Authentic Movement Community Blog

Galleries for Images by Kathy Chowanec

2011-10-28T09:00:00.000-04:00

The Authentic Movement Community Blog would like to open the door wider to the visual realm, by creating personal galleries of visual art images or creative forming results. We hope you would enjoy seeing your creative forming pieces from a gallery perspective of a whole group of your own work and a group of other's work as well. There is a strong belief that our mind/body tells us things through our artistic expressions. Most pieces currently on the AMC Blog are narrative.
The idea is to have a place for art strictly from authentic movement experience. We are inviting artistic expression that has happened in conjunction with a movement session. These galleries are not for art that has been judged, juried, or awarded any level of expertise. These galleries are not to be art work that is for sale anywhere else.
This is an invitation to send photos of art pieces you may be shy about showing. They can be entered anonymously, or not. This is an opportunity if you want to have comments on what others see in your expressions.
From a personal standpoint this idea came about because I think I’m shy about pieces “I don’t like”. I’m not sure what that means. They are certainly mine, a part of me I love, and yet it would be courageous to have others see them. So I think I need to let others see them to surpass my fear of these art pieces being ugly, unfinished, or out of character, the shadow in me. Putting them on the blog allows me to set them free, see them from a longer lens, be non judgemental about them. They now belong as a part of the blog gallery. I can claim them, or not and decide to remain anonymous. I hope you join me in posting images. ---Kathy Chowanec

Send your images in an email or email attachment to Elizabeth at ereid1@yahoo.com
Please include any titles or wording you would like posted with your image. We need written permission to publish your images and any pictures of you.

Kathy invited the September Reunion of the Facillitator's Group to try these Galleries. Below are six galleries as our first effort. Witness response welcome!

Kathy Chowanec's Gallery

Ann McGinty Gallery "Nourishing Art"

2011-10-28T08:45:00.002-04:00

Visioning

The whole gallery goes together.

Top---Clarity
Bottom---Visioning

Top---Portal
Bottom---My Blue Wings

Top--Yes
Bottom--Holding Fire

Nephron--From nothing comes something

Burning away, letting go

calling card

wonder

crucible

opening

power shield

lightning lifting light

she whispers the door is open

fire in her spine

messenger

the dancer sees

Kathryn Kollar Gallery

2011-10-28T08:45:00.001-04:00

Safety
I really like this one. It feels safe to me. It's odd isn't it?

Safety from a different angle

Safety from one more angle

Let--What's on the table.

Safety--upper left
Dog--lower left
Party--upper right
Let--lower right

Authentic Movement: Creative Forming Roberta Whitney

2011-10-28T08:45:00.000-04:00

SEP 2011

On Mexican Yams

It was a time of the Mexican yam and I am on the edge of creating...
It was a time of estrogen and I am well-beyond ovaries and carrying potential within.

And yet—I can create externally now...

I am the fecundity in a marigold

and flowering broccoli in the gardens.

I am the flow of a watery stream
running off the clay vase, made fountain.
I am stillness drinking in the sun.
I am the warrior--slicing--protecting.
I am the roaring lion-fiercely sounding out

to an [American] culture devouring the children.

I am one half-

one pole-

one side.

In the coolness, I rock.
Waters shift gently within.
I am a silent prayer for life
No longer between hips-but in

the world-wide mother.

I am of Her.

My vessel is She.
It is bigger and more beautiful

than all of time and space.

She is my estrogen,
My Mexican yam.

On Sound

1.
There is a phenomenon
With noise—when it
Stops,
There is still silence...
And in that space, is there no sound?
Night bugs of summer orchestrating after a flaming sunset.
The moon—
Does it not have a sound?
Perhaps, a moon wind whispering over the craters.
And then,
Your breathing.
The most beautiful sound in the world—
Life, singing into you.

2.
Connect—you—me—
The sound between us.
The vibrations do not
Know the color of your hair
Your weight, or mine.
There is no eye color
Revealed in the notes
Only heart—
And there, we meet.

I draw a circle around me—
It is the circle sound creates around us.

Then, as if too staid,
Cacophony erupts.
Sound and pace shift.
Again, I hear noise.

Until that refines
into
Creative overlay of individuated expression
That finds rhythm and expands

Then, ends
After a beat of your foot on the wall—
now still, now silent.

I want A Circle

I want a circle.
Last night, I saw it ringing a moon,
Full and white.
There were colors there
Softly playing off the light.

I want a circle here now.
In this space.
A rainbow circle.

Alison Buck Gallery

2011-10-28T08:30:00.001-04:00

Moving in relation to “Estrogen from the fermented Mexican Yam plant called Dioscorea Composita:”
What is my connection with it?
Part 1 (left): Being rooted in the grasses of nature
Part 2 (right): In Tai Chi mode

Giving Voice to Silence
(My response to a movement session with vocal sounding)

Elizabeth Reid Creative Forming Gallery

2011-10-28T08:30:00.000-04:00

Sound Vibration

witnessing group energy

playing with water color pencils

Transformation tadpoles
The colored pencil drawing transformed with water on paint brushes.

Blue shoulders and hips, black eyes, green torso
Intense and complex body energy at this moment.

more color play

Desire Composita
Answer to the question "What is your connection to fermented Mexican Yams ?

Projection: After I finished this I saw the Moon as I had seen it the night before the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11. It was not my intention as I played with the colors.

"AUTHENTIC" AS THE NEW FAD WORD by Aileen Crow with Carol Zahner

2011-09-25T02:42:00.022-04:00

In the New York Times, in the Fashion section, Sunday, September 11, 2011, there was an article , "Authentic? Get Real" (click here), talking about the fad-like current use of the word "authentic" to describe themselves by many famous people. Michelle Bachman said, "I am authentic." The Pope talks about the challenge to be authentic and faithful. Hilary Clinton said, "I believe in being as authentic as possible." What does that mean? The implication is that being “authentic” is better than—what? Better than usual? Better than others? It implies that one is genuine, real, truthful and spontaneous, and not phony, fake, artificial, insincere, self conscious or pretending --- which, in the article, one professor calls ”calculated authority’, or “stage management.”

Try saying aloud about yourself, "I am authentic." To me, it just doesn’t ring true. I asked a colleague to say that, and she laughed, saying, “I’m a work in progress.” Proclaiming one’s authenticity can imply a hierarchy between those who are authentic and those who are not; between those who are superior and those who are inferior. We are naturally authentic unless we've been traumatized. How strange to brag about it.

I have always thought the use of the word authentic unfortunate for what we do in AM. It no doubt implies that some movements are good, and others are bad. I remember years ago, when my son Daniel, about seven, first heard the word “authentic ", (said in a tone of voice implying something wonderful) he made a grotesque face and gesture, and said, "Is this authentic?" Just a kid, he got the moral implication.

