. This is the point of connection- just before the action take place- in the hesitancy of a breath savoured just beyond itself; the taste of it. That is why I am crying, out of the sheer relief that this moment brings by resting in itself before any point of deliverance.

The man with the three dogs joins me for a chat. The older man wanders off with his stick askew, glancing behind himself momentarily and the tension comes undone- limps and stutters into this or that story, this or that need un-met. And it is only time before we go our separate ways.

Rocking our world

In a rocking perturbation something rises, unfolds, spreads out and sinks back down to the ground. Only to repeat this patterning again and again, rising and falling on the edge of its own disturbance. It is the disturbance that brings out the patterning in a movement at first reckless like a tangent or a distraction that seems to cause a missed beat to an otherwise perfect symmetry. But this symmetry is only our idea of the body; of a plan; of a function. And it is peppered with arrested development; unforeseen environmental beckoning or the simple uneven lay of the land. How to iron out these fault-lines? And where would we be in this uncreased landscape; if nature was such a good housekeeper that it equalised every nook and cranny; erased the tumultuous fluid and larva-filled rumblings of our ancient and not so distant past. In the perfection of an unmarked landscape we would be erased our history never begun. For it is one thing after another; one interruption or slight of hand; one slippage or runaway rumination that fashions our oblique disposition.

Yes we are swaying in this world which itself is one large swing hoisted who knows where subject to weather conditions and sedimentary shifts in the strata below our feet. The wind blows. It sinks into the hollows of our sunken cheeks. It screams out its escape hollering over the wasted episodes, blowing up a storm and making child-kites that flutter and glide, swerve and remain poised for seconds at a time out of the paper bags and polythene wrappers of discarded groceries. High up in the stratosphere they are balanced between jet-streams; submerged in the crevices of circuits that contradict one another, swaying with ease where at another level; in another split second, they might collide and crumple to the ground.

We are breathing; rising and falling; making and breaking these volatile patterns in our every gesture, our every hesitation. For in these split second coincidences; in these circuitous rebuffs and momentary mis-matches, there is a folding back onto itself and out of itself  in the mad dance of making and re-making an origami paper-weight bird that acquires some kind of gravitas not through its near transparent substance but through the passages and tail-ends of its own formation; the ground-swell of our own restless hands, our agitating bodies and the buzzing insistent distractions of colloidal sound-scapes that break in upon the flow, cut it up and re-assemble the pieces out of the fallen stars of our dreaming imaginations. This is where we come to rest; out of and in the midst of our own and one anothers continual agitation. We are dreaming the same dream and it is the same dream, out of which we meet as one or annihilate one another. Both are possible and both are playing out together.

Body Unforetold

Working with M yesterday I noticed firstly even when he was still strapped into his chair and I had yet to touch him that he was alert to my voice. His eyes seemed to scan the duration of a sound emission then blink and like a wind-screen wiper run the opposite way. I felt the slight softening of his lips- something between a puckering outwards and a pressing inwards. The first touch then is always through the lips- that in a sense feel themselves... in anticipation for the breast..and later for any kind of nurturing contact. Sound emission is a natural consequence of  this touching into; readying through the sensate reciprocity of lips feeling both the hardness and the give-point of this pulsing muscle that both reaches out and receives in. Communication is the out spill of an organism readying itself for need- and reciprocity where at first it sets up its own internal feedback loop, takes on a wider patterning of self and other; of taking in and giving out. This gift-giving is the flowing of our capacity of reach and absorption through one another; a rinsing through and a co-emergence of a wider sense of unity. The body changes in this process of pouring into and out of other until in a sense there is only one body continually re-shaping as if by the wind through the trees that does not hold onto any one shape or position. Need is met, reacalibrated and sent forth in continual dynamic shifts of attention, of balance; of emphasis.

I lift M out of the chair having undone the many straps that hold him in place like the bound contents of a tidy rucksack, strapped and secured.

His body becomes stiffened as he meets the mat, belly down, and he rolls himself over by tensing his neck and torso at a slight torsion and thrusting himself over onto his back. His upper back is arched and tense and his hips and sacrum area are buckling on and off of the mat. He thrusts his fist into his mouth.

