I will post simple exercises and please share ideas and experiences.

January 5, 2012.  Take a moment and close your eyes and allow your ear sense to be magnified.  Listen to the sounds around you while keeping them outside of you.  Now allow the sounds to begin to enter into your internal space and meet with other internal sensation and just observe.

Music can be a beautiful backdrop to any embodiment practice that can help with a deepening of images, feelings and sensations.  Begin in silence and then turn on music.  Sigur Ross (Icelandic group) has wonderful full, textured sound to their music.

Nicholas Humphrey, evolutionary psychologist and philosophy presents to assumptions: 1. consciousness stems from the having of sensations. 2. The subject of consciousness, “I”, is an embodied self.

A mind requires boundaries.  Primitive animals, including our ancestors, had  a sense of “me” from “not me.”  A physical boundary (skin or any membrane) forms a threshold across which exchanges of matter and energy take place.  Sensory stimuli are processed and experienced.  Such as temperature, pressure, pain or other sensations.  ” Any animal that had the means to sort out the good from the bad-would clearly  have been at a biological advantage.  Natural selection was therefore likely to select for ‘sensitivity’”, Humphrey writes.

Early ancestors and some animals were able to ask, according to Humphrey, “what is happening to me?”  but also detecting whether it was good or bad and what to  be done about it.  So the ability to hear your thoughts enunciated in your head as you are thinking and reading.  In Buddhism or mediation practices this is often described as the “observing self.”

As we have advanced we are able to better understand what was happening to us, able to receive incoming stimuli, but to link them to the “I”, the source, the inner and to be curious about the source.  There is then a basic awareness of things being out there and in here.  At this stage the “I” is not just a passive receptor of external stimuli but an awareness of existing in the world in our own right.  A personality can now take shape with more abstract thinking (such as symbolization, categorization) and creative expression (e.g language, culture and art) is possible.

Moreover, though noticing an awareness is reached that sensations, feelings and thoughts do not go on indefinitely but have a certain quality and duration.  They exist in time, past, present and future.  The cornerstone of our consciousness is the realization that we are mortal and will one day die.  So our time in living, our human existence has a time limited and thus the need to appreciate ourselves and others.  According to Humphrey, none of this would be possible without embodied feelings, “I feel, therefore I am.”

between things…’ P Broks…

It is often difficult to put into words, and even harder to justify to politicians, the ways in which dance works its magic – the basis of its transformative powers. We tend as a culture to value only what is tangible and measurable whereas dance is all about the ephemeral, the allusive, the inbetween. Yet I am increasingly excited by the contribution dancers do and could make within our various communities, not only as performers, but as harbourers of an embodied knowledge, traders in mindful motion – facilitating experiences rather than delivering consumable goods. As we have evolved as humans our ever more sophisticated, analytical brains have been taking over control. Instead of turning our developed intelligence inward to better understand how we live through our bodies, or outwards to understand our symbiotic relationship with the natural world, our intelligence seems paradoxically to be directing us towards an existence beyond the body, with need only of a brain in order to operate and design technology. A rational and technological arrogance has gradually led us away from ‘relationship’, and towards an ecological tipping point – in terms of the sustainability of our external environment and our bodily health. I am not naïve enough to think that dancers can single-handedly get us out of our present troubles, but I do believe their concerns, expertise and knowledge are ever more vital in connecting us back into our living, moving organisms, to a sense of relationship within ourselves and with the world. In our small ways, in the transformative experiences we partake of and witness daily through our dance practices, we can and do help at least to bring a greater embodiment to mind and mindfulness to body.

Since Descartes (17th Century Philosopher and Mathematician) we, in the West, have retained a duality between mind and body, which has remained lodged in our language. Even to use the term body-mind implies the putting together of two things that are really separate. I envy the germans who have two different words for body: ‘korper’ which relates to the physical body, and ‘leib’ with the sense of lived, experiencing body/mind/spirit. (I will use the term ‘self’ to attempt to encapsulate this integrated whole, with which some dance practices are particularly engaged.) Way back as a child I began to connect my passion for dancing, with a curiosity about learning. I was aware that in my out of school dancing I was somehow learning more, applying my intelligence more keenly, than I did most of the time at school with its emphasis on memorisation and regurgitation of information. If, through evolution, intelligence has been manifested as an ability to adapt to a changing environment, then the dynamic dance processes I was involved in,applied and developed my intelligence.

