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?…