When I am in Authentic Movement, I question constantly HOW DO I KNOW? when I feel I am moving authentically. And when I witness, I question HOW DO I KNOW? when I judge that the mover is or is not moving authentically. What are my criteria, and what am I projecting? There are a lot of different ways to sort. (See Alton Wasson’s article, on “A Chest of Drawers,“ in contact Quarterly, Summer-Fall 2002, and my article on “Sensory Channels” in A Moving Journal, Fall-Winter 2002.)

I recently received from Patrizia Pallaro, who has written two important books about Authentic Movement, (www.movingtheself.org/patriziapallaro.html), the recommendation of a phenomenally relevant article we should all read: "Is 'Authentic' a Meaningful Name for the Practice of Authentic Movement?" The article is written by Dr. Eila Goldhahn, a long-time Dance and Movement Psychotherapist and Authentic Movement teacher, and it was published in the American Journal of Dance Therapy, 2009. http:/www.springerlink.com/content/33533m4873088x24/

Dr. Goldhahn goes into the philosophy of Authentic Movement in fine detail. The history begins with Mary Whitehouse's combining of Jung's “Active Imagination” with dance movement. Whitehouse called what she did “Movement in Depth”. She was followed by Janet Adler, who called her form “Authentic Movement”. Alton Wasson and Daphne Lowell call their version “Contemplative Dance/Authentic Movement.” (www.contemplativedance.org) Shelley Tanenbaum calls her kindred form “Intuitive Life Movement.” (See A Moving Journal, Summer 2004.) Arnold Mindell calls his Process Work approach “Sentient Awareness.” www.aamindell.net

Eila Goldhahn discusses how she arrived at her decision to discontinue using the term Authentic Movement, and instead, proposes an alternate term: "The MoverWitness Exchange," an egalitarian rather than hierarchal concept.

I believe what makes Authentic Movement so essential and much missing in our consensus reality, is that it is sensory based. The body IS authentic.

To paraphrase Yeats, "Oh keep us from the thoughts we think in the mind alone. Those who sing a lasting song sing in a marrow bone."

‘Seeing Within and Without’ Through Authentic Movement:

2011-03-04T08:30:00.008-05:00

Workshops use movement as a bridge to meditation and increased well-being

by Alison Rooney

Suzi Tortora

Courtesy of Phillipstown Dot

Info and Alison Rooney,

©Alison Rooney, February 1,2011

Suzi Tortora’s practice, which encompasses therapy, dance classes and much more, is called ‘Dancing Dialogue.’ It is indeed a dialogue, of words and movement, intellect and emotion, conscious and sub-conscious, which threads its way through the varied classes and workshops she conducts at her Marion Avenue space in Cold Spring. Known to many local parents as the home of gentle, let it flow, creative dance classes for young children, as well as therapeutic dance movement therapy and social skills navigation classes for slightly older children, Tortora also conducts programs for adults who are seeking to reach within and use the combination of a creative process and meditation to come to a deeper understanding of self.

On a recent Saturday, Tortora conducted an Authentic Movement workshop in her inviting studio, lined with colorful scarves and hoops used in her children’s classes. Authentic Movement, also known as Movement Meditation, had its beginnings in the mid-1950s when the woman who first developed it, Mary Starks Whitehouse, combined her interest in Jungian concepts of ‘active imagination’ with her background as a dancer—in particular with modern dance movement improvisation. As Tortora describes it, Whitehouse “got very interested in the content of dance.” The practice drew from its double roots in psychology and in dance, along with mindfulness and meditation; it emphasizes, above all, “compassionate communication.” Authentic Movement is an independent discipline, but is also incorporated into other practices.

There is a mutable structure to Authentic Movement workshops, and the facilitator is able to use the overall template but adjust the timings and the order as suits the individual group. In Tortora’s group, the ten participants, virtually all of whom had participated in previous workshops, began the session with some activities acknowledging and honoring the space and each other. Then, guided by the gentle gongs of a bell, participants paired off into groups of two, each pair consisting of a “Mover” and a “Witness.” All in silence, the five witnesses took spots around the room, while the movers were free to enter into the circular area within, and, with eyes closed or barely open, to let their bodies follow innate impulses, whatever they might be, for a fixed period of time. Some movers were more inwardly-directed, others had bigger, broader movements either in place or in any part of the circle. The witnesses trained their eyes on their specific partner, and focused on their partner’s actions and also how these movements and the aura of their partner influenced their (the witnesses) perceptions, taking care to avoid projection of their own impressions onto the interpretation of the mover. After the movers “time” was up, both movers and witnesses were able to record, either with words, through journaling or through art, their feelings about the movement which had just taken place.

The movers and witnesses then switched off, and the watcher became the watched. This alternating structure was repeated again, and was followed by a meeting time for the pairs, to go over reactions both to self and partner and compare notes, so to speak. Other, more group-oriented movements and reflections followed, and the four-hour program ended with a closing gesture and some dance. All of the participants appeared to be absorbed, in a positive way, with their experience on the day.

Tortora's Marion Ave studio
Courtesy of Phillipstown Dot Info and Alison Rooney, © Alison Rooney, February 1, 2011

Tortora’s notes for the workshop describe Authentic Movement as “a type of meditation that occurs by closing your eyes and listening to your body—as you listen to your body with this inward focus, you will find a natural state—through an unfolding process that can be active, taking you through the room, or deeply internal, where you may not be moving in any perceivable way to your outside observer … the witness never assumes s/he knows what your experience is for you, but rather explains the images and sensations that have come up for her or him. As you listen, you attend to your reactions, to see if any of these images resonate with your experience.” The website http://www.authenticmovementcommunity.org/ describes the process as “[it] cultivates a contemplative frame of mind, clarity of perception, and movement that is personally enhancing.”

Suzi Tortora has been practicing Authentic Movement for over 25 years. She learned it from Janet Adler, who was a protégé of Mary Whitehouse, being first a patient and then a student. Adler studied and applied Authentic Movement initially as a therapy, and then as a practice, and Tortora’s sessions are similarly non-therapeutic, serving instead a “personal discovery” for those who partake of it. Tortora sees Authentic Movement as “a free association, but we allow our bodies to move us, rather than our minds.”

