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.