There is often this going into habitual patterns of self-soothing when M is lifted out of the chair into a prone position; as if his organism was trying to wrap itself back up into itself, becoming in its soft and vulnerable exterior, the shell of its own dwelling. But the way this is sought is through stiffness and the momentary jolts of sudden release with the muscles playing into waves and ripples of contortion and this becomes the stimulus of his awake life. That the release does not really ever come fully before another wave of contortion is set into action, means that what results is a build-up of spasm through the entire body so that the ankles, the hips, the diaphragm, belly, upper back, chest, arms, neck and face become self-referential; locked in and looping around their own particular locality as if self-existing; as if not needing the support of the whole.
The bowels tighten and the breath rises locked into the top-most parts of the body. The head becomes hot and the senses overwhelmed. There is a sense of scattering around the head like bees that do not settle and there can be no moment of focus; no precision grasp and no lull or drop in the intensity of  this-low level exhaustive excitation in order to settle back down; to settle through and circulate out into a wider atmosphere in the intensity and impact of every felt gesture and contact.

Working on the "Off "contact to give more space can help. But this space is only available out of the first holding points of containment and stilled waiting. I use the outer palms of my whole hand wrapped around the lower back from the mid line of the bony spine to the soft sides of the body and simply hold here.
No movement; no stimulation, caress or disturbance. Simply the slow filter emission of a natural heat; blood to blood warming as if it were flowing across the border of my skin to his; through my hands, through his shirt with no directionality, no intent or concern; no goal of healing or helping. This slow emanation gradually sinks in and then the subtle ripples under my hands inform me where to momentarily give more space or slant a little at an angle; to go into a certain level of depth and then no more and to then release this level of holding like a miner rising up through the layers of rock and earth sediments deep below the surface of the land. A recalibration at the surface can only come out of these low intensity barely active mining journeys where one simply takes up residence, waits for the slightest of shifts in the flicker or lightening ripple of fascia or muscles as it is animated through the swift and mobile play of the breath and then, in the precise and apt moment of this occurrence, it shifts.

M becomes aware of this co-ordinated shift; a certain unravelling or loosening of a bundle of nerve-flesh fibres contained in a trapped breath that at the slightest evocation of a wider pattern, is reflected in the shifting quality of touch. And as this undulation of touch and release; like the belows that at first create wind and disturbance and then heat and an emanation of warmth, gathers a momentum of its own, other areas of the body like gateways that need the co-attention of M and myself, open to view.

The upper back, stiffened from protection and holding that constrict the arm bent and turned so that the whole fist is bottled into M's mouth and the neck and face and throat en wrapped in this backwash that reverberates and lets nothing escape, is called to our attention. With my one palm still wrapped around the lower back and side like a sheath and the other opened wide yet with the pad of one or two fingers moving and tracing into small rivulets that are like vortexes that swirl and descend, I move in and out of these cushioned intensities again not trying to change anything; just aware of what is there beneath the pads of my fingers. Then again I spread my hand open and wide barely resting now on the flesh at all yet still carrying down into a depth with the other hand wrapped around the lower back so that each hand becomes a different vehicle of transport or dwelling the one drifting downwards by a kind of gravitational sensing, the other wafting up like a leaf on the wind just above the ripples and froth of the sea.

In the gap between these two qualities of contact; these two areas of the body, something is beginning to shift; a recalibration of what it means to be heavy and sinking and what it means to be light and dissipated. And between the sinking and the scattering something of interest catches in and M is blinking and pausing, listening and softening through his puckering lips; catching on to the threads and distillations of his own body pulsing. And my body too is tilting and settling, recalibrating through my base sitting bones and releasing through my chest and throat so that there is this two-way movement of giving and receiving through the subtle discrimination's of on-off contact that are forming and reformulating around finer and finer levels of variation like the ebb and flow of waves on an ever re-patterning shoreline.

What is given? Nothing. What is received? Nothing. Yet here we are moving in barely recognisable shifts that at a glance would look like nothing happening at all. And that is the case. For these are the preambles to movement, to sounding, to song-making. To the celebration and dismay the outrage and smiling. They are the premonitions; the mere feint outlines or ambient hum, out of which  the physical readiness to act and grasp; to intend and to move away, to push down and to rise up in locomotion evolve and upon which the ability to rest and renew in stillness and resettlement take shape. So too are they the pre-emptive baseline upon which emotional and social levels of communication take shape in brief and passing manifestations, like clouds passing in the sky.