I remember even early on, being riled by comments that seemed to dismiss dance as ‘self expression’- as if it was a matter of letting off steam, – like running round the playground before focusing back on the ‘serious’ work. I sensed that what I was involved in was more substantial than that. I have subsequently enjoyed how linguist G. Kress has written about visual art and children’s play – as cognitive acts, as ‘meaning- making’, as ‘intentful’ activity…..yes that is what my dancing ‘felt’ like – making a considered mark on the paper, not just mindless scribble.In hindsight I have wondered if my childhood experience of ‘mindfulness’ was a felt-sense of, and the satisfaction that came from, a total engagement of ‘self’ in the dancing – the energising power of the self focused in thought and reflection as action. Mihaly Csikszentmhalyi writes of people engaged in ‘optimal experience’ or ‘flow’ that ‘ they stop being aware of themselves as separate from the actions they are performing’.

Or physicist David Bohm relates this idea to learning: ‘…the ability to learn something new is based on the general state of mind of a human being… (in which) there is an undivided and total interest in what one is doing… Only this kind of wholehearted interest will give the mind the energy needed to see what is new and different…’ So I was predisposed to seek out dance practices that were concerned with learning through sensing, and the refining of awareness of my ‘self’ in motion. I discovered how focusing the mind and imagination through the body could re-pattern, or re-educate, my movement with a speed and efficiency that endless repetition, and attention to the ‘physical’ had not achieved, and this further fuelled my curiosity about the integration of mind and body in movement. These ‘somatic’and improvisational practices gave access to a more openly perceptive and receptive state, one that prioritised subjective experience, proprioception, a listening to, and questioning of,movement that arose from the body, an opening up of choice in the movement that my bodymind could allow to arise or which my mind could more consciously intend and shape. Some of this might sound a little self-indulgent. Indeed at times the experience needs to be selfabsorbed, proprioceptive, in order to be a rigorous process of tuning one’s awareness and attention. And partly this self-absorption relates to the time and focus needed for the ‘unlearning’,and ‘un-fixing’ of habitual patterns of mind and movement. As children we learn through constant interaction with the world, we have a mental and physical flexibility and openness – our world and our brains literally emerge from this dialogue. For adults, movement practices can enable a re-awakening and re-tuning of this perception of relationship – of layers and elements of our body and mind to each other, and to the environment around us. In part such practices are trying to redress a balance, turning up the volume on the sensing, intuitive ‘self’, to meet the more dominant rational brain. Psychologist William James wrote insightfully, over a hundred years ago, of the limitations of our over-emphasis on conceptualising and labelling the world: ‘Out of time we cut ‘days’ and ‘nights’, ‘summers’ and ‘winters’. We say what each part of thesensible continuum is, and these abstract ‘whats’ are concepts. The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.’ So dance can play a valuable role in re-asserting, re-experiencing this perceptual present, the undivided self. It is re-assuring though to know that movement practices are not alone in pursuing these ideas. We have some support and corroboration from our more ‘rational’ colleagues!

On a philosophical level phenomenologists, such as Merleau Ponty, have been concerned with lived experience, seeing people as part of, not separate from the world, and the world as created through our engagement with it. ‘Perception in Merleau Ponty’s work, is precisely this reciprocity, the ongoing interchange between my body and the entities that surround it. It is a sort of silent conversation that I carry on with things, a continuous dialogue that unfolds far below my verbal awareness… Whenever I quiet the persistent chatter of words within my head, I find this silent and wordless dance always already going on – this improvised duet between my animal body and the fluid, breathing landscape that it inhabits.’ David Abram This ‘wordless dance’ then inhabits an ‘immeasurable’, intuitive realm which, by contrast with the authority that is attached to conceptual and analytical thought has, in the West, been undervalued, almost dismissed as a way of knowing and learning. However, there is now considerable psychological research affirming the power and efficacy of ‘intuition’ as a mode of thought and tool of learning. Psychologist Guy Claxton in ‘Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind’ identifies intuition as: ‘…a kind of knowing which is essentially indirect, sideways, allusive and symbolic; which hints and evokes, touches and moves, in ways that resist explication. And it is accessed not through earnest manipulation of abstraction, but through leisurely contemplation of the particular…’and he describes how it helps us learn by osmosis: ‘(intuition) works through a relaxed yet precise, non-verbal attention to the details of a situation, to the actual effect of one’s interventions, without any explicit commentary of justification or judgement, and without deliberately hunting for a conscious, articulate mental grasp.’

