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PART 1

EXPLORATION:  18.10.2021

PRACTICE: Reading as distillation

FOCUS: A further reading distillation of the various 'distillations' that we had already generated over the previous four episodes of practice-based explorations as source text.; (1) Back-ness in lying down; (2) Back-ness in rotation; (3) Back-ness in transition; (4) Back-ness in movement.

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

- Reading Distillation (20 minutes) and (2) 30 minutes

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.

1.

Letting. Folds. Non-grasping. Dropping. Leaning. Closed. Listen. Granting. Magnetic. Twisting. Unknown. Possible. Oblique. Heavier. Gravity. Cooperation. Spaciousness. Horizontal. Embryonic. Softness. Beneath-ness. Enveloping. Capacity. Field. Opening up. Counter-intuitive. Alive and vibrant. Projecting. Connection. Parameters. Continuity. Imagery. Dropping. Chest, heart. Dorsal listening. A tendency. Vulnerable. Sometimes dissolving. Possibilities. Dynamic, shadows. System, thinking noticing oblique and indirect orientation, edges of continuum, spaciousness. Taking care. Organise unravel surrender. Releasing habits feeling backness a watery human allowing things pleasure of cooperation attention texture disorientates a reversal of action, a correlation, that not-ness an opening movement, being in the world. Messy and murky messy and murky, pulling thinking acting on us. To counteract, anticipating. Passivity, awkwardness unravelling. Crystallising unravelling, looking forward, a kind of falling, a murky back thinking. A very elemental pleasure. Reconfiguring. A direction sense – releasing of weight, participating. Of the head, breathing. Backwards. More receptively. Crawling, darkness. Acceptance. Pleasure. Participation. With the eyes looking, releasing, a watery human. About desire but also pleasure. In the physical sense, there is an unravelling and a reconfiguring of how muscles and joints connect with each other. It is sometimes tricky – it disorientates. Cushioned by air – I mean I was just going up and down, left to right, breathing in and out. Thinking, lots of one, two, one, two – but how all that coordinates, it is really into the back. And I am thinking of the back in terms of this all-round sense of the back. This kind of middle point or halfway seems to open up a different kind of register of sensation and awareness, a vertical line, the slash line or the hyphen and in language this also sets up a kind of tension, a play between. Conjuring up images of cats, dogs, horses, but particularly cats. It felt as if I could fall but was cushioned by the air or by something. That not-ness, what is it to talk or even to think from the back-ness. It is almost like pulling thinking coming from the back. Having your eyes closed, trying not to disturb the rhythm. Letting it come – this letting, this letting aspect of the back. The sense of really taking care of the transition, closing the eyes but not completely, like looking through a slight gap of the eye, a slight slant of the eye. Recognising the mutual relationship of the front and the back, something about dropping into the back, not necessarily dropping back but letting go, a sort of oblique or indirect sense of listening, a sense of periphery. There is 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 or backwards. This idea of the sides allowing, how we can also listen from the sides. How sight it is often trying to direct, pinpoint, name things, whereas this blurred vision or eyes scanning or almost eyes touching the surface of things, more a sense of scanning, a different kind of possibility with the eyes. Disrupting the usual mode of understanding, our orientation to our own bodies and to each other. Orient to listening. There is a kind of void here as well. How we lean into some part of what we have experienced, or what we know, or what we think we know or how we get retriggered or reconnected with something that has happened before. I often wonder whether those previous experiences inform what is happening now – sometimes they can be so strong that they block the experience, or replace it or muddle it. It is impossible to untangle. Like grasping, grasping towards the things that I want to say. I often think of the dorsal as something that relieves the eyes, but maybe it is something that can relieve the voice, a sort of softening. Twisting – feeling more like what happens, turning is more of a possibility. I am thinking about twisting, and sometimes you see a fold on the skin. There is something about what is possible and the mechanics of it, and the observation of it and what appears on the skin or in the folds and surfaces. Not just the surfaces outside but also inside surfaces, all the organs. Shifting from the pressure of projecting, a kind of voicing like speaking to oneself. Or even listening, listening to oneself really. I realise that my taken-for-granted mode for lying on my back would be to have my eyes closed. There is this other experience of backness. Having a sense of force or of pressure against which you can work; a kind of move or experience which was in relation to uprightness, a certain idea of uprightness, or a certain idea not just of uprightness but also of holding and of control actually. It is not the body and it is not the floor, it is the plane of contact between the body and the floor. Bringing voicing into this, opening up spaces. My body here sitting, my awareness