Rather than impose a-priori beliefs and judgements that proclaim a singular truth as fact, the Body-Mind Centering® field of inquiry invites the ‘seeding’ of ideas through touch and movement in a space in which they may come alive and find corporeal form. Since our bodies are unique, they reveal our uniqueness – and, for better or worse, the subjective experience of the body reveals that it knows its own truth and will ‘speak’ if the mind is prepared to listen. The body is the sensing moving being that can change, adapt and repattern itself either within a conducive environment or in the hands of another who knows how to allow or facilitate this process to permeate.
Body to body is one thing but a knowing body-mind with experience of the possibility for re-patterning can offer the support or safe space for change to happen, be brought to awareness, realisation and understood. The integration of cellular listening and cellular communication occurs at the permeable relational membranes first of the touched and toucher and secondly of their own body-mind, the one permeating the other in a two-way mutual exchange firstly through touch and movement and then through the movement of ‘mind’ in words in response to that kinetic-affective insight.
The membrane allows for mutability – for the outflow of matter that is not needed and the inflow of what is – it is a kinetic affective mechanism, it receives, perceives, passes on or retains.
The membrane between the body-mind is conceptual – it describes the space in which a physical or perceptive state can ‘breathe’ and shift the unhelpful, old and embedded matter that prevents a release or change taking place. Whilst this shift is moving out the held matter, space is created and pathways cleared for something new to emerge.
This ‘new’ is often described as a sensation of lightness, space, (i.e. a movement of matter or dynamic shift) and feelings of relief or affective shifts which inform conscious awareness of a change taking place. This inner insight is like turning the grey or dark lifeless state to something motile, alive and vibrational that can fill the whole body with a sense of transmission and transformation. Feelings of joy and awe at what takes place are common affective changes that shape insights and indicate the movement of body-mind as a unity – a form of self compassion?
Beyond this relational space there is a wider societal field which rarely comes into view, where common experience has shaped beliefs that are ‘bought into’, that permeate and sit like books on a shelf no longer ‘seen’ as the truth within is unquestioned it is projected unaware that alternatives exist – these truths stand in the way of other ways of being.
BMC emits an idea of a unitary being whilst recognising incongruence and duality as being an aspect of ‘mind’ – a state of conflicted self-identity split between subjective, intuitive responses and other conflicting, received beliefs. There is a paradox of unity and disparity, of equality and hierarchy within a coercive yet divisive social system. BMC brings awareness back to the compassionate body-mind relationship and space for the unfolding of self.
Beyond the realm of BMC, attempts at unifying the duality of body-mind have been concurrent in philosophy and consciousness studies. See for example, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who refers to the ‘habitus’ as the inherent, ingrained and unconscious influence of social and economic conditions on the self-identity of an individual, conditioning the habitual ways to sense, feel and act so that self-perception and behavioural dispositions may become troublesome to change.
Deleuze, the French philosopher refers to the ‘assemblage’ as the coming together of diverse elements to form a unified whole, structure or order, yet each constituent part retains its characteristics. For example, societal controls establish ‘order’ words that are internalised and influence perceptual sense making, and cause projection that affirms this ‘order’ but denies the self.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (1990) refers to the body as bio and mind as philo, and to the ‘fact’ that touch and movement are the foundation to thought and so meaning. The body holds the reality of life itself but the mind is reductionist in putting this into words and concepts that shape thought, displaces the corporeal ‘meanings’ of movement, i.e. bodily experience, creating discourses on embodied theory void of the same.
The answer is to supply the mind with words to describe the bodily experience as it emerges to view, and shape a language that does justice to it – rather than colonise it.
Small insights
The membrane concept enables writing to move with and between the body-mind in movement.
