Category Archives: the body

Nov16

balance

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I have had a profound bodily and emotional revelation.  It came about as I was watching Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s videos about the organ system.  In the last DVD, she is explaining something called the “organ roll.”  It begins by side lying,  feeling the lateral line of the body, and clearly sensing the front body and the back body.  When I first lay on my side, I quivered into uneasy balance,  I could feel muscles bracing, and how my sacrum pushed forward, and then my chest drew back, looking for how to lie poised on that razor’s edge of the side body.

I stayed there for a long time, then changed sides, then came back to the first side again.  Gradually, I began to feel how I could unwind from the inside out, releasing my sacrum (and the pain there) and how as I stayed, it became more restful, more expansive.  In Bonnie’s words, the confusion between the back body and front body began to ease – nothing pushing or falling backwards or forwards.  When I stood up, I felt as if – perhaps for the first time – I was resting in my center, nothing braced or pushing or falling.  My mind also felt quiet, reflecting this new balance. I became curious about how this new way of sensing balance would change my riding.

The answer is, profoundly.  I felt a huge shift with my big Friesian, Sanne, who because of his power, can easily disrupt my balance, engaging me in a forward-falling, backward-bracing dialogue,  It was as if all of that simply unraveled.  I could feel my own quiet center – no muscling required – and he reflected that easy longitudinal balance in a completely new and effortless way.  Our riding dialogue was soft, engaged, supple and playful.

This physical revelation has an emotional parallel in the Somatic Experiencing work that I have been studying for the past couple years.  In that work, when we become activated – emotionally triggered – we find regularion by using sensing awareness and slowing to pendulate between activation and settling.  It is a way of finding balance, of not tipping into full on panic or disassociation.

To learn more about this work, connect with me here.

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Nov12

surfacing

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The intentional pause helps us to feel into the whole bodily, sensory landscape of where we are.   It is a way of coming to the surface, coming up for air.  It is about being in the midst of doing.  This fall, as the light faces more each day, as the colors leave the trees, I have been pausing a lot.  I want to breathe in the glory.  I also want to feel myself more fully.

During the past two years, I have been studying Somatic Experiencing – a profound and embodied method of working with the ways in which our bodies hold our histories.  It is “a potent psychobiological method for resolving trauma symptoms and relieving chronic stress.with old patterns of behavior, of bodily holding and reactivity in ourselves and in others.”

What this work is giving me are other ways of “surfacing,”  of swimming out of the waves of worry, preoccupation, and bodily constriction.  What I like about it is that it is a way of embodying more deeply the practice of pausing, of stopping and orienting outwardly and inwardly more fully.  It helps me notice when I am activated, when something has landed in me creating a cross-current of tension and holding.  It is a powerful and elegant way to breathe, to open.

I am integrating this work onto my somatic movement therapy practice with individuals and into my creative work.  For more information, contact me here.

 

 

Oct15

a body, a landscape

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Screen Shot 2014-10-14 at 9.29.04 AMEiko:  A Body in Fukushima; Photograph by William Johnston

Thirty years ago I took a Delicious Movement Workshop with Eiko and Koma at their home in the Catskills.  It was transformative, life changing.  I had just met them at a performance of Kazuo Ohno  at La Mama in New York.  That performance had blown open my ideas about movement, time, age and beauty.  Working with them for a week pushed me off any dancing vector I might have had into a world of possibility and poetry.  Eiko and Koma have threaded through my life since then, casually and profoundly.

Now Eiko is venturing into the wild waters of solo work at a time when I am doing the same. Her current collaboration  with the photographer William Johnston, “A Body in Fukushima”, is currently on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art in Philadelphia.  At the same time, Eiko is performing “A Body in a Station” in the Philadelphia train station.  Her courage and devotion are  boundless.

Last summer, I performed in front of my collaborator Pam White’s  camera in Bogliasco and Venice, Italy.  One day, we shot in front of some wild grafitti near a church as a group of students sat with a priest.  They never glanced at me.  Oddly, that was both unsettling and reassuring.  Most days, we would set out – me in costume – and then find a spot that beckoned – a series of narrow passages, a garden, a courtyard, a landscape of doors fronting a church.  We let the opportunity shape the material.  I love to improvise to let the confluence of sound and sight and whatever is arising from my own body in that moment shape what happens.  I am interested in the intersection of the performative body in public spaces, and then weaving those narrative, imagistic threads into the work both in the theater and on the street.   And the thing that drives me, has driven me for the past thirty-five years, is a lust for movement, a hunger to channel that volcanic urgency from the body into something that I can share.

I will keep you posted on my upcoming performances.  In the meantime, get to Philadelphia if you can to see the beautiful work of Eiko and Mr. Johnston.

 

Oct13

the receptive body

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I am no longer swimming.  October, and the nights have dropped into the 30’s.  Lakes and pools are hovering around 60 — too cold for even a quick dip.  Besides, I swim to luxuriate, to open, to lengthen, to receive.  As best I can, I am cultivating a receptive body.

Yesterday in my studio, in my body, I was watching a DVD of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen exploring in movement the relationship among kidneys, uterus, bladder and ureters.  Each one of those organs has a quality of mind and movement that is unique, and the orchestration of those parts is a continually shifting and expanding improvisational dance.  As I moved with Bonnie, and then on my own, I thought about the time it takes to open, to sense and feel in this way, and how doing that nourishes and expands everything else.

What I mean is this:  the receptive body is also the vulnerable body.  The receptive body is also the relational body.  What is missing in a lot of the conversations about vulnerability and courage (Brene Brown) and living your dreams (Oprah) is the body.  The body in the sense of an ongoing, exploratory, improvisational, playful, listening relationship with oneself.

How do we discover that without being a dancer or a yogi?  What is a simple way of entering those waters?  My friend and colleague is the composer Pauline Oliveros.  Her life practice, Deep Listening, is listening to everything all of the time, and noticing when we are not doing that.  Deep feeling, or deep sensing is about attuning to the inner and outer landscapes of the body and its relationship to what surrounds us.

Begin here:  practice the intentional pause.  Whether you are eating breakfast, or diapering an active 21 month old child – pause.  Take 5 or more seconds to notice what you feel with all of your senses.  Do you feel the shape of the keyboard keys beneath your fingers?  The soft warmth of the baby’s skin?  The soft channel of breath entering your body?  The unseen space behind you, the rush of a truck passing by?  Just notice.  Let yourself take that in.  Then go on.  Pause often, throughout the day, an unexpected moments.  Catch yourself off-guard.  Pause mid-action.  As if you were a dry sponge, imagine your tissues – all of them – expanding and opening to the waters of that moment.  Receive.