Streaming Contact

Moving energy via the principle of bodily intimacy

Intuitive Bodywork

There is a tradition of bodywork that perhaps reached its peak in the 1990's, a tradition that today's world cannot effectively support, due to its depth of intimacy and explicit eschewing of prescribed methods. The root teacher, Loil Neidhoefer, taught in Germany, and there is almost no material available in English except a limited run English edition of the German book Intuitive Körperarbeit. He called it "Skan", a word that means “that which moves”. To evoke cultural resonances, it could be described as "intuitive Reichian therapy", or Reich x Da Free John, circa "Love of the Two-Armed Form". Don't over-index on the genealogy and associations, because it is distinctly its own thing!

Skan is both an exploration of what it is to feel energy and emotion streaming and pulsating as a bodily event, and an exploration of intimacy based on feeling the energy and emotion streaming through other's bodies.

Streaming Contact

When you are with *anyone*, there is the possibility of feeling the movement of energy in the space and the bodily energy of the person as a single experience that flows into and mixes with the energy and pulsation of your own body. This includes every person that you might walk past in an airport or walk past on the sidewalk: there is no qualification for who you can come into this form of intimacy with, including people you don't like.

This intimacy is based on the ability to inhabit their lifeworld, as displayed bodily and energetically to you. What does it *feel* like to be them, as *sensation*? The prerequisite for this capability is to actually perceive what it feels like to inhabit your own body, as sensation.

This intimate contact is to allow yourself to feel what the other person displays as feeling in their bodily sensation, putting aside narratives or labels about their experience.

The Exploration

The fundamental one-on-one practice is for one person to lie down on a mat, and simply breathe, deeply and whole-bodily. They may move as they wish, and likely will in time. The person who will facilitate greater streaming of energy starts by simply being present, feeling everything, inhabiting the lifeworld of the person on the mat, coming into full contact.

From this space, perhaps nothing need be done. One could sit for an hour, and the person on the mat may go through a valuable exploration all by themselves.

The facilitator can do whatever is useful to assist in helping unclogging energy. There is no prescribed method. From immersion in the Skan lineage, the facilitator may have hundreds of methods at their disposal, from forms of massage to simple imperatives like "kick!", to high-contact approaches like hugging and wrestling, or simply moving their hands close to the gaze.

The highest-level intuitive choice could be said to be among the following three attitudes:

Merely being *receptively present*. Sometimes this allows the person on the mat to gain confidence in or relax into an energetic movement. Perhaps what has been labeled "shame" relaxes by occurring in the simple receptive presence of another human being, fully in streaming contact.

*Supporting or augmenting the energy*. This could be as simple as noticing some tension in the person on the mat, as if the most subtle desire to reach out is present and encouraging the person to "reach out". Or could be to make a growling sound in response to the person on the mat making a quiet growling-like sound, but a little stronger, encouraging the person on the mat to let their growl out by supporting the energy.

*Resisting or challenging the energy*. For example, if the gaze seems to have places it will not go, then "look at my finger!" where the finger is moving in that corner of vision. If the energy flow is dramatic, but seems to have fallen into repetition, then snapping the fingers near the ear to create a shock that knocks the person out of repetitive energetic dramatization. Or wrestling with the feet and legs, giving the person a challenge to respond to that brings energy and responsiveness into the legs.

Group practice has as many methods as one-on-one practice, and, again, no prescribed methods. Moving, dancing, touching, vocalizing; giving, receiving, and letting go of eye contact.

The Spirit of the Times

The foundation of this work is intimacy at the level of bodily sensation! To become able to be deeply intimate with someone, in this physical way, requires absolute depth of feeling. The meditation as a practitioner is to return to the basic position of inhabiting the other's sensory lifeworld again and again and again. This position is what brings safety: there is always deep sympathy with a person, never a feeling of "here is how they *need* to be helped!", as if the practitioner is bestowing something special, or "I wonder what would happen if I did this?", as if the practitioner was an experimenter on an object. A high-touch method with no carefully prescribed forms of physical contact can only be taught in a culture let by those who are in the dispositions and can transmit these dispositions to those they teach.

Source Material

What follows is a quote from the English edition of Loil Neidhoefer's 1990 book "Intuitive Bodywork". Books like these are simply supporting records of conversations that practitioners have had. A book of interviews with Werner Herzog may reveal much about the foundational attitudes with which he makes film but will teach hardly a thing about the cinematography, producing, or editing. Skan is exclusively transmitted though immersion in a culture, and there *could* be no book or even video series that did much more than touch on it, because it is learned in bodily contact with others. I shudder to think of the abuse that might proceed from those who learned such practices exclusively from books or videos, without the guiding hand of lineage to transmit the indefinable quality of open intimacy that can be found with everyone and anyone in streaming contact.

A one point, Wilhelm Reich wrote that a naturalist has to love his/her object, that he has to be in undisturbed, direct energetic contact with his object in order to do research. The same counts for any form of effective therapy: the therapist must love his/her client in the sense defined by Reich: otherwise nothing will come of it. I am sure that even the method-oriented, highly technical therapy forms only because somehow at the backdoor the necessary measure of human meeting and love happened. "Intimacy is the healing principle," says Da Free John. It is never the method.

In this context Wilhelm Reich speaks about "Vegetative Identification" (vegetative current) and "Organsensation". He describes this ability to feel one's way into a person and to sympathize with with him/her as a part of our biological fundamental equipment, as a means to sensually-concretely realize our connection with nature and the cosmos.

In bodywork, this ability is the decisive tool, the crucial qualification. The people must learn to become more and more sensitive to their own plasmatic movements and streamings and the emotions which are connected with them. They have to learn to not only understand themselves as a pulsating energy field, but first of all to perceive themselves as such.

They have to learn to perceive another as an energy field and to understand the energetic messages. They have to learn to trust their sensations and their intuitions and to not devaluate them immediately. They have to learn to also give space to their seemingly bizarre and unusual intuitions instead of being reasonable. They have to learn to produce and maintain immediate streaming, vegetative contact, and see themselves confronted with their own boundaries and taboos over and over again, in which the possibilities and room for substitute contact get smaller and smaller.