Somewhere in there...

Returning to that which knew me

A Picture for You and Me...

We have never stayed home long enough to experience the truth about ourselves - Erich Schiffmann

Following a week of fruitful exploration - full of challenges, surprises and creative inspiration, with the body fending off illness, I am constantly reminded of the need to slow down and find comfort in stillness. I love to start a movement practice simply tuning in to the sounds around me; the wind tumbling down the chimney, wailing trees, muffled sounds of strangers outside, lawnmowers firing in the distance…Can I listen to each sound without judgment, without projection? Can I sit in this space between sounds for just a fraction before moving on.. Can my body respond rather than react? How does the environment provide me with creative choices? I often find that moving from this place of deep listening and  awareness  serves to open the gates to deeper emotions and residues latent in the body. After a long period of slow sustained movement, a familiar pattern comes - my left arm delivers slow, wide circles, my right arm reaches towards my belly and the felt sense in my body is of being a child again as the words trickle out…“I remember running around the garden with abandonment, unconfined. To be who I wanted to be. I just wanted to dance…I denied it to myself…now I need to move in stillness”. What becomes clear in my movement practice is the need for assimilation and integration, of finding equilibrium and quietness in my body. Taken from a Tamalpa Life/Art perspective, I ask, how can I bring that stillness, quietude and deep grounding that I feel when I am dancing into my life? For me, it means responding rather than reacting to challenges and emotional turbulence, feeling centered within myself, seeking and finding interests in the small and beautiful parts that inform the whole and simply slowing down with integrity and awareness, honoring my physical, mental and emotional limits…walking slower, cycling slower, swimming slower, practicing asana slower - resisting the desire to become complacent and sloppy! Arriving at the end point in my movement, a subtle spiraling of the tailbone, I am reminded of a beautiful poem by Gary Snyder, “Marin - An”:

Sun breaks over the eucalyptus
grove below the wet pasture,
water’s about hot.
I sit in the open window
and roll a smoke.

distant dogs bark, a pair of
cawing crows; the twang
of a pygmy nuthatch high in the pine-
from behind the cypress window
the mare moves up, grazing.

a soft continuous roar
comes out of the valley
of the six-lane highway - thousands
and thousands of cars
driving men to work

Scribbles in my Shadows...

Do I Need to Understand?...

With my roots sinking further into the earth, the relationship between my left and right reaching a sweet compromise, these last few weeks have seen my focus shift from exploring the emotional body to working within a more creative sphere. What becomes obvious as I move is a need to give birth to the tightly woven words in my body waiting for their narrative, their protagonist to come forth and bring them to life. What fascinates me when working with language and movement is the free flowing repetition of words, sentences, images and patterns of response that can be highly tuned and used as creative tools within the exploration of personal mythology. Repetition provides a kind of layering effect, a synthesis or chiseling down of the therapeutic and creative process and becomes a way to de-center, inviting one to transcend deeper into the identified issue and explore, extrapolate, edit, re-edit….!! Aswell as allowing for refinement of movement, repetition grants access into a rather indeterminate space (again and again my body arrives in this space!) between words, images and the  origin of movement. I find myself consumed and fascinated by this space, that is, when the aesthetic experience has been broken down so profoundly, one is left with almost raw and somewhat intangible emotion and product. The abstraction and poeticism that punctuate these spaces provide reference points for exploring my own narrative, albeit it in syntactical confusion, and raise many important questions on the validity of the aesthetic experience in one’s exploration of the self: a subject that seems to keep coming back to me in new ways, shapes and forms  over the years. Writing from a movement therapy viewpoint rather than a performative one, I ask myself, do I have to understand the nature of my words? Does my witness have to understand them? Is there infact deeper meaning in seemingly translucent words pieced together in seemingly disparate ways, or do they arrive solely from the memory bank as records, snapshots of memories, traces of things past?…Can the body fill the gap between words and their meaning, subject / object, or further serve to layer them? Or can I trust that these words don’t need to be understood, that the wisdom of the body is enough in releasing them? And so I am reminded by a quote of Lao Tzu; 'Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is enlightenment'...yet right now I arrive at my own question, my own impetus for further explorations, do I need to really understand?…