of you behind, these things on the wall, my breath. Breathing and gravity – it is also a sort of conversation. Allowing the back to have its own agency, to really tune into what unfolds or what opens up as an experience in its own right. Feedback from floor or the wall, feedback from surface, feedback from another person – a counter-force. Magnetic tilt in that direction. Not falling into a binary. A sense of rotation, movement from side to side, the possibilities of the back. To do with this movement to the ground, there is something to begin with to do with this forward leaning, future leaning sense of frontality. Coming to the ground, coming the ground has associations of letting go – and there being some confrontation with a sense of my own resistance to that also. This relation between doing and being and it feels as though the back is a mode of being and the front a mode of doing, but again there is a risk here that these are binaries being perpetuated. Axis and twist and turn also the transition from up to down – how complex it is. Allowing the back to have its own agency somehow – to really tune into what opens up or what unfolds as an experience in its own right. Feedback from the floor or wall, feedback from surface, feedback from another person – a counter-force. This back breathing. Only then being able to soften into a sense of breathing into the back and the awareness of the breath. It takes a while to settle, to let go. Dropping into the body, the voicing feels as if it has the lungs behind it somehow, or the organs behind it, and the diaphragm behind it. Taking time actually, there is something about taking time. Can I let myself be held and what can I let go of and what can I surrender? As though wrapping around the body, embryonic trace of forming. This coming into down, the folding down, the crouch, this coming down further to hands and knees. And that has more animal-like sensations – a different relationship going into the back. The feeling of a tail coming, a dorsal fin. A slight uneasiness about being under-guard, to be low down. Something that is somehow concealed or hidden or not accessible or unknown in a way – this leaning back into the unknown space of the behind enables a kind of relaxation or 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. I am talking towards the wall, I am quite close to the wall. A lot of the work has been relaxing, leaning back into, letting the body go – exploring the relation between reactive gestures and creative responses. Being able to speak and also to listen without thinking about what you look like, or that someone is looking at you or you are looking at them. Breathing and gravity – it is also a sort of conversation. Different combinations of tending towards seeing and listening, a different kind of spaciousness which is not visible and has a different kind of imagery – dark rather than light, low orientation, low as in not social or not language based, a link with low as in behind. How can we just see and let light come in. Letting light come in, letting things arrive rather than reaching out. Bubbling up, surfacing – a kind of restlessness. Trying to communicate something, confronted with the instability of balance, asymmetry of the body and having a sense of force or pressure against which you could push. Needing some kind of force or resistance against which to push the back. Gravity gets worked with as a kind of force, a quality of relaxing or letting go or releasing. Allowing the front and the back to cooperate more and maybe allowing 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 is involved and what doesn’t need to be involved. Thinking of the body as a field of cooperation. My horizontal plane, my point, my plane of reference. What can I surrender? A sense of the shape of my back – a sensation and an image, the sense of the hairs on the back of my neck. It is like an image forms in my mind, but it is a sensation. A kind of falling in on myself, a kind of dreamy sense – 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 comes from. A dark spaciousness – you catch things in the corner of your eyes, the corner-of-the-eye kind of shadowy spaces between physical things and imaginary things. Unsettling too sometimes. There is something to do with protection and exposure, working with the forces of gravity and the possibilities of rotating the spine, bending the spine, leading or letting another thing lead. I was thinking about the experience of the back expanding the range of awareness, not so much to three dimensionality but to 360 degrees. All this unknown terrain that is just there, unfurling. It was much more mobile, more dynamic – perhaps becoming other, sensing another, becoming a human being in another way. A kinaesthetic groundedness as the basis for experience. Rather than it being a passive state when I am lying down how might that passivity be active and dynamic and vibrant and alive and full of feeling. Not a closing off - moving up and down, what does it mean to keep my attention in my back while doing that. Working with gravity, the pulling of gravity, and moving up a sense of moving through. Back bone, back ground, back track – again it is falling into binaries and how these binaries create a field, a dynamic field. Trying to activate an antidote to that next, next, next, with a sense of not having gravity acting on the body. Whereas with the back, there is a lot of acceptance, listening, allowing things in, a connection with the environment.

