Space within Moving Bodies

Co-ordinate points that constellate in precision contact out of the movement itself. This dynamic re-settlement in which moving bodies come into brief moments of association and where that very association become axions out of which further movement or "Spin" becomes self-generative, is our joint holding.

To generate movement, the points of relative still contact must be embedded into the tilts and swayings itself where mobile bodies press up against one another or imapct one another briefly.. These still points are not outside the movement or dissociated from it; they are coincidences that reflect and so escalate or intensify the movement that becomes "Read" in these momentary events.

Contact becomes overloaded and pumped up into a self-importance that can not sustain all the add-ons of projective emotion, when divorced from the sphere of moving bodies out of which it arrives. The slight slant or twist of a dircetive takes shape according to unfolding circumstances; of air pressure, internal viscosity, kinaesthethic drag, muscles that are primed or on the verge of inertia, breath intake and expulsion, sound vibrations and how they reach the angling of the ear, nasal in-take, temperature gauges, ground consitancy and the rise and fall of this consitancy, skin sensitivity, throat articulaitons and how they travel over the vissitudes of prolongued or shortened distance and what becomes of them through our varying perceptual frameworks over that distance; light luminosity and the reflective bounce of the spectrums of this light onto surfaces that, like sound vibrations, multiply them in endless cycles.

The movement dimension that is described in the tangents of our living moving forms- and in the spaces between that are shaped and stretched out, shrunk and compacted, fragmented and dissipated in this dance of negative space, becomes the progression of possibilites that are born out of every touch. Touch then is loaded with significance that resides outside of the graspable body; the material of flesh and bone, sinew and nerve. And yet the movements that transcend this physically denotive body are also borne out of it and because of it.

The body over-reaches itself; overstretches its own reach and in the void or the blind spot where the body on turning, seems to disapear from itself and from view, it arises across distance and through time in the transformations that break up any consistancy and at the same time, allow this body to live.

This time is different from the next moment and the next and the next. In this pulsation of breath; this blinking eidetic fluctuation of rhythms that at one speed play back into seizure and at another into running, jumping, smiling or wailing, are brief accounts- sleights of hand and of figure- that are reformulations of an original that never really existed.

So between existance and non-existance we play with our histories, delving for one relief into the next; into spheres of darkness- the shadow moments of disappearance and ambiguity- through which light and contour is given its resounding and momentary glory.

It is in the turning that we come to be; moods and expressions formulate anew on the cusp of the wind.

Points where we hook into a combined point of impact; these can be points of crash-landings; accidents and collisions that kill our vigour and destroy and tear into our bodies.This is because they capture us mid-movement and prevent the resolution; the fall suspended, the turn inhibited is a caustic and brittle entombment. And frequently it leads to death -absolute or partial- as when the cricket-man turned his head at just such an angle that a coursing ball hit and split open his jugular vein which in turn catastrophically flooded his brain and killed him.

Therapy perhaps works in reverse order to such trauma and it does so only by retracing back into movement potentials and completing them.

The points that come up in a Shiatsu//Somatic treatment do so at the points where there is an intensification of vibrations where directives course together and condense into static and opaque areas in the body. These are sign-posts and keys that sometimes lock against further movement when arrived at too insistantly. Yet they are high density signs as well; like the scar tissues on the flesh or the lacerations on the bark of a tree that has been hit over and over again and yet has stood its ground.

Can we in fact stand our ground imaginatively and at the same time yield? So that in the translations from one response to another touch guides us into movement rather than impacting us as trauma?
The movement diagram does not live alone in the intention of an individual but in an environmental constellation where there is a swarming of resources in every meeting and seperation.

As we unfold back out this embedded potential the life stories of our movment patterns begin to unfurl. They are indicated in a treatment session in the emotive points or Tsubos on the body that show up sequentially as a relay of openings and closings; of brief moments of responsiveness that give rise- like the cat's eyes lit up by head-lights on a dark journey- to create lineages of association that criss-cross over the body in order to describe its life-story; its multi-facetted spherical movements which are the adpatations and reformulations that are created in each moment. And these are shaped and influenced out of the very blockages that emerge in our life stories to more direct and habitual routes. The very form of our body is made up and sketched out from out of these cross-hatched lacerations and detours and just as scar tissue or held-breath or muscle contraction sign-post us towards a certain unknown inclination, so our very inhibitions and fault-lines; our illnesses, aches and pains, give us clues into the immediacy of areas of attention. In themsleves they may be seen as problems but within a wider scope of movement patterns they become land-marks that help us release back into a wider sense of our shared gesturing.

