<

PART 2

EXPLORATION DATE: 16.04.2021

FOCUS/PRACTICE: Conversation-as-Material (I) as a shared practice. The focus of this conversation practice was to come together to share in response to the preceding period of live exploration (between 19.03.2021 - 16.04.2021) where we had both been investigating 'back-ness in rotation' through individual enquiry. The session was structured through a series of timed activities, where we took turns to speak and listen.

STRUCTURE OF PRACTICE

0. Tuning in/Arrival - Lying-on-the-back, reconnecting with the body and the sense of practice [20 mins]

1. Speaking/listening: taking turns facing [5 mins each]

2. Speaking/listening: taking turns facing [10 mins each]

3. Speaking/listening: back-to-back [3 mins each]

4. Speaking/listening: Back-to-back [10 mins each]

'SCORE' FOR CONVERSATION PRACTICE

- Take a moment to tune into the chosen object/focus of exploration – this could involve a period of recollection, or looking back at notes, sketches, wordings that relate to the object/focus of exploration, or by noting/drawing/diagramming.

- Connect and try to stay connected with your direct experience.

- Feel free to speak before knowing what it is that you want to say – thinking through speaking.

- Feel free to speak in single words, partial phrases, half sentences, and thought fragments.

- Allow for vulnerability and embarrassment – for wrestling with, stumbling and falling over one’s words.

- Consider different speeds and rhythms. Allow for silence.

- Approach listening to the other as an aesthetic practice.

3a.

4a.

3b.

4b.

PART 3

INTERIM PERIOD

FOCUS/PRACTICE: Transcription and distillation of resulting text through marking/highlighting, undertaken separately.

