Streaming Conductivity: the interactive flow of physical-emotional engagement
Exploring power and freedom via posture, gesture, enactment, dance, imagination, and theatre
Embodying Care
Consider the interactive flow of physical-emotional engagement that embodies care...
Full engagement has three qualities:
The engagement is effective as participation in an interactive pattern — it is capable of response, whether via skill or in unprescribed ways, as appropriate.
The engagement is not constrained by the inability to access potential force (though the appropriate force in any given moment may be gentle) — it is powerful, fully embodying possibilities for action.
The engagement with the current circumstance does not carry momentum over from the forms of engagement that arose in previous circumstances — it is fluid.
This stream of engagement may effervesce gently like mist on a water or jet out like the gusher of a high-pressure well. When there is a connected circuit of unitary flow of participatory engagement, body-and-world become a single conductive pattern, for the moment.
Below, a variety of methods are discussed that can serve to increase the capability, power, and fluidity of responsive action. This is streaming, responsive action viewed with an arbitrary boundary drawn around body in the body-and-world unitary event. Conductivity is established in a particular context, when the streaming of engagement from body-to-world and reciprocally from world-to-body form a singular circuit without fixed form, a circuit which is continually recreated anew in the next, transformed moment. Conductivity is not concerned with searchlessness, but with responsiveness.
Engagement-Presence-Release
The methods described below are set-aside physical-emotional contexts which provide the circumstance for three aspects:
coming into full engagement with a physical-emotional texture of responsiveness
Full presence to sensation in that context of engagement
release of the momentum of patterns in the context of that presence and engagement
To make things concrete, let’s choose a simple gesture as a physical-emotional context: drawing one’s hands to the chest in a gesture of “this touches my heart”.
To fully engage in something unfamiliar takes time. By repeating the gesture over and over, there is opportunity for deepening engagement. At first, the gesture may be purely physical. Via repetition and a surrender into allowing the gesture to flower as the entire dimension of being, the body can come into full engagement with the resonance of the gesture. Becoming present to all sensation, comprehensively, in this context, reveals the essentialized texture of this gesture. In this context, release of the momentum of patterns can occur.
Compulsive narratives and labels, whether explicit or implicit, coarse or subtle, generate momentum: they serve to create a continuity between this moment and the next. This continuity can be a useful method once there is no compulsion. Presence and appreciation of sensation without narratives or labels reveals the ever-changing, ambiguous and amorphous field of sensation and affordances.
Below, we will explore engagement-presence-release in three forms: individual, facilitated, and group.
Individual Forms
Presence: Spacious Posture and Spacious Gesture
By either holding a single physical-emotional posture, or rhythmically repeating a simple physical-emotional gesture on the scale of a second or so, a bodily circumstance can be generated that serves as the context for coming into full engagement, presence, and release of the momentum of patterns.
Spacious Posture: any posture that can be held (or which can be developed such that it can be held) effectively indefinitely can function as a physical-emotional posture. Many yoga poses could serve this way (though altogether they are a single, limited family of textures); this is entering the emotional from the physical. The physical can also be entered from the emotional, by allowing an emotional sensation (of any valence) to draw the body into a posture: perhaps the posture of the singer in a Broadway show who has just hit the climactic note of their triumphant showstopper, or the curled-up fetal posture of horror.
Whichever way the posture is found, it can become the circumstance to become present all sensation, both kinesthetically and in all other senses, both outer and inner (sensations of thought, emotion, and desire, free of narrative or label). This can become a context for relaxing into or resting in the felt-experience of “this, too, is an acceptable state, which can be fully felt (experienced as sensation without label or narrative). It may continue forever if it will or may end at any moment. Whichever way it goes, it may.”
Spacious Gesture: examples of physical-emotional gestures might be: standing hip thrusts while grunting, raising the shoulders and throwing them down in the spirit of “fuck it”, gentle intimate pulsations of the hands in front of the chest, rhythmically clenching into and then relaxing out of a fearful posture. There are innumerable possibilities. Repetition allows these gestures to become a circumstance for release of the momentum of patterns, functioning similarly to the static circumstance of physical-emotional postures.
Exploration: Liberated Dance and Spacious Enactment of Otherness
Liberated Dance: emotional tones can be elaborated and explored by improvising a prolonged dance in a mood, such as erotic, heroic, disgusting, furious, tranquil. There are innumerable moods in this world to explore. This exploration is a circumstance for discovery of the ways the energy of a mood can be physicalized. Once full engagement has been come into, the dance becomes a circumstance for presence to sensation and release of the momentum of patterns.