These patterns are always embodied. Yet in their very embodiment as they shift from one instant to another of co-adaptation, they give up absolute ownership and open up pockets of space or absence within the mass of the body itself. These become turning points for the body as a joint imagination.

Freedom is this; these spheres of emptinness that are enmeshed within the body-fibre- the materiality of matter itself. For they are truly our  one voice; both the sounding and the listened to sound. They are our vibrationary attunement with one another in varying roles of care and dependancy and on into the more spherical realms of play and improvisation. In that evolving dance we are to each other, both figure and ground; a shimmering give and take that gauges and recalibrates responsiveness and position in countless ways in the moment of our holding. This is love.

Falling and catching; the pulse of our being

Catching into a pulse. Movement is the passenger to this momentary falling and sending back through.

Gesture/intake is fastened upon this momentary beat- of touching down and taking up; the first translation.

We utilise our gravitational flux and the stiffness this impinges on our nervous, excitary and muscular system in order to sustain a position and then to move in one direction or another.

Yet this is not a constant thread. It is a continuous on-off pulsation of beats; of catching and falling in variations of depth, pressure, speed.

In this sense there is no single time or place of impulse. It is always this on-going translation just as there is no single limb or brain area in which we rely on a certain faculty or sensation and its execution in motor control or consciousness.

There is a constant relay.

As in M, I sense how the pulsar attunement with the back of his head- where the falling impulse can be directly activated, flows into grasp and reach of his hand. And yet this is not a direct messenger route. Rather it is a catching and tightening and release endlessly; in the throat, face, lips, chest; the fascia below the ribs, into the hips, sacrum and opening through the groin, into the legs and knees, ankles and feet. Through this working arch, the felt dimensionality of a hand rising- supported in mine- becomes the flicker pulsation of this gesturing and unfurling around widening contours and currents activated initially by a non-local falling impulse.

By triggering and harnessing this falling impulse internally, M is learning to activate his hands and fingers and to explore his surroundings by messaging me directly at the level of muscle activation. Through the direct engagement of this contact, his hand in mine, his hand and fingers become the differentiated tendrils of an exploratory organism as a direct flow that is felt in my muscles and nerves. And so with minute degrees of tension and release we move as one. But yet it is clear to me that M is messaging into me in this near simultaneous evocation and resolution in a continuous movement pattern.

We are working below the threshold of conscious activation- of goal and its implementation through a target.

Rather we are working through the falling reflex into patterns of shared expression and consolidation along a mid-line that exists- according to each gravitational situation- as a particular way of being throught he body and is translated into every other kind of momentary sound, visual, tactile resolution. We are channelling into these simultaneous currents- out of our communality of falling and catching. And out of it M is learning to hold lightly- as if flowing in water- his head, limbs and body organs; to rely on a spaciousness emanating through bodies as one.

It is through meeting an appointed connection- in falling fully and then in fully having the support of the ground; or of another, that the falling gathers into the multi-directional context of uprightness and spacial orientation.

Thought, language, memory relies on this pivotal human capacity for uprightness in order to tune into particular positions and to go off-centre without losing in the body-schema a sense of the upright mid-line. This again and again is strengthened and re-drawn by going into these tangents of swaying, rocking, tilting and jolting in order to find in this life movement a cross-section stillness that is made out of every new turn; a floating effortless sense of being and of being lightly with another. Upright, but in the manner of falling.

Falling into Contact

M falls into contact- falls back into a resting on my support as ground. Time passes and the contact is felt- experienced by both him and me. There is atunement- feelings of togetherness. I feel in some vibratory pulse in my flesh, that I want to care for him. I can imagine him in his propensity for growth- adaptation; in movement, expressiveness- yet the fullness for his being is held deeply and safely within his body as he now is. It is this felt sensation- this inter flowing of viscosity that enables me as Carer to imagine him as the condensation here and now of all that his life holds store for him. It is a storage- an autumnal harvest- a seed-pod internalised and it's explosion as co-existing in and through one another. Whether he walks, talks, smiles, laughs, squeezes my hand, an object, plays with another child, makes friendships is the observational and behavioural details of a running life that may or may not manifest. The imaginary holding of capacity is not scripted in the details of how something unfolds; it is in the potential fullness- a fullness that is specifically positioned- right here, right now in the particularity of this moment of actual contact.

