Authentic Movement: dyad practice

Authentic Movement dyad practice August 2020 I am drawn to pull the red blanket over my head. The changes in the light, the knowledge that I am not seen but yet still witnessed, and that I can choose give me a feeling of safety and comfort. I roll to my right side and my right arm lands on a bolster on the floor. I hold the bolster to my body. An image of clinging to a raft at sea provokes me to reject the bolster, wanting to explore what may be beyond clinging. I turn my head and torso away to the left. I stand, keeping the blanket over my head and sway slowly from foot to foot. I am aware that my head and upper body are still not seen. A thought, a memory provokes me to pull the blanket off my head. I feel an anger about something that may happen today, it deepens into relationships of the past that have already happened. I am conscious of patterns through time. My mood has been waiting for this gesture to emerge. My hands find a wall and push hard through one palm and then both palms. A judder is moving through me each time a hand makes contact with the wall. I’m feeling the force back into my muscles, joints and bones. My hands begin to cross my midline to push the wall in an alternating pattern leading my ribs to rotate slightly. I increase the speed and intensity. I would like my hands to break the wall, to make an impression, to change something. The words come “I cannot hurt you without hurting myself”. I stop. I feel defeat. My head drops to my chest, my arms hang limply at my sides. I sense my posture as forlorn. My head lifts slowly, my mouth opens to the sky, sensing a deep connection through this space of my mouth and throat and even through my whole body. I have the image of a sea squirt. I am surrendering. There is no point in fighting. I pick up the red blanket up again and wrap it around my shoulders. A cloak now. Giving warmth and comfort. I lie on the floor and let my arm and right cheek rest on the bolster. I sense mother and comfort. I am at ease. The bell goes. My witness offers a clear seeing of all of this- except my hidden face when the blanket is over my head- but she names this choice I made to not be seen by her. She sees me being met by the wall. She sees the blanket as a cloak and feels its comfort. She senses mother now in the bolster. She offers that she senses mother everywhere. In the wall, in the blanket, in the bolster and that the wall met and contained me. Not knowing As I review my progression through this work, I note the temporal spirals of experience, information and embodied knowledge. My ‘knowing’ serves to move with curiosity and as much open innocence as can be mustered, attentive to emergent phenomena. Meaning and understanding appear in layers- from the present into the past and back again – synchronicities consolidate these ripples back and forth through time. In moments of awe and wonder grand synchronicities and tableaux organise themselves in front of my eyes. I once asked my teacher, “where do we start?”. “Anywhere”, he replied.