49 What happened after the Dance
Amanda goes to a Conscious Movement workshop and uncovers another pathway to expanding consciousness. As her bodymind experiences shift, she ponders the inadequacy of words to express wordless knowledge.
Here’s what I’ve noticed a few weeks after I completed a workshop called Bare Bones Fundamental. This was a Conscious Movement workshop, involving two intense days of music and dance, working with every aspect of the physical body.
Conscious Movement is freeform dance where there is no right or wrong and no set moves. The etiquette is no talking on the dancefloor, a set period of time including warm up and warm down, and all set to a program of music led by an instructor.
It was hard work – especially as the workshop fell on a series of 40 plus degree days, but the joyous bits were seriously joyous - mainly to do with the sense of exhilaration and pleasure experienced in the dance with fellow workshoppers. It felt like Team Human, being with 30 odd fellow humans feeling for truth through the agency of their physical bodies.
Not everyone is drawn to the idea of Ecstatic Dancework . The people I met at my first dance in Hilton, near Fremantle seem to be a fairly stable and dedicated crew. I became an instant devotee. The dance, as choreographed and sound tracked by the instructor(slash) DJ, Theva was addictively good. Fantastic even. Not to mention the dedicated team of enablers who make sure the beautiful hall we dance in is soothed, respected and geared for all movement. The training is based on a method known as Open Floor Dance – it’s a thing.
POST DANCE
After the 2 days I was so physically tired it took me a week or so to get that something had changed. Out of sight, a long and deeply subterranean process had began that quietly unfolded in the days after the workshop. I noticed changes in my behaviour.
Being more conscious of my physicality brings me right to the front of my experience. By this I mean, I spend less time in my head thinking and speculating about what is happening in my body and more time exploring actual sensations. What is it? What’s going on? What’s happening in a knee or the solar plexus? What is the exact sensation in my body which is the indivisible expression of this Amanda person?
I use this clumsy language because I have a small foot in the Feldenkrais world. This fabulous body movement technique was developed by Moshe Feldenkrais and aims to retrain people in the way they move. He points out that our language cements a division between the self, as in the person, and the body. We say "my knee hurts" which immediately places a distinction between me, a person, and me, the body, when it would be more accurate to say "I hurt—in my knee." This leaves me wondering, can I reverse decades of the language of separation by unpicking alienating phrases? Would it help train my awareness away from sitting in my head thinking, rather than the better option of running around below the neck, feeling and experiencing life first hand, so to speak?
FIRST DANCE
I was totally drawn to the idea of Conscious movement. I remember boring my friends for days: this is it! This is the new expression for humans! It will finally blow yoga out of the water and free us from techniques that have been wildly overused and pushed out of shape in the West for years. Then I found out that these classes have been running for 11 years in WA and although they exist in cities over the world, in WA they can’t be found outside of a few hundred devotees based around Fremantle. A trend spotter I am not.
Regardless, my first few sessions were powerful. I hit pockets of nausea, moved through periods where I yawned hugely. I was able to keep moving through all sensations, conscious that the nausea was necessary: simply me responding and changing in real time to new patterns of movement that were pushing attention and breath into dark, neglected corners of my bodymind.
NORA WARMS UP THE DATA
Have you been introduced to Nora Bateson’s work? She researches Warm data. This is an idea that contains within it the language one needs to talk about things like Conscious Movement -it being the stuff that records the unseen but strongly felt experiences that happen within oneself and between people within the ‘context ‘ of their lived experiences. The relational bits.
WHAT IS WARM DATA?
Nora describes Warm Data through the narrative of a doctor visiting an elderly patient at home. The doctor enters the house and notes whether the place feels looked after or unkempt; whether the patient’s bedroom is cold or warm; the patient relaxed or on edge. Who is in the house and what do the conversations reflect? Does someone offer them a cup of tea? This information might not necessarily be recorded by the doctor, but in terms of the patient’s wellbeing, it is as important as the clinical evaluation.
THE WRONG QUESTION
Normally a patient is seen out of her context, in the clinic where the doctor works, and a lot of this Warm Data is lost. The scientific method that rules in the doctors’ surgery relies on hard data, the physical evidence produced in labs by machines and test tubes in response to symptoms.
So in many cases how can we expect relevant, holistic care for the old lady who is only encountered by a health practitioner in a clinical setting. We know immediately the doctor is receiving a severely restricted set of data in terms of the patient’s wellbeing.
The quality of the old lady’s connections with other people, her relationships, or lack of relationships within her home environment tell a truer story about what might be helpful in her return to health. That, plus the hard data, might suggest a more rounded and cause oriented treatment plan to her doctor.
As Nora points out – we (as in, team human) don’t have time to spend on untangling and following single strands of complex situations when talking about the wicked problems of our day. If we try to separate and chase down the individual elements that make up these wicked problems, all we are going to do is end up with (and I quote Nora): ‘a great solution to the wrong question’.