And because his body has let go into the support of my holding; the weight has actually and really dropped deep into our shared ground, there is this ability in me- and him? across our differences of cognitive, neurological, muscular, age systems to relate- and to relay- in this global imaginary space, all the capacity before it ever arrives. It is simply this pause-gap- this waiting- this momentary suspension- of dropping down- of touching in, that allows for a buoyancy- a lightness- an effortless floating, rising in the space between- like a light balloon that floats across our shared attention- a visionary nebulous sensate marker- that is continually shifting - in the near distant space that joins us in  each of our wider capacities beyond our bounded selves- yet that depends on- demands- the imperative of a care-nurturing contact that is truly met- an appointment that is kept- where bodies for an instant flow together and remain that way for long enough in order to touch base- to feel  the limit point- the demarcation and point of stoppage as one directive comes up against another and two organisms- the Carer and the Cared For- truly meet and receive one anothers gift to one another- and so in that moment- through the ever-inceasing duration of moments that create time and distance, we know what it means to merge and in that very moment we know how to utilise that greater ground in order to bounce, spin and ricochet out into our individualities in our creative, functional, perceptual and communicative dreams through which we weave an environment of togetherness and apartness.

This splaying apart only to weave and knot together again and then this continual stretchiness as the doubled-up fibres that we build together support more and more Independence and the connective tissue becomes symbolic, playful, transitional- (Winnicot) in our voyaging and return- is what allows for "Affectional bonds" that take us through life. (Bowlby)

What it is I feel; as M lets go the tensile holding of his spasmic body and incrementally bit by bit, like a water fall touching down, is this probing and rooting deep into my being. It affects me and allows me to infitessiminally adapt and mediate to these falling groups of tensile muscle and contorted fascia. And as incrementally I relax and make space for this tempered falling, so portions of his body fill out into their natural shape and capacity, he takes space for himself in the time it takes to land in contact to a receptive ground. And in this receptivity and co-adaptation there is air circulation; the natural rising and falling of the breath and it begins to build into tensile vortices's; to release into sound-waves and to settle again into silent breath.There is anxiety, despair, pain, joy, playfulness, celebration and beauty closely tumbling and and out of one another. Out of this background re verb where we join and counter-point in spliced tempo and harmony, a sound texture grows and I find myself in a song that is not so much improvised or made up on the spot as being simply the audible outcome of  this on-going atunement that is occurring on the level of blood, breath, bone, flesh, hormones, neurological processes, visual circuits, kinaesthetic and visceral  affectivties, smell and touch.

And it is the beginnings of this translation from the arrived-at-touch that lingers on through time into sound waves, and feeling emotions, calibrating as facial expressions and then as gestural pulsations; opening and closing the hands bringing them together at the chest and apart again and then the gradual and playful interaction of our limbs as mine; through the mediation of my hands,  hold, support and wait for this touch arrival; for a slight contraction and then for a release out into movement as the patterning and co-patterning of imaginary diagrams that simply open into actuality out of the held propensity of a system present to itself.

This propensity for movement is always resting on the near invisible ground of a Care Connection that attunes and adapts making the propensity to move form out of a need; for comfort, nurturing, warmth, support and the demarcation of self at the firm holding border of another, a reality because it is met in the moment that it is thought. Like Winnicot and his work on baby and mother early interactions; where the breast is always angled in just such a way that it reaches the pursed lips of the baby just as its hunger wells up in this act of pouting and probing outwards with the lips in this rooting activity- so this is extended endlessly into every other gesturing out. And so the imaginary space and the actual space of contact merge and co-formulate around and through one another.
The actual and the virtual;  the heavy and the light are always co-influencing in our every gesture, posture and manifestation as patterns of becoming (Deleuze) that grow and die like sparks from the embers of a fire that are procreating out of one another in a continual feedback loop.

To be free is to experience this ground support fully and to let the body in its materiality then float above that - like the neutral gear of a vehicle that is primed and alert- clear yet rested in this propensity to move effortlessly and  as the fulfilment of the last piece of a pattern; where the tensile energy of contact builds and builds and then releases like the falling of a water-full into the happening of an action. Action, capability, movement, dance, music, is only ever that; simply the letting fall naturally out of an apt and fully congruent meeting; a touching in and in this way, a clear positioning out of which buoyancy and lightness in the world can effortlessly flow.

So it is with M, that as he sinks into the contact I feel him primed  for flow- resting really on nothing but believing in the ground and so light and ready- his limbs no longer meshed and bolted into place around a riveted torso but a recalibration of  each part in versatile  connective patterns of redistribution- that are alive, awake to  changing conditions and reformulating on each new pulse of breath; a breath that is flowing into a wider sphere of patterning.

