Encountering the mystery that you are

There was a moment when I knew exactly where I would die.

It has the luminous quality of a peak experience.

I was sitting on my bed, on a late spring afternoon, in my shared, university student house in Melbourne, Australia. The knowing gripped me and held me until I fell back on my bed with joy, grief and relief.

I knew that I would die right here.

In my body.

The knowing came unexpectedly, yet in a way that made sense, after a week of intensely practicing dance with the body you have.

I learned the phrase ‘dance with the body you have’ from my first Contact Improvisation teacher, Martin Hughes. He used it to teach us safety because Contact Improv is a dance form that invites surrender to momentum and falling. If you lose track of your actual body, the body you have, then you risk injuring yourself, or your partner.

That week, I had been at a residential Contact Improvisation ‘Jam’, hosted in rural Victoria. A Contact Jam is an open space style dance practice/training/community gathering, modeled on the idea of a musical jam. People come together to improvise within the rules of the defined dance form, to discover what they can create together.

Contact Improvisation is a contemporary dance practice, created in 1972 by US based dance artist, Steve Paxton (Novack, 1990; Smith et al 1997). It involves unchoreographed duets using the communication of touch, weight and momentum to interact with your partner. (Contact Improv is easier to show than explain – see video links below to get a sense.)

It had been a week of big open skies, and the freedom to be in my body. There was no program except showing up authentically to move and move with others. We were about twenty people, gathered in Natimuk, a small town known for rock-climbing visitors. We danced in a church hall and stayed together at the next door backpackers, co-creating the daily program as we went.

That moment of knowing where I will die lives in my mind like a singularity.

I did not feel alone.

And it is this precious and vulnerable possibility of a relationship to the body you have that I want to talk about.

How do you encounter the body you have?

In modern industrialized life, awareness of the body we have usually falls into two unwanted types of experiences:

• feeling bad about our bodies for their shape, their color, their needs.
• feeling pain or impairment that blocks our ability to do what we want.

Overall our body is treated as an object. It is a thing that we can use, that we can abuse or care for. A threatening thing that will age and ultimately lead to our death.

But what if you could have a different kind of relationship? A relationship in which you felt less alone.

In Contact Improvisation, dance with the body you have means pay close attention to the moment by moment physical reality of your body’s capacity to bear weight and negotiate falling.

But it also brings forward a metaphor that we can use for our lives. A metaphor and a paradox. After all, with whom else’s body could you dance? Yet in dance and in life, we often try to dance with the body we wish we had, rather than the one we actually have. And even without trying, our awareness constantly slides into the past or future, making it a quite a discipline to stay in the present.

Contact Improvisation demands moment to moment attention to the point of physical contact with your partner. It is a form of movement meditation. The dance is the exploration of what is possible when both dancers focus on maintaining that point of contact, while being free to follow the flow of gravity and momentum. Because it is an unscripted, improvised dance practice, you cannot rely on your partner or your own body to do any specific movements. Instead you dialogue through touch, through the point of contact, following the flow of gravity and momentum, and allowing the contact between bodies to create the dance.

The dance form cultivates moment to moment body awareness integrity by requiring respectful attention to all parts of yourself: the slow, tired parts as much as the flexible, responsive aspects. If you skip over something, you will lose contact, and you might even get hurt.

It is a dance of freedom and relationship. The dance you will have cannot be predicted. It is something that you have to encounter. The invitation to dance with the body you have is an invitation to a mystery.

Body awareness as a practice

This invitation to dance with the body you have fascinated me and became the inspiration and focus of my doctoral research into body awareness practices.

Body awareness practices are activities that focus attention on your own bodily experience. They offer a unique opportunity to focus on the interaction between what you think of as yourself, and what you think of as your body.

Yoga, literally meaning the union of mind and body, is perhaps the most recognisable form of body awareness practice in modern western, postcolonial society. And subsequently, the mindfulness revolution popularized eastern meditation practices, by demonstrating their health benefits, followed by the trauma and trauma informed approaches which put body awareness front and center of even mainstream psychology and medicine.

These practices use our conscious awareness as the connection between our self of self and our bodily experience.