Nora’s point is that Hard Data is only going to take you so far. It will only supply one dimension of the many dimensioned information that needs to be gathered to respond effectively to a situation.
WHOLE CLOTH APPROACHES
This dance stuff just continues my desire to walk a path that offers what can be called a contextual approach to life’s experiences. The whole cloth, the holistic, the multi-dimensional approach.
To cater for all tastes – seeing as how the whole world is inexplicably not going to embrace Conscious movement straight up, we humans need many pathways to holistic responses. So Consciousness work. Whether it is though movement classes, breathwork, through nature or deity worship, through the way we use language –these endeavours are all trying to nudge us towards ways of awareness, of knitting body and soul together. We are looking for alignment within ourselves and in relationship with our environment and all the living and non-living things within that environment.
INFERNAL HEAT AND WIND
I’m writing this in February, back in Geraldton for a bit of RnR after several months in Perth. Being home, out of the big city, in these days of infernal heat and wind feels like being a kid again. Connecting with the garden, eating figs so sweet that jam-making becomes a ludicrous concept, sharing rainwater showers with the mango tree, running naked around the backyard, and listening to podcasts while engaging in embroidery, my hot weather craft now.
Geoff set up a shallow birdbath years ago and has created a rainmaking sprinkler 10feet high that waters a small patch in our back garden, loaded with trees and other shrubs, it is an oasis for the birds who flock to the party at the end of day, and for us humans.
The heat and wind are too intense to contemplate going beyond the house or shady greenery past the early morning until late in the afternoon. Coming from the big city, I’m meant to wear a mask, it seems easier to stay home in view of the range of opinions raging around issues to do with the plague.
This is the life of a Geraldtonian in full summer and full relaxation mode. It probably has all the hallmarks of the deep retreat that happens for inhabitants of cold climates in the darkest times of the winter (minus the beach excursions).
Metaphorically speaking, February is arguably WA’s ‘darkest time’ - but that language is misleadingly northern hemisphere, more suited to blizzards, snow drifts and freezing rains.
It doesn’t translate because we all know in most of WA, February, the toughest month, is stupidly hot, insanely windy and blindingly light….
WHAT HAPPENED AFTER THE DANCE
So, what happened after the dance workshop?
My physical movements have become more multi-directional and whole body. With a deliberate expansion into non-linear zones, I am breaking myself out of tram-track habits to move in much more complex and fluid ways. As someone said, once you break out of linear ways of thinking and doing you cannot know what is going to happen next…and it can feel like magic.
The workshop definitely brought more breath and connectedness to the 70 trillion cells in my body. Stuff got moved around. I reckon, without being able to bring the listener any scientific proof - just that SENSE of myself - that the messaging and communication within all the intricate pathways of the cells rapidly increased as I danced and moved with more conscious attention to sensation.
My nervous system was rewired; messages zinged through stiff and forgotten zones. Sometimes I felt the movements I made were coming from a more instinctive, looser part of my being.
THE RESISTANCE
Days after the workshop, moving/dancing in my back yard, I met ‘resistance’ to a movement. That something happened at this point I was sure but didn’t know how to define what it was. A few days later, trying to describe this moment to a friend, she had the perfect phrase at hand courtesy of philosopher Peter Ralston:
you know you’ve had a breakthrough because you’ve broken through.
There you go.
I forget whatever story I was planning to develop to explain this felt experience rationally. Enough said. Count it as another Warm data moment.
More gentle change came when I was practising a breathwork exercise, one I have been doing on and off for about six months with Scott Schwenk of the Commune online community. I usually do this lying-in bed in the morning and find it to be a deeply relaxing process. One morning there was a sense of solidity, as if my breath had become a more tangible, liquid presence. True God: As Tyson would say.
RESONANCE
Here’s a Warm Data-ish word: Resonance.
As in, are you resonating with what I am saying?
It fulfils a lot of the prerequisites of Warm Data, I reckon. For example, it describes things that feel real to me but are hard to convey to others. Resonance implies fuzzy edges, lends itself to wordlessness. A magic show of phenomena that can only be sensed in the body.
WHEN BILL SINGS
Bill Callahan, musician from the USA, says it so well in a song called From the River to the Ocean from his album, Woke on a Whaleheart, Some of the lyrics:
I could tell you about the river…or…. we could just get in….
Or the refrain – Have faith in wordless knowledge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRKkoI0HUKc
These things, these noticings, that are not things, but processes, are hard to convey or quantify with words without sounding like a hackneyed paragraph of a book in the Self-help section. But they are great and true to experience or sense, which is what inspires me to throw 2000 or so words into the arena of wordlessness, just to share.
If any of this resonates with you do not hesitate; go immediately to your computer and marinate yourself in Bill Callahan’s song from the link below. Maybe even move or dance as it plays.
https://www.dancingdhevas.com/
Bill Callahan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRKkoI0HUKc