EXERCISES/SCORES

Just doing the lying down then, I think the thing that came to mind quite strongly was this sense of taking care of the transition, to really try and take care of the transition because I was realising, also through the early experiments that I didn’t really know what was going on to be honest, like if I was asked independently of doing the movement: how do you move between standing and lying down? how do you move between lying and standing? I am not sure how I could describe it and actually even when I was doing it, it was almost I couldn’t see or become attuned to the different qualities of activation or release that needed to happen within that. So, I suppose the sense of taking care of the transition feels as if it’s really to do with paying attention to what’s happening, what’s actually happening. And two things came out of that and one was to do with what parts of my body need to be involved in this but perhaps aren’t being involved, so like what am I not letting get involved in this movement between standing and lying down, so like resisting, or just not letting the movement extend into a part of a part of the body that might really need to be involved in this, and then on the flipside of that, what’s getting involved that doesn’t need to be. So, the kind of taking care of was also to do with, on the one hand, being as efficient as possible in this movement between lying and standing, so stripping out or exploring the possibility of stripping out anything that doesn’t need to be really involved but on the other hand it was to do with testing the potential within that movement. I know this a little bit from some of the Yoga teaching I’ve received where there’s this invitation  ..it’s like a functional kind of yoga which is to do with getting from the floor to standing as efficiently as possible but not using your hands, so really using the legs as way of moving between lying and standing. So I was thinking what gets lost or what falls away in our capacity if we are not careful in a way, out of habit, or ease, or sometimes inefficiency actually. I notice that I have quite a lot of hip problem at the moment so there’s nothing really pleasurable in that investigation at the moment, it feels quite awkward, and I suppose because it feels awkward, I’m not giving it attention, I’m sort of pushing it away. So, yes, this sense of really taking care. And the thing about transition as well was that, it really somehow mediated between the back and the front, I think it can be easy for me to think of the front and the back as these two separated planes that are opposite from one another and I think this attention to the transition activated a sense of awareness of the side. There’s lots more I ..I was also thinking around the sideness of this operation, I think, perhaps I was not giving attention to when we were just focussing on the back when we were lying, so there is something to do with the way the attention to the transition dissolves this binary a bit between the front and the back or opens up a space between the front and the back as a site of a different kind of investigation. And just actually the sense of moving in and out of something as a dynamic action rather than this flat plane of sensation which was also dynamic but …. Hmm I’ve got three things, which I need to choose. There’s moving between lying and standing. I really enjoy, something you said about the side, as soon as there’s movement, say from down to up, the body has to roll, has to immediately be asymmetrical, something has to move, something has to move first and the same with coming on the way down something has to drop first. There’s always a sort of curiosity about what will start the movement. Also in Feldenkrais, she’ll often say I want you to not move but first imagine how you will come to sitting for example. I sometimes try and practice that and anyway I wonder if the body …what’s first? is there an idea of the movement or ..? what initiates? So actually, I’m not standing and not lying but moving constantly between up and down. I get very curious, how something is always having to drop, and something is always having to rise or push up. So, I become very aware then of something around an efficiency, as well as what’s having to work and what’s having to release, and how you’re navigating that and slowing the process down a bit or going this way rather than that way first. Exploring sometimes, how direct a route I can come or how convoluted a route I can come. I find it very interesting because the more attention you give it, it’s so complex what’s going on. By slowing it down there are more possibilities to create a diversion or a different decision or to drop something that was held or – there’s this huge playground of possibilities. Something again about the side, sorry I can’t help but keep linking into what you were saying, the sense of back-front and an idea of the back wrapping, as soon as I come into movement, especially in this transition from up to down, the body has to curve and bow and wrap itself. Somehow the back, is more of a wrapping or an unfurling, so it creates a sense of wrapping as well as initiating different kinds of spirals and twists in the body - a complex system somehow of unfolding, bending, twisting, and physically working with that - in the transition. It’s just quite amazing how we can get up and how we can fall down and the sense I can just collapse. I let go of everything and I can fall to the ground, simply, just like, gravitational, vertical - gone, and the body has to somehow sort itself out on the way. Different from the careful consideration. Something interesting in there, because if the body just let’s go it’s still doing all those decisions but too fast for me to hold on to in thought. I’m finding it hard to stay with the thought and not look too much to my notes. Some of what you were saying also resonated, which, I think there was this thing about the asymmetrical dimension to it. Some of the experiments I was doing were trying to move between lying and standing but staying within a symmetrical register, so it’s almost like a kind of rolling up to standing, this is really difficult, and I can’t do it very well. So, lying back and using the momentum of, a roll momentum so there is no twist or turn within that, but it felt a quite an aggressive movement actually to do this, to stay in this single plane. I felt actually in this, it was using the different kind of momentum or maybe … the way in which gravity gets worked with as a certain kind of force. So, there was also something to do with this exploration of moving from standing into lying and whether I could reverse it exactly in the same kind of way and what I was finding a lot was that my way into lying was not the same as my way out of lying quite often. Then I was trying to quite actively really try and reverse the momentum but of course it’s really different because on the way down you’re working with the force of gravity and just letting the body drop down in a way, whereas the momentum coming from lying is quite different, there’s this sort of pull of gravity on the way down and the push of the body back to come to standing seemed to be sort of quite significant. There was something to do with the relation of the front of the body needing to be receptive and the relationship of the front and the back, so what I was doing with some of the movements on the floor was just exploring this turn on the floor where at times the turn was leading from the hips and the pelvis area almost as though my legs were turning first and then to explore the movement of the chest and the shoulder girdle really moving. And this was very different. The sense of the movement from the hips was something to do, I mean obviously, with opening in that part of the body and then this chest opening, but it just seems as if the capacity of the back for me seems as if it’s so contingent on openness at the front, and the two areas in particular, like a kind of openness around the hip area which is a tremendous area of tension for me, just really letting go into that hip area, which feels as if, it’s also to do with a kind of receptivity to the pull of gravity, to just let the body be willing to work with gravity rather than just tensioning all the time, always tensioning against gravity, so with the hip sort of movement, its felt like its just to do with playing with gravity and being willing to yield into gravity, whereas the torso and the chest was much more somehow to do with vulnerability, in that sense of openness of the body, taking the attention to the back opens the front of the body in a way that feels quite vulnerable, or exposed, well maybe not even vulnerable, maybe vulnerable is a condition of habit actually, that it feels as if it wants to protect the front, so this opening up feels vulnerable but it actually also feels quite spacious and quite liberated to move into the chest, heart, opening movement. But I was quite surprised by the different feel between these two territories really. Then I was doing something where I was laying on my back and turning my feet and seeing how far that travelled and I think the relation of the feet in particular, when I turn its very much coming from the foot quite often, a pressing into the foot that turns the body. And the I went on a bit of deviation from this, and I started thinking about the relationship between discipline and curiosity in terms of daily practice because I got into a bit of thing where I was berating myself, like why am I not really doing this as a practice because when I start doing this, I really love it especially if I am writing alongside. Yes, I was thinking a lot about daily practice and the sense of discipline of daily practice and also the curiosity of daily practice. And what’s the relation between discipline and curiosity. Maybe it’s also to do with the back and the front. If I think about the back or the front, is the front and the back more to do with discipline or curiosity. How might it be to think of them more as a continuum, I think this notion of the continuum feels important, and also through the sense of the side. Yes, maybe the sides have become really significant because of the dissolving of the binary between front and back, or even between discipline and curiosity, kind of well, I wonder, well what would be the sides of discipline and curiosity, what is the transition space between discipline and curiosity and how to activate that. Hmm. I feel like that perhaps is deviating from the direct experience but something I was drawn to think about. Also, one of the other things was to do with this sense of the cooperation of the body, so maybe going back to what’s involved and what doesn’t need to be involved, thinking of the body as a field of cooperation and noticing where I was getting in the way of it being able to cooperate properly, so the movement in particular from the foot to the shoulder, which is also a Feldenkrais practice I think, where you are exploring this diagonal from the foot to the shoulder girdle, how much was I blocking that and where was I blocking that and not allowing the turn to happen, in a way. And then there was something about the relation of the back as a plane and the back as the spine, and the difference in having attention or awareness in terms of it as a surface or a skeletal structure, the kind of rolling down, feels as if the articulation of the spine gets much more drawn into attention, this kind of rolling down to squatting, actually that was just very nice to do, just rolling down, not even going as far as lying, just rolling down to squatting and back up again. There’s sort of a theme running through that is to do with allowing, allowing certain movements to happen, not resisting, or maybe not even thinking it, I had to do it quite quick to begin with, how do I do this, how do I drop into… I was just reminded about the curiosity, when we first lay down, a slightly disappointment in myself that I hadn’t cordoned off some time, but also a sense that I might have lost something or missed something but then on the other hand I think I do practice in between, so maybe its that cordoning off some time is important, it is important but I am doing things in between but I am not really reflecting on them, so even talking to you now I am thinking I probably I have done some homework, but there’s something about the awareness of it and the saying of it and practicing does feel important, even to give a feedbacking to yourself of daily practice, to remind yourself that I am working with these things. I loved there was the sense of disappointment that descended upon me when I first lay down, but I’ve got over that now. Ah yes, this disappointment pulled me into my breath. I’ve had some problems with my ears, they are very blocked at the moment and I have to put oil in my ears in order to get them unblocked. So I have a lot of internal sound… a kind of falling in on myself, a kind of dreamy state, but it makes me hear the ocean breath that you do with yoga. And I have also been thinking about tuning, resonance, vibration and whether a combination of tuning into the back, or a dropping into the body, that breath gets activated and there is a spacious sense and made me think again of strong back and soft belly, maybe Feldenkrais again. I’m thinking breath and softness that creates a sense of spaciousness if the body lets that happened. Something about the dropping back, not necessarily back, but letting go, dropping something that let’s something else move up and out, interesting how the force of gravity allows the expanse of the body. These vertical and horizontal forces and gravity is … so the breath somehow with these forces .. is resonant in the body. And even thinking that brings me into a sense of the skin at back of my neck, it’s interesting how these connections come up. In these transitions between up and down to almost have an image of the skeleton to work with, so for example in bowing down to ignore the muscles and everything else, the image of skeleton helps me, so having a duet with my own skeleton, and gravity, oh that’s a trio, a trio of myself, skeletal image and gravity. How imagination can deeply affect the possibility of the body, a body’s physical capacity. And I remember, in a programme by Angela Rippon, if you can get up to standing without using your hands is an indicator of how long you will live. I don’t remember the details, just as well. But now and then I do it to test myself, and it