LANDSCAPES OF THE SOUL April, May, June 2004 : Reflections and a Frame of Reference for Movement Exploration

The following text was read at the beginning of one of the movement courses posted on this site. It was meant to bring an expanding awareness to the nature of movement, the body and the world.

How we conceive of ourselves, our bodies, and our bodies in time and space, define in part who and what we are. Down to the words and wording, to the languaging, is how we are determined and defined. How we move in the world, how we think, what we think, are influenced by how thought forms itself in the mind. If we think of ourselves, because of our languaging and our notions of reality, as an object moving through space in linear time, separate from other objects, then we set up an experience of object and subject with a limited understanding of time. We omit circular time, we omit eternal time, we omit the field in which all resides simultaneously and through which all is inextricably related. We omit zero, the void point, the absolute stillness out of which all arises.


The movement work attempts to challenge the experience of subject and object as well as chronological, linear time. Rather than, "I am walking on the road," we shift and we have, "Roadwalking is happening." Rather than, "I am singing a song," we have, "There is singing going on."

We can take one step further and say, "The song is singing itself. The walking or movement is moving itself." In other words, the song and the movement are living beings. The movement we invite is a being that we honor with our attention and our surrender to its expression. We offer ourselves to the impulses of the unconscious, temporarily sacrificing ego desires.


The more we conceive of the human body NOT as mechanistic, not as biological reactions, BUT as the physical manifestation of "fields of meaning" and "processes of knowledge," the more we will be open to subtle levels of energy, the subtle levels that are contained within the process of healing.

"[Physicist David] Bohm suggested that, in its deepest essence, reality, or "that which is," is not a collection of material objects in interaction but a process or a movement ... of the whole. This flowing movement throws out explicit forms that we recognize through our senses of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. These explicate forms abide for a time and we take them as the direct evidence of a hard and fast reality. However, Bohm argues, this explicate order accounts for only a very small portion of reality; underlying it is a more extensive implicate ... order. The stable forms we see around us are not primary in themselves but only the temporary unfolding of the underlying implicate order. To take rocks, trees, planets, or stars as the primary reality would be like assuming that the vortices in a river exist in their own right and are totally independent of the flowing river itself." (D. Peat, 1996, p140)

The knowledge or insight gained in this process is yours. It resides and springs from deep within. Once the experience is felt, it cannot be taken away. At the same time, you are the only person who can give the experience and the ensuing insight to yourself, by commitment to the process, by removing the critic, by dropping small mind and letting your body become your field of perception. This takes practice, and it is practice that this work helps to provide.

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