It’s a new week, and our proposal for movement workshops has gone out for review by someone who works in human resources.
The Language Arts of Body Language…………movement having meaning, syntax, structure, as I’ve said before. This becomes clearer in the context of linguistics, viewing movement vocabulary as another language, in just the way that viewing ASL is looking at the structure of another language.
Chronic postures and movement tendencies sustain beliefs, attitudes and cognitive distortions. The body shapes beliefs, and is in turn shaped by our notions of how we ‘know our own minds’, so that self-reflection and insight are not the best tools we have for bringing the workings of the mind to consciousness. (Bessel Van der Kolk in Pat Ogden’s Trauma and the Body)
Antonio Damasio, neuroscientist, talks about how the mind actually hides our knowledge of the body, deflecting us from knowing the ins and outs of the body, the interior-scape of the shapes and functions that sustain our very being (The Feeling of What Happens).
Alexander Lowen and even Wilhelm Reich talked many decades ago about chronic body posturing/armoring as reflecting the defensive structures of the mind.
Doing is becoming. If we don’t experience, with our bodies, new ways of moving, we can’t effect change. Problem solving happens at a body level, requiring flexibility and an extended range of repertoire/vocabulary. Just as in verbal language, greater vocabulary allows for deepening and widening of expression, nuance, meaning.
We teach by exploring the affinities each of us has for moving, and broadening the existing range of affinities so that alternative options become available, as choices, as new vocabulary for solving problems. Critical in the expansion of repertoire is the notion of transitions or connectors. One does not get from here to there without passing through something else. The passage is equally important to the arrival at the next location………………that very Zen notion is at the essence of being a moving, sentient, social being.