In my research, I used the method of closely analyzing my own experience of body awareness practices using cultural theory, and investigating the social context of these practices, taking a phenomenological, ethnographic research approach. I discovered the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, writing in the early 1930s about the way in which people know how to use their bodies (Mauss, 1992 (1934)). Instead of taking this for granted, as simply natural, Mauss opened up the question of the cultural and technological aspects of how we use our bodies. Our bodily capabilities are not only biological facts, he observed, but cultural artifacts. And Iris Marion Young’s classic feminist essay, ‘Throwing like a girl,’ politicised this attention by linking specific movement restrictions to female socialization (Young, 1990).

My interest however, was not so much about what a body could do, but how we can feel our body.

What could it mean for the way we feel freedom, for our ability to use power, make change, express ourselves and connect with each other?

Getting real about our relationship to nature

I was also very concerned about environmental issues, about the clear cut logging of old growth forests and the risk of global warming. I wanted to get real about my own relationship to nature. I wanted to get real about how I personally relate to that little piece of nature I call my own, my own physical body.

What did body awareness practices mean for how we understand the relationship between nature and culture?

What did it mean for an ecological approach? Could it help us find an environmentalism that went beyond just righteous opposition?

I wondered, how do I live and understand the relationship to my own body, that little bit of nature that I call my own? How am I able to feel my relationship to the living world of which I am inescapably part? How do I relate to the nature that I myself, am?

Was I treating my personal piece of our ecosystem with the respect it deserved? Or was I using it as a vehicle for my own will and pleasure, a resource that could be extracted and dominated for profit?
I wanted to honestly confront my own will to dominate my own nature and not just call out other people from some moral high ground. I couldn’t live with the self-righteous position, calling out the “bad people killing the planet” while not confronting and working with my own complicity.

I love being in wild nature more than anything in the world. But if I’m honest, when pesky nature disturbs my peace, I hate it. If I can I reach for the insect repellent, non-toxic if possible! And I love being able to go home from wild nature, driving in a comfortable car and arriving at a safe, clean indoor shelter with clean drinking water on tap, electricity and not to mention the internet. I love indoor plumbing and I do think a hot shower in your own home might be one of the most profound achievements of modern civilization.

And when wild nature threatens my life, my community, my very possibility of existence, I absolutely want modern technology and industrial scale emergency efforts to save me. In those moments of threat, I do not want to be subject to wild nature and I’m grateful for safety.

These extraordinary physical comforts and the privilege of relative safety of modern industrialized society are not equally shared, yet have reached enough people that there are powerful forces willing to sacrifice perhaps everything to defend them.

‘I’ you say…

Grappling with this tension between environmental sensitivity and the comforts of modern life, I came across the contentious German philosopher of power, Friedrich Nietzsche, who suffered from nasty migraine headaches during his life.

Nietzsche wrote about creative power, about humans being defined by their ability to make promises: promises that allow us to make and re-make the world, to facilitate change. He coined the term ‘will to power’ to describe our inherent drive for creative expression, for the transcendence of our limits, for the striving to make an impact.

But he also noticed that our conscious, intentional self had a self-importance that it did not quite deserve:

‘I’, you say and are proud of the word. But greater is that in which you do not wish to have faith – your body and its great reason: that which does not say ‘I’, but does ‘I.’ (Nietzsche, 1978 34)

I got fascinated by the possibility of connecting to ‘my body and its great reason’. What if I could develop a more democratic relationship to my body? A relationship in which I wasn’t only the boss, telling my body what to do and when. What if I wasn’t only using my body like an ‘earthsuit’, like an empty vehicle for my will and power to express itself?

What if I was actually engaging in an encounter with the mystery that I am?

I discovered this encounter through body awareness practices and dance with the body you have.

For example, I arrive at a Contact Jam after a day at work and my mind says: there is no dance today! ‘I’ cannot dance. But I wait. I rest. I relax. I let my body sink into gravity’s pull. I invite myself to dance with the body I have. And then, if I’m patient, the dance comes.

From nothing, something. I dance with the body I have as a discipline of not doing. I dance with the body I have as a practice of surrender and joy. The joy of going beyond what I think is possible and experiencing a bigger self. The pleasure of receiving the dance from that which ‘does I’, my body and its great reason.

Dance with the body you have is the idea that you can relate to your own body as a partner in the mysterious, unfolding story of your life.

Thinking differently about your body

Dance with the body you have asks you to think differently about your own body, about your sense of freedom and power, and about your relationship to what looks like the constraints of your own physical reality. It asks you to build a relationship with that little piece of nature that you call your own, your body.