2.

Flipping the body reveals something. To counteract, activate – attention disoriented. Murky pleasure - rolling from side to side. A preconception – why is it to do with inertia and stasis? Maybe it is to do with associations of sleep and death actually. The active dimension of the back, a sense of active passivity. A kineaesthetic grounded-ness as the basis for experience. How to activate the back as a dynamic field - the sensation of time, how this can create different sensations of duration and of time. My body is future-leaning. Underneath the level of the ground … but where does the back begin in terms of the interior of the body. I can sometimes get this simple pattern – this leaning back, or resting upon, or reconnecting rather than pushing forwards. A dropping into the body. The voicing feels like it has the lungs behind it. Future-leaning – and almost a sense of reversal. The quality of the back being negative – this not or non- or un- or opposite of the forward, of the frontal. Or whether this is just a habit of my thinking, to think of it only as a reversal of going forward. Or whether with more attention a different kind of experiential sensation shows itself? Doing it almost a remedy almost to the forwardness of my attention. A zone that is somehow concealed or hidden or not accessible or unknown in a way. A complex system of unfolding, bending and twisting, of physically working. It seems counter intuitive that somehow this leaning back into the unknown of a behind space enables a kind of relaxation, or of resting in experience. A leaning into the unknown future is quite different. Something more, murky back thinking. There is a kind of resistance to it – the pleasure of the cooperation of the body and the ground and the environment. A kind of resistance. Becoming other, sensing another, being a human being in another way. It activates another kind of sense of oneself as human. It seems that there is a space that feels less known somehow, that has the capacity to hold a certain kind of experience. What gets lost or what falls away in our capacity if we are not careful, out of habit or ease or sometimes inefficiency? The sense of really taking care of the transition. And there is this move from the front to the back as a kind of conscious transition, there is some murkiness in the back, a different kind of thinking perhaps. And again, not front/back – this is too binary. Having your eyes closed – trying not to disturb the rhythm. There is something very enjoyable about being on the street and having your eyes closed for a while, whilst trying not to disturb the rhythm. There are qualities of thinking which have much more of a sense of this back-ness than the qualities of talking. Trying to complicate or unsettle the sense of the binary between the front and the back. A correlation between back-ness and slowness; and am not sure how much this is a correlation, or if this is a habit. The attention to the back, lying down, there is something of settling or stilling, and those kinds of associations of non-movement, passivity and inaction. Perhaps the sense of binaries can invade the thinking, like I am cutting off the edges, not moving around the edges. No, not edges, sides. The sides of the conversation – listening and talking from the back. Also, bringing me back to walking in twilight, less contrast between light and dark, more shadows. You can catch things in the corner of your eyes. The impact of such a strong orientation of frontality – how might the participation of a fuller range of the body change the sense of connection, and what worlds start to emerge in a way. Future leaning - it seems it has this dorsal tilt, but it is confusing. If I were to say to someone – future leaning … it feels like falling forwards. Something more like murky back thinking. Our being in the world, our ways of moving and being in the world, are shaped by the ways that we move and be in the world. Pulling thinking, thinking from the back. To get in tune with your back is to do with releasing certain expectations, particularly to do with habits of control, which are also habits of the eyes in a way. This undoing of the head-oriented, sight-oriented, future-forward oriented – to try and undo that. And letting go, surrendering, renouncing, releasing. Not-ness and not upright. A pleasure in moving backwards, an elemental pleasure, the pleasure of the cooperation of the body and the ground and the environment. A correlation, a dynamic field. There is a sense of being disoriented and not clarifying. There is some murkiness in the back, a different kind of thinking – not front/back, because this is too binary. But there is a back-ness and a future-leaning, there is a kind of resistance to it. In thinking, I am pulled up and forwards. There is a lot of darkness. 