Through the body and its release into contact the imagination is set free and so the limbs become articulate. Sound follows and the heart opens wide because it is aptly placed in the widening space between this safe contact. The world opens up from out of this single point and our perception flourishes on the journeying of our bodies set in motion and deeply able to rest with another.

Touch as a wider Positioning

Touch as a wider positioning.

What is its trajectory? It's circulatory routes?

Touch- staying for long enough to receive impact of touch- and for it to begin this journey of translation- articulation though the body and into a wider set of relationships; an environment that we are a part of.

Sense impressions: Hot/Cold, pressure/release, compression/relaxation, Heaviness/lightness- position; enclosure: place/movement, distribution, re-distribution.

Then colour, sound as atmospheric intensities- felt through entire body- qualities of immersion that the body becomes.

Moods,emotions- felt affectivities.
And imagery, symbolism, imagination, aesthetic art/music, architecture-- language

In common with others who also feel through this body sensing

Empathy- to stay long enough to co-attune.

Not to be in fight/flight mode and so jolt continually out of contact.

Then felt impressions, shared immersions- become shared journey.

Circulatory systems- internal and organism-environment- as co-evolving single system that homoeostatically self-regulate.


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Therefore Touch- Spacial distribution/composition through Time

Health-Art-Environment as one-

Our shared body redistributing in ambient sensations, atmospheres of resonant sound, colour velocity, shape, speed, dynamic, viscosity

Into visionary forms as dreams, images, stories, songs, pictures, sculpture, buildings, landscapes, rooms, parks, nature reserves, factories, waste disposal sites, ships, shops, museums and community groups, political parties, wars, social parties, groups, exclusions to groups; what is seen/what is prohibited form being seen

Attention- non-attentiveness- patterns of inclusion and exclusion.

Therefore any rights movement must address health: Art :Environment as one.

Because perception is based around sensory permission- and where this staying long enough to experience true contact has been prohibited or abused creating fear, anger, blocking, there will be a knock on affect to perception, imagination, symbol making, empathy, and verbal and non-verbal communication.

A system of careful attunement needs to be an on-going practise  not to redress the wrong and normalise/cure a person but to align into a sensitised sensory, perceptual, emotional and neurological system so as to utilise this abundance and propensity of unbridled affectivity.

Not therefore to numb the affects  but to utilise them in connective attunement.

as Health- in Touch Therapy
as Culture- in utilising ambient sound, colour, viscosity, weight, speed in imagery, music, stories etc
as Environment- in the placement of people and objects in real-time and in real space and the dynamic movement and transformation of these brief positions as part of a trajectory that harnesses and holds lightly in a tensile set of movement possibilities, neurological, occupational, play and artistic patterns.

These patterns to become communicative styles that is a real practise built up and mediated, navigated through co-responsiveness- so that this culture becomes  workable according to  the neurological , emotional, perceptual , communicative patterns as they NOW are and in that way creates a valid tenure out of which real and authentic contact is truly felt and so patterns of movement through the body, through the environment, into symbols, support networks and communicative styles can be realistically built.

This as preferable to imposing a bench-mark of Health, Art and Environment out of which all bodies- seen as functional or dysfunctional- must more or less- as best they can - adhere to.

No. Rather it is the moment by moment real responsiveness  and the recalibration of affects- of touch, sound, temperature, speed, light, pressure, and the intervals between these various depth readings that build up as accumulative layers, a nuanced reading that is apt in the moment; Truly a co-witnessing.

Only this to be a true meeting- where both adjust int he very momentum and pacing of that meeting.

Upon this rests the resources to build up imaginative worlds that are not split off as fantasy but relay back into the felt body as the container and containment through which symbolic worlds weave in and out-  as metaphors of the body- through; imagery capacities, utterance capacities, verbal symbolic meaning. These are second order layers resting on the secure foundation of truly nuanced holding of care-giver to cared for ( Health) and more and more the coming into active responsiveness of the cared for as a co-interdependence with carer who  becomes a foundation for later relationships of equal co-witnessing; where  there is a sense of dynamic articulation  and circulation even as one stays still within a nurturing contact or moves independently playing, making, building and imagining.