Body Distortion

I have to use the distortion and let it move. The impact like a sudden punch, even if only anticipated and acted upon and not actually inflicted, is a real event. 

There is a distortion as flesh makes way for the supposed fist. This intrusion is in a sense accommodated; welcomed. And the redistribution of the impact as it is met, ripples through the mobile liquid flesh carried by the circulatory processes of breath, blood, nutrition and excretion. Yet more than this it must be worked through and through as a taking hold of mind; through the redistributed attention, as the indent creates protrusion somewhere else and this protrusion in turn displaces another mass of presencing. This then needs to be nimble in emptying out and probing a new temporary placement.

On and on this itinerant journeying becomes a formation where all parts remain in contact with one another like a crowd flowing through a space- stopping and starting in collectivity's and affinities that are exacting, precise, grammatical and then let go of.

Movement and pause is this filling and emptying as it hinges on the lid of a provocation; an assault. 

How to resist the startle-freeze fixture that is laid down like a fossil into habitual patterns of auto-repetition? For such exacting and prescribed repetition becomes stasis. The predictable goes on-foreseen. It is held in the cerebral memory bank rather than articulated through the body distortion and redistributed to keep the aliveness of a responsiveness that alludes always to a position taken up briefly in a configuration of multiple co-dependencies.

The assault must be heard and met; the distortion accepted; the redistribution that is the beginning of circulation entrusted piecemeal as it vibrates and pulsates throughout the accommodating body. 

The body must change and be met and contained by a reflective mind that is simply another level of body- movement. Articulation and communication is this double enfold; the body in constant adjustment as witnessed and attended to by the mind that in a sense pre-empts the movement by giving space for this filling and emptying. It makes it so, and this is freedom.

After Session with M. (Seiki reformulated)

To describe this experience is to gradually take out the parts of notable doing. For there is nothing else to do than work from out of the absence of this habitual stiffness. In this child a rigidity so full it blanks out the possibility of receptivity.

Yet there are layers underneath layers. Impossible realms that do not exist except in counter-point to the vacant fullness of this distressed absenting of a child's hope.

Gather than into the fullness and rest. Stay quiet, attentive and in every small degree of un-bunching of this knot as it repositions momentarily from here to there give space accordingly.

Finally the space is the space of an enquiring mind that forms into the vacancy outside of the pressure to remove itself with further tightening. For I too remove myself- wider into a dispersed arena of circulation- the sounds, feelings, touch and sensations of a mobile environ. So that I too am in the space together with the child absenting from the impossibility of grasping tight and so coming back around with inquisitiveness, freedom and hope.

This loosening of the mind is simultaneous to the loosening of the body. Like bunches of clung-together soil becoming successively porous and aerated. Each particle a separate piece in the ground orientation that gathers or redistributes as needs be.

So alignment through the body and the gestures that follow is predominately this tilting in and out of balance; this moving through the mid-line so that no angle carries the locked weight of a closed and private pocket but is a movement on the way through to those brief resting points of uprightness where vertebra upon vertebra stack up upon one another with optimum mobility in choosing each particular course of action as it follows.

As the extremities of hands, feet and head become more engaged and are pushing through out of the ground-base stability of a contained environment so the body is able to move not as a solid fixed mass, but in the intricacies of each movable part, like so many animals creating a collectivity that dialogue between themselves only to appear fully coherent and conversant in the brief and shimmering brightness of the eyes that flickers on and off.

This is joy. Song comes out of this unbidden and the child is there with you in all their open potential.

The Movement of the Body through the Imagination

It is the imagination that implements the first yearning towards a preparation for action; the capacity to move. The preparation for this action is nothing more than a tightening or holding in so as to build the volitional force needed for execution. The execution is simply an unravelling of this collected potential, like the bees storing nectar for honey. Yet the free flow of an act like the pouring of honey needs the precision of directed attention. This is where the imagination takes a hold of the potential in order to carry it through and like the banks of a river it channels and so consolidates the act as it is being done.

