Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash
unpolished thoughts 5/16/2019
If you slowly bring your hand towards your face, it’s possible to sense the heat of your hand before it touches.
To make the sensation clearer you might bring your hand towards your face and away, very slowly, many times.
Can you create a pulsation of warmth?
Try it for a moment or two, perhaps just with the right hand and just over the right side of the face, bringing the hand close and then taking it away.
Maybe you lightly touch sometimes, but the idea is not to touch. The idea is to just bring the hand close so you can feel its radiance.
You can open the hand as it approaches the face and close the hand a little as it goes away. The opening and closing of the hand creates another sense of pulsation. It’s as if you open your hand to spill warmth onto your right cheek.
After pulsing for some time this way, you might simply move your hand, without touching, over your face, sending warmth wherever it’s needed. Perhaps you feel a slight tightness at the corner of your lips, near your right ear, or above your right eyebrow.
If you then pause for a moment, can you still sense a relationship between your right hand and the right side of your face?
How do you sense the right side of your face now?
How do you imagine its expression?
How do you sense the left side of your face?
Perhaps you will explore a bit more this way, still with your right hand.
Without touching, your hand approaches, bringing warmth to the right side of your neck and throat, passing down over different areas of the right side of your chest and abdomen.
Can you imagine the warmth of your hand radiating through your skin to your insides?
Whenever the sensation of warmth gets lost, you could remind yourself by opening and closing your hand, bringing it towards and away from your face.
You might bring your hand to the area of your groin, imagining that you warm the inside of your hip joint. You might use radiance to warm the inside of your knee.
Then perhaps you’d like to pause to sense again how you experience your right side.
How do you experience your right hand now, each of the fingers and the spaces in between them?
How do you experience the palm of your right hand?
How is this experience different than the way that you experience your left hand?
Perhaps now you would like to invite the radiance of your left hand to warm the left side of your face.
You might take it towards and away with a soft pulsation, like the dimmer switch on a light was being slowly raised and lowered. You might keep the hand close, moving from your left cheek to your left eye to your left ear to the left side of your neck.
Every so often, you might pause to simply listen, sensing your hands and the other parts of yourself, and feeling the sense of radiance connecting them.
You might continue this way for some time, exploring your left side with the warmth of your left hand, then pausing to listen.
You might do this lying on your back with your eyes closed, but you also might do this in a brief moment of being stopped at a traffic light, or for a few minutes while taking a break from working at your desk.
When might be a good moment to gift yourself this experience of radiance?
Of course, your left hand may also warm your right side.
Your right hand may also warm your left side.
Your two hands may move together to warm other places and you may bring those parts of your body to your hands just as your hands reach to those places.
Whenever you feel satisfied you might take another minute to walk, or roll on the ground, or make any other movement that satisfies you.
Perhaps you will begin by moving in slow motion, imagining that each part of you that touches the ground brings warmth, and the that the ground warms you in each place it touches.
You can use this radiance to teach yourself a sense of flowing movement.
How might you move differently through the world if you were guided by sensations of radiant warmth?
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Radiant movement is an example of what’s possible when you Tune Into Your Creative Body.
That’s the name of my online course starting on Monday, May 20.
Love that so much. Thanks for sharing. I love how your mind works!
Thanks for checking this out, Molly. You may recognize this as (a version of) the last ATM that Feldenkrais taught at Amherst.