M- agitation and rest- two sides that need to feel joined

M is flustered and out of sorts as he is shipped through from classroom to therapy room, first raised up like a lopsided flag on a flagpole in his hoist, his head and body slumping over to one side, then lowered mechanically from this hoist onto the mat below.

There are various LSA'a learning on the job, shadowing others who are about to leave and slightly rushedly trying to move this "Object" lump that is M from one position to the next. They are really trying- inbetween other jobs and other eruptions from needly children in the classroom.

M is literally jolted out of one kind of inactivated slumber into another entirely different hyper-alert anxious state. Yet his body is still considered baggage to be transported in the least possible amount of time so that scarce hands can return to other committments in the classroom.

K is assisting me today and helping in many practical ways to begin with, because I have twisted my back and certain movements are very painful.

M is now down on the mat and it is a race against time to slot in the adjoining matts to either side of him before he tips and rolls onto the hard floor beneath him. Just in time the mats slotted into place like a jigsaw puzzle to create the level gorund for his eratic first movement. This is a kind of cry of resistance and M is becoming panicky and upset even as he is fostering the momentuum to move against all these forces acting upon him.

It is an outcry of rebellion and an angry rebuff. His feet are still masked inside the plastic splinths that he wears underneath his outsized shoes and that circle the soles of his feet too, binding leg, ankle and foot together as one single contour. This is not much good for feeling the nuanced differences of  the ground beneath; yet the thinking is probably that given he is in a wheelchair, that these nuanced pressure points of standing and walking and feeling into the give and take of  a density of expected ground, is not open to him. I think this is a mistake; an oversight in much the same way as M himself is an oversight in some of his assistant carers' minds; somehting to be done to rather than a person that calls for a doing alongside. Play of course is missing in this one way interaction of being done to from the outside or being held together from the outside; an exoskeloton that denies the growth in every gesture, every thought, every emotion that blossomes up over and over again and splays out into a wide net of holding like bursts of scent.

M is on the verge of dissociating out of the grief of his stolen body. It is too early in the session even to speak of a body for there are body parts that beign and end without seeming to touch into one another.

M's sense of himself; the passing sensations and the waves of pulsations withuin his gut and across his muscles is similarily confused, jerking open and closed like the peel of a shot-gun. There is a startle affect on M's face, his eyes alnmost pinned open and his face blank and  locked, messaging back and forth  like a rapid windscreen-wiper, flickering into near constant vibrations of excitation that never know how to switch off and so go on and on indefinitely creating a waxen mannequin of  a boy startled into freeze by the imposition of crisis-filled operations into the semblance of a boy held together and held apart by an outer frame that seems not to address the child within.

I feel terribly upset- but this is not a senitment to indulge in if this state of waxen alert lifelessness is not to be taken as a continual never-ending state. I know that it is not; that M can come back on-line by degrees, little by little like the filtering through of rain through branches that are almost horizontal to the ground. This filtering emergence of sensation and experience is possible when there is a rooting deep enough to support him remaning with a feeling and letting it play through, meander and cris-cross unseen thresholds that bit by bit release groups of muscle and bone that are allowed to drop through this wider support and settle.

Though I am now holding M, having him propped up in my lap with his head in my hands, the true support is as much in an attitude of witnessing- both the pain and disturbance- and this gradual coming through into a filtration of sensitivity. The pulsing becomes known to itself and plays on myriad levels deep in the breath, blood circulation, viscera and muscles and later in the imagination. The propensity to join this with that as sensation sweeps across into the circuits it needs to take in order to open up pathways and trajectories that curve and splay, condense and redistribute. There is something in this movement that describes the swirling of water as it falls and catches; a sense mirrored gradually in M's face as he becomes again a 10 year old boy playing in the ravines of his own body, jumping from positon to position, sweeping and daring himself to  reach up, hover a little mid air and then cruse back down on the wind or on the backtide. He is an active doing boy not a boy done to. Yet it is his ability to take in feeling states and to stay daringly with this, hovering on the edge of his imminant fall, knowing that within this support of me and K, that this is now possible; like a  surfer who trusts the wave to catch him as he crashes and times his crash in order to be caught over and over again until he anticupates this catching in and does it himself, in the way he  breathes and lightens his body against the downward pull of gravity. It is between gravity and the propensity to grow in the opposite direction simultaneously that begins to describe the living thinking and imaginative body.

K takes M's feet, entirely wrapping her hands around these small end-points and giving them a sense of growth or extension even in this cradling certainty. She goes right down to his level and looks back through into his very centre connecting the extremity with this pulsing tide that cruises right through his centre. I sense his eyes brightening and his fine level of responsiveness; this equisite shifting calibaration from one emphasis to another as he leans his head far back in my cupped hands; a mirror image of what K is doing at the other end, and  rest there as he begins opening out as if through an outfolding at the central seam of his body; at the midline of his chest running through his umbilical and up his back through the mideline of his spine and rising over the crown of his head, then back down over his face- his perceptual orifiecs of eyes, nose ears and mouth turning outwards to face us and the world he is in, like a plant turning to face light and water as an automatic yet deeply thought responsiveness; from encapsulation and concentric shell-like protection, to a flowering in which the full beauty of this boy in all his livingness is apparent.