Ref:

Bowlby: Secure attachment
Winnicot: Playing and reality
Merleu Ponty: The Phenomenology of Perception
Klein: Love, Guilt and Reparation
Intensive Interaction: Phoebe Caldwell

Movement Currents

An array of possibility- on the cusp of every aggravation- every dead-end. In the extremity of a solo direction there is a necessary inertia- a running out of fuel- an abrupt atrophy. This limbless torso rolls in on itself probing into a depth for a slight flicker -a sign-  a provocation at the febrile level of nervous excitation- on the verge of nervous exhaustion- on the very verge of giving up- of reconciling to a self-referential that self-soothes in the habitual loop of oblivion. Can we use up all our energy in this way? The death-wish- either unto ourselves or by cascading and imprinting aspects of self on to other who simply play the part of this double enclosure? How to break free of this doubling and redoubling unto ourselves? The locked-in space outside of relationship.

It is scary to move out of this- risky- at the edge of need and abandonment- longing and betrayal. How to open up the relationality bit by bit on the cusp of an interior affect? At the very point where inertia and atrophy spasm into a ricocheting of distant echoes that seem then to break off from the main body- to go their own way- to become Other and to push the interior more and more in onto itself as a defencive blockade- a wall of circuits that keep travelling beyond the moment of touch into  the evasions of images of self and other that cohere and burst by their own excess.

How then to keep the tensile resolve on the edge of aggravation at the border-line where new growth- new proliferation takes place?

A body- what is that? A body curtailed in a wheelchair - in an excess of affect- in an assault of sensory impulse that hits it like flotsam from the sky onto its passive surface- and marks it here and then here. Psychological markings are abundant because the capacity for movement- for absorption and integration goes missing. The articulation is set in limbo-  in a vacancy of space where there is no definite ground- nothing to push against or pull towards. The gravitational flow of  drawing towards and away has become dismembered from action. And the thought about action- even the idea to act- which is a form of deep imagination flowing from body impulse to action- is curtailed in the body restricted from both internal and external response.

The border as interchange between different levels of affect; its very depth reading as co-existing in  the milieu of an environment is not foretold. There is no reading- no literacy at all which when it occurs is the exquisite delicate exchange between affect and manifestation. Without the clear signs of behaviour, there is no signs or impulses drawing towards potential care-givers, educators or play-mates. And so isolation ensues. Deep aloneness in the midst of the overwhelming bombardment of affect.

So there needs to be an intervention- a slight warp or waver in the line of demarcation. Where skin packages and enfolds flesh, blood and inner organs, then something, anything; just a slight indentation, needs to give. There needs to be a flicker, a ripple, a hesitation, the momentary holding and release of breath so that in this detour- this minuscule de-railment of habitual patterns of self-enfoldment, something catches in,  something splays out and in this minuscule roll, a slight questioning is opened; the gap between self-reference and co-dependence. Here time begins to move as and from the moment of each new affect. In the slight lapsing of time- into the neutrality of a pause, new life begins to configure at the interface of what before was a border of exclusion.

How does this actually look or feel in practise? Practises may be diverse- Gardening or farming for instance, building or demolishing houses, parks, schools and roads. Or the accumulation of marks and colours on a piece of paper. Or the excess sounds that interject and rise up through one another into un-foretold harmonics. Nobody summoned these up out of a set plan. They emerged in the relationship of beats and tones to create an exegesis that excelled the input of this tensile system to overflow into a new kind of adaptation- a new life-form- that is not representational of something outside the system but is the very composition of a life-form struggling on the verge of its own possible extinction; its own possible adaptation. Every line in a sketch is this- a limit point of a certain kind of pressing down- a certain type of temperature reading- only to bounce out of that deposited trough into an explosive rebound that configures as mark-making into a new area of whiteness- soon to be undone. So the image fashions itself out of the limit points of its own tolerance for touching/for any kind of contact; its own provocation where paper becomes skin and feels itself out from the inside into a face; an exposure face now flickering through. Individual lines and dots that ricocheted on and off of one another in the making- with no mind or plan of overall features or expressive content, suddenly bounce out and cohere as a unified expression; a configuration that is born out of non-local, non causal synchronic explosions. These are self perpetuating affects which tell back the story of how that face, diagram, map or territory was brought into formation through countless affects beyond the content and frame of what is there depicted. The viewer- and there may be many from all points of view- is the relational absentee partner of this facing whether human or non-human; not now a mere surface but a touching through into what is deferred- can not be directly apprehended or seen- out of the exclusion zones- the dead-ends; the curtailments and abrupt endings that any frame demands.

Can we use these frames; the frames of endings- abandonment's that we make of others and that others make of us- to tease through into a relational identification?