does get harder and harder to stand up without using your hands as you get older, to roll up is such a gathering of force, of energy. Thinking of the discipline and curiosity. Last week you said something about the front and the back and the being and the doing, so there is something in accepting, a certain acceptance….As soon as you settle into the body in how the body is at the moment, it can then cooperate with itself rather than projecting an idea of itself, having to, hmm, tuning in. And also, the place of thinking, because there is a lot of thinking involved, even if you are not aware. Perhaps there is a thinking that is bringing attention to the certain patterns of the body, because I know there are things I can easily slip into, as patterns of my body, but how to be thinking a different way. Sometimes in having nothing more to say, it is then that something comes out. I was thinking or reflecting on what you were saying about the sense of equality of thinking which seems to be a thread really that runs through this, and from that something to do with allowing the front and the back to cooperate more, and maybe the qualities of thinking that are connected with the front and the back to cooperate more so rather than it being this either/or possibility to see something more of a cooperation, like I was talking about the cooperation of the whole of the body and the movement of transition between lying and standing, how do these various modes of experience and of thinking experience cooperate within the whole experience of thinking, really. Something to do with taking the attention to the back as a way of working against certain habits but not forgetting about ,this not forgetting of the front, and recognising the mutual relationship with the front and the back, going back on the one hand to the necessary softening of the front that feels enabling of the back , but also something to do withbringing a quality of backness into the front, maybe that relates to this idea of enveloping or the wrapping of the back you were talking about, this sense of the back seeping around the sides of the body or holding the experience of the body in a kind of envelope of experience. I think in particular those qualities of backness that seem to do with this letting go and releasing, the being rather than the doing, maybe to allow the sense of the front to exist within that as the wider landscape of experience. That actually feels as if that would be very affirmative as an experience to allow there to be some degree of frontality but actually it’s held in this wider frame of backness that has this quality of letting go or relaxing or releasing. So I was thinking a little about this movement between the front and the back, maybe this transition between the front and the back and the standing into the lying, Yes, because lying down it feels as if, or I’m making a parallel between standing up somehow having a quality of frontality to it and lying down having a quality of the back or of dorsality, but there’s no reason why that would be the case, you can stand with the attention more on the back, and if your lying down there’s no reason why we can’t lie on our front, so in lying down take all of the attention to the front of the body, I haven’t done this, or not as an experiment within the investigation we have been doing. Lying on your front has this quality of calming which is quite interesting so what happens if the front presses into a surface and it’s not facing out into the world but it’s facing the floor. When you were describing that first .. the back and the front and the back or the front not being excluded from this backness, I had my eyes closed and I had a real strong sense of the back holding, an almost physical image of presence there almost, like a supporting hand, a supporting surface that allows then the front to soften and be open but again in my imagination go with your words. I often find myself saying these things like back/front, up/down, right/left, that in a way that does set up a binary but also its a continuum, it sets up a field of play, a playing field, which in itself doesn’t feel binary in the doing or in working with those terms but at the same time, I fall into them. Interesting. And the different kinds of symbols like the vertical line, the slash line or the hyphen, and in language that also sets up a kind of tension, play between. I haven’t actually looked at the recording yet, but I feel we have this image before we started this conversation, linking with other things I have been working on an idea of back-slash-ground, something coming up whilst working with some students, when we were trying to create a screen presentation, so I have an image of us back to back in the real-space back to back but also then in the recording of our conversation with two backs to the viewer, which will be us. Strange, something interesting. I can’t quite articulate at the moment but something about back/ground and groundlessness, there’s an image, forming in my mind, that’s not directly what we are doing but has something to do with it too. Round and back. That image is coming back when you were talking, that strong supportive round of the back supporting the front and again not so clearly shaped but more of a presence. A strong physical sensation, its behind. The frontal and my eyes, softness, closing of the eyes, or half scanning and this blurred vision we talked about before. And now I have this blur, blurred hearing, and with my ears on the side of the head. I’m now making strange movements with my head, scanning with eyes and ears. Did you hear the alarm then …. No. There’s a lot in there that resonated with things I was thinking about. One I think was to do with this relationship or even difference the sense of back and the notion of behind, if I am drawing attention to the back of the body there is this awareness taken to the behind, which is including my back but also including a range of or part of a spectrum of awareness that I can’t see. I think my tendency might be to think of that zone that is something that is somehow concealed or hidden or not accessible or unknown in a way and actually my experience often is, that that is how this space behind feels. When we have been talking, there is a something about the kind of support that comes from leaning into that space and being supported by that space and letting go into that space where the possibility of a different kind of confidence come from. It seems this space that feels less known somehow has the capacity to support or hold a certain kind of experience. It seems counterintuitive that, that somehow this leaning back into the unknown of the behind space enables a kind of relaxation or a resting in experience which we talked about before a leaning into the unknown future is quite different. Something about backness and behindness. I was also thinking about the proximity of the back and behind space to some of those other notions of location like the beside or the below or the beneath that somehow in my association, behindness has close affinity to beneathness and belowness, so there’s something to with this proximity between upness and frontness and belowness and backness, which I am curious about why that is actually. I am now sort of imagining a three-dimensional sphere of some sort and some of the range of experience is in the front and upper range of it and some of it is in the lower range. And it seems as if there is something there about light and shadow and light and dark, and the back seems as if it has an association with darkness or shadow and I wonder how much that binary is actually an experience and how much of it is a product of language. I thought that the sense of, in the play of experience, that things feel a lot less differentiated in a way, that the line between the front and the back or up and down is very graded, or not even graded, it’s very, this term blur, the blurring, the dissolving of those differentiated categories but as soon as you come to language that experience becomes squeezed into certain kinds of binary relationships. I guess I was thinking to try and take attention to the sides of language, to the grey areas of language. Not the up and the down, but to really activate this side space that is neither up nor down, nor front nor back, but is really looking at a range somehow. On the one hand the limitations of language but on the other hand the capacity of language to perhaps open up some of these spaces that falls outside of that binary relationship. The sense of the blur, actually, you were talking about closing the eyes but not completely, like looking through the kind of gap of the eye, slight slant of the eye and I thought this is very interesting, that sense of eyes being open and the frontality, eyes being closed and there’s something about dorsality. But this kind of middle point or halfway seems to open up a different kind of register of sensation and awareness, and what might that be, somehow. So, this middle point, maybe there’s something about this kind of middle point or middle range that’s neither fully back, nor fully front nor fully open nor fully closed, or there’s this range of experience that falls a bit outside the parameters of language or the tendency in language to fix things as one or the other. I was also thinking about this sense of being thrown off balance, and maybe it connects back to this idea of asymmetry and this throwing off balance as a way of activating a different kind of range of attention. No, there wasn’t. There was something about what you were saying about listening and about the way that the ears are more on the sides of the body. It feels like the behind of the body is an unknown space but that’s only really from the perspective of sight and seeing and visuality, but actually, as a space it’s really present in terms of listening, especially. I’m becoming interested in that sense of trying to activate a real three-dimensional sense of listening, and not to listen as if I’m listening with my eyes, and to perhaps recognise that my listening can be quite frontal, and my listening behaves in a similar way to sight and to try and activate a more three-dimensional sense of listening or certainly a sort of oblique or indirect sense of listening, a sense of periphery, the sides of what can be heard, because I think often my listening is allied very closely with what I am looking at, so it feels as if it’s at the service of sight, at the service of frontality, and it would be very interesting to really tune in to this sense of, activating listening very much from the perspective of the back but also from the sides, like this oblique diagonal kind of listening. So maybe there is something there about the way in which certain tendencies come to dominate and the range of capacity that the body and the senses has becomes a little bit almost curtailed by the habits…This idea of the sides allow, and this connecting with listening and muffled hearing and sides of the body, hmm, sight, and also how we can also listen more frontally. How sight is often trying to direct, pinpoint, to name things whereas this half, blurred vision or eyes scanning, or almost eye sight touching the surfaces of things, more a sense of scanning, a different kind of possibility with the eyes, more linked to an experience of the eye, light touch, eyes seeing but not jumping into a cerebral mode, into naming, which we do of course need to communicate, but this other connecting to a kind of looking and the relationship with light. So, in listening we do also try and grasp what someone is saying, for social communication, also in trying to understand where you are, like locating, but then there’s another sense of listening as in dropping more, something to do with something around sensation and looking around, a three-dimensionality and sideness. And I’m thinking what’s the sides of right and the sides of left? I am being a bit literal at the moment. Right side and left side, right and left are not exact things, like north and south of the compass feel, it’s relative and perhaps more like a tendency towards, there is always something tending towards right or left, our bodies are not stable, so there’s always a tendency to lean a little this way or that way, forwards, backwards, left, also different combinations of tending towards seeing or listening. I do find this behindness very fascinating, and a different kind of spaciousness in the place, that’s not visible and has a different of metaphoric imagery around dark rather than light. It reminds me of when I was working on the ground, I was then thinking about low orientation, low as in not social or not language -based. And visuality and language were not dominant. A link with low and behind, unknown but also knocking the stability of being able to see, and being able to say and this notion of understanding, a connection perhaps with eyes and language. Behindness is very,there is a dark spaciousness, it also brings me back to walking in twilight, with a sense of light and dark, there gets less contrast, there are more shadows, you catch things in the corner of the eyes, the corner of the eye kind of shadowy spaces between physical things and imaginary things, unsettling as well sometimes. What’s unknown and dark has a lot to do with fear, and there is an excitement in fear which is interesting. Last week you said something about qualities of uncertainty and a more anxious visual anxious forward future leaning and that behindness has different qualities of uncertainty. It feels heavier. It can become heavy. Something that binaries can make something feel heavy. Perhaps because binaries are fixing. Sometimes when I am working with the back, I can sometimes feel heavy but become stuck in it. That I lose the edges of the continuum and the spaciousness of around and through the body. Perhaps the sense of binary can invade the thinking … like I’m cutting off the edges, not moving around the edges. No not edges, sides. The sides of a conversation. Listening and talking from the back, feels very spacious actually more possible to not speak and to think. Yes it feels more possible not to speak and I become less conscious of for example what volume was I speaking at, or was I speaking slow, there was a sense of drift which is more difficult with others, and it is drift with someone which is sometimes hard to organise when you are with someone. And also the quality of listening is different because you are not performing your listening to the other.

