This is the first of a series of posts on the topic of writing. I enjoy the process and find writing to be a means to contribute to an ongoing inquiry into the membranous, fluid nature of consciousness, corporeality, and the process of perception.
Writing feeds the field of body-based practice and the growth of new ideas promoting the fact that the bodily nature of experience matters. Writing, like any form of expression brings the inner world to the outer, it attempts to create an ‘account’ of what lies within, to assist the perceptual process, which in turn may affirm the unique, unitary self that emerges. For me writing about the body pays the body its due attention, creates literacy, enriches self-awareness and reflexivity. (Judith Butler has written incisively about the moral and ethical significance of self-reflexive accounts and the need for autonomy as well as responsibility for the impact these may have on others). We may observe how first-person accounts provide access to autonomy that truth seeking digital media and AI undermine, or worse, threaten?
Writing is both a form of transmission of information from a moment in time to another, to the present moment in which it is read, and a form of transcription, a means to document and give value and life to the subject – at least partially. In this case the topic of interest is the part that the body plays in day-to-day life, firstly as the foundation of self-identity, the locus of a unitary self which includes aspects that can be differentiated into systems or be experienced as multiple selves within the whole. Secondly, as a foundation for self-other relationship – our body is a locus of relating, in simple terms, for receiving, bonding, inhibiting, or defending against others.
A sensory stimulus touches the membrane of sensory receptors, a ‘charge’ triggers the threshold to send a signal that generates a felt sense of the stimulus and a physical response manifesting in a particular movement quality; for example, either as withdrawal towards self, integration and stasis within self, or outwardly exploring relationship to the input. At any point, the pathway of flow is determined by innate, reflexive movement reactions or mediated by learned response patterns referred to as (self-)reflexive. In both cases, the word reflexive describes an act, the first is local to the body, the other a means to consider, pause, and introspect to consider how to act before acting. Writing is a self-reflexive act that attends to experience, and corporeal experience has been overlooked as part of this territory, hence somatic enquiry, like BMC® as it is easier and more literal to experience the body than to put words on – there is often too much to attend to that escape thought.
The literacy of the body is in its motility, it is constantly in flow and so hard to fix, to pin down, to transcribe in accounts. The outflow of words is another process, a different state of consciousness, that seeks to track, capture and transmit the often richly complex and differentiated elements.
In BMC and other living philosophies, the idea that the body holds stories is not new, these stories are vital gifts that the body communicates to itself and may share to inspire and discover – i.e. to enhance awareness, communication and learning. If the body is able to give an account of itself the mind is engaged – intercellular communication in the brain creates the picture, the timeline, and commits aspects to memory across the cell membranes into other cells to hold a colour, a sound, a taste and so on, an energetic resonance, a layer of meaning sedimented and available.
The word ‘data’ comes to mind as a word to transmit the raw yet collective interrelated nature of sensory or affective experience. The data that is retrieved in the space created to recall is like a re-emergence shaped into something new, establishing another experience, conjuring impressions, a transmission of ‘energy’ that emerges, a semblance of the original that words transcribe. The fluid nature of this process at the membrane of cellular transmission, accounts for why some aspects disappear, are lost, or are displaced by another, as the words are ‘not’ the experience, they are a transcription.
BMC® and Body-Mind Centering® are registered service marks of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen used with permission