The lived body of a boy in a wheel-chair taken out and held briefly in my arms; laid down on a mat. The treatment is already there from the first apprehension even before touch. The touch a mere touching in, in order to release out. And I am reading through into the mobile body; the capacity for movement; the recollection of organs, these channels and neuro-circuitry leanings tilting into a totality that builds and dissolves like sands at the edge of the sea. The provocation becomes an accepted part of the internal milieu as warmth pervades and settlement ensues. The interior bulk of the body settles and lands and the torso begins to spasm - to lift minutely off the ground and to settle back down each time a little more.  This incremental re-settlement is sending through into atrophied limbs that curl and infuse back into the interior as M thrusts his whole fist deep into his mouth. And there is nothing for me to do; no sense at all in un-doing this knot through even  minimal force even with the best of intentions. For that is simply reinforcing the separation and the need to defend an interior self-referential system against an outside attack. Rather as the interior warmth pervades and the ripples of excess and redistribution escalate and release through the belly and spine, the neck and chest, the  face and the temples, the top of the head and the feet, something seems to tighten and then unfold in the hips and pelvis and this ripples out into the chest; it flows down through the arms and into the fingers that are sensitised; linked to the flickering questioning eyes that follow internally this visual, kinaestethic and visceral journeying of the senses. Organs uncurl out of the very spasm deep at the core of the body provoked and released in these first touchings.And then much later and as if of their own volition, fingers and hands uncurl and tap into the space just above the body- clasp my own hands in pulsar waves of holding and letting go. The rhythm builds and there is a playfulness of heightened contact that leads to a light spasm or rigidity and then its instantaneous release and unfolding into movement. Movement patterns begin to fashion themselves out of the sensorial   compression and relaxation that occur as waves and now become configured into a communicative link that is nearly play. This is on the edge of imagining the body in action that it then shapes itself around. Limbs, hands, feet, head, neck, throat and voice literally grow out of these imaginings.

And the boy becomes adept in playing through from passivity- to provocation- to tightening- to spasm- to release- to movement pattern- to functional use. And so he fashions his limbs and body- parts as composite growths out of a core reflexivity that is induced at the border between his body and mine and brings us both into this composed relationship where we are together with one another in the treatment room- and where I talk with him casually and he understands and gives me signals back. Or I hold a limb; an arm in a neutral floating position and I wait. And he shows me because he waits with me for long enough to have a sense of this limb hanging there in space- supported-as if in water- very lightly; almost invisibly. And then he spasms-really just on the edge of spasm- and releases the spasm into counter-flow, showing me the direction in which his arm begins to swim with a new-found volition all of its own- like swimming up-current against the tide- as I lightly support it but do nothing to direct it- for the direction is internally given- now beyond both his and my thought-about volition-and yes he has manifested this action- not by some prior intentional goal but by listening acutely to the impulses at the border of the contact and then using the provocation of that contact- not to habitually ward off the feeling of the contact and enter instead a recursive loop of continuing rigidity, but to use the initial rigidity in order to release into a movement current. This is how he sets his body free- incrementally- through use; by imagining it to be so in each particular detail of its manifestation. And so it becomes this to him- out of his own experience made possible on the very cusp of an inhibition- a fright- that would threaten to push it in the other direction, towards rigidity and inertia. This is the contact interface and by keeping open with awareness this place that is equally the place of curtailment and growth, limbs are imagined and are given life-vigour in the freshness of these imaginings. They are always linked to actual sensations; real provocations, real adaptations according to each emerging set of circumstances, describing  through affect the situation as it is unfolding. This is our felt experience; our pain threshold and its new given use into life-energy- into a sharing. The fear of abandonment, of betrayal has been reconfigured anew on each occasion into the use we put ourselves in according to our on-going relationship to one another and to the ground. This is love. It is at the basis of our capacity to communicate. This is based on us seeing and feeling the relevance of this communication in order to come more fully into being ourselves as a way of being with another. it evolves out of a continuity which is always changing in form yet is unbroken, whether we are physically near or further apart.

The contact then becomes a way of configuring these changing intervals and the space between becomes our grammar of continuing contact; always reconfiguring from moment to moment between Independence and dependence. A better way to put it perhaps is a continually up-dated style of interdependence. This is the playfulness of imaginings- grounded as always in real events- real experiences- real kinaesthetic and visceral movements of being drawn in and out of different levels of clarity and discharge.