Spacious Enactment of Otherness: A one-line single actor theatrical piece can be created, and repeated over and over, whether drawn from fiction, from other’s lives, or spontaneously constructed. Here, it is best if the dramatic role is not experientially familiar to you as a way of being. It may take twenty minutes or so to achieve conviction in the role. Once conviction in the role is attained, and there is presence to the sensation of inhabiting the role, then this becomes the circumstance for gnosis of the nature of states: “this, too, is an acceptable state, which can be fully felt (experienced as sensation without label or narrative). It may continue forever if it will or may end at any moment. Whichever way it goes, it may.”
Embrace: Spacious Enactment of the Unseen and Spacious Imagination
Spacious Enactment of the Unseen: one’s memory can be searched for situations that were not totally allowed or that seem to contain intrinsic momentum, including pleasure not fully allowed or not fully released. Enacting your own past, the actions of others, or fictional characters can all be useful explorations. Spacious Enactment here focuses on at least slightly familiar ways of being, as opposed to exploring possibilities previously outside one’s experience. The focus here is on exploring release of the momentum of patterns. Enacting the mundane can be very revelatory: what is it like to be the shop clerk experiencing you on the other side of the register? What is it like to be a lizard basking in the sun, or enjoying a meal of a bug?
Engagement here is an entering into the disposition of the enactment so any ordinary sense of self fades away: you are not a fiction writer narrativizing the experience of the shop clerk, you are living that experience, with full empathy to the sensation and emotion and desiring of the shop clerk: perhaps a one-act play, “Your change is three dollars and seventy-eight cents”, handing someone bills and coins. What is it to be fully present to that moment? What is it to release the momentum of patterns while also fully engaged in that moment, present to the sensation of that moment?
Spacious Imagination can be used as an “inner” form of Spacious Enactment. Spacious Imagination allows for playing out scenarios which are socially taboo or can be used for explorations which are not physically coherent, such as elaborations inspired by psychedelic experiences, the imagined experience of dying in numerous ways, or sensory fuckery, such as “experiencing as shards of glass flying in numerous directions in infinite blank space”.
There is no way of being that cannot be appreciated and released from the momentum of patterns, from the highest meditative absorptions to the way of being of those who appear most vile. Empathy here enables greater responsiveness and is orthogonal to the question of practical agreement with a way of being. One can have profound empathy for those whom one also acts strongly against.
Facilitated Forms: Spacious Gesture and Liberated Dance
Facilitated Spacious Gesture: physical-emotional gestures are particularly amenable to a facilitator who can intervene and provoke to increase the depth of engagement, if weak. For example, verbally: “kick harder”, “open the eyes wider”, “allow more gentleness and intimacy, feel the chest”; or by interacting bodily, such as pushing hard on kicking legs, or caressing the chest.
Facilitated Liberated Dance: Exploring moods by dance can be fruitfully facilitated in a similar manner.
Group Forms: Streaming Theatre
Streaming Theatre of Dance: exploratory dance is particularly amenable to being a group circumstance, where forms of interaction are added to a mood. For example, exploring relating to others while dancing disgust, and also exploring the spectrum of gaze, from averted eyes to deep eye contact. Or, similarly, exploring the spectrum of engagement while dancing eroticism, from co-erotic, to individually erotic-without-relation, to anti-erotic (without parody or mockery). There is a matrix of forms of interpersonal interaction multiplied by the possibilities of explorations of individual moods.
Narrative Streaming Theatre: Improvised long-form narrative theatre can provide an integrated exploration of possibility. Taking on a role amongst others taking on roles facilitates exploring responsively what it is to come into full engagement of the role. This has as a prerequisite that all participants can drop into their roles as spontaneous engagement, without either distancing from the role or adding conceptuality to the role (as opposed to spontaneous full bodily engagement, presence, and release).
Resting in the aftermath
There is often a natural wave of
increasing engagement
full engagement, entering into the apex of engagement-presence-release
the spontaneous arrival of a sense of completion
Spontaneous completion of engagement can be responded to by collapsing from all activity, entering into stillness, physical relaxation, and feeling all sensation that is happening, until that also reaches completion, and new explorations begin.
The infinite terrain
We have explored a family of approaches to increase the capability, power, and fluidity of unprescribed, responsive action arising from ways of being, in individual, facilitated, and group contexts:
Spacious Posture
Spacious Gesture
Liberated Dance
Spacious Enactment of the Other
Spacious Enactment of the Unseen
Spacious Imagination
Facilitated Spacious Gesture
Facilitated Liberated Dance
Streaming Theatre of Dance
Narrative Streaming Theatre
Engaging in the practices fruitfully requires a preliminary gnosis of the release of the momentum of patterns described in Searchless Responsiveness. While there is nowhere to go with searchlessness, responsiveness has everywhere to go; these methods may facilitate exploration of the infinite terrain.