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 about how certain tendencies come to dominate, and the range of capacities that a body and the senses has becomes a little more curtailed by the habits. On the one hand, the limitations of language, but on the other hand the potential of language to open up some of these spaces that fall outside of this binary relation, to a sense of blur. A kind of sampling, reconfiguring of how muscles and joints and things connect with each other. Unravelling - a surprisingly fresh perspective. It shifts your perspective. And within that the nuance between directional frontality and backwards in a directional sense, moving forwards, moving backwards, awareness forward, awareness to the back, looking forwards, looking more receptively. And the correlation between direction and awareness and sight in a way. It is a kind of falling as well as a forward motion. It is a different kind of territory - a different kind of experiential sensation shows itself, which might not just be the opposite of this going-forward. Recognising the mutual relationship between the front and the back, in a sort of oblique or indirect sense. Something that is somehow concealed or hidden or unknown. This leaning back into the unknown space enables a kind of relaxation in experience, a leaning in to the unknown. And by slowing it down there are more possibilities to create a diversion, a sense of moving in and out of something as a dynamic action rather than this flat plane of sensation. Listening to the other surfaces of the body – of the eyes, the ears, voice as a kind of listening. The way that the back might be a sort of gateway into a proprioceptive capacity, a way of practising that capacity, or nurturing that capacity. There is something to do with really trying to nurture proprioceptive capacity. There is also something around the eyes – open/closed. The eyes are so fascinating because of what they do but also the materiality of them – a sense of when they are opening, when they are open, they don’t feel that they have to see or to understand. Light just falling in, a mode of dorsal listening. The exterior aspect of the back of the body – there is a depth to it. But where does the back begin, and where does it turn into the interior of the body? Working with the forces of gravity and the possibilities of rotating the spine, bending the spine, twisting at the waist. Leading or letting another thing lead. Undoing tendency, uprightness. Releasing towards turning. Low down, working ground. Arrive, alert, alive. Future-leaning – I feel my imagination move, tilt forwards. Future-leaning – and actually my understanding of it is different to what my actual body thinks, perhaps through cultural conditioning of the future in front, of desire and possibilities. The doing – the rush of desire. But for me, there is something about the front, there is something about the front and the back that does create a binary. But also the front somehow relying on the back become exposed to the air. There is a sort of voluminous feeling to it, with breath and light and air. Dropping binaries. Peripheral feelings. Paying attention. Memories, rotating. Memories and imagination. Back-ness. Form-less. Impossible to untangle. Arise, attentive. Urge to turn towards. Breathing and gravity – it is also a sort of conversation, allowing the back to have its own agency somehow. To tune into this relationship between holding on and fighting gravity and letting myself be held. Can I let myself be held? What can I let go of and what can I surrender? Maybe releasing the weight falls into the back or creates lightness around the ribs and the top surfaces, softens all these exposed areas - the mouth, the skin, the eyes. And maybe there is a kind of voice that can drop, something to do with a more thinking, drifting, experiential voice. How I might bring voicing into this, opening up spaces – also taking this, my body here sitting. My awareness of you behind me, these things that are on the wall, my breath. How voicing a dorsal voice creates spaces, is part of listening. A sort of softening. Dropping into the body, the voicing feels that it has the lungs behind it, or the organs behind it, of the diaphragm behind it. Twisting feels like what happens, turning is a possibility. The limbs were more like the active agents and the back just followed. Shifting from the pressure of projecting, towards a kind of voicing like speaking to oneself, of even listening, listening to yourself. Because it feels as if I have to almost, very actively, de-privilege that frontal-facing way of being in order to somehow become more aware of the back. Residing in this space of the not fully formed in a positive sense, not having to force it into formation, not to force it, not even to do with forcing it into language, because we are in a conversation with our backs. The sound coming from behind – more of an environmental sound. Maybe there is something in there about the axis. Like the impulse I could feel was reactive actually. And maybe there is a kind of voice that can drop – something to do with a more thinking, drifting, experiential voice. How