Moving Just Because

Movement as a non-reflective aesthetic experience

This is a particular form of engagement, not THE way of engagement. It may be a good or poor fit, useful, or not, for any given person at any given time.

One way movement practices can be practiced is solely as an experience.

Working things out in more detail, let’s take the form of Qigong "Hugging the Tree", for the sake of discussion...

To engage a movement practice purely as a non-reflective aesthetic experience, is to:

* practice without an intrinsic teleology: the form is not engaged with to get healthier, better, stronger, more spiritual, etc.

* practice without any addition of method: the form is complete in itself. No augmenting the form with methods such as images, knowledge of physiology or anatomy, understandings from other qigong practices, the rich history and lore of the practice, etc.

* practice without a concept about what is to be experienced: no presumption, for example, that the legs will get heavy and the torso light, or that feelings of qi flow will arise in any particular way, or even arise at all.

* practice inseparably from the form's context: the form is always "Hugging the Tree outside on the front porch", or "Hugging the Tree in the morning", or "Hugging the Tree while tired". The contextual experience is part of the experience of the form.

* enjoy an always fresh experience: the form in context is always unique and unexpected. The context brings an immense amount of variation to the experience - perhaps it is colder, warmer, the body more or less fluid, attention moves differently. You don’t control the form; you don’t control the context; the rest of the points above are about not adding reference points that act as a way of making the experience more knowable. This ensures that the experience is always fresh (and that even apparent repetition will be surprising).