There is really no unitary act. More a series of on-off flickers of consolidation through the channelling of form in the imagination. Impulses are positioned and intensified in the breath, blood and musculature and then implemented in the falling off of this intensity in the act as it is being done. The appearance of the smooth flowing continuity of an act is this rapid pulsation of seizure and release. It only appears as smooth because the imaginative unity; which begins with the tendency to imagine an intentional act in the life of an individual, runs across the jolt of the preparatory activation through stories, songs, images, historical records, remembrances and on into the self-perpetuating dynamics of a physical action.

To be what we are there is this shimmering tension between an emptying out which is immediately recalled into action and re-orientation as a continuous fold-unfold.

The very flux of a horse shimmering with the animation of perturbation experienced in shifting air currents, sound intensities, smell nuances, nervous-muscular excitation; a continual revitalisation that momentarily cohere in admixtures that are the coursing buzz of an animate multitude that at another level fixes into the supposed figural relief of a horse that runs and gallops, snorts and pounds the earth.

But it is at the level of minute impulses activated through these emergent fields, that brings the coursing perception of a horse in motion into view.

Mental unrest could be called the activation of these impulses without their resolution through releasing acts. Contraction and tension builds up in the muscles and there is no possibility for circulation through the dynamic reorientation of the body. Patterns of held muscles and breath and the stagnation of bracketed-off residual impulses result. All sensations are affected by this continual putting on hold, becoming overly acute and intense. The person like a startled horse in a small pen is stilled and stultified by the impact of nervous excitation collecting at the surface and interior of the body-psyche. Over-riding fear results and an enmeshed longing that can never be satiated becomes the pervading background atmosphere. For in this constant state of over-preparation it becomes impossible to truly receive what the environment offers.

Touch Therapy can be a first port of call working at the border-line between contact, perturbation and impulse and reconfiguring the options from stagnation and holding to release and circulation.

It becomes the arena for a micro world mapping system that is made through the duration of a session in terms of co-responsiveness between practitioner and client as this emerges and transforms. In this sense it is a deeply relational contact therapy offering the possibility of participating in a fundamental secure attachment on a pre-verbal psycho-somatic level.

It becomes a battery-charger and memory repository experienced dynamically and played out through the body through sensory and visceral receptivity that can hold the possibility of tipping the balance- in a light and effortless way-  from touch responsiveness towards spontaneous movement responses. In this way it can create the ground for a person to work on reformulating their orientation from Self to Other. It may hold the possibility of shared experience and conjoint presence.

This may or may not manifest in the session but it is a possibility of formulating experiential and imaginatively varied ways of acting and resting and being in the world.

The Seams of our conversation

Forged in forgetting. A turnstile oblivious to its own turning. It is there and there and there- the frontal view of this locked-in activation. The startle response held wide open- unblinking. Or sleeping endlessly, drifting upon the seas that are indifferent to the turning that both carries and unsettles the flotsam upon its surface. Down below the reverberations are channelled into endless filters along which light and dark flow- fishes swiftly using the currents to streamline their speckled bodies and in a flick or a deviation from a given course, there is both suspension and the inflection of a vacuum momentarily filled and met. This embrace which is movement itself but appears so still. Is there an abstract diagram of this delay-thrust? This hesitation and reabsorbtion into a wider milieu and the immediacy of a sudden filling- as if by release- so that what was withheld, braced under the surface suddenly leaps up, breaks through the surface of the chopping tide and dances in the sheer light only to drop back down again; this cascading  into the splinters of current that carries and melds the body to the absolute necessity of a new course that only in that moment is given.
What is given? Where are the hints, the guidelines, the memory jolts, the course to be taken? There is no plan of action. Action lends itself like a sudden urge to yawn or burp out of the sheer emptiness of a hesitation- a rip in the yarn, a seizure of place and time, where identity which up until that moment seems to cohere along a given trajectory, suddenly is halted and freed of its contextual reading.

Illiterate and unpronounceable it gasps for air, forgetting indeed its aqua allegiance and in the vacuum or conflictual respiratory systems there is a charge- the near urgency of almost foretold death and the eyes blink both open and closed. This is the winking shudder manifesting who knows where that we come face to face with in those blue-grey clear running eyes and yet which quiver through the porous affinity of a gaseous liquid that runs and courses through the body, into the ground and back out into the atmosphere.