It is the ability to alter the focal range or intensity that allows us to stay present with ourselves in relationship to other. This is a continuing attunement and it is durational - long-term-  through every interval that in a sense holds over and makes valid the point and intensity of each contact. This is how it is put to use floating and moving effortlessly, lightly configuring between the charges of more intensive contact. Movement is the natural overflow and discharge of this contact intensity. Where it is prohibited or disallowed it will create psychological repercussions. This is how physical contact, movement and the psyche are all interdependently linked. It is the imagination that links, transgress and translates one aspect of experience into another linking the physical and material with the virtual and transitory. Language and communication is the sign; the marked residue that points not to itself or to its representational aspect of denotation but rather to the apt placement of touch or feeling contact and its exchange into the realm of movement discharge. Language naturally fashions around this right consolidation of focus and its release into energy. This is also the pulse of  the in-breath and the out-breath continually replacing, replicating and re-composing one another into a unified presence whose aspects are inseparable but never fixed.

The Dam Release

A session with M today at the school. He is coming into contact. Getting stronger- I am feeling his presence. He is using his own jerks and spasms as brief excitations - just before release. I am using this same pattern- high-lighting  the blockage like a small dam build-up - then to let go- give space and let the pattern flow out as if from a nebulae that splays cylindrically all the way out. Shiatsu/Seiki touch is this- it is  the precision intervention of a blockage- not in fact a circulation or balancing act. For in and of itself it can do nothing- or perhaps nothing other than provoke and heighten a compulsion that has become a habitual gaurding into an interior. By piggy-backing on this same pattern it flips it back out- provoking the halt or seizure at a precise juncture then as the liquid flow builds up and builds up, it creates this momentary swelling- like an over-flow- and then as the contact is released there is a vacuum that immediately is flooded with a charge of substance that goes in a multi-directional way from centre-point both centrifugally and as an outwards dissipation. This double-move creates a momentary suspension- like a line drawn in the sand- a marking- an indentation- which is timeless, spaceless. Thereupon this void arises a back-swell back into livingness and - like a man choking whose channels are filled with water, there is a sudden eruption and the passages clear themselves out by the kick-start engagement  that this provocation and turbulance creates. Out of the ground-swell there comes a magnetic pull the other way like the pull of the tide back towards the ocean current and into its dark depths- sucking back into its own integrity and force from the sandy shores where it ceaselessly comes and goes.

So with M he is learning to orientate his limbs, his internal organs, his breath, his bowel movements, his heart beats and his voice all from the same source. This catching in and exposition out that occur simultaneously as a double-take that is extensive and recursive- that is manifest and deep within the fold; that is the point of contact- of communication- and the point of seperation; of reliance and independance, joy and pain, elaborate through one another becoming the play of one another; a dance of up and down, in and out that together create a small insertion- a pause-gap through which we glance back at ourselves with humour and kindness, then let it go and sow the seeds of this merging with other, as  the preliminary of our aperception of another.

Only in this unity where we get to feel the biting in of force and counter-force curling in and out of one another; upon the banks of one another- do we then have the imagination to interact with another- as a part of ourself that we hold apart - and then leap over through this man-made gulf to create emergant patterns- signs and symbols- communication networks- soundings and vibrations; the pulsar on-off vibrations of  muscular contractions and their instantaneous release. It is the release- the letting go- the streamng through which is the journey of our seeing/feeling/kinaesthethic volitional action. Yet it is set on the banks of a seizure- a near-death interiority- a contraction that seems endless- leading towards oblivion- until miraculouly it stops- glances back at itself like a mirror gazing at its reversed image- and then unfolds back into exposition. For this miracle of reversal is life- it is health- it is well-being.

On Waiting as doing.

This tensile wait is an end in itself. Leaning through from potential to outcome it is neither. More delicate it is the straw bridge between these poles strung out between these erected pillars that are so convoluted with expectation, yearning and disappointment that they are compacted into substances; blinded in the realness of that accumulative dream.

But between landings and before the flight where is anyone, anything? How are we locatable? Not in and of ourselves. There is this pervading sense of settings infinitely and minutely adjustable as co-ordinate points that is this Waiting. And the Waiting becomes a verb "To do" no longer a position to take up. It is loaded- both compact and spacious- impacted and yet transparent. It's the circulation of air - the wind currents, the temperature shifts, the atmospheric pressure and humidity gradients. It is the rising and falling of particles of dust that hang and drop or are taken up on wind currents to be dispersed far and wide. It's the glint of the light onto and off of the bark of a tree, the buildings, the reflective backwash of a window. And also the humming drone of chanting cloaked religious men that pervade this area of the park on this Saturday morning; a Shabut, interlaced with bird-calls as they take up morsels of bread in their beak, swoop up into the tree foliage and drop back down again as the morsel slips from their beak. It seems not to be marked as a mis-hap, a loss, an altercation. Rather it is the pulse of sensing matter, following it through into movement and pressing it momentarily with the lightest of grips into matter once again. This is the heart-beat, the breath and the eidetic blink of our eyes that like the tree foliage lets in and screens the widening rays of the sun. Warmth can be felt on my skin where before there was a coolness and a light breeze that dissembled that gathering of warmth so that it did not linger for long enough to be experienced as such.