Just doing the lying down then, I think the thing that came to mind quite strongly was this sense of taking care of the transition, to really try and take care of the transition because I was realising, also through the early experiments that I didn’t really know what was going on to be honest, like if I was asked independently of doing the movement: how do you move between standing and lying down? how do you move between lying and standing? I am not sure how I could describe it and actually even when I was doing it, it was almost I couldn’t see or become attuned to the different qualities of activation or release that needed to happen within that. So, I suppose the sense of taking care of the transition feels as if it’s really to do with paying attention to what’s happening, what’s actually happening. And two things came out of that and one was to do with what parts of my body need to be involved in this but perhaps aren’t being involved, so like what am I not letting get involved in this movement between standing and lying down, so like resisting, or just not letting the movement extend into a part of a part of the body that might really need to be involved in this, and then on the flipside of that, what’s getting involved that doesn’t need to be. So, the kind of taking care of was also to do with, on the one hand, being as efficient as possible in this movement between lying and standing, so stripping out or exploring the possibility of stripping out anything that doesn’t need to be really involved but on the other hand it was to do with testing the potential within that movement. I know this a little bit from some of the Yoga teaching I’ve received where there’s this invitation  ..it’s like a functional kind of yoga which is to do with getting from the floor to standing as efficiently as possible but not using your hands, so really using the legs as way of moving between lying and standing. So I was thinking what gets lost or what falls away in our capacity if we are not careful in a way, out of habit, or ease, or sometimes inefficiency actually. I notice that I have quite a lot of hip problem at the moment so there’s nothing really pleasurable in that investigation at the moment, it feels quite awkward, and I suppose because it feels awkward, I’m not giving it attention, I’m sort of pushing it away. So, yes, this sense of really taking care. And the thing about transition as well was that, it really somehow mediated between the back and the front, I think it can be easy for me to think of the front and the back as these two separated planes that are opposite from one another and I think this attention to the transition activated a sense of awareness of the side. There’s lots more I ..I was also thinking around the sideness of this operation, I think, perhaps I was not giving attention to when we were just focussing on the back when we were lying, so there is something to do with the way the attention to the transition dissolves this binary a bit between the front and the back or opens up a space between the front and the back as a site of a different kind of investigation. And just actually the sense of moving in and out of something as a dynamic action rather than this flat plane of sensation which was also dynamic but …. Hmm I’ve got three things, which I need to choose. There’s moving between lying and standing. I really enjoy, something you said about the side, as soon as there’s movement, say from down to up, the body has to roll, has to immediately be asymmetrical, something has to move, something has to move first and the same with coming on the way down something has to drop first. There’s always a sort of curiosity about what will start the movement. Also in Feldenkrais, she’ll often say I want you to not move but first imagine how you will come to sitting for example. I sometimes try and practice that and anyway I wonder if the body …what’s first? is there an idea of the movement or ..? what initiates? So actually, I’m not standing and not lying but moving constantly between up and down. I get very curious, how something is always having to drop, and something is always having to rise or push up. So, I become very aware then of something around an efficiency, as well as what’s having to work and what’s having to release, and how you’re navigating that and slowing the process down a bit or going this way rather than that way first. Exploring sometimes, how direct a route I can come or how convoluted a route I can come. I find it very interesting because the more attention you give it, it’s so complex what’s going on. By slowing it down there are more possibilities to create a diversion or a different decision or to drop something that was held or – there’s this huge playground of possibilities. Something again about the side, sorry I can’t help but keep linking into what you were saying, the sense of back-front and an idea of the back wrapping, as soon as I come into movement, especially in this transition from up to down, the body has to curve and bow and wrap itself. Somehow the back, is more of a wrapping or an unfurling, so it creates a sense of wrapping as well as initiating different kinds of spirals and twists in the body - a complex system somehow of unfolding, bending, twisting, and physically working with that - in the transition. It’s just quite amazing how we can get up and how we can fall down and the sense I can just collapse. I let go of everything and I can fall to the ground, simply, just like, gravitational, vertical - gone, and the body has to somehow sort itself out on the way. Different from the careful consideration. Something interesting in there, because if the body just let’s go it’s still doing all those decisions but too fast for me to hold on to in thought. I’m finding it hard to stay with the thought and not look too much to my notes. Some of what you were saying also resonated, which, I think there was this thing about the asymmetrical dimension to it. Some of the experiments I was doing were trying to move between lying and standing but staying within a symmetrical register, so it’s almost like a kind of rolling up to standing, this is really difficult, and I can’t do it very well. So, lying back and using the momentum of, a roll momentum so there is no twist or turn within that, but it felt a quite an aggressive movement actually to do this, to stay in this single plane. I felt actually in this, it was using the different kind of momentum or maybe … the way in which gravity gets worked with as a certain kind of force. So, there was also something to do with this exploration of moving from standing into lying and whether I could reverse it exactly in the same kind of way and what I was finding a lot was that my way into lying was not the same as my way out of lying quite often. Then I was trying to quite actively really try and reverse the momentum but of course it’s really different because on the way down you’re working with the force of gravity and just letting the body drop down in a way, whereas the momentum coming from lying is quite different, there’s this sort of pull of gravity on the way down and the push of the body back to come to standing seemed to be sort of quite significant. There was something to do with the relation of the front of the body needing to be receptive and the relationship of the front and the back, so what I was doing with some of the movements on the floor was just exploring this turn on the floor where at times the turn was leading from the hips and the pelvis area almost as though my legs were turning first and then to explore the movement of the chest and the shoulder girdle really moving. And this was very different. The sense of the movement from the hips was something to do, I mean obviously, with opening in that part of the body and then this chest opening, but it just seems as if the capacity of the back for me seems as if it’s so contingent on openness at the front, and the two areas in particular, like a kind of openness around the hip area which is a tremendous area of tension for me, just really letting go into that hip area, which feels as if, it’s also to do with a kind of receptivity to the pull of gravity, to just let the body be willing to work with gravity rather than just tensioning all the time, always tensioning against gravity, so with the hip sort of movement, its felt like its just to do with playing with gravity and being willing to yield into gravity, whereas the torso and the chest was much more somehow to do with vulnerability, in that sense of openness of the body, taking the attention to the back opens the front of the body in a way that feels quite vulnerable, or exposed, well maybe not even vulnerable, maybe vulnerable is a condition of habit actually, that it feels as if it wants to protect the front, so this opening up feels vulnerable but it actually also feels quite spacious and quite liberated to move into the chest, heart, opening movement. But I was quite surprised by the different feel between these two territories really. Then I was doing something where I was laying on my back and turning my feet and seeing how far that travelled and I think the relation of the feet in particular, when I turn its very much coming from the foot quite often, a pressing into the foot that turns the body. And the I went on a bit of deviation from this, and I started thinking about the relationship between discipline and curiosity in terms of daily practice because I got into a bit of thing where I was berating myself, like why am I not really doing this as a practice because when I start doing this, I really love it especially if I am writing alongside. Yes, I was thinking a lot about daily practice and the sense of discipline of daily practice and also the curiosity of daily practice. And what’s the relation between discipline and curiosity. Maybe it’s also to do with the back and the front. If I think about the back or the front, is the front and the back more to do with discipline or curiosity. How might it be to think of them more as a continuum, I think this notion of the continuum feels important, and also through the sense of the side. Yes, maybe the sides have become really significant because of the dissolving of the binary between front and back, or even between discipline and curiosity, kind of well, I wonder, well what would be the sides of discipline and curiosity, what is the transition space between discipline and curiosity and how to activate that. Hmm. I feel like that perhaps is deviating from the direct experience but something I was drawn to think about. Also, one of the other things was to do with this sense of the cooperation of the body, so maybe going back to what’s involved and what doesn’t need to be involved, thinking of the body as a field of cooperation and noticing where I was getting in the way of it being able to cooperate properly, so the movement in particular from the foot to the shoulder, which is also a Feldenkrais practice I think, where you are exploring this diagonal from the foot to the shoulder girdle, how much was I blocking that and where was I blocking that and not allowing the turn to happen, in a way. And then there was something about the relation of the back as a plane and the back as the spine, and the difference in having attention or awareness in terms of it as a surface or a skeletal structure, the kind of rolling down, feels as if the articulation of the spine gets much more drawn into attention, this kind of rolling down to squatting, actually that was just very nice to do, just rolling down, not even going as far as lying, just rolling down to squatting and back up again. There’s sort of a theme running through that is to do with allowing, allowing certain movements to happen, not resisting, or maybe not even thinking it, I had to do it quite quick to begin with, how do I do this, how do I drop into… I was just reminded about the curiosity, when we first lay down, a slightly disappointment in myself that I hadn’t cordoned off some time, but also a sense that I might have lost something or missed something but then on the other hand I think I do practice in between, so maybe its that cordoning off some time is important, it is important but I am doing things in between but I am not really reflecting on them, so even talking to you now I am thinking I probably I have done some homework, but there’s something about the awareness of it and the saying of it and practicing does feel important, even to give a feedbacking to yourself of daily practice, to remind yourself that I am working with these things. I loved there was the sense of disappointment that descended upon me when I first lay down, but I’ve got over that now. Ah yes, this disappointment pulled me into my breath. I’ve had some problems with my ears, they are very blocked at the moment and I have to put oil in my ears in order to get them unblocked. So I have a lot of internal sound… a kind of falling in on myself, a kind of dreamy state, but it makes me hear the ocean breath that you do with yoga. And I have also been thinking about tuning, resonance, vibration and whether a combination of tuning into the back, or a dropping into the body, that breath gets activated and there is a spacious sense and made me think again of strong back and soft belly, maybe Feldenkrais again. I’m thinking breath and softness that creates a sense of spaciousness if the body lets that happened. Something about the dropping back, not necessarily back, but letting go, dropping something that let’s something else move up and out, interesting how the force of gravity allows the expanse of the body. These vertical and horizontal forces and gravity is … so the breath somehow with these forces .. is resonant in the body. And even thinking that brings me into a sense of the skin at back of my neck, it’s interesting how these connections come up. In these transitions between up and down to almost have an image of the skeleton to work with, so for example in bowing down to ignore the muscles and everything else, the image of skeleton helps me, so having a duet with my own skeleton, and gravity, oh that’s a trio, a trio of myself, skeletal image and gravity. How imagination can deeply affect the possibility of the body, a body’s physical capacity. And I remember, in a programme by Angela Rippon, if you can get up to standing without using your hands is an indicator of how long you will live. I don’t remember the details, just as well. But now and then I do it to test myself, and it does get harder and harder to stand up without using your hands as you get older, to roll up is such a gathering of force, of energy. Thinking of the discipline and curiosity. Last week you said something about the front and the back and the being and the doing, so there is something in accepting, a certain acceptance….As soon as you settle into the body in how the body is at the moment, it can then cooperate with itself rather than projecting an idea of itself, having to, hmm, tuning in. And also, the place of thinking, because there is a lot of thinking involved, even if you are not aware. Perhaps there is a thinking that is bringing attention to the certain patterns of the body, because I know there are things I can easily slip into, as patterns of my body, but how to be thinking a different way. Sometimes in having nothing more to say, it is then that something comes out. I was thinking or reflecting on what you were saying about the sense of equality of thinking which seems to be a thread really that runs through this, and from that something to do with allowing the front and the back to cooperate more, and maybe the qualities of thinking that are connected with the front and the back to cooperate more so rather than it being this either/or possibility to see something more of a cooperation, like I was talking about the cooperation of the whole of the body and the movement of transition between lying and standing, how do these various modes of experience and of thinking experience cooperate within the whole experience of thinking, really. Something to do with taking the attention to the back as a way of working against certain habits but not forgetting about ,this not forgetting of the front, and recognising the mutual relationship with the front and the back, going back on the one hand to the necessary softening of the front that feels enabling of the back , but also something to do withbringing a quality of backness into the front, maybe that relates to this idea of enveloping or the wrapping of the back you were talking about, this sense of the back seeping around the sides of the body or holding the experience of the body in a kind of envelope of experience. I think in particular those qualities of backness that seem to do with this letting go and releasing, the being rather than the doing, maybe to allow the sense of the front to exist within that as the wider landscape of experience. That actually feels as if that would be very affirmative as an experience to allow there to be some degree of frontality but actually it’s held in this wider frame of backness that has this quality of letting go or relaxing or releasing. So I was thinking a little about this movement between the front and the back, maybe this transition between the front and the back and the standing into the lying, Yes, because lying down it feels as if, or I’m making a parallel between standing up somehow having a quality of frontality to it and lying down having a quality of the back or of dorsality, but there’s no reason why that would be the case, you can stand with the attention more on the back, and if your lying down there’s no reason why we can’t lie on our front, so in lying down take all of the attention to the front of the body, I haven’t done this, or not as an experiment within the investigation we have been doing. Lying on your front has this quality of calming which is quite interesting so what happens if the front presses into a surface and it’s not facing out into the world but it’s facing the floor. When you were describing that first .. the back and the front and the back or the front not being excluded from this backness, I had my eyes closed and I had a real strong sense of the back holding, an almost physical image of presence there almost, like a supporting hand, a supporting surface that allows then the front to soften and be open but again in my imagination go with your words. I often find myself saying these things like back/front, up/down, right/left, that in a way that does set up a binary but also its a continuum, it sets up a field of play, a playing field, which in itself doesn’t feel binary in the doing or in working with those terms but at the same time, I fall into them. Interesting. And the different kinds of symbols like the vertical line, the slash line or the hyphen, and in language that also sets up a kind of tension, play between. I haven’t actually looked at the recording yet, but I feel we have this image before we started this conversation, linking with other things I have been working on an idea of back-slash-ground, something coming up whilst working with some students, when we were trying to create a screen presentation, so I have an image of us back to back in the real-space back to back but also then in the recording of our conversation with two backs to the viewer, which will be us. Strange, something interesting. I can’t quite articulate at the moment but something about back/ground and groundlessness, there’s an image, forming in my mind, that’s not directly what we are doing but has something to do with it too. Round and back. That image is coming back when you were talking, that strong supportive round of the back supporting the front and again not so clearly shaped but more of a presence. A strong physical sensation, its behind. The frontal and my eyes, softness, closing of the eyes, or half scanning and this blurred vision we talked about before. And now I have this blur, blurred hearing, and with my ears on the side of the head. I’m now making strange movements with my head, scanning with eyes and ears. Did you hear the alarm then …. No. There’s a lot in there that resonated with things I was thinking about. One I think was to do with this relationship or even difference the sense of back and the notion of behind, if I am drawing attention to the back of the body there is this awareness taken to the behind, which is including my back but also including a range of or part of a spectrum of awareness that I can’t see. I think my tendency might be to think of that zone that is something that is somehow concealed or hidden or not accessible or unknown in a way and actually my experience often is, that that is how this space behind feels. When we have been talking, there is a something about the kind of support that comes from leaning into that space and being supported by that space and letting go into that space where the possibility of a different kind of confidence come from. It seems this space that feels less known somehow has the capacity to support or hold a certain kind of experience. It seems counterintuitive that, that somehow this leaning back into the unknown of the behind space enables a kind of relaxation or a resting in experience which we talked about before a leaning into the unknown future is quite different. Something about backness and behindness. I was also thinking about the proximity of the back and behind space to some of those other notions of location like the beside or the below or the beneath that somehow in my association, behindness has close affinity to beneathness and belowness, so there’s something to with this proximity between upness and frontness and belowness and backness, which I am curious about why that is actually. I am now sort of imagining a three-dimensional sphere of some sort and some of the range of experience is in the front and upper range of it and some of it is in the lower range. And it seems as if there is something there about light and shadow and light and dark, and the back seems as if it has an association with darkness or shadow and I wonder how much that binary is actually an experience and how much of it is a product of language. I thought that the sense of, in the play of experience, that things feel a lot less differentiated in a way, that the line between the front and the back or up and down is very graded, or not even graded, it’s very, this term blur, the blurring, the dissolving of those differentiated categories but as soon as you come to language that experience becomes squeezed into certain kinds of binary relationships. I guess I was thinking to try and take attention to the sides of language, to the grey areas of language. Not the up and the down, but to really activate this side space that is neither up nor down, nor front nor back, but is really looking at a range somehow. On the one hand the limitations of language but on the other hand the capacity of language to perhaps open up some of these spaces that falls outside of that binary relationship.The sense of the blur, actually, you were talking about closing the eyes but not completely, like looking through the kind of gap of the eye, slight slant of the eye and I thought this is very interesting, that sense of eyes being open and the frontality, eyes being closed and there’s something about dorsality. But this kind of middle point or halfway seems to open up a different kind of register of sensation and awareness, and what might that be, somehow. So, this middle point, maybe there’s something about this kind of middle point or middle range that’s neither fully back, nor fully front nor fully open nor fully closed, or there’s this range of experience that falls a bit outside the parameters of language or the tendency in language to fix things as one or the other. I was also thinking about this sense of being thrown off balance, and maybe it connects back to this idea of asymmetry and this throwing off balance as a way of activating a different kind of range of attention. No, there wasn’t. There was something about what you were saying about listening and about the way that the ears are more on the sides of the body. It feels like the behind of the body is an unknown space but that’s only really from the perspective of sight and seeing and visuality, but actually, as a space it’s really present in terms of listening, especially. I’m becoming interested in that sense of trying to activate a real three-dimensional sense of listening, and not to listen as if I’m listening with my eyes, and to perhaps recognise that my listening can be quite frontal, and my listening behaves in a similar way to sight and to try and activate a more three-dimensional sense of listening or certainly a sort of oblique or indirect sense of listening, a sense of periphery, the sides of what can be heard, because I think often my listening is allied very closely with what I am looking at, so it feels as if it’s at the service of sight, at the service of frontality, and it would be very interesting to really tune in to this sense of, activating listening very much from the perspective of the back but also from the sides, like this oblique diagonal kind of listening. So maybe there is something there about the way in which certain tendencies come to dominate and the range of capacity that the body and the senses has becomes a little bit almost curtailed by the habits…This idea of the sides allow, and this connecting with listening and muffled hearing and sides of the body, hmm, sight, and also how we can also listen more frontally. How sight is often trying to direct, pinpoint, to name things whereas this half, blurred vision or eyes scanning, or almost eye sight touching the surfaces of things, more a sense of scanning, a different kind of possibility with the eyes, more linked to an experience of the eye, light touch, eyes seeing but not jumping into a cerebral mode, into naming, which we do of course need to communicate, but this other connecting to a kind of looking and the relationship with light. So, in listening we do also try and grasp what someone is saying, for social communication, also in trying to understand where you are, like locating, but then there’s another sense of listening as in dropping more, something to do with something around sensation and looking around, a three-dimensionality and sideness. And I’m thinking what’s the sides of right and the sides of left? I am being a bit literal at the moment. Right side and left side, right and left are not exact things, like north and south of the compass feel, it’s relative and perhaps more like a tendency towards, there is always something tending towards right or left, our bodies are not stable, so there’s always a tendency to lean a little this way or that way, forwards, backwards, left, also different combinations of tending towards seeing or listening. I do find this behindness very fascinating, and a different kind of spaciousness in the place, that’s not visible and has a different of metaphoric imagery around dark rather than light. It reminds me of when I was working on the ground, I was then thinking about low orientation, low as in not social or not language -based. And visuality and language were not dominant. A link with low and behind, unknown but also knocking the stability of being able to see, and being able to say and this notion of understanding, a connection perhaps with eyes and language. Behindness is very,there is a dark spaciousness, it also brings me back to walking in twilight, with a sense of light and dark, there gets less contrast, there are more shadows, you catch things in the corner of the eyes, the corner of the eye kind of shadowy spaces between physical things and imaginary things, unsettling as well sometimes. What’s unknown and dark has a lot to do with fear, and there is an excitement in fear which is interesting. Last week you said something about qualities of uncertainty and a more anxious visual anxious forward future leaning and that behindness has different qualities of uncertainty. It feels heavier. It can become heavy. Something that binaries can make something feel heavy. Perhaps because binaries are fixing. Sometimes when I am working with the back, I can sometimes feel heavy but become stuck in it. That I lose the edges of the continuum and the spaciousness of around and through the body. Perhaps the sense of binary can invade the thinking … like I’m cutting off the edges, not moving around the edges. No not edges, sides. The sides of a conversation. Listening and talking from the back, feels very spacious actually more possible to not speak and to think. Yes it feels more possible not to speak and I become less conscious of for example what volume was I speaking at, or was I speaking slow, there was a sense of drift which is more difficult with others, and it is drift with someone which is sometimes hard to organise when you are with someone. And also the quality of listening is different because you are not performing your listening to the other.

