Session with M Play of Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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