‘I’ you say and are proud of the word. But what if, instead of feeling your embodiment as an earth suit, you felt the mystery and partnership of being with your body and its great reason?

Exploring this invitation to dance with the body you have as an idea, a metaphor, and a practice, allows you to follow the flow of freedom, relationship, power and surrender. It gives you the opportunity to encounter the mystery that you are.

You’ve got this.

And the world needs you.

Try this practice

If you’re game, I want to invite you into a few moments of a body awareness practice.

Read through these instructions and imagine yourself doing the practice. Then give it a try in your own time.

First, make yourself comfortable sitting or standing …

If you wish you might close your eyes – for many people this amplifies body experience – and conversely if you want to come out of the practice, opening your eyes will bring you back.

Take your attention to your breath – notice its rhythm – the speed, the frequency. Notice the movement that occurs in your chest – is your in breath longer than the out breath? Don’t try to change it, just observe, notice the autonomous movement of your body as it exchanges air from the outside to the inside, while your heart is pumping the newly oxygenated blood around your body, feeding your cells with oxygen.

Now let your attention widen to include the whole of your body. Take your attention to your face, to your neck and shoulders, chest, torso … and notice now as you scan your body if there are any sensations or movement impulses that catch your attention – it could be a twitch in your shoulder, a desire to wriggle in your seat, a slight warmth or cold in your feet or hands.

If something catches your attention then invite yourself to take your awareness to that part of your body and notice everything about the experience. Use a friendly kind of attention. See if you can get to know this sensation or movement impulse a little bit more.

Imagine this sensation or movement impulse were a seed, and you were to plant it – what kind of plant would grow from it?

It can help to try and imagine how this experience could be amplified, made bigger or more intense (Mindell, 1990).

For example:

• If you found a vibration, you might imagine your whole body vibrating and maybe a humming sound to go with it …
• If you felt a twisting impulse in your neck you might imagine following that with your body and turning all the way around …
• If you felt a heaviness in your limbs you might imagine getting heavier and heavier and dropping down onto the floor…

Invite yourself to think of this as a dance that your body is trying to have while you are busy reading this blog post.

It is a part of your experience that is not entirely going along with your intention.

And it isn’t the specific meaning of any particular bodily experience that I am interested in, but the very fact of noticing that something is happening which isn’t entirely or perhaps anything to do with your intention, your agenda …

There is a dance your body is having or trying to have without you …

And I want to really welcome your whole self, your whole experience – the parts which you are intending and aligned with, and the other parts, the dance your body is having without you.

When you are ready please let that experience go and return your attention to being where you are – feeling the contact between your body and your chair, if you are sitting, feeling your feet on the floor. You may want to wriggle your fingers, stretch a little, as you open your eyes …

When I’m feeling brave, as I notice my breath, I invite myself to connect with the beating of my heart and to remember that I depend on this heart beat and the flow of breath. I feel the in and out of breath and the pulse of my heart beat. I gently and lovingly invite myself to remember that at some point my heart and breath will stop. And there will be nothing that I’ll be able to do about it.

The experience of my body as mysterious other, an other on which I depend, an other whom I must encounter, is a vulnerability and at the same time a creative opportunity and the possibility of relationship.

I know I will die, here, in my body. And I will not be alone.

References to go further

Find out more about my doctoral thesis

Contact Improv practice (video) Irene Sposetti https://youtu.be/ED8hNoulZv4?si=vPGHtGU6j_eFncMl

Contact Improvisation practice (video) – Originators Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith, Curt Siddall
https://youtu.be/EjhS7cXrrUc?si=TCd1fsAtnoPzDHCE

Mauss, M. (1992 (1934)). Techniques of the Body. In J. Crary (Ed.), Zone 6: Incorporations (pp. 454-477). New York: Urzone, Inc.

Mindell, A. (1990). Working on yourself alone: Innner Dreambody Work. London: Arkana, Penguin Group.

Nietzsche, F. (1978). Thus Spoke Zarathustra (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Novack, Cynthia J. (1990) Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture, Madison and London, University of Wisconsin Press.

Smith, Nancy Stark, Jastremsky, Harriet & Gustavsen, Mette (Eds.) (1997) Contact Quarterly’s Contact Improvisation Sourcebook: Collected Writings and Graphics from Contact Quarterly Dance Journal 1975-1992, Northampton, MA, Contact Editions.

Young, I. M. (1990). Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.