Care of the transition. How do you move between lying and standing? It was almost I couldn’t see or become attuned to the different qualities of activation or release that needed to happen within that.

Stripping out or exploring the possibility of stripping out anything that doesn’t need to be really involved but on the other hand it was to do with testing the potential within that movement. 

So I was thinking what gets lost or what falls away in our capacity if we are not careful in a way, out of habit, or ease, or sometimes inefficiency actually. 

The thing about transition as well was that, it really somehow mediated between the back and the front, I think it can be easy for me to think of the front and the back as these two separated planes that are opposite from one another and I think this attention to the transition activated a sense of awareness of the side. There’s lots more I ..I was also thinking around the sideness of this operation.

The attention to the transition dissolves this binary a bit between the front and the back or opens up a space between the front and the back as a site of a different kind of investigation. 

The body has to roll, has to immediately be asymmetrical, something has to move, something has to move first and the same with coming on the way down something has to drop first. There’s always a sort of curiosity about what will start the movement. 

Something around an efficiency, as well as what’s having to work and what’s having to release, and how you’re navigating that. Exploring sometimes, how direct a route I can come or how convoluted a route I can come. 

By slowing it down there are more possibilities to create a diversion or a different decision or to drop something that was held or – there’s this huge playground of possibilities. 

An idea of the back wrapping, as soon as I come into movement, especially in this transition from up to down, the body has to curve and bow and wrap itself. More of a wrapping or an unfurling, so it creates a sense of wrapping as well as initiating different kinds of spirals and twists in the body - a complex system somehow of unfolding, bending, twisting.

I can just collapse. I let go of everything and I can fall to the ground.

Trying to move between lying and standing but staying within a symmetrical register, so it’s almost like a kind of rolling up to standing. Using the momentum of, a roll momentum so there is no twist or turn. Using the different kind of momentum or maybe … the way in which gravity gets worked with as a certain kind of force. 

This exploration of moving from standing into lying and whether I could reverse it exactly in the same kind of way and what I was finding a lot was that my way into lying was not the same as my way out of lying quite often. 

Something to do with the relation of the front of the body needing to be receptive and the relationship of the front and the back. The capacity of the back for me seems as if it’s so contingent on openness at the front.

Playing with gravity and being willing to yield into gravity, whereas the torso and the chest was much more somehow to do with vulnerability, in that sense of openness of the body, taking the attention to the back opens the front of the body in a way that feels quite vulnerable, or exposed. Maybe vulnerable is a condition of habit actually, that it feels as if it wants to protect the front, so this opening up feels vulnerable but it actually also feels quite spacious and quite liberated to move into the chest, heart, opening movement. 

The relationship between discipline and curiosity. Daily practice. The sense of discipline of daily practice and also the curiosity of daily practice. And what’s the relation between discipline and curiosity. Maybe it’s also to do with the back and the front. If I think about the back or the front, is the front and the back more to do with discipline or curiosity. How might it be to think of them more as a continuum, I think this notion of the continuum feels important, and also through the sense of the side. Yes, maybe the sides have become really significant because of the dissolving of the binary between front and back, or even between discipline and curiosity. What would be the sides of discipline and curiosity, what is the transition space between discipline and curiosity and how to activate that.

Thinking of the body as a field of cooperation and noticing where I was getting in the way of it being able to cooperate properly.

Something about the relation of the back as a plane and the back as the spine, and the difference in having attention or awareness in terms of it as a surface or a skeletal structure, the kind of rolling down, feels as if the articulation of the spine gets much more drawn into attention.

Allowing - allowing certain movements to happen, not resisting, or maybe not even thinking it, I had to do it quite quick to begin with: How do I do this? How do I drop into?I

There’s something about the awareness of it and the saying of it and practicing does feel important, even to give a feedbacking to yourself of daily practice, to remind yourself.