The participants in Saturday’s workshop were male and female and ranged in age across decades. Some had worked with Tortora before, and others have done Authentic Movement in a different setting and with different guides. “Our bodies tell stories,” says Tortora. “Our bodies are maps of everything that’s ever happened to us. The more you listen, the more you tune out the chatter, the more you discover about yourself. Shut off the thinking self and go into the kinesthetic self.” Tortora herself has been a participant in Authentic Movement retreats, some lasting as long as “10 or 12 days, where you go deeper and deeper into the process, spending several days in a row just moving and journaling, getting in touch with self in a mind-body way, creative and expansive.”

Asked how other dance therapy practitioners view Authentic Movement, Tortora, also a dance/movement psychotherapist replied, “most people treasure it.”

Excerpt from the article, “Seeing Within and Without Through Authentic Movement” originally published in “Philipstown Dot Info” http://www.philipstown.info/ptwp/?p=9560. Reprinted here by permission, courtesy of Phillipstown Dot Info, Alison Rooney, and Suzi Tortora. © Alison Rooney, February 1, 2011

Witnessing in Silence, by Ann McNeal

2011-02-12T12:50:00.010-05:00

A report from the Contemplative Dance Winter Retreat Feb 3-6, 2011, led by Alton Wasson in Westfield, MA

q u i e t

I’m in such a tender state from this mostly-silent movement retreat (the Contemplative Dance Winter Retreat Feb 3-6, 2011, led by Alton Wasson in Westfield, MA).

It was a workshop in the thick of winter, the snow deep and crusty in the lawns and woods of the Genesis Center, but the sun also thickening towards spring, its warm hand reaching down from blue, blue sky to touch our faces.

We were eight dancers plus a leader. There was much silence, a care in speaking.

I knew I needed to let go, let go. I’ve been busy with projects of my own making—important projects dear to me. I was tangled in my own fishing lines, the ideas, the ambitions, the urgency, the familiar loss of center.

Our first movement session was an hour. Catch, release, think, let go. Crawl on the floor, feel gravity welcoming me, then spiral off into thoughts. Lie down and sigh, let my hands trace the contours of my face, then another flock of ideas swooping like starlings, carrying off any peace that had crept in. Over and over, the step by step descent and startle, release and be caught up.

As we sat in the circle afterwards, Alton invited each of us to take five minutes to share what had happened, but with a different twist. It would be OK to sit in silence for those minutes and simply be held in the container (the grace, the mind, the love) of the group. Whether we spoke or showed a movement or simply sat, it would be a continuation of the meditation that was the movement.

Just to form the words for this, I leave the experience. We were

held, together,

separate, safe,

invited gently,

allowed, allotted

these minutes ours

whether we said a word

or closed our mouths in awe

There was no requirement to come out of the deepening quiet, no requirement to produce a word or conjure a concept. And, at the same time, each of us was seen. Being silent did not mean being ignored or left out. When my turn came, after two people had spoken, bringing words to their experience, I crossed my hands on my breast, with a shaky indrawn breath, and sat, trusting that I was held, silent for five minutes, being with the group with no words. Occasionally I looked at faces and saw acceptance. Throughout the weekend, different people took this risk in the circle and allowed the group to witness and hold them without articulating or condensing their experience. The space felt larger for this.

I am still learning what it is I savored, what grace we created and discovered and risked.

You do not have to speak

in order to be heard.

You do not have to move

to be seen.

Nor accomplish

to be worthy.

The glory of your being

is with you

in sickness and in health

in moving and in stillness.

You are loved,

you are held,

you are worthy

of all this.

Kathryn Kollar said...: Ann,What a beautiful reminder for even those of us who were there. Thank you for this sharing. It moves my dream forward and enrichs my own experience.My Love,Kathryn; Sunday, February 20, 2011 8:51:00 AM EST
Christine Draper said...: Thank you Annfor reminding me of the giftof being heldby the group.I feel deepened,stilled, seen.Christine; Monday, February 28, 2011 9:15:00 PM EST

Gratitude for the Fourth Anniversary of the Authentic Movement Community Web Site

2010-11-21T14:45:00.004-05:00

It did not really occur to me what a delight it would be to create a presence for the Authentic Movement Community on the web. When we began this venture in a brainstorming session of the International Gathering in June 2006, I only knew a handful of folks from our community. Four years later I am familiar with over 400 names of people who participate on some level with the practice of Authentic Movement. Renewals for the Directory have been steady with over 25 updates in the last few months. Thank you for keeping your listing up to date with us! Not a month goes by that one and usually many more write me to express their gratitude for the work of the site. For example the response to our anniversary notice included these notes:

I am so grateful for the Community, for the first year with the A Moving Journal and now for the blog. I would love to help more, but I don´t know how because my life in Brazil is really busy. I have no money to support. My way is to continue the work here, to create a group which is studying the practice and its theories and in a long term, I would love to have here in Rio like a Conference. And I have preparing myself to write more. Thanks Elizabeth for everyhting and share my gratittude to everybody. Authentic Movement became my first teaching and practice. A basic practice for creating also other practices .... Much love, Soraya

Wow Elizabeth, you guys have been doing such a huge service to the world AM community, and doing so with grace, insight, and solid, creative and clear principles. real leadership. congratulations and thanks and kudos to you all. truly! Daphne Lowell

Would love to contribute - will send (small) donation today - I don't take part much but so need your presence! Thank you for being there. Kedzie Penfield

A gift was given in our name to provide seeds for one acre community garden through the Seva Foundation.

So . . . . I am the one who gets to hear all this gratitude and take it in, but I hope that you also get the message sent back from me and all of us who work on the site of how grateful we are for our community.

Sending the message back to all of you ... Thank you! Elizabeth

Witnessing Somatic Experience in Maya Lila

2010-10-16T10:41:00.005-04:00

By Emma Meehan

I wrote an article on www.choreograph.net about my experience of witnessing in the Maya Lila performances of Joan Davis, an Irish choreographer who works with Authentic Movement. As a participant-researcher, I have tried to deepen my understanding of Davis’ approach by interacting with the work on a practical level. In attending training modules with Davis, I have been particularly fascinated with her emphasis on tracking and reflecting on experience through different layers of witnessing. This is what I hope my writing grapples with, as I seek to find a way of articulating my relationship with the work, rather than attempting to document Maya Lila in an objective way. Please follow the link if you would like to read the full article, and I welcome any responses. http://choreograph.net/articles/article-witnessing-somatic-experience-in-maya-lila

Thanks,
Emma.

© 2010 Emma Meehan

Anonymous said...: I could not get into the link.; Saturday, December 4, 2010 8:16:00 PM EST
Emma said...: Hi there, you could go to www.choreograph.net, my article is on the lower left side under Recent Articles. Emma; Monday, December 6, 2010 4:42:00 AM EST

(Unabashed) Ode to my Self

2010-08-29T14:23:00.003-04:00

This was written at the annual wild-women annual Maine get together (my name for it), and is submitted to the blog at Aileen’s urging. Ego was on my coat tails as I wrote it, wanting to own it, panting at getting credit, making its squeaks at taking over, tamper with, wanting to be in front of it. That was as interesting as the session.

