Tuning your body instrument: The alignment of tone and movement

In this article, we outline a movement practice we devised called ‘tonal alignment’. It invites you to regard your body as a musical instrument that produces both a mechanical vibration (movement) and an acoustic vibration (sound). The basic practice involves moving different parts of your body to various musical tones. These tones can be made with your own voice, an instrument, or you can play recorded music. Synchronizing body movement with acoustic sound is what tunes the body instrument. Body tuning, now regarded as comparable with tuning a musical instrument, can be done before any activity or ‘performance’ including the everyday tasks of work and play. Intentionally moving different parts of the body in response to particular musical tones develops a greater capacity to be spontaneously moved by music. Tonal alignment is fun, experimental, can be done alone or with others and brings a welcome inspirational reset.

Your feet and my hands – fulcrums of support and reorganization: Bio-somatic dance movement naturotherapy

This article is offered as part of the COVID-19 special issue. I imagine it is useful for practitioners and students who are working at home, unable to attend the studio. The article explores the joints in the feet through a model of differentiation (traditional anatomy) and de-differentiation (biotensegrity). The feet are often forgotten. While they carry us through the world, from our first step to our last, they often fall beneath conscious awareness. Our feet run frantically underneath us, trying to catch up with our over sympathetically charged bodies. Under current socio-economic pressures, and work–rest imbalance, they suffer considerable strain. They often become a repository of life’s stresses and strain. The health of the feet affects the whole organism and any change in the feet locally will affect the global. In this article, I share a practice that helps to realign the feet through a model of biotensegrity, co-creative touch and self-regulatory movement. In this model, the bones are viewed as floating in a sea of connective tissue. Each joint is perceived as a mini fulcrum of reorganization. The article explores the feet as fulcrums of reorganization and the receptive hands of the therapist as fulcrums of sensory support. The article also shares some subtle embodied qualities that underlie healthy practice, such as finding safety in your nervous system before facilitating. The article is divided into four parts – Part 1: Hygeia meets Asclepius; Part 2: The feet suffer; Part 3: Preparing for practice; and Part 4: My hands, your feet: Fulcrums of support and reorganization.

Self-regulation and the subjective Self: Practice to cultivate awareness

In this article, I offer a somatic process to non-movers at home during the COVID-19 lockdown. These participants also offer reflections on their individual experience post-moving. As a facilitator, I invite you to take part in this process, whether you are a dancer or non-mover (whatever your age or ability). The process focuses on self-regulation and interoceptive awareness, allowing the time and space to connect with Self. Self-regulation and interoceptive awareness are two of the most important aspects of somatic movement in supporting free-flowing movement and balancing the nervous system. Self-regulation in turn can produce a sense of agency – meaning a sense of autonomy and release within the body can occur. In line with cultural pressures experienced within society, somatic processes can ease the anxieties of everyday life. Inviting Self into a practical, felt process is sometimes what we need in order to re-evaluate our positioning and perceptions within the world. As human beings we often find ourselves in stressful and challenging situations that ultimately affect the body’s nervous state and our relationship with Self. We currently find ourselves in the middle of a global pandemic, and opportunities to connect with Self in creative, communal ways are hindered. I am offering this article as a way of communicating my appreciation and passion for somatic work during this pandemic. As a Ph.D. student studying somatic movement dance education and therapy, I deeply recognize it is important to be connected with community and others, as well as my own inner sphere. Connection produces a sense of optimism during this time. This article offers a simplistically detailed, yet effective process that locates and contacts Self within our feeling, sensing organism. As we begin to re-connect with our energy and interoceptive awareness, a physiological shift can be experienced. When we drop our awareness within the vitality of the moving body, a change in consciousness can occur. Using breath awareness as an inroad to sensing internal processes, I offer this practical process to you, inviting you to cultivate an inner essence of gravity, breath, ground and body.

Dancesong

Dancesong is a reflective article that explores the author’s somatic and dance practice in times of isolation in a pandemic: walking, dancing and writing in sites in proximity to her home. On the edge of wild and urban landscapes as well as the inner landscape of fragility, she takes her feet walking as a way of opening up attention and exploring the intimacy of embodied ways of inquiry. Mud, sea, soil and flora become the terrain where these somatic and poetic reflections occur. In a collaboration with creation, the invitation is to respond to the moment through tiny dances and inhabiting the fullness of what it means to be present. As an arts-based researcher, this article is written in poetic and visceral language, honouring the relationship between language emerging from the breath and syntax of flesh and blood, bone and ligaments. Poetic language and poetry are central to responding to creation and being recreated as a way of articulating. Peppered through this short piece is poetry, images and videos of movement practices that evoke a call and response in creation. The reader is invited to open to the wisdom of embodied knowing and be recreated through their own somatic practices.

