Sparks from the ground; Session with M

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sleep and wakefulness- Session with M

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Session with M- In lightness and rain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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