unpolished thought 4/14/2019
As I write this, my lips are buzzing, making a kind of electronic bumble bee buzzing sound.
It’s the result of the Awareness Through Movementlesson I just did.
The lesson had nothing to do with my lips.
Most of the movements in the lesson involved reaching with one arm or leg, or drawing one arm or leg into myself
Or reaching there while drawing in here.
It was not unlike being an imaginary marionette, experiencing the internal tug of the puppeteers’ strings.
By the end, any movement of any limb could be initiated in any direction from any source.
With all the internal rooting fully alive, it was just as easy to lengthen the right arm overhead by drawing left heel into myself as it was to extend the left heel down.
Or to turn the head to extend a leg.
Or change the orientation of my pelvis to change the orientation of my eyes.
When I rolled off my back into sitting, it took place in one single pulse that opened one armpit and closed the opposite hip joint. Then, there I was sitting with my left leg in front of me and my right leg behind.
Once again, I reached the right arm forward and drew the left leg into me. Internal cords pushed against each other to create a continuous spiraling movement, carrying me up onto my left knee and right foot, and then further around myself until I stood on both feet, facing the opposite wall.
After a few test movements of my new skeleton, and a new sense of leverage in relation to the floor, a new activity began unconsciously as my ears became interested in the sound of my breath.
My mouth spontaneously changed shape making the rushing air change in pitch, higher and lower. A kind of rhythm emerged, and before I knew it, a wordless windy song:
fitha-fithaf-sheeoo, fitha-fithaf-sheeoo
fitha-fithaf-sheeoo, fitha-fithaf-sheeoo
It wanted it to be continuous (like the way my pelvis has been bouncing left and right this entire time I’ve been typing) – but I did have to breathe in and out.
Luckily, air sounds like these can be made on the in-breath just as on the out-breath – although it’s not the habitual way we’re used to making mouth sounds.
So the rhythm became slightly altered as I learned how to continue the momentum of the rushing syllables, and breathe.
Other new possibilities began to come to life, and before I knew it, the buzzing of the lips, the electronic bumble bee.
In this moment, having settled into this new task, the pursuit of words to describe my experience, my fingers passing over a keyboard, my mouth has quieted, but my body continues to dance.
It is not nervous energy.
I wouldn’t exactly call it adrenaline either, although who knows what’s going on with my internal chemistry right now.
But the experience is very familiar to me. It’s happened many times before in my Awareness Through Movement practice.
It’s the opening of something inside me where the separation between the movement of body and the music in my head melts away.
It’s the dropping of inhibition and the tapping into natural creative energies that are always inside, waiting for us.
Just now I was overcome again by a wave of mouth sounds.
Obviously, my typing slowed down (there is only so much multi-tasking of creative expression that I can pull off at once).
This is the experience that I return to again and again.
It’s the same experience that told me once, in a moment of total darkness seven years ago, that I’d discovered a pathway back in the direction of light.
It’s why I became a Feldenkrais practitioner.
It’s what I have to offer you.