might I bring voicing into this – opening up spaces? How voicing a dorsal voice creates spaces or is part of listening? Active, activation around the neck, a sort of softening. There is something very joyful about it – I am doing a hand gesture where my left hand is angled back towards me and my right hand is moving around in a circle, kind of gathering. But maybe it should be the other way round? It is touching, there is a touch to it, and yes, the touch took me on a thought. Something about feeling able to rest in the situation or being able to reside in the situation, or being able to reside, to lean back, taking time. Something about taking time. There is something to do with the confrontation of my own sense of resistance to that. Listening, thinking, voicing – orientation, falling. De-privilege, releasing. Proprioceptive capacity, slippery. A dorsal listening, a way of releasing. Asymmetrical. A different kind of gaze like the liquid of the eye was dropping back into its orbit. The sense of the shape of my back – this slump was really nice, this sense of unit-thing of back and chair, wrapping around the body, wraps around the body. Embryonic trace forming. Magnetic tilt in that direction. Not falling into a binary. A sense of rotating. Movement from side to side. Soft eyes, relaxing. Flipping the body. Dropping, dropping – associations of sleep. A dorsal voicing. The twist, the resistance. Twisting feels more like what happens, turning is more a possibility. Voice as a kind of listening. I love this idea that light is just falling in. Eyes can stay soft and blurred, the eyes scanning, blurring, which is also what happens when the eyes drop back, when attention drops away from this orientation. There is a lot of release that has to happen in the front, there is a lot of relaxation that has to happen to really drop back into the experience of back-ness. Am I really experiencing a sense of the back or am I just thinking about the experience of the back? Is this a direct experience or a thought I am having about experience? There is something to do with this thinking about something which feels as if it is very much in the front mode of being, whereas dropping into the back feels as if it is much closer to the experience. You let this voice drift in, it comes in. To do with non-grasping, letting things arrive or arise. But not to completely flip from an active, grasping mode – there are these different forces and resistances and limits to the material body. Tuning into the back softens the front, softens the front, allows the front to drop back. Expectation drops, time drops, the body drops into another sense of time. Eyes drop into the body. Front falls back. So I am working between memories and imagination – projecting, bringing the previous into what is happening now. And this is how we lean into what we have experienced, or what we know or what we think we know, or what gets retriggered or reconnected. But it takes some effort to move into this. It actually feels like it requires effort to move into this more relaxed mode of being – which is perhaps going about it in the wrong way. It slips between a physical understanding and slippery abstract sense of the unseen surfaces of the body. This listening to the other surfaces of the body – they ears, the eyes, voice as a kind of listening. And the way that the back might be a gateway into a proprioceptive capacity, a way of practising that capacity, or nurturing that capacity. There is something to do with really trying to nurture a proprioceptive capacity and what kinds of being and thinking and observing comes from that as a ground. Disrupting the usual mode or understanding, our orientation to our own bodies and to each other. To reorient to seeing and listening – there is a kind of void here as well. I feel like because I am not facing you, but I am aware that you are receiving, therefore it is that the sense that I am talking to you is less dominant. Working between memory and imagination – projecting, bringing the previous into what is happening now. There is a sense of being disoriented, not clarifying – there is a murkiness in the back. Moving backwards, this stepping backwards, taking the joints in a direction that they don’t very often travel in. Against the operation of habits of movement, shift of orientation in the body, affecting how we move through the world and how we perceive the world. There is a kind of resistance to it. The awkwardness of the opposite, the awkwardness of the limbs moving opposite to habit. There is something about how you are moving through life. As soon as you pull back it opens into a much more spacious expanded feeling. How do we move through the world, and how does this shift in orientation affect how we move through the world and the way that we perceive the world? Gravity and grace – dynamic and alive and vibrant and full of feeling. The front and the back – letting go but keeping it still there. The spine is perhaps different from the