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.