A meditation on stacked block cushions. Wide-legged Indian stance by a sunny window turns to a self-healing session, going over every nook and cranny of the body’s terrain. Everything gets smoothed out and over. Feels so good.

I begin walking the bar and the wall. It becomes walking my life continuum. I am touched by how I/She loves me best. Knowing exactly how to satisfy, entertain, listen and respond. It’s beautiful. I become a gorgeous lover, an open wanderer/adventurer, a playful/fun mate, an astute see-er/listener. Back and forth I go, sometimes forward or backward, sometimes sideways. The light contact with the bar and the wall is imperative.

After many many back and forths I can leave the bar and travel the wall, delicately mostly, but sometimes with great strength and athleticism; pushing, leaning, resisting. I am the wall, I am the body resisting the wall, I am the folding into the wall. It’s all lovely, nourishing.

I am the best person I know. I love her so. I have loved walking this life with you. She knows me so well, can give me exactly what I most need and want when I am engaged with her. Time spent with her is pure joy, pure rightness. I even love that she is not perfect, and am charmed by her sometime misalignments, mistakes; she elicits generosity when her woundedness surfaces. I feel so grateful for everything that she is, that I am. So lucky! I feel excited about living with you for the rest of my life.

posted anonymously by request

Anonymous said...: XXXXXXXXXXXXhow delishluscious you are!; Monday, September 6, 2010 3:31:00 AM EDT

LONG DISTANCE AUTHENTIC MOVEMENT, by Annette Geiger

2010-08-01T15:42:00.012-04:00

The Vienna AM group that I participated in last year came up with the idea of doing a long distance AM session and I joined them.

Saturday July 31st 2010, 08:00

With my dog I go for a long walk in the woods. The weather is beautiful, after some cool rainy days. The sky is blue, there is a wonderful smell in the air and the trees are comforting.

10:30

The candle is lit. I am imagining the room in Vienna where we all moved together for days last year. I see faces and hear sounds. I feel human beings around me and I feel protected in and from that image.

1st movement 10:35 to 10:55

I am alone with my dog. I decide to keep him in the room as my witness or my peer. He goes immediately onto the sheepskin which I had put on the floor in case I want to lie down. He starts to lick at his feet, I can hear it. After standing for a while and waiting for what wants to come, my torso moves forward and down, slowly and gently until I am on my knees. The arms go down and the back of my hands go on the floor. They are open and are welcoming my skull to comfort in them.

The operation on my cheek 4 months ago has not allowed me to go into full body movement – I am a little anxious about what will happen. My skull is moving very slowly in my hands – I am very aware of the skin and the bones. There is a big range of movement in the skin. The skull is hard and strong. My face starts to relax and muscles after muscles let go, my breathing is getting deeper and deeper. The spine moves delicately like a snake. Slowly and gently my whole torso and my head are moving in that position, while the arms and legs become part of the movement. It is like being in a fluid state, very comfortable and safe, satisfying, calming and soothing. I am in a silent trance.

After getting up I feel an ongoing movement in my head, my eyes are seeing from deep inside into the room, my breathing is carrying me. My body feels light and at ease. My mind is peaceful.

2nd movement 11:05 to 11:25

I am very aware of being „on“ the world. I see the world like a big living ball and I feel very connected with it. I am standing on my sheepskin, my feet far apart. My body is searching for its perfect balance. The arms move up and out, the fingers are streching out. My body is aligning itself like the needle of a compass. It wants to go into length, width and depth as much as possible in these moments. All the bones of the skeleton become very clear. I see it like a drawing in motion, in the position of the Vitruvian Man, in the famous drawing by Leonardo da Vinci.

The heart beat is strong and the breathing gets very deep, it moves my belly. What strong muscles! I am representing a priestess, a goddess or a shaman. It feels very archaic. It is not about me. I am representing someone who makes people aware of what „IS“.

For quite a while it feels very light and easy to be in that position. What a body feeling, to be so transparent and light at the same time. My body farts several times. The sound is deep and wide and reminds me of a drum. Oh, my inner drums make sounds. The smell is very spicy and good.

I lie down in the same position. Legs apart, arms way out. I become aware of the difference of my left and right side. In my left side the heart beats and I feel my poor cheek, my right side is still. Both sides are very present in their own quality. The left side has the quality of the moon, the right side of the sun. It is not what I would imagine the sun is like, but that is what it tells me. The two sides are very separate and very different. There is no judgment. The left side feels more alive, the right side more still. I feel very connected with he world in my dance of beautiful colors and changing forms. I realize that I am lying on the world. I am lying with the whole length of my back on this big big ball – surrounding the whole ball and embracing it while looking out and listening to a big silence. I am embracing the world and breathing into it – I am seeing in all directions.

It is the big IT IS, the big I AM, the big WE ARE.

The moving has been very interesting, satisfying and fulfilling. Thank you all for being there and giving me the chance to move with you in time and space.

I have sent my writing to the Vienna group and asked that I hear from all of them about their experiences. (Maybe to be shared on this blog).

Love to you all, Annette

Comments:

Julia Morozova said...
Thank you for sharing this, Annette!
i would like to share my experience, I joined the session from my place.

I close my eyes and listen to my body. My body feels a bit numbed, as if I am still sleepy. In my mind I am making a connection to the people moving at the same moment in Vienna and in other places.
There are sensations in my fingers and palms as if they are electrified. I start moving my hands, observing how these sensations change. The image comes to me as if there are strings connected to my fingers. i think of movers in Vienna, but suddenly images from my dreams of the last days are coming up. I have dreamed about people I saw for the last time about 20 years ago and didn't hear anything from them anymore, but in my dreams these persons were very important, it felt like they brought very important message with them. I feel excitement and sadness. I spread my arms and stand up, I am turning around the room with spread arms, trying to reach not only the ones who are far way from me in the space, but also the one who are left in the past. the feeling of sadness is still present but is getting lighter, i feel released. Tears and smile. Hope. Gratitude
Thank you!
Julia

Thursday, August 12, 2010 7:20:00 PM EDT

Donna Kuhn asks:

How is this done long distance?

Friday, June 10, 2011 5:27:00 PM EDT

A GARDEN WITNESS, by Roberta H. Whitney

2010-08-01T13:04:00.009-04:00

The plant stems, supporting sagging leaves during a summer’s drought cast long shadows across earth and rock as I walk a small garden. My whole body stands in imitation of the stalks. My skin feels puckered like a plant craving water.