The birds on the lawn plateau, this plateau now strewn in loose tiny white feathers, are angling towards the brink craning their necks into the same direction, quaking and cawing with guttural throat sounds. Yet where I am now,  that sound is almost lost on the wind until I am more imagining it or transplanting it from an earlier experience when I was then closer to them.

These birds are waiting,  lulled yet infinitely alert in the threshold gaps between tiny leaps in atmospheric pressure, cool and warm interpenetrating swathes of air, slight breezes and their instantaneous dying; sounds that come and disappear as if around tangible corners as their passageway is eased or erased in concordant and discordant air-bands; light frequencies squeezed like bubbles through a hoop to intensify and bounce back and forth like an agile ball  in an impossibly small space. Or else thrown to the skies, the universe beckoning until light becomes a soft stroke that is no different to our experience of our skin;  not a division but a contour through which signals are forged and made meaningful as if in a wide and improvised artist studio. 

These birds are held  in these cross currents. More they are forged in this way only out of these particular vectors. And what appears to be inclinations, decisions or complex programs of coordinated movements based on unknown communication networks; the submerged signals of intelligent flesh, are simply the coming into fruition of all these movements. These do not stop at the border of each feathered bird but rather run right through these bulky squat bodies tainting them with the same brush, colouring them simultaneously from the outside and inside as if the birds were doorways; valves that sense invisible discrepancies in the pressure and speed of air currents, light flicker and sound resonance. And as a certain decimal of frequency is reached in these multi modular currents the birds simply take to the air. They find themselves airborne not because  they have made the move towards flight as if collectively following a good fact by fact Manuel on flying, but because they are no longer landborne creatures; they have become airborne and the relationship between these two states is not simply the galvanisation of skill sets; of muscle collectivity's and metabolic shifts. Rather the ability to imagine flight belongs to all the atmospheric vectors that make it so. And the birds simply lean in to that possibility made real; they simply take a ride on the currents that have informed them of that possibility. They are lulled into this new state much as a new-born is lulled into comfort by the singing voice of its mother or the falling into the nurture of a milk-filled breast that offers up its riches as soon as it is touched and seems in turn to touch back with the very essence of life.

In this sense to talk of the organism-environment is more than to say that the environment attunes to the organism's needs. It is to say that the environment- whether wind currents or the real or imagined solidity of
the mother or the mother's breast, lends itself to the idea of being harnessed in the very way in which it presents itself. "Use" then comes from this merging momentarily into the swell and surf of a sea that carries us and into which we let ourselves be carried. Yet somehow in this carrying we wake up, nearly die from the shock of being truly alone and separate from the object of our merging and then if we are lucky reconcile the mis-match and communicate to one another out of this new dream of a volitional encounter. Holding delicately in the balance between these two states; a merging with and a separating out from- so that we are neither engulfed nor spat out, is the ambiguity out of which the Waiting occurs. And we can truly listen into and sense the conditions in which this waiting occurs so that when we give our trust out into the idea of being carried and of having our weight borne through space by forces other than ourselves it is already brought to us out of the environmental conditions that make it so. It is in the action that we imagine the possibility that is emerging through us into this action at that very point in time.

Imagination is nothing more than this. We are given into a shape and form momentarily out of the tensile currents that offer up precisely this and no other possibility. Where we can lean into these forms lightly and gracefully and then as conditions change, re-formulate these imaginative shapes to a more updated Use, this is how we come into health and connectivity with our environment and with others who like us are manifesting into and out of these same environmental conditions.

In Therapy or between Therapies, this active Waiting: the tensile interim space that is not foreclosed into goals and objectives, is the place of Health. Wherever this loose tensile connectivity remains, there is Health. If the Therapist can be this kind of loose Environment then the child can move into action and move simultaneously into the idea of action as the imaginative rising and falling of brief forms.This is freedom and it is the basis upon which connective presence is felt and a relationship becomes possible.