Shaping the Kinesthetic Field

The kinesthetic field of the body as an artistic path of relationship.

The kinesthetic field of the body is the felt sense of the body in space. For most people, this approximates conventional notions about where your body is located.

The subjective sense of the body, though, does not map one-to-one with the body-as-object. Like all perceptions, it evolved to be useful to the organism, not to be accurate by contemporary ideas about accuracy!

For example, when you are milling about having conversations with other people, there is the distance you stand apart that feels right to you. Hence, someone can be “too close”, impinging on your felt sense of the body. Or (especially with young children) you can tickle someone without touching them! Just make tickling motions close to, or even visually directed at, their body, and laughter ensues!

During sex, the felt sense of the body may naturally expand to include your partner.

Besides shape, the primary other qualities of the kinesthetic field are the felt density and motion, which may be very complex. Imagine if you dropped bright dye into a body of water, revealing the microcurrents. Some bodies of water would be still. Other might have light currents in any direction. Some might have turbulence!

An important further quality available in the kinesthetic field is mood. For example, the kinesthetic field can be infused with heart-feeling, or power, or vitality, or stillness.

Your kinesthetic field is not a fixed thing. It arises naturally in a given form due to habits of perception, usually built up with no consciousness of their development. Like aspects of breathing and aspects of the gaze, the kinesthetic field can come under semi-volitional control. Having the multi-dimensional qualities of shape, density, motion and mood, one can make an art out of the shaping of the kinesthetic field.

Here, I am not going to discuss how to develop volitional power over the kinesthetic field. I am going to elaborate on working with the kinesthetic field as an artistic practice in my relational life.

The simplest transformation of the kinesthetic field is to expand it to include the bodies of others. This places the other person’s body within your tacit field of care. I might do this, for example, if I am sitting on the couch with my wife, just relaxing and being companionable. It brings the potential bodily merging more easily accessed during sex into an ordinary moment, without arousal.

If I am side-by-side with my child who is working on a project, I might include their body in my kinesthetic field. This encourages co-focus, where my focus matches the focus of my child, supporting their focus. That’s because, from all sorts of subtle signs, we can sense the general shape of someone’s kinesthetic field. Someone can look isolated and cut-off from others bodily, or in deep communion with others. To the degree that we haven’t developed full volitional abilities with respect to our kinesthetic field, other’s fields may be contagious, where, for example, someone who is strongly inward turned can cause you to become inward turned. On the other hand, if you can hold one’s kinesthetic field in a situation, other people may find your field contagious!

Any object can be connected with in a deeper manner if it is merged with the kinesthetic field. For example, I just took a sip of a cup of tea. Feeling the cup as part of my body added a dimension of connection to the act. The cup was no different than me.

It is possible, ultimately, for everything in the environment to be felt as one’s body. This might initially sound egotistical, but it is actually counter-egoic: it physically expands the innate self-care for the body into the environment. It decenters the bodily desires and contextualizes them within the “subjectivity of the environment”: what does this environment want to do?

Each of the innumerable ways of engaging the kinesthetic field is an artistic choice. As capabilities grow, the artistic palette grows, and with it the ability to beautify whatever is happening by the form of one’s kinesthetic field.