Internal sound… a kind of falling in on myself, a kind of dreamy state, but it makes me hear the ocean breath. Tuning, resonance, vibration and whether a combination of tuning into the back, or a dropping into the body, that breath gets activated and there is a spacious sense.

Strong back and soft belly. I’m thinking breath and softness that creates a sense of spaciousness if the body lets that happened. Something about the dropping back, not necessarily back, but letting go, dropping something that let’s something else move up and out, interesting how the force of gravity allows the expanse of the body. These vertical and horizontal forces and gravity is … so the breath somehow with these forces .. is resonant in the body. And even thinking that brings me into a sense of the skin at back of my neck.i

Having a duet with my own skeleton, and gravity, oh that’s a trio, a trio of myself, skeletal image and gravity. How imagination can deeply affect the possibility of the body, a body’s physical capacity. 

To roll up is such a gathering of force, of energy. As soon as you settle into the body in how the body is at the moment, it can then cooperate with itself rather than projecting an idea of itself.

Perhaps there is a thinking that is bringing attention to the certain patterns of the body, because I know there are things I can easily slip into, as patterns of my body, but how to be thinking a different way. Sometimes in having nothing more to say, it is then that something comes out. 

Allowing the front and the back to cooperate more, and maybe the qualities of thinking that are connected with the front and the back to cooperate more so rather than it being this either/or possibility to see something more of a cooperation. How do these various modes of experience and of thinking experience cooperate within the whole experience of thinking?

This not forgetting of the front, and recognising the mutual relationship with the front and the back. Bringing a quality of backness into the front. This sense of the back seeping around the sides of the body or holding the experience of the body in a kind of envelope of experience. To allow the sense of the front to exist within that as the wider landscape of experience. That would be very affirmative as an experience to allow there to be some degree of frontality but actually it’s held in this wider frame of backness that has this quality of letting go or relaxing or releasing. 

What happens if the front presses into a surface and it’s not facing out into the world but it’s facing the floor. Like a supporting hand, a supporting surface that allows then the front to soften and be open.

Back/front, up/down, right/left, that in a way that does set up a binary but also its a continuum, it sets up a field of play, a playing field, which in itself doesn’t feel binary in the doing or in working with those terms but at the same time, I fall into them.

The vertical line, the slash line or the hyphen, and in language that also sets up a kind of tension, play between.. 

An image of us back to back in the real-space back to back. Something about back/ground and groundlessness.

That strong supportive round of the back supporting the front and again not so clearly shaped but more of a presence. A strong physical sensation, its behind. The frontal and my eyes, softness, closing of the eyes, or half scanning and this blurred vision. This blur, blurred hearing, and with my ears on the side of the head. 

That zone that is something that is somehow concealed or hidden or not accessible or unknown in a way. It seems this space that feels less known somehow has the capacity to support or hold a certain kind of experience. It seems counterintuitive that, that somehow this leaning back into the unknown of the behind space enables a kind of relaxation or a resting in experience which we talked about before a leaning into the unknown future is quite different.

Something about backness and behindness. Behindness has close affinity to beneathness and belowness, so there’s something to with this proximity between upness and frontness and belowness and backness.

A three-dimensional sphere of some sort and some of the range of experience is in the front and upper range of it and some of it is in the lower range. There is something there about light and shadow and light and dark, and the back seems as if it has an association with darkness or shadow and I wonder how much that binary is actually an experience and how much of it is a product of language. 

That the line between the front and the back or up and down is very graded, or not even graded, it’s very, this term blur, the blurring, the dissolving of those differentiated categories but as soon as you come to language that experience becomes squeezed into certain kinds of binary relationships. I

To try and take attention to the sides of language, to the grey areas of language. Not the up and the down, but to really activate this side space that is neither up nor down, nor front nor back, but is really looking at a range. So

The sense of the blur - looking through the kind of gap of the eye, slight slant of the eye.

This kind of middle point or halfway seems to open up a different kind of register of sensation and awareness. This kind of middle point or middle range that’s neither fully back, nor fully front nor fully open nor fully closed, or there’s this range of experience that falls a bit outside the parameters of language or the tendency in language to fix things as one or the other. 

The ears are more on the sides of the body. It feels like the behind of the body is an unknown space but that’s only really from the perspective of sight and seeing and visuality, but actually, as a space it’s really present in terms of listening.

To try and activate a more three-dimensional sense of listening or certainly a sort of oblique or indirect sense of listening, a sense of periphery, the sides of what can be heard, because I think often my listening is allied very closely with what I am looking at, so it feels as if it’s at the service of sight, at the service of frontality, and it would be very interesting to really tune in to this sense of, activating listening very much from the perspective of the back but also from the sides, like this oblique diagonal kind of listening. 

How sight is often trying to direct, pinpoint, to name things whereas this half, blurred vision or eyes scanning, or almost eye sight touching the surfaces of things, more a sense of scanning, a different kind of possibility with the eyes, more linked to an experience of the eye, light touch, eyes seeing but not jumping.

There is always something tending towards right or left, our bodies are not stable, so there’s always a tendency to lean a little this way or that way, forwards, backwards.

A different of metaphoric imagery around dark rather than light. Low as in not social or not language -based. A link with low and behind, unknown but also knocking the stability of being able to see. A connection perhaps with eyes and language.

There is a dark spaciousness. Walking in twilight, with a sense of light and dark, there gets less contrast, there are more shadows, you catch things in the corner of the eyes, the corner of the eye kind of shadowy spaces between physical things and imaginary things, unsettling as well sometimes. What’s unknown and dark has a lot to do with fear, and there is an excitement in fear. Qualities of uncertainty - a more anxious visual anxious forward future leaning and that behindness has different qualities of uncertainty. It

That I lose the edges of the continuum and the spaciousness of around and through the body. Perhaps the sense of binary can invade the thinking … like I’m cutting off the edges, not moving around the edges. No not edges, sides. The sides of a conversation. Listening and talking from the back, feels very spacious.

And it is drift with someone which is sometimes hard to organise when you are with someone. And also the quality of listening is different because you are not performing your listening to the other.

PART 4

04.08.2021

FOCUS/PRACTICE: Reading as distillation

- Reading practices using the conversational transcript from 16.04.2021 as source text.

- Take time to tune into the transcript, marking phrases and words that strike you or that resonate

(1) Reading (Noticing Attraction) (5 mins) – Have the transcript to hand, allow gaze to be soft and glide/roam the pages. Practising simultaneously. When a word draws your attention speak it outloud. Allow for overlaps and also silences.

(2) Conversation-as-material distillation (10 mins) – Have the transcript to hand.

When the time feels right read aloud some of the words and phrases that have been highlighted - these could be single words, phrases or a cluster of sentences. Or alternatively, identify words and phrases live and read them aloud.

(3) A more fluid exploration moving between (A) Noticing Attraction and (B) Conversation-as-material distillation. Decide fluidly when to move between one practice and the other and back again (and so on). (20 mins)

3.

1.

2.

1.

Unfurling. Momentum. Flat. Receptivity. Sideness. Operation. Resisting. Grasp. Falling in. Vibration. Feedbacking. Dropping back. Continuum. Wrapping. Twists. Activation. Opening movement. Roll. Relation. Asymmetrical. Tuning into. Slowing. Dropping into. Going this way. Appearances. Transition between. Something about. Releasing. Uncertainty. Mutual. Cutting off. Unknown. Edges. Upness and frontness. Quality of listening. Oblique diagonal. Below and behind. Heavier. Playing field. Stripping out. Force. Transition. Dip of the head. The sideness. Of falling in. Asymmetrical. Soft belly. Convoluted. Blur. Cooperation. Awareness. Resonance. Sideness. Bending. Really try. Just collapse. Cordon off. Slowing down. Thinking breath. Complex. Curiosity. Vulnerable. Horizontal forces. A field of cooperation. Back of my neck. Slip into. Deeply affect. Back and behind. Presence. Eyes scanning. Supporting hand. Sides. Kind of experience. Indirect. Resting in. Periphery. Blurring. Listening. Dissolving. Shadowy spaces. Belowness and backness. Behindness. Beneathness.

2.