Finding heart in the well of being

‘Finding Heart in the Well of Being’ is written from the author’s daily experiences, thoughts and memories while living in New York City, the epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic during Spring 2020. Recognizing her body, and our bodies, as both the epicentre and well of resource of experience, she highlights the importance of affect-feeling-emotion moving through the body-minding processes. She reflects upon themes and metaphors of stop signs, sinking ships, everlasting love, dancing in the dark, life, death and unseeable paths ahead as expressions of what became meaningful in her consciousness. With these themes, she offers guidance for somatic movement explorations for readers to inquire into bodily awakening and to reflect upon and rearrange the themes and narratives in their own ways. This autoethnographic narrative includes artwork and photographs and invites readers to join the author from the epicentres and wells of their bodily beings, to dance with her in the epicentre and well of her bodily being, as we all live with and the beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

Humanity in a time of collective initiation

As our whole global community entered a period of much loss, both personal and collective, the realization came to me that we are facing a process of collective initiation. Initiation always involves a loss of some sort and, to some degree, a potential for something new to be born. Initiatory journeys, which have been mapped by shamans since antiquity, and in the myths and legends of various cultures, show us an archetypal pattern of loss and death, dismemberment or burning, followed by renewal and rebirth. We also each know this process, however unconsciously, in our own embodied experience of birth, where the same archetypal pattern can be discerned. In this article I will explore the connection between the birth process, mapped in Grof’s Basic Perinatal Matrix, and the collective crisis of illness, intense pressure and restriction, loss and death that we are currently facing. Having such a map to contextualize the intensity of experience we are going through is a resource that helps me to be with all that is happening and changing in our world.

Four body- and nature-based practices to move your life force

This piece shares four invitations to reconnect with your energy, vitality, and wholeness. Shape-shifting into an animal gives you access to a sense of life force that is unmediated by demands and expectations of the human world. With pairs or opposites, you can explore two qualities that exist simultaneously, including emotions, situations or choices. These might be in harmony or tension with each other or within you, and you can explore and learn from both without judgement or bias. Nature as a teacher provides an opportunity to walk with a specific question in mind. Through close observation, you will find guidance or answers to your question. Finally, dancing your soul back offers a danced version of soul retrieval, if you feel disconnected from yourself or from an essential quality in your life. Although they are inspired by shamanic dance practices, you need no previous experience with either dance or shamanism to try them out. You can practise them at home or in a place in nature where you feel safe and connected.

Everyone needs to breathe

This article is written with an eye towards the future and a foot in the past. It is partly autobiographical, and in each of four parts offers reflective somatic practices. The author is sheltering at home, so her thoughts centre on the meaning of home, family and pets. At the same time, she articulates somatic skills to cultivate embodied presence, insightful verbal interactions and healing touch. Her writing invites readers into somatic movement explorations and somatic communication practices through poetry. Life and death, love and war, ground her article. The section on Simbi involves global shadow work through butoh and the healing essence of water. Golden shadows appear as elemental and ecosomatic in Morphic Curiosity, a butoh invitation to site-specific dance. Video links and photographs further embody the work. The final section, Dance back the world, presents somatic witnessing as an extraordinary process of intimate notice and care. Becoming friends with the whole world is an exhortation of Mahatma Gandhi, and the life work of this author. Her article was written before the brutal murder of George Floyd and the international protests that began in America as cries for social and racial justice. Now we have a new imperative for Gandhi’s call, because everyone has a right to breathe.

Fascia and biotensegrity: Bio-somatic dance movement naturotherapy

This article is offered in the spirit of supporting students studying at home during the COVID-19 lockdown. It is offered as a study aid for those who may not be able to return to the studio for months but want to continue with their life-giving somatic studies at home. The article shares the properties of fascia and biotensegrity. I reflect on why somatic movement dance education and therapy is an effective approach in the world of fascial therapies. The first areas covered are sensory nerve endings found in fascia that respond to different types of movement and pressure, such as Golgi organs, Ruffini receptors, Pacini corpuscles and interstitial receptors. Other movement concepts covered are omnidirectional volume, pressure, time, stretch, gravity, ground reaction, floating bones, and chirality and counter-chirality. The article serves as an introduction to biotensegrity and why fascia innervates the parsympathetics. Of note, the article is pedagogical, primarily aimed at supporting students who are training in somatic movement dance education and therapy. Throughout the article Karin Rugman and Maisie Beth James offer experiential sensory images applying key ideas about fascia in the studio.