The reachabiltiy that a moment before appears to be the clasping of hands across an absolute distance- the distance between you and I , this and that, one object and the next, now melds and bends like the long grasses swaying in the wind after a monsoon in the rainy season in Africa. The desert gives birth. The roots push ever downwards into a subterranean lake of fresh water that sparkles below the baked earth, now loosening in the droplets of rain that part it by resting lightly and sinking into the grains that welcome this rain. It  becomes a dispersal- a gateway, the circulation system of a complex animal. It becomes you and  me in our life-form- dancing and wavering out of the still recession of our dream-space. Is this mere fantasy? Maybe not. The imagination can make flesh and blood live. It can cloth bare earth in myriad colour eruptions. It can bring life and it can bring catastrophe. How we enact it- grasp it to us as a seized truth or hold it lightly to go where it will, is up to the freedom of the milieu that we are a part of. We give permission to one another in the displays and in the quietude that sees both horror and the motivation of a dance in the same pedestrian tread. How do we make contact with the surface? Beckon it into a revealment of a depth that is not a masked hidden realm- accessible only in fantasy, but a lived encounter- in the particular sway and suspension of that dance.

A child who does not move from beyond a chair unless he is carried. Whose body is brittle. Whose fist is shoved deep into his mouth as if to stop up a constant leakage of vital resources out into an unseeing world. Who is blinded by his own internal reverberations that churn sluggishly and inhibit any possibility of release- of satisfaction or discharge.

But his aliveness is wrapped in this very conundrum of a disengaged alertness that turns into muscular rigidity- the breath caught within an old casket. It's not a question of fixing this- as if a plumber could come on to the job, locate the stuck point and simply loosen up the blockage with a few mighty movements of his own vital body. Vitality is not transmissible in this way- as if sheer effort and good intention created the right conditions for this virtuous leakage. More there must be a slow affinity where a simple proximity creates the charge necessary for low level responsiveness. Through the pads of ones fingers, barely resting on the body, the chest rises and lowers, the abdomen and diaphragm too. This undulation where a slight touch is then undone, timed in and out of sync with the body pulsation manifesting through the breath, creates a series of reverberations. Of hesitancy's, bracing and the sudden minute release of a built-up tension going to meet  the perturbation as always with habitual stiffening, only to find in its precision absence- a spaciousness that is a shared co-witnessing that then has nothing to do with touching here in order to fix rather but opens up this local choked protectiveness into its opposite- a sudden widening into an ever expanding realm.

The spaciousness cannot be felt out-side of the provocation of this stifling claustrophobia which comes at first on the arrival of any touch, sound or gesture. Gradually these gestures play out in reverse like an ever- receding view that is un-graspable, un-locatable and forever reassembling on the edge of what is felt. This is the domain of the mind when it is held in a very wide care connection that does not ask back anything and simply provokes, holds or lets go as a timed dance in and out of the siezure and flow of the breath, of muscle distortions and the momentary stretching or unravelling that occurs as their reverse patterning.

This coil and recoil becomes the gradual echolocation that talks back through the originally learnt talking to self- as a wider self that incorporates environment and the relationship of one perosn to another in this alignment/misalingnment that creates both the flow and grit of a true conversation.

The boy looks off into the distance. His foot is pushing against my hand and he is guiding as if by remote sensor the patterning of his leg-my arm as one movement in what before was a locking into the fixture of position. The very tendency towards rigidity is taken as one part of the paradox of movement; that to crush into an imoveable space gives the leverage to push against and to reverse back out  like a ball caught by the corners of a wall and bounced back out into a reverse flow that is effortless, unthought-about and therefore uninhibted. Movement patterns itself in this push-pull reversability. All communication is only this. The lock and the key engaged in an impossible embrace that somehow miraculously leads through the percieved opaqueness of what appears the blunt fact of what is before us into a moving through.

