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Exercises
Movement Meditation
Stand with your feet hip-width
apart, your knees relaxed, your shoulders balanced over your hips. Close
your eyes. Relax. Feel the sensations of your body– tightness, pain,
buzzing, spaciousness, burning, tingling. Allow the strongest sensation
to come to the forefront of awareness. Invite that sensation to become
stronger, more intense. Respond with movement.
The body will "tell"
you how to move. Listen and respond. Go along for the ride. Allow one
movement to transform into another movement, following the physical impulses
as they arise. Avoid responding to ideas that may emerge about what an
interesting movement might be and simply feel the movement. Avoid worrying
about what the movement looks like.
As you move, see if you can
do what is unfamiliar. If you do yoga on a regular basis, avoid doing
asanas or components of asanas. If you do Tai Chi, avoid doing slow motion
curves of the arms as you rest in a deep knee bend. If you are a martial
artist, avoid doing kicks and lunges and punches. If you do Aikido, avoid
doing rolls. Find what is called for not from memory or habit, but by
the body’s idiosyncratic needs of the moment. Let yourself be awkward,
clumsy, goofy, quirky. Allow yourself to move in a way you have never
moved before.
Continue for as long as you
like: one minute, two minutes, five minutes, twenty minutes. When you
are ready, return to stillness. As you rest in stillness, take a moment
to feel the sensations in the body, the final resonance of the movement.
Finding the Story
As in the exercise described above, stand with your feet hip-width apart,
your knees relaxed, your shoulders balanced over your hips. Relax. Feel
your body. Respond to a movement impulse with a simple gesture that you
repeat, over and over again. Perhaps you roll your hips, or circle your
shoulders, or flick your wrists. If you can, do what is unfamiliar rather
than moving from habit. Commit to the movement you are doing, whatever
it is. Let the mind empty.
As you repeat the movement,
over and over again, invite an image to surface. What do you see? What
is it that you are doing? Begin to describe the image with words, out
loud.
If you are moving your feet
in fast circles, you might be reminded of how you’ve been wanting
to take tango lessons for years but haven’t had the courage to go
to a class. How you decided to take tango lessons after seeing a Japanese
film where the lead character fell in love again with his wife after he
learned how to tango. How you met a man at a party who does the tango
and you asked him to show you a step and he moved his foot, encased in
a shining black shoe, in a quick arc on the floor and you knew you had
to learn how to do that.
If you are tossing your arms
in the air, you might be reminded of the way you felt when you got out
of the bathtub and realized all the towels were downstairs in the washing
machine. Tell us about that: who else was in the house, how you handled
the situation, if you had robe or used your T-shirt to dry yourself, or
simply ran naked and dripping into basement past the dinner party guests.
Avoid miming. In other words,
don’t come up with an idea (like hammering a nail into the wall)
and then execute it with movement (like pretending you have a hammer in
your hand and pounding it against the wall). Instead, let the movement
lead you to the image. The movement might not be literally or logically
related to the image it evokes. The movement has a visceral relationship
to images that lie in the memory bank. You might be doing deep knee bends
as you point your index finger in the air and be reminded of your best
friend telling you how to put in a tampon. You might be rocking your ribs
from side to side and be reminded of your first kiss.
Remember: Don’t know. Surprise yourself. Let the body move and name the images as they arise.
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