The way in which gravity gets worked with as a kind of force. A quality of letting go or relaxing or releasing. Allowing the front and the back to cooperate more and maybe the qualities of thinking that are connected with the front and the back to cooperate more. The sense of the cooperation of the body, what’s involved and what doesn’t need to be involved. Thinking of the body as a field of cooperation. This sense of the back seeping around the sides of the body. How do these various modes of experience in the thinking cooperate with the whole experience of thinking? I am thinking breath and softness that creates a sense of spaciousness, if the body lets that happen. Recognising the mutual relationship with the front and the back. Something about the dropping back, not necessarily back but letting go, dropping something. A sort of oblique or indirect sense of listening, a sense of periphery, the sides. Maybe vulnerable is a condition of habit, that it feels as if you want to protect the front so this opening up feels vulnerable, but it actually also feels quite spacious, and quite liberated to move into the chest, heart, opening movement. Something that is somehow concealed or hidden or not accessible or unknown in a way. And the body has to somehow sort itself out on the way down. This leaning back into the unknown space of the behind enables a kind of relaxation or a resting in experience. A leaning into the unknown. And by slowing it down there are more possibilities to create a diversion, a different decision or to drop something that was held. The line between the front and the back or the up and the down is very graded, or not even graded. It is very blurred. Behindness has a close affinity to beneathness and belowness, so there’s something to do with this proximity between upness and frontness and belowness and backness that I am curious about. A sense of moving in and out of something as a dynamic action rather than this flat plane of sensation. Maybe the sides become really significant because of the dissolving of the binary between front and back or even between discipline and curiosity. Dropping in. Or what would be the sides of discipline and curiosity, the transition space between discipline and curiosity and how to activate that? Something about the dropping back, not necessarily back, but letting go, dropping something that let’s something else move up and out, how the force of gravity allows the expanse of the body. There’s something about the awareness of it and the saying of it and practicing does feel important, even to give a feedbacking to yourself of daily practice, to remind yourself that you are working with these things. Bringing a quality of backness into the front, maybe that relates to this idea of enveloping or the wrapping of the back. That strong supportive round of the back supporting the front and again not so clearly shaped, but more of a presence, a strong physical sensation. It’s behind. The back and the front and the back or the front not being excluded from this backness. Something there about light and shadow and light and dark, and the back seems as if it has an association with darkness or shadow and I wonder how much that binary is actually an experience and how much of it is a product of language. Like back/front, up/down, right/left, that in a way does set up a binary but also its a continuum, it sets up a field of play, a playing field. That zone that is something, that is somehow concealed or hidden or not accessible, or unknown in a way. A complex system somehow of unfolding, bending, twisting, and physically working. It seems counterintuitive that somehow this leaning back into the unknown of the behind space enables a kind of relaxation or a resting in experience. A leaning into the unknown future is quite different. I can just collapse, I can let go of everything, I can fall to the ground. The body has to curve and bow and wrap itself, it creates a sense of wrapping as well as initiating different kinds of spirals and twists in the body, a complex system somehow of unfolding, bending, twisting, and physically working with that in the transition. At times the turn was leading from the hips, and then to explore the movement of the chest and the shoulder girdle really moving. Kind of rolling up to standing, this is really difficult, I can’t do it very well. It’s also to do with a kind of receptivity to the pull of gravity, to just let the body be willing to work with gravity rather than just tensioning all the time, always tensioning against gravity. Something has to move first, something has to drop first, there’s always a sort of curiosity about what will start a movement. A sort of oblique or indirect sense of listening, a sense of periphery, the sides of what can be heard. The sense of the back seeping around the side of the body or holding the experience of the body in a kind of envelope of experience. Right side and left side, right and left are not exact things, like north and south of the compass feel, it’s relative.

3.

The image of the skeleton helps me, so having a duet with my own skeleton and gravity, a trio of myself, skeletal image and gravity. This sort of pull of gravity on the way down and the push of the body back to come to standing. Round and back, that image is coming back that strong supportive round of the back supporting the front. A kind of falling in on myself. Strong back soft belly, sense of openness. Hip. To think of that zone that is something that is somehow hidden or not accessible or unknown in a way. As soon as you settle into the body in how the body is at the moment, it can then cooperate with itself rather than projecting an idea of itself, having to hmm tune in. This not forgetting of the front and recognising the mutual relationship with the front and the back. Maybe there’s something about this kind of middle point or middle range that’s neither fully back, nor fully front nor fully open nor fully closed, or there’s a range of experience that falls a bit outside the parameters of language or the tendency in language to fix things as one or the other. Allowing the front and the back to cooperate more and the qualities of thinking that are connected with the front and the back to cooperate more. Metaphoric imagery. Ground. Orientation. Eyes. A supporting hand. A supporting surface that allows then the front to soften and be open. A sort of oblique or indirect sense of listening, a sense of periphery, the sides of what can be heard. Some of it is in a lower range and it seems as if there is something there about light and shadow and light and dark and the back seems as if it has an association with darkness or shadow. This half, blurred vision or eyes scanning, or almost eyesight touching the surfaces of things, more a sense of scanning, a different kind of possibility with the eyes, more linked to an experience of the eye, light touch, eyes seeing but not jumping. Closing the eyes but not completely, like looking through a kind gap of the eye, a slight slant of the eye. It just seems as if the capacity of the back seems as if it’s so contingent on openness at the front. Like a kind of openness around the hip area, which is a tremendous area of tension for me, just really letting go into that hip area. Also, different combinations of tending towards seeing and listening, a different kind of spaciousness that is not visible and has a different kind of imagery dark rather than the light. There is moving between lying and standing. Low orientation, low as in not social, or language based, a link with low and behind. Just exploring this turn on the floor where at times the turn was leading from the hips and the pelvis, pelvic area almost as though my legs were turning first and then to explore the movement of the chest and the shoulder girdle. Playing with gravity, being willing to yield into gravity, whereas the torso and the chest were much more somehow to do with vulnerability, in that sense of openness of the body. Maybe vulnerable is a condition of habit actually, as if it wants to protect the front, so this opening up feels vulnerable but it actually also feels quite spacious and quite liberated to move into the chest, heart, opening movement. It was to do with testing the potential within that movement, there’s this invitation. It seems this space that feels less known somehow has the capacity to support or hold a certain kind of experience. What gets lost or what falls away in our capacity if we’re not careful, out of habit, or ease, or sometimes inefficiency. A sense of really taking care of the transition. In listening we do also try and grasp what someone is saying, for social communication, also in trying to understand where you are, like locating, but then there’s another sense of listening as in dropping more, something to do with something around sensation and looking around, a three-dimensionality and sideness. It’s so contingent on openness in the front, a kind of receptivity. There’s always something tending towards right or left, our bodies are not stable, always a tendency to lean a little this way or that way, a little forwards, backwards. This idea of the sides allow, how we can listen, also from the sides, how sight is often trying to direct, pinpoint, to name things, whereas this blurred vision or eyes scanning, or almost eyesight touching the surfaces of things, more a sense of scanning, a different kind of possibility with the eyes. Sometimes when I am working with the back, I can feel heavy, or get quite stuck in it. I lose the edges of the continuum and the spaciousness of around and through the body. Perhaps the sense of binary can invade the thinking, like I’m cutting off the edges, not moving around the edges. No, not edges, sides. The sides of a conversation. Listening and talking from the back. This blur, blurred hearing and with my ears on the sides of my head, scanning with eyes and ears. Speaking low. A sense of drift. There is something about the kind of support that comes from leaning into that space and being supported by that space and letting go into that space where the possibility of a different kind of confidence come from. A dark spaciousness. Also bringing me back to walking in twilight, less contrast between light and dark, more shadows. You catch things in the corner of the eyes, the corner of the eye kind of shadowy spaces between physical things and imaginary things, unsettling too sometimes. Behindness has different qualities of uncertainty. It feels heavier. It can become heavy. What’s unknown and dark has a lot to do with fear. And there is an excitement in fear. I lose the edges of the continuum and the spaciousness of around and through the body. I’m cutting off the edges, not moving around the edges, no, not edges sides. Sides of a conversation. Listening and talking from the back. A kind of falling in on myself, a kind of dreamy sense. That makes me hear the ocean breath that you do with yoga. And I have also been thinking about tuning, resonance, vibration and whether a combination of tuning into the back, or a dropping into the body, that breath gets activated. By slowing it down there are more possibilities to create a diversion or a different decision or to drop something that was held or – there’s this huge playground of possibilities. The body just lets go, it’s still doing all those decisions but too fast to hold on to thought. I’m finding it hard to stay with the thought. Taking the attention to the back as a way of working against certain habits but not forgetting about, this not forgetting about the front. Of course it’s really different because on the way down you’re working with the force of gravity and just letting the body drop down in a way, whereas the momentum coming from lying is quite different, there’s this sort of pull of gravity on the way down and the push of the body back to come to standing, that seemed to be sort of quite significant. This sense of the cooperation of the body, what’s involved and what doesn’t need to be involved, thinking of the body as a field of cooperation and noticing where I was getting in the way of being able to cooperate properly. Something to do with the relation of the front of the body needing to be receptive and the relationship between the front and the back. Allowing, allowing certain movements to happen, not resisting, or maybe not even thinking it, I had to do it quite quick to begin with, how do I do this, how do I drop into. The kind of taking care of what was also to do with on the one hand, being as efficient as possible in this movement between lying and standing, so stripping out or exploring the possibility of stripping out anything that doesn’t need to be really involved but on the other hand it was to do with testing the potential within that movement. Initiating different kinds of spirals and twists in the body a complex system somehow of unfolding and bending ad twisting. The way gravity gets worked with as a kind of force. I can just collapse, I can let go of everything and I fall to the ground. A condition of habit. Chest heart opening movement. Sense of the back seeping around the sides of the body. The front of the body needing to be receptive. The relationship of the front and the back. It’s so contingent on openness at the front. What happens if the front presses into a surface and it’s not facing out into the world but it’s facing the floor. To protect the front so this opening feels vulnerable, but it actually also feels quite spacious and quite liberated, to move into the chest, the heart, opening movement. But this kind of middle point or halfway seems to open up a different kind of register of sensation and awareness, and what might that be somehow. The vertical line, the slash line, or the hyphen and in language this also sets up a kind of tension, a play between. So maybe there is something there about the way in which certain tendencies come to dominate and the range of capacity that the body and the senses has, becomes a little bit almost curtailed by the habits. On the one hand the limitations of language but on the other hand the capacity of language to perhaps open up some of these spaces that fall outside of this binary relation, the sense of the blur. The kind of gap of the eye, slight slant of the eye. Walking in twilight. I lose the edges of the continuum and the spaciousness of around and through the body. There are more shadows. You catch things in the corner of your eyes, the corner of the eye kind of shadowy spaces between physical things and imaginary things. There was a sense of drift, it is a drift with someone which is sometimes hard to organise when you are with someone. And also, the quality of listening is different because you are not performing, you’re listening to the other. I lose the edges of the continuum. It feels like the behind of the body is an unknown space but that’s only really from the perspective of sight and seeing and visuality, but actually, as a space, it’s really present in terms of listening. The transition dissolves the binary between the front and the back, what opens up a space between the front and back is the site of a different investigation. So, in listening we do also try and grasp what someone is saying.