The boy dreams the dream of his endless momentum and through his body in small seizures and the reversals that their momentary intertia and release allow, he imparts this dream to me. It articulates through my body as a song and is imparted back to him as the enactment of this song in co-movement. His face is awash with light andshadow. There is interest and the flecks of conversant intelligence that is neither simply within him nor without him. It is flowing between in the sharp flickers of thresholds of light and dark, sound and silence, touch and non-touch that energises like a pump this conversant space where fishes swim in this darkened airless room swiftly with the agility of free creatures. Flicking the light and dust from their reversible spines, the colours are breathtaking. We wonder at them- for they are neither of us in entirelty. They are something more- on another realm that informs endlessly with multiple variation what we can be in connection to one another. This is  the mapping- the internal external fold and display of our unfixedbearing.

SPEAKING THROUGH

In the fold of an arm something springs undone. The reversibility a focal dispersion filtering outwards on every turn. What are we facing? Where are we heading? It is a round-about presenting that inclines out of each pre-set mid-line, to incline on a falling slope or to rise up as an inclination remembered from afar rinsing through. We are not where we are supposed to be. We are the thought-of motion built out of our oaring. This is the breath and it cannot be put into a holding though it builds in the vacuum of an encounter that fast becomes its momentary expulsion.

In the smells of the distance that collect around our quivering nostrils, here is our most immediate loci tingling through the nerve-ends in our face, quivering at the edge of our eyes, peppering in the breeze, our lips.

Do we speak? Not yet. Our bellies soften and the tendons in our neck pull taught bracing the clavicle and sternum and the moveable chest plates and rib bones under which our heart resides and our lungs too, emptying and filling, emptying and filling; blood and air mixed yet separate; this transmogrification from a spectre that is no more than the brief shapes of the wind held in the core depositary of flesh and bone.

Earth and sky; this admixture held apart; a mere hairs breadth or the separation of continents across the ocean.

Where are we? Where are we going? Between one deposit and one way of mark-making and its seeming erasure; the accumulation of layers that speak through this emptiness; harmonies and incongruities, clashing and holding, affronts and dispersals that rise and fall in the crest of a wave between dissonance and the continual reverberation of our people through the ages. This is the sounding that is placeless because it is mobile. It is the meshing that creates junctures of correspondence; a recognition and deep love that is both this tension and its release.

After Aikido

AFTER AIKIDO: PETER SHAPIRO

 

Solothurn: Switzerland: 26.7.14

 

In flux so that in a cascading together, directions are held and accounted for and in the stillness something rises, something sinks out of the same core and there’s a spreading, an opening; the Heart. Something that turns over and over; it is there only in this turning. Otherwise it dissipates.

 

In the falling the remorse and the loss; the natural ageing process of things that seem to be slipping away, there is a recurrence. Not a glancing in front or behind but a wavering a quivering, through which new life comes up.

 

The gaze is un-grasping. It is encircling, a quivering frailty through which the voice carries forth in an immediacy of expression. And because it has been set about its turning out of the near destitution of unclasping, in the fray of these threads, the magnetism of attraction/repulsion locks into dynamic balance and in the questioning; the perturbation; the unrest, all begins to fall and rise.

 

The wave; it isn’t here with the move but it is rinsing through into the fibres like a tensile buzzing that on touching is a touching through and so it immediately softens. The angles that we perceive are softened into this melting through. Then to stand up again; the shock of being alert like a child that asks again and again “….but why?…” The child soothed as if into the bosom, an enfolding surround that then awakens to a questioning in its own embrace. Then again this softening on and on… This is contact which in itself carries the shock of separation as a sharp intake of breath- then releases into expiration. To seize and abandon that position again and again- until all there is, is this pulsation- this on-off, fast-slow, hard and soft that are momentarily- as if in a blink- what they are, only at the threshold of what they are not.

 

The question like the wrinkling of a brow sends out patterns across the mobile skin. The flesh is malleable and softens around each turn, each fall. And the momentum of that fall carries through because it has come from a height. The move when held as  one from above and below, is patterning in the perceived effort of all intention towards and away, up-down, left-right, forward-backwards into the core seed where we are encapsulated as unity and grow out of one another, on the cusp of one another; on the brink of each ending a threshold of extremity which every extreme vocation must endure only to be softened by its nemesis, enfolding into what in the attack is perceived as extinction but is an angling round- into a greater dimensionality; a wider atmosphere; of Love- where time and space are enfolded as one and the meeting and the met is a unified gesture that is simultaneously a contraction and expansion.