Muscles draw in protectively, in imitation of the flowers. My chin turns upward, mouth soft and vulnerable, open and begging water from the sky. Waiting thus, a flutter flashes my line of vision and I look sideways to see a black butterfly settle on a purple cluster of tiny flowers. Stalks shimmy in a dry breeze.

The butterfly’s wings turn upward, revealing an inky coat splashed with orange and white edging. I am reminded of lace. I stand transfixed with its beauty. I do not know how it is called. As the wings settle, I delight in a pale blue strip accenting the black. I had not seen this before. I expect its departure any moment. I leave, having imbibed all I can for now.

Witnessing when I stand in nature opens me in deep ways. I feel easily what impacts me, whether beautiful or ugly. Yet even here, as real as it seems, I can be subject to projection. For example, moments earlier, I stopped to watch a large brown beetle ramble over mulch beside a blue hydrangea.

The evening air was thick and there was no rain. I scanned the hydrangeas and then my eyes grew wide at the sight of what seems gigantic…a cockroach on spindly legs? I studied it…a large beetle I named it. Even as part of me wanted to step on it lest it hurt the plant of my affection, something else wanted to get down on hands and knees, observing this being’s movements more closely. My mind got busy: In what pattern did its legs move?

I simply stood. But I noticed that my inner conversation was not strictly scientific study. “Too fast it’s going…Why, it can’t get over that large chunk of mulch? Look, it missed that way.”

Noting this, I smiled. Was I looking at this being as if it were a tiny child?

I witnessed the witness. My gaze settled into appreciation of the moments…and I noticed what each movement told me about myself.

Comment:

I enjoyed reading your writing. A reminder that movement and witnessing happens minute to minute, it is as easy as bringing awareness to it....Corlene

Sunday, August 8, 2010 2:41:00 PM EDT

SUMMER MOMENTO, by Germaine Fraser

2010-08-01T13:00:00.001-04:00

After reading Roberta's entry, I was struck at how familiar it was, having had one or two like experiences this summer: summer momentos in a way. I attach one. It's affirming of these short-in-time sessions and the power of them.

My home is filled with young-adult offspring visiting for the first time in a long while. It is early morning, everyone is asleep but me. I have my tea and meditate begrudgingly. Resistance reigns constantly day in and day out these days. It’s been a “dark night of the soul” time for me; not sure where I belong in the world, vague on the purpose of this life.A transition is here. I feel lost and ungraceful navigating the waters when I am trying not to completely avoid the discomfort of it. The meditation brings me some material; something about intimacy in my relationship to myself. My life is my own. This being and body I inhabit the only thing that I will ever truly be able to count on as being there for me through this life’s continuum. My chronic eight year mind-meanderings of where I should go, where/how should I live is somehow answered, “what does it matter? You are at Home in yourself (right this minute, anyway). You just need to have a space, an empty room to welcome You.”

I putter around the still house on this warm summer morning and find myself sitting on the edge of an overstuffed chair in the living room. My eyes close and open periodically as my arms lift and slide across each other and my face in this sublime, tender way. The soft belly of my forearm turns inward slowly with a pulsing attention. Love and care and intimacy are invoked into the torso’s trunk, the planted pelvis and legs. Everything takes it’s own time. Something is hugely respectful in me of me. My cool inhale-breath matches the air lightly playing in my armpits as these forever arms and wrists and hands do their thing. It’s a short but very complete little session.

Comment:

Teri said...
Your description of moments of just being with awareness inspires me to cherish such treasures.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010 12:51:00 PM EDT

NIGHT BODY by Roberta H. Whitney

2010-08-01T12:53:00.021-04:00

The clock shows me the time: 2:51AM. I turn over and draw the blankets up tightly around my chest. I debate through closed eyes whether I should get up to move. The inner dialogue sounds something like this:

“You’ll feel better if you do.”

“Yes, but it is going to be so cold downstairs.”

“Only for a bit-you won’t notice the chill for long and the carpet is warm.

“It’s the perfect time. It’s so quiet.”

“It’s quiet here too. My mind will settle soon.”

“And what about the body?”

“Oh, alright.”

Folding back the covers more with reluctance than gentleness, I pull on my fleece robe and secure the tie at my waist. My left hand taps into the blackness that is a chair, locating some slipper socks. I bend to put them on and proceed to the door, turning the knob to close it behind me as I head down the stairs.

My mind presses forward, “Well, if you’re going to be up, you could answer those emails and read the article on…”

I pass through a lower doorway on the staircase and scuff across the dining room into the living room, pulling closed yet another set of doors separating me and sleep.

I raise the blinds at the bay window, drawing in light amid the blackness. I breathe. I sigh. I don’t have the slightest idea why I have lain awake since 12:23AM. The mind has kept running…decisions…issues…conversations…even existential matters. Arms break through this cloud hanging over my head. My back arches slightly and then curves like a silky snake.
I come to hands and knees. Cat/cow yoga stretches move through my spine and back. I rest in child’s pose. My mind wants to grab onto something known here and I wonder if I should go ahead and work on a yoga lesson plan for later in the week? I seem wide awake. My mind feels clear. Or does it?

I close my eyes with a gentle intention. I want to be with my body. I invite the mind to rest. I kneel then, again arching my back slightly. Arms lift. I have an image forming of lifting weights. In my arms I feel resistance…

I lean over, ‘washing my hands’ of “it”…slowly, deliberately. There then is an interlude on my back. Something is gentle and opening. Movements are more unstructured. I lose a sense of specifics playing through my body.

To use Janet Adler’s terminology, in the next pool I remember, I am on hands and knees, my belly hanging down. I shake back and forth, then wildly throw my weight from side to side. Hair sweeps my face and shoulders like hard rain on a car windshield.

I pause. I feel my heart beat. The living room feels too small. I want to run. Instead, I move on knees like a bull—I bounce into the side of the sofa, several times then I slide my head down between my breasts and suck air from deep in my lungs. Exhaustion spreads over my shoulders. There is a sense of wasted energy…something about futility…loss…a scattering. Now seated on my knees, hands massage my head. Then I drop to the floor, knees bent. My head is in my hands.

I roll to my right, hands gathered at my heart. Nurture…care…ease…my breath changes.
I lie still and sense something within that is forming around a need in my life. I lie still, being with it all until it is clear. My body speaks.

I rise slowly after a few more minutes. My breath has slowed. My body feels relaxed and slightly heavy. I pad back upstairs through the three doors…I sleep almost immediately.
________________________________________________________

I’m not sure how many of us move in the middle of a night or use Authentic Movement to treat insomnia. However, I would welcome other’s insights and experiences.