PART 5

04.08.2021

FOCUS/PRACTICE: Fields of Association

Fields of Association (30 mins)

- Tuning into the transcript, marking phrases and words that strike you or that resonate

- Each selects a cluster of single words to explore through conversation and etymological exploration, live within the conversation), as a field of association.

(1) 3 mins (e.g. KBs choice of words)

(2)  8 mins (e.g. ECs choice of words)

(3) 3 mins (e.g. KBs choice of words)

(4) 8 mins (e.g. ECs choice of words)

1.

4.

2.

3.

1.

So this verb to support. To hold up. Prop up. Put up with or tolerate. To tolerate. To support. That’s interesting. From the old French supporter, to bear, endure, sustain. Support and sustain. From the Latin supportare to convey, carry, bring up, bring forward. So, this comes from an assimilated form of sub, so sup to sub which is ‘up from under’ and potare ‘to ‘carry’, from the pie roots *per. So, there’s quite a lot here to look at. Up from under. To carry up from under is sub - sub meaning under, beneath, behind, from under, at the foot of. Also, so. Close up. Close to. Spatially. So the sub as in spatially close to, up to and towards but in time meaning within or during. Figuratively, subject to or in the power of. A variant of the root *upo - under, also up from under. Upo. I’ve never seen this before. Up from under. Related words. Ahh hyphen, that’s interesting. Open. Succumb. Supple. Supine. Hmm. Supine. An eavesdropper. Also, kind of surge. Suspect. Suspend. Sustain. Uproar. Supine. Lying on the back. Bent backwards or thrown backwards. Figuratively meaning inactive or indolent. Supine. So this comes from the roots of sub and this upo. Go back to support, this pie root *per, meaning forwards or in front of. Now this is interesting, so a kind of support has ‘up from under’ and also ‘in front of’. By extension in front of. Before. First. Near. Against as in approach. Before. Forth. Perform. Also, in privilege and proper. Provoke. Also, in reciprocal. That’s interesting. Existing on both sides, exclusive or interchangeable.

2.

I’ve put blur in. Hmm. As in blur, first as the noun. 1540s. A moral stain. Around 1600s, a smear on the surface of writing, perhaps akin to blear, extended sense of ‘a confused dimness’ is from 1860 - in reference to the Orion Nebula. Interesting. Blear. Let me just look at blear. So blear. Of the eyes. Blere. Watery. Rheumy. Sore or dim with watery discharge. Related to blear as in the verb. Comparing to Middle-High German blerre, having blurred vision. Low German bleeroged, ‘blear eyed’. And now I am with blear, to dim the vision with tears, rheum etc, also to have watery or rheumy eyes. Early 14^th Century, of uncertain origin, possibly from an unrecorded Old English *blerian which is perhaps related to blur. Bleared. Blearing. I’m just going to go back to what it says. Blur verb. It’s interesting to blear is more how we have been talking aroundd vision. And to blur is to blot out by smearing ink over, coming from blur, to obscure without defacing, also to dim the perception of. In an intransitive to become blurred. Related blurred and blurring. And also here, blurry. Confused and indistinct. Blurrily and blurriness. It seems to have run to an end. So may if I would put together with that, periphery. Late 14^th century periferie. Atmosphere around the earth. Old French periferie. Mediaeval Latin. Late Latin peripheria, from Greek peripheria circumference. Outer circle. Line around a circular body. Literally a carrying around…

3.

Oblique. Early 15^th century, slanting sloping sideways. Crooked, not straight, or direct. Originally of the muscles of the eyes. Now this is interesting. So, the blearing of the eyes and the slanting or obliqueness of the eye. From the Old French oblique and the Latin obliquus -slanting, sidelong, indirect. So possibly from the part *ob, meaning against and the root of *licinus bent upwards. So, against, bent upwards. From the pie root meaning to bend, be movable. So see the source of limb. So licinus bent upward seems as if there is a source of limb. Closest in form and meaning are līmus or tranverse and sublīmis transverse from below upward, and the latter would be morphologically similar to oblīquus. So let me just look at limb. So limb part of the body distinct from the head or trunk. The Old English plural is often limo or limen. To go out on a limb. In a figurative sense to ‘enter a risky situation’. So limb, seems there is also a connection with limp. To hang down limply. Something that twists, goes round or binds. Limbal. Limbo. Limbate. The border or the hem or the fringe or the edge. So this *ob against – word-forming element towards against, before, near, across, and down. From the pie root *epi, also *opi near or against. So, the sense of sloping, slanting, slant. To strike obliquely against something. To slip sideways. To fall on one’s side. To give a sloping direction to. The noun, an oblique directional plane. Slant meaning a way of regarding something from 1905. Ahh the slant. A certain slant. Slantways. Aslant. It’s making me think also of the word we had athwart. Aslant or in a sloping direction. Not perm[p]endicular or at right angles. And sloping, similar, to be in a slanting position. Go in an oblique direction. Inclination meaning an incline. A slant of ground. Declivity. A downward slope. From the French déclivité. A slope declivity. Sloping downwards. From *de meaning down and *clivus a slope from the pie *klei-wo suffix form of the root *klei to lean. This is interesting. So lean has also the connection to low, to cause to bend. Inclination. To cause to bend down, turn aside and then low, not high, below the usual level. Lying on the ground or in a deep place. Low. Low down. Humble. Lying flat or low. So, the connection to the abject. Low more often used with respect to nature, condition, or rank. Low. Near the ground, not high. I thought lower would be. Lower to descend to sink to grow less or lower. Transitive meaning let down, cause to descend. I’ve also got this word tension. A stretched condition. From the root *ten. This might be interesting. To stretch. Something stretched. Also, there in abstain. Attend. This is interesting. Attend as a stretching. Intend. Tenacious. Tendency and tender. Attend. To stretch towards, add meaning to and toward and tendere to stretch.

4.

I’m going to put in continuum. 1640s. A noun a continuous spread or extension, a connection of elements as intimate as that of the instants of time. From Latin continuum a continuous thing, neuter of continuous, joining, connecting with something, following one after another. From continere, intransitive, to be uninterrupted, literally to hang together. Plural is continua. See contain. Contain. Retain. Restrain (someone). Control (oneself). Behave (in certain way). From the Old French contein-, tonic stem of contenir, from Latin continere, to hold together. Enclose. Continuum. To contain. Feels like a jump. I suppose to continue, I suppose, that can make sense, to continue around perhaps, to hold together, enclose. From assimilated form of com with, together or see con, tenere to hold, to hold with, from the pie root *ten- to stretch. Which is coming to your .. touched upon with tension. From 14^th century to have something as a constituent part. To have something inside. Enclosed. Contained. Containable. Ten. Continuous. Self-contained. Let me go to con. Word-forming element meaning together, with. Used in Latin before consonants except -b, -p, -l, -m, or -r. In native English formations, such as co-star, Co- tends to be used where Latin would use con-. So co…together, with. That’s quite nice. Maybe I’ll put side in - no sideways. From side and way. To look sideways, to cast scornful glances. 1844. Very much leading me to two words. Old English, side, flanks of a person, the long part or aspect of something. From proto Germanic *sido Old Saxon sida, Old Norse, sioa, Danish, Swedish sida, Middle Dutch side. Long. Broad. Spacious. Hanging Down. From the pie root *se long, late. Also related to soirée. Some sort of original sense preserved as in like country-side. Side, as in the sense of a position or attitude of a person or set of persons in relation to another, as in choosing sides. Meaning one of the parties in a transaction. Sense in sporting contest, this is different to how we have been using it. Meaning music on one side of a phonograph record, like one side of a flat or surface. Close together. Abreast. Side splitting, affecting with compulsive laughter. And the verb to side. To cut into sides. Meaning to support one of the parties in a discussion or dispute. To hold sides.  Siding. Sided. Alongside. Alongside, parallel to the side of. This is very different to wat we have been talking about, the sides round. Twist, mid 14th century flat part of a hinge, now obsolete. Old English twist divided object, fork, rope, candletwist, wick, from the pie root *dwo- two. That’s interesting, we had that before, the dwo and the two and the twofold. Twist. Original sense suggests a dividing in two, Old Norse tvistra to divide and separate, in two, asunder, Dutch twist, German zwist quarrel, discord, though these senses have no equivalent in English, but later ones are of combining two into one, hence the original sense of the word may be ‘rope made of two strands’. Ahh to twist. Twist meaning thread or cord composed of two or more fibres, meaning act or action to turn or turning on an axis, beverage consisting of two or more liquor …. A popular rock 'n' roll dance craze from 1961, so called from the motion involved, but twist was used to describe popular dances in 1894 and again in the 1920s. To get one's knickers in a twist, to be unduly agitated. Slang. Twist the verb implied in past tense form to wring, sense of to spin two or more strands of yarn into thread, meaning to move in a winding fashion. Twist to provoke, to twist someone arm, sense of having pressure on oneself. Twist. Twisting. To twist off.