These accounts chime for me with the qualities of my own most productive dancing experiences -whether making, learning, performing or teaching – and with that engaged state of undividedattention. The term ‘mindfulness’ has been coined for this state, in which one is:‘highly aware and focused on the reality of the present moment ‘as it is’, accepting and acknowledging it in its full ‘reality’ without immediately engaging in discursive thought about it… ‘On Kabat-Zinn in Guy Claxton. So again we come back to the perceptual present of experience. Traditionally perception was seen as the passive reception of stimulus through our senses, the relaying of this to the brain, which then responded through action. But there has been an emerging recognition withinneuroscience that perception is an ‘embodied’, or ‘enactive’ process. Not only do our senses seek and select stimuli rather than relay to the brain a representation of everything they encounter, but this proactive process requires the involvement of our sensori-motor system to make it possible… at the simplest level we need to turn our head, or shift our gaze in order to see. ‘Perception does not take place in the brain of the perceiver, but rather is an act of the whole animal, the act of perceptually guided exploration of the environment…’ Gibbs So perception is an activity intimately wrapped up with movement and a holistic engagement of the ‘self’ in a learningful interaction with the world we inhabit. ‘An act of perception is not the copying of an incoming stimulus. It is the step in a trajectory by which brains grow, recognise themselves and reach into the environment to change to their own advantage.’ Freeman in Gibbs. No wonder then that dancers as specialists in movement have developed an interest in deepening an awareness of perception and honing its tools. Such work is not a source of objective or abstract, conceptual knowledge. It is about detailed attention, the ‘non-verbal particular’, about learning processes and subjective experiences that can open up choices for the body/mind in how it moves, behaves and organises itself in relation to the world.This sense of ‘relationship’ is key to dance as a performance art. Bringing attention into the present moment and into relationship, to the flow between internal and the external, to how we inhabit voluminous space and interact with a larger environment which includes the audience – all of these enhance the power of performance to communicate, to involve participation in a shared experience. But these sensed relationships are also important to living. If we are more alert and ready to act and respond in the changing moment, then we are better equipped to adapt to the complex flux of our quantum world. It is striking how physicists have embraced the fluidity of intuition andmindfulness, just as they have acknowledged energy as well as matter. Heisenberg, for example expresses a wish that new physics might effect the development of human thinking – ‘maycombine different human endeavours into a new kind of balance between thought and deed, between activity and meditation… ‘ (he might have added between body and mind)…’ Even themost important decisions in life’ he maintains must contain an ‘inevitable element of irrationality’… So the interests and ways of thinking of Dance begin to meet those of Science. To dateneuroscientific research has tended to focus on pathology as a means of better understanding healthy functioning. Surely, as with the research into the enlarged brain areas of taxi-drivers,there could also be something to be learnt from the study of movement expertise. Much recent work on perception has focused on the visual, also in relation to movement. Dancers, particularly those working with perceptual practices are also refining other senses such as touch and the vestibular system. It would be interesting to discover what their knowledge might contribute to our understanding of human functioning and potential. The visual is, after all, not so dominant in all cultures. The Anlo-Ewe of West Africa, for example, emphasise the proprioceptive quality of balance. Your standing and moral fortitude within their community is established by the way you move! Well we are not there yet – but I find it re-assuring and re-affirming to discover increasing corroboration from other disciplines of the power and role of practices and knowledge that we, as dancers, have developed intuitively: practices that help us re-balance our experience of the perceptual present, with our rational thought, and re-assert that mind functions through motion, that mind in a sense IS motion.

References

Abram, D. (1996) The Spell of the Sensuous

Bohm, D. (1996) On Creativity

Broks, P. (2003) Into the Silent Land

Claxton. G. (1997) Hare Brain Tortoise Mind

Csikszentmhalyi, (2002) M., Flow

Gibbs, R. (2006?)W. Embodiment and Cognitive Science

A big part of an eating disorder is the development of a system of control.  Usually the central themes are around “I cannot get fat.”  To prevent this I need to develop hypervigilence to food and develop a system that will not allow me to give into my hunger (physiological needs) and eat as minimally as possible.  Thus a fear of food, with each individual having their own particularities.  Of course, we cannot continue to deprive our bodies of food so breaking these rules will happen or the result of starvation is drastic.