I am not a scientist but I am intrigued by how a few moments of being with my body has repeatedly, on many occasions, calmed my whole being and restored a natural balance. I sense these movements in the night come more easily perhaps because I am more tired and my mind is less guarded. I also sense that night itself pulls me inward, in the quiet and darkness.
On night duty, if I allow it, my body shares what it is holding. Whether I give it a detailed witness or simply allow a general sensation to come, the time offers me release. Something shifts whether named or not.

The sessions in these night meanderings are often brief, each interlude lasting perhaps ten or twenty minutes. Many times I don’t jot anything down. The next morning there may be some details, or not. But I do in all cases, find rest and because perhaps I gain an inner congruence, I often feel less fatigued…certainly more than I might if I simply remained awake in bed, without the “night rising”.

3 comments:

Mie Sato said...
there have been times also awake in the middle of the night when I listen and follow my body impulses. I do not get out of bed..I lie there quietly until my body finds what it needs. Sometimes it is a rocking motion from side to side from vigorous to softly. Other times it could be shaking out limbs as if the days energy was caught in the muscles of my legs preventing the ability to surrender to deep sleep....Recently my mind decided that being without a lover did not mean that I had to do without tender touch.I started with my right hand following the skins surface down my left arm, traveling over my body like a forgotten landscape. I allowed myself to linger when the movement needed repetition. This became a loving experience of touching myself as I would like to be touched ending with a strong pulse deep in my chest. Then I lay quietly and fell into a deep sleep.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010 7:52:00 AM EDT

Teri said...
What a beautiful vignette by Roberta and comment by Mia. Using mindfulness and embodiment to integrate deep layers of the psyche and body remains my favorite path. This includes writing and painting and making music. It is so joyful to be free from judgment as you observe your body and allow it to be the observed while your witness consciousness remains the observer.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010 12:46:00 PM EDT

Emma said...
Really appreciate this post and the following comments. Since reading, I have practiced Authentic Movement when I can't sleep. Not sleeping has been a bit problem for me when I am anxious or stressed, and I am amazed how this helps me to switch from a chattering brain to mindful awareness even in the dead of night. I step out of bed and lie on the floor, waiting for movement impulses, my breathing changes, then often movements arise and finally I crawl back into bed and drift off to sleep.
Thursday, December 2, 2010 9:15:00 AM EST

TOUCHING AND RECEIVING, by Lucy Mahler

2010-07-30T10:08:00.002-04:00

At the beginning of an Authentic Movement group (all women), I felt out of my body, inundated by real-life problems. I couldn’t move the way I normally like to move. I had overeaten. I was judging myself and my belly (which felt bloated and gassy) as too big and too fat - Busting out - Too soft and flabby- Tired- Not vital - Unlovable and untouchable.

In the movement session, I am trying to find my agility and my “dancers body”. I’m telling my body how it should be moving, but my body is continuing to feel the way it feels. Finally I give in to being where I am: swollen belly and breasts, feeling disconnected.

Gradually my body begins to express how different parts are feeling. They want to
be touched. My hands reach out to read and accept exactly how each part is feeling.

Through the wisdom of my hands, I have the sense of being connected to an ageless wisdom that knows exactly how to heal. I try a few undiscovered and exactly perfect touching techniques that have unexpected depth, nuance, rhythms, pressures, lightnesses, and off-the-body finger dances. The area being addressed kisses and is kissed in perfect unity.

It dawns on me that I have been doing this healing dance for others for twenty-five years! Why do I forget to do it for myself?

My hands remember they have the skill to hear and channel what my body is longing for. Touching and receiving become the meeting place where anything and everything can happen, especially the miraculous. My belly burps out its discomfort, and I am once again whole and healed by simply moving authentically.

Thank you to all who share these circles and these depths with me, and who continue to create safe spaces and havens of communal dance.

© 2010 August 7, 2010

Moving in Greece by Elizabeth Reid

2010-06-13T07:29:00.026-04:00

We start in Delphi... do our movement practice in the ruins. My partner and I did not want to close our eyes to the beauty so we did an eyes open movement scan, swinging and twisting, each time around slowly noticing differences; the irregular but solid way the stone walls were built, the flowers growing among the stones, the tall cypress trees. Each scan and twist brings a different focus; the nuthatches are actually parent and child;one feeding the other. This was really a pre-workshop day lead by Alton Wasson.

The workshop begins in Athens with three leaders, Alton, Dennis McCarthy and Sil Reynolds. We are in a basement conference room way below the Parthenon. We will use Homer's Odyssey as the backdrop, invocation for movement, dreams and sand play. Often this is way too intense a story for me and I just don't go there with the story or the group. I can't get my mind around drowning Odysseus or monster plagued Odysseus or visiting the house of the dead Odysseus. Many in our group explore glorious fire filled, terror inducing monsters. My images are uninspiring to me.

But the story fills our dreams and morning movement sessions come alive for me with growling back scratching bears and loosening senovial fluids in my stiff joints as my jet lag lessens. I find some new inner voices and landscapes to add to my inner child, inner elder, and slowly quieting inner critic. Other dreamers dream of a divine child and this inspires me with help from Dennis to explore an inner wise child who does not need care. This image side steps my obsessive questioning of why I can't get enough nurturance to heal old neglect. The image helps me remember a place inside that does not feel needy and has always felt just wise and full and beyond beautiful.

Sil reminds us each day that Penelope is waiting and weaving for twenty years while Odysseus adventures; the capital “T” feminine archetype. When Alton reads the last night of the couple's reconnection, the inner romance, inner marriage of male and female finds a sensual landscape in my body where action and waiting, striving and grieving, sailing and sitting, traveling and being home meet in inner recognition of all the parts of the self that love to be bedded in a deeply rooted olive tree.

Another mover and I do pair witnessing in the Aegean/Mediterranean waters of our secluded alcove on Paros. In my imagination we are dolphins and fetuses in deep green and blue enclosures or incubators. My sand play partner and I create scenes with balloons and edges and roots, monster eyes that swirl in our dreams and imagination and then for real as we have chosen live snails for the eyes that move off center as we work. We find big bellies, thunder bolts and veils in the rocks, devouring dogs and Poseidon's angry face. All the beauty of the Greek landscapes become our projective field. So we indulge the sweet practice of “in my imagination” and “if this were my dream” every day until lunch.

It is hard to travel with a group of 18; herd into cars, find restaurants, to order and split the bill fairly. It takes us until the last days to order just what each want, to eat what we want from our own plate and then let it go around the table for others to taste. Amazingly spiced chick peas, mild anchovies, zucchini balls, rooster in a mild red sauce, rabbit, chicken souvlaki, honey dipped deserts, local soft cheese, local wine made by the waitresses father, are sampled around until all are much too full. We order less as the days pass, but we are fuller at the end.

