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.