Eating disorder are really not about food, but it is really an emotional disorder, because the individual turns to food as a substitute for dealing with bigger emotional issues.  An eating disorder is also an adaptive disorder to deal with multiple issue that involve in an individual’s life that she cannot cope with.  Usually healthier individuals learn to maintain an appropriate level of self awareness, affect regulation, impulse regulation and emotional self protection.  Instead maladaptive and alternative patterns of functioning are used to keep functioning according to perceived external expectation from family and society.  An individual’s own emotional system and needs are chronically ignored and shut down to replaced with the “eating disorder system of control.”

Helping express feelings on a both verbal and non verbal level is key to eating disorder recovery.  Life focus is on food, weight and physical body.  The challenge is to shift the focus back to natural ways of living that include experiencing one’s feelings, following ones life values, emotionally connecting with others, living life according to one’s authentic expressions and developing compassion and acceptions for one’s imperfections.

Feminist, Jungian and existential psychotherapies influence my approach.  Using a mindfulness movement approach with inner listening is crucial for entering the body’s space.  However, step need to be taken prior to this through more structured, externalized projective approaches to look at inner issues in a more concrete way.  Art and structured improvisation themes and ideas are organized in therapy to allow for easier access to internal states.

So the disturbed body image needs to be metaphoricallyviewed as a physicalization or somatization of difficulties with self other relationships.   Having body boundaries is about being self aware of what affects a person and what defenses need to be put in place to protect a person in certain situations and relationships.  Also having a good repetoire of social roles while being grounded in ones authentic being.  Relationally we need boundaries.  With an eating disorder the body becomes the actual boundary rather than a psychic one.  The taking in or not of food is the playing out of what is nourishing or feels good over what makes one feel bad.  As with someone who deprives oneself of food, it is easier to try and not need anything (anyone).  Be alone and deprive oneself of any love, closeness and intimacy.

The disturbed body boundaries of someone with anorexia, bulimia or binge eating can be symbolically be the psyche refusing to take in or accept other people’s (family/friends etc) versions of who she ought to be.  For someone who deprives herself and then binges and purges, she is playing out the chaos and confusion she feels with her boundaries in relationships.  She finds outher intrusive or leave her with bad feelings and so it is easier to have a empty, clean (symbolically) inner self.  For someone who binge eats, it is her attempt to control the world by taking it into herself but it leaves her feeling shameful and bad about her overweight body.  Body boundaries therefore act as metaphors for social relations.  The way we allow people into our ‘space’ is crucial for someone who is anorexic.  The ‘space’ or inner psychic realm of the self needs to be highlighted and explored to allow for insight, curiosity and acceptance.

I have read so so many books on eating disorders but they all seem to articulate similar ideas.  Some books more focussed on the symptoms and treatment primarily based on altering these symptoms.  If someone is so ill and physically and medically compromised then this approach is necessary but this approach does not get to the deeper motivation and reasons for an eating disorder.

With an eating disorder the outer body becomes the enemy, the fear and the loathing.   The outer body being the anatomy and physical body image (reflection and felt experience) but also the emotional container for difficult, overwhelming and painful emotions.  The outer body also becomes a container for the external intrusions, conflicts and pressures from others and culture.  This inner and external location in the body becomes a perceived consolodation of all that can be made different, non existent and controlled.  Sometimes, the feeling of depriving the outer body can lead to a transcendant experience.

Working with the concept of the outer and inner body so that the experience of the outer body becomes more an extension of the inner body is the real therapeutic work.  The inner body being ones internal world of sensations, perceptions, emotions, thoughts, personality and sense of self.  Ultimately, the inner body is who one is authentically with all one’s complexity.  Another aspect of therapy then is replacing the eating disorder with an more integrated sense of one self in the world.  Many of the women I have worked with and work with are the most intuitive, sensitive and emotionally sophisticated women but their families, life experiences, societal/cultural pressures and accepting their full selves become the journey of recovery from the holding place and distraction of the eating disorder.

I think somatic and movement therapy are then essential in treatment of eating disorders.  In movement one becomes more conscious and movement is iniated from one’s inner body.  A non verbal relationship and images can then develop more freely to bring insight.  The body needs to be spoken about, explored and incorporated with images and emotions.

I welcome anyones thoughts and insights about sharing about the meaning and purpose of their eating disorder and what has been helpful in treatment.