1 comment:

Greece said...: Hi Elizabeth,

Thank you for this remembrance of our time in Greece. There was so much captured movement there in the drape of the garments on statues and in the postures of the figures themselves. To view the Caryatids sustaining the porch on the Erichtheum, each with a slightly bent knee evoked a slow dance suspended for over 2400 years. And then the procession on the inner frieze of the Parthenon with men, horses, bulls, boys, and women all still circulating in honor of Athena. We were not alone in our attempts to embody our experiences there.
Good to share this rich time with you, Tom; Tuesday, June 22, 2010 9:31:00 AM EDT

An Account of the 2009 International Authentic Movement Gathering, Vienna

2010-03-24T16:45:00.007-04:00

There is a challenge, a never-ending game, being in the abyss between having a sensation and naming it.

Why would we write about the 2009 Vienna International Authentic Movement gathering in Vienna in March when it took place last July? Maybe because we are looking forward to the 2010 gathering. We remember moving together, thinking about the perspectives of developing practices, skills and understanding what we call “the miracle” of Authentic Movement.

The Second International Gathering of Authentic Movement took place again in Vienna, Austria in July 2009. This time there were nineteen people from twelve different countries: Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, the U.K., the U.S., Ireland, Switzerland, Norway, Portugal, Brazil, Russia and Belarus. Therapists from the fields of dance-movement therapy, body-oriented therapy, music therapy, Hakomi, psychomotor, and others were present. Whether there for the first or second time, we were all united by one thing - the Authentic Movement practice. We convened once again in the wonderful space of the therapeutic center, Gersthof, that our colleague therapists Isaías and Clarissa Costa, generously provided for this annual gathering.

The International Meeting of AM lasted four and a half days and maintained a very full schedule. The first night we started with an Authentic Movement “long circle”. The following days there were two sessions each day. A warm-up starting each session was offered by one of the participants. The group decided on the form for each following session in the day based on the individual state and needs of participants. One evening our Brazilian colleagues, Soraya Jorge and Guto Macedo, showed us the video of their work and spoke of their dance projects. On another day, on the initiative of Alexei Konstantinov (Minsk), a group discussion took place regarding methodological issues of the practice. There was a lot of professional as well as interpersonally warm and supportive interaction.

Following are the experiences from three of the attendees:

Yulia Morozova:
This was the second peer-group gathering that I attended. The first hours in the therapeutic centre Gersthof, were filled with the joy of reconnecting with old friends and the anticipation of meeting new people. I knew some things about the new participants from the impressive mail introductions. I was very excited to meet and communicate, talk, move, and witness with people who had years of training and practice in AM and other fields of movement and dance therapy.

It was remarkable to me, that the most used form was a 'long circle'. We did not plan it in advance, but by the middle of the day, after sharing and asking which form feels the most appropriate to undertake in the moment, the long circle was most often chosen. This choice in the moment was natural and reflected the logic of a process. This being said, I feel I missed dyad processes!

During the sessions, I faced some moments in practice that were new for me. For example, one participant asked the circle of witnesses to make some space for moving outside the circle—behind the witnesses, so if one had a need to move there s/he could do so. Another participant noticed that in her practice there was an 'official third role' in addition to the mover and the witness. This being so, if a person in her/his process couldn't stay in the witness position, but couldn't be a mover either, s/he could choose the role of the one 'sleeping 'outside the circle. I do not know how this fits in with the classic canon of AM, but I think sometimes it could be the safest option in some situations.

The discussion initiated by Alexey Konstantinov, revealed that we have learned the practice in slightly difference ways, not the core of the discipline but some details of the form. These tiny details, such as how the mover begins the process, (ie: sliding to the floor from her place with eyes closed, taking a place not far from her witness, or going to the place where something "caught" the attention when s\he was a witness) were in question. The language of witnessing was also a question. Do we say, "I see the mover", or "I see you", or "I'm the witness who sees the mover." Of course we asked ourselves, which version is "the right one"? We came to the conclusion, that awareness is most important in that every word and action has a function that impacts the movers and the group process. We then as a group, could find and commit to solutions that were safe and supportive to our process. Finding time for the discussions was difficult. That is the common problem at such gatherings, to find time for everything: for more AM-sessions, for the discussions, and for the integration of one's own process.

Also the witnessing styles present at this gathering I would call poetic. In a large group setting where there is not much time for the detailed sharing, there begins the process of crystallization of many sensations, movements, images and feelings in a few capacious words. The witnessing remained full of sensation, and that was for me the breathtaking process of creating the space of shared experience. This is a space where everyone could see and be seen, as well as feel and share with others. It was like poetry. My experience was that witnessing sometimes became the form of a poem.

This meeting was one of the most supportive events of the year for me, and I am grateful to all those with whom I shared this experience.

Elena Starikova:
“To write about a peer group with the understanding that I am myself a member of a peer group for two years is important, as it clarifies and makes the practice of Authentic Movement more conscious, more valuable and grounded not only in the body, but also in words. The format requires sufficient maturity and elaboration (or desire to move in that direction), the ability to take responsibility, not only for one’s own process but also for the process happening in the group as well. This is a group without a leader. What does it mean? In the group with a leader, we are completely, feeling it within, sharing with others and learning to see and be seen. In general, it can be called a learning process where the formation and development of “Authentic Movement skills” takes place. The leader teaches, directs and is responsible for group dynamics. He/she leads the process. In the peer-group, leadership as I understand it is distributed among group members who possess the ability to see the process and talk about it outside the language of the projections, based on the deep experience of the body. This is the language of respect and trust for others. By following the rules drawn up by the group, we have the ability to discuss and follow the unfolding process. I often have brought to the group’s attention that we should not move further until we have specified all the nuances to achieve the necessary safety to start the movement again. Even if one member feels unsafe, the group takes this into account and looks for the most appropriate practice for the present session.

Yes, we practiced most often in a long circle, a breathing circle with a bit of dyad work. Why did most people prefer the long circle? I think it gave everyone in the group process support and allowed themes to unfold, giving them space to grow and gain strength. The long circle gave us the freedom to balance between the roles of witness and mover, assessing the needs to move or to be seen. Dyad work at the beginning of the process served as a good start and established the sufficient level of confidence in the group. There were warm-ups in pairs that held the same authenticity felt in AM dyad work.