There is a sense of muscle groupings in his shoulder and chest sliding over one another to give way and release patterns of held tension so that bit by bit there is a lowering of his body into contact upon my body and upon the floor. Simulatnaoudlsy and in resonant dance my body is releasing and drifting down wards into this pooled settlement. As this occurs I feel the vibrant yet subtle push of his head and neck in my hands- like a live wire suddenly ignited and this is when he is able and ready to raise his head to the vertical and truly and fully to look around him.

All this time he has already been playing with my hands and fingers; squeezing and unsqueezing them alnost in readinees for this later flexibilty of head and attention. It is as if even when his whole body is imobile; still shocked into a position of startled yet lucid dreaming in which he cannot move for himself or even imagine the motivation needed to do so. Yet through is fingers and hands he is practicing and keeping engaged this propensity to turn things around- to close and open his grip; as if his hand were a seeing organ that can focus through these minute feeling adjustment of his pulsing opening and closing hand..

Now that  he is sitting more vertically, his spine straightened and his head now aligned through his body posture, he is able to make full use of this playful grasp and ungrasp of his hands and fingers and to, as it were, open out his mind and his propensity to feel and think, through this parralel and equivalent motor activity; that becomes for him, like a neurological pulsing.

I lower and raise my arm and dip my fingers down into his reach and then glide them up again. It is like two birds floating and flying around one another . He connects, fingers lacing through fingers, then slips away, I follow him down then stop and glide up. I hover and wait and he too catches onto the wind and glides up to meet me. In this way sporadically and in stops and starts he is reaching further and further and estsblishing musclie constancy in order to maintina a positon and to wait in the epectation and anticatopn of  the game to folow- a game he knows but yet does not quite know how exactly it will play out until he is rght inside it.

I feel smiling on my face in this natural play and M too is initiating and taking turns in this playfullness as his face becomes more soft and animated.

K is matching this playfullness with light yet continual touch- in order to support and ground M deep into her reliable contact so that he can play from up above without risk of falling forever..

I follow this play with my voice and sing a little, modulating tones from high to low, letting them flicker and hover and then deepen into a steady base reverberation. M is making many sounds himself, Some are anguished- like something locked deep within that is now releasing and espcaping, Others are inquisitive yet lighter and fast moving like he is really getting into something that is both deep in his feeling state but also connected to this outward level of play. The two begin to merge- the anguished cut-off level and the playful moment by moment improviataion like his hands circling one another and circling mine. I think this is how the anguish can be acknowledged and brought into veiw- through a level of playfulness that makes it audible and not simply a sink hole disapearing endlessly into itself or into silent submission. He is literally voicing out his concerns.

I tell part pieces of the story about the tree and the bird- as a way to work alongside this body support telling the story of him opening into a connectivity that circulates from the top to the bottom and from the bottom to the top. With K working from his feet upwards and with me working from his head and chest downwards, there is a natural cross-over like tying and retying a bow at the centre of his body in his abdomen and lower back. I warm these areas again- the areas where I first started the treatment when he was identified completely in an all-conssuming anguish that felt then like an uncontainable panic. Now with his greater resources- as if he is being earthed from both ends so that these immense fiirings of energetic life-force can be held and utilized by M himself, there is a sense of great releif. He can now really go with the dream-state necessary for deep levels of integration- throwing back his head fully into my cupped hands and letting go into this immersive listening and sensing  state, then coming back through and sitting suddenly bolt upright, thrusting his head this way and that way as if not wanting to miss a beat in these moments of full  lucid life. So he goes from one state to the other; from the total rest of a lucid sleep to the high energy state of an aggitated aroused level of consciosuness. Too much of either is a tipping point for M into either lulled unboundedness or into concentrated exlossiveness. Both together become a level of engagement and utilization, and this in turn becomes M' style of walking through the world- of pushing down and bouncing back up again into nuanced and responsive relationship.

*His old LSA enters to help us lift hin back into the chair. Her style of dealing with M is direct and no-nonsense. She doesn't use the hoist but simply seats herself very close to M on a stool, scoops him up and leans him into her body before easing him into the wheelchair. He grumbles a little but quickly recoversd and relaxes with her. She clearly has a soft spot for M and this eases and nullifies any discomfort from the manoevre. She carries him literally heart to heart. There is all the difference in the world between a Carer who clearly loves this boy and is therfore at ease, and one who has not yet had the time, experience or permission within life and within the school setting to sit inside this love and so transmit it effortlessly to this boy.

This LSA has now been allocated a different boy to work with. If she could have worked with the new LSAs to impart this simple attitude of seeing M clearly and so allowing oneself time to be moved by him, this would go along way to resolving his periods of deep dissociation.

It is hoped that what me now together with K can do is to stay with a practice of sensitivity in which to remainin a state of noticing these deep qualities that emerge and strengthen where there is heart to heart contact. This kind of level of contact should not be something embarassing or too removed from the practicalities of a school and its program of education. It should underpin all else as the ground conditions out of which everything else arises.


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