back – the depth and density of the body in a way. And whether the back is this plane of the back, this exterior aspect of the body or whether there is a depth to it. Where does the back begin in terms of the interior of the body? Working with the forces of gravity and the possibilities of rotating the spine. Bending at the spine, twisting at the waist, leading or letting another thing lead. Reconfiguring how we are moving brings attention to these pulls and forces, that act upon us, that can be activated or isolated. And those kinds of associations of non-movement and passivity and inaction – trying to complicate or unsettle the sense of the binary between the back and the front. I suppose it is back – but it is inside the body, so it is an experiential sense of the spine. There is something about the image of the anatomical. And then dropping into it. The voicing feels like it has the lungs behind it, the organs behind it, the diaphragm behind it. I think that sometimes the voice is high in the body or shallow in the body. A sense of dorsal voicing, a mode of dorsal listening. Back bone, back-ground, back track – again, it is falling into binaries and how these binaries create a field, a dynamic field. Trying to activate an antidote to that next, next, next. Whereas with back-ness there is a lot of acceptance - listening, allowing things in. Reconfiguring how muscles and joints and things connect with each other – unravelling of the habit, it shifts your perspective. This thinking, listening, voicing. Asymmetry feeds back into the body – stimulates to understand. It keeps working the mind’s interest – it intrigues. Maybe it triggers some self-generation, the moving that self-generates the body or reminds the body it is a body, or something like that. The muscles that sort of resist or won’t soften or won’t allow – I can feel this in the moving and twisting. There is a mechanics to this skeleton – it is built in a way that it can turn. It feels like I am making this up because of the words – but there is the mechanical and there is the manifestation. There is a call for rotation – the way that the skeletal system is activated. But also around the organs – this turning of the body and the way that the weight feels more compressed as you move from one side, the sense of the body pressuring on one lung, or a sense of the digestive organs being moved in some kind of way. It activates a different experience of backwards, the reversal of things, unravelling. Very simply what the body has to do, or what breathing has to do in order to balance on one leg, or move backwards, or orientate differently. There is something about how you are moving through life – you have to coordinate the limbs, and the swing and the kick. There are all these different rhythms. The sense of the back seeping around the sides of the body – unfurling, dissolving, supporting, scanning. Beneath-ness – a sense of spaciousness, if the body lets that happen. A sense of dorsality - I am moving away from the future in a sense, a sense of time going backwards, going back in time. It is surrender, it is not giving up. It is coming down to a more child-like, animal-like, low to the ground – a kind of safe space, it removes any sense of having to talk. That strong supportive ground of the back, supporting the front, and again, it is not so clearly shaped, more of a presence. A strong physical sensation – it is behind the back and the front, and the back or the front not being excluded from this back-ness. A pleasure in moving backwards – it is a very elemental pleasure, the pleasure of the cooperation of the body and the ground. A correlation, a dynamic field. A continuum, a field of play, a playing field. All these variables within small sequences, it is much more dynamic. Where are the edges, yes, the back as a dynamic field is still this area of challenge. Round and back – a kind of falling in on myself. Strong back, soft belly. This sense of openness. To think of this zone as something that is hidden or not accessible or unknown. To explore the participation of the thoracic spine in movement and being in the world. This sense, this notion of being in the world, and how our ways of moving and being in the world are shaped by how we move and be in the world. Contingent and open – the front, a kind of receptivity. There is always something tending towards right or left – our bodies are not stable, there is always a tendency to lean a little this way or that way, a little forwards, a little backwards. This idea of the sides allow, how can we also listen from the sides? Sight is often trying to direct, pinpoint, name things – whereas this blurred vision or eyes scanning, almost eyes touching the surfaces of things … a kind of different possibility with the eyes. A dark spaciousness. Drop back. Drop back into the not yet formed, back to back, or into the inbetween. Into the back as an agent of moving, of movement. Surrendering. Renouncing. Releasing. Not-ness, not upright.