Yes, it is true we were all from different schools, from different countries and even continents, but we were sharing a universal language of movement, scooping it from the depths of our own experience—the wisdom of ours bodies. Of course it is important to verbalize the details of the practice again and again, the process of formulating the rules for the practice, by referring to the foundational principles laid down by Mary Whitehouse, Janet Adler, and others whose work is now (to the great joy of the many of us who do the practice) available in the printed form.

In spite of the fact that the fundamental rules are the same for many people practicing AM - the nuances and the details can be determined by each group separately; the group develops, breathes, grows and can experiment with different forms of practice. This is what I found and became open to. I am glad that my understanding of the AM practice is resonant, on the same rails so-to-speak with those at the conference, giving me the possibility to “move myself” further.

As I see it now, it would be great to have more space for the integration of whatever came through the movement and witnessing experience. Perhaps, one free day in the middle of the conference to just emerge from the process. But this, I think, is to be discussed in this next year. Overall the experience of moving and witnessing, communicating and the new interactions with such remarkable people brought and continues to bring an increasing awareness and understanding in me. The ideas, the great support received and a lot of joy came from the understanding that there is AM practice in many parts of the world!

And, of course, I would like to thank Irina Biryukova who conveys the tradition of Authentic Movement in the form in which it is proposed by Janet Adler, Joan Chodorow, Tina Stromsted and the others. I also want to thank my peer group in Moscow, which continues to move and be moved.

Soraya Jorge:
After a wonderful description to our meeting in Vienna in the year 2009 from Yulia and Elena, I am bringing some words with the intention to participate in this written piece. I feel a great honor to be part of this Gathering and appreciate their impulses to give and shares words from our time together.

All my work as a movement specialist is profoundly touched by the discipline of Authentic Movement. The way I learned and the way I´ve been developing it in Brazil is an inner/outer dialogue creating new avenues in life. To see, perceive and sense the other in me, and the flowing of invisible and visible movements, have been themes of investigation for me in teaching and performing. Through AM, I experience my body is in the presence of not knowing, embodied experiences of unnamed sensations, life and death in gestures of time, connecting with the spirits in the cells of my whole body.

I hope in the future Authentic Movement Gatherings in Vienna (2010), I will be able to collectively touch the deep extensions of Moving Thoughts*, and sensitive dances. The beauty that comes from sensorial movements, whether they are in silence, in explosive gestures or in a loving, reflective container for our art, becomes a capacity to own and to relate to judgments, thoughts and sensations as a vibrating tune in relationship.

The big event felt in my heart from this Gathering, is to have met people who have experienced Authentic Movement and who love the work. Also, it was wonderful be able to see our differences and similarities, and learn how Authentic Movement expands our relationships and expressions in the world.

Even when tired, I never feel tired when I am at an Authentic Movement retreat. I witness myself embracing my limits and my deep will to gain inner and outer volume, space and time-- stretching possibilities to walk the path of not-knowing. As witness, as mover, with no separation between functions, but conscious of my role in the circle, I interweave personal and collective, solitude and togetherness, closed eyes and open eyes as a way to transform dance in a state of presence. Dance transforms us in this way as well.

My deep interest is to share our creative work as teachers of the form, as therapists, as people influenced by Authentic Movement.

*‘Moving Thought. Movement that is sensation and thought in the search for its own pathways of existence, embodying different forms of being art and life, of observing, deconstructing and creating new patterns. Movement that is spontaneous gesture, the instant before it even happens. A gesture that reveals a fine texture provides meaning without a logical form, capturing the gaze of the observer (in the moment when he meets with the one who performs the gesture). Hence a new question emerges: what unfolding, expansions and possibilities of Moving Thought can arise from such given place? (part of final text from a Specialization in Dance / Therapy - Brazil).

Authentic Movement in Grief Work by Germaine Fraser

2010-01-29T14:24:00.011-05:00

Hi Nanette,

I read in the Connections page of the community website you’re looking for experience or research on how others are using AM in grief work. I am one of the editors of the AM community blog and make my living as a conventional/holistic bedside-care RN in a northeastern hospital.

My hospital was deeply affected by the Haitian earthquake as we have many staff that are Haitian. I am trained in Critical Intervention Stress Management (CISM) and did several grief groups over the last 2 wks.

In spite of the conservative nature of most hospitals, I found my AM practice very beneficial, indirectly and directly. The deep listening skills cultivated in AM over two decades served me well during the sessions listening to the catastrophic experiences of my coworkers. In the sessions, I noted lots of respectful silences and stillness, sensing this as extremely supportive to the entire group. Granted, deep listening is not solely the auspices of AM, still I attribute its influence indirectly impacting those sessions. Watching body language and movement, even how people aligned themselves in relation to each other was very interesting (in one group in a circle, participants chose to sit in a semi circle not across from each other). I found a home-spun version of the form in the experience of debriefing myself after the sessions doing AM in my rather small living room space (circumstances are never ideal, are they, but inevitably don't really matter when one has intention).

Lighting a candle as my witness, I set a personal intention of caring for myself after witnessing the devastating testimony. I moved, breathed and sounded as I needed to to help me process the very intense work. It was very healing. An unplanned AM experience was finding myself at the end of the week at a live Afro-Cuban music concert in a small and intimate cafe, in the darkened room toward the back, releasing through my hands and torso what I'm sure was residue of the earlier grief experience. Eyes closed sitting next to an AM friend, I just let it move. The expression was contained to my immediate seated self at a table, but again, despite the circumstantial limitations, it rocked. Very cool. Very healing. My main impression of this experience was the softness and incredible articulation of my hands, how receptive and open and responsive they were/are. They waited and listened, skimmed each other repeatedly and opened their humbled, magnificent soles/souls to themselves and to the world so gently, patiently and with a great deal of love. – All to an amazing Afro-Cuban beat!

I frequently have AM moments in my role as a bedside nurse.
My first experience was 7-8 years ago when I first started considering using the form and presence in my work. During one night shift I admitted a 60+ yo man for heart palpitations. It turned out he had found his 30 yo son’s body hanging in the woods behind his house (“heart palpitations”… give me a break). This patient was in shock, able to speak, but barely. His eyes were 200 miles deep in his head. Very disassociated. All the nurses kept telling me to drug him to the max, but he refused everything and I couldn’t talk him into even the mildest medication. As sometimes happens, it was a slow night, so I decided to sit with him. I sat in a chair facing him in the bed, he was sitting pretty much 90 degrees in the bed, the room dark. I told him I was going to sit with him as long as I could and he was free to speak or do whatever, or not. I know Therapeutic Touch, a type of energy medicine, and I did this around his heart and down his right arm finally settling at his open palm. My fingers met his wrist and his fingers met mine and we just sat like that for a very long time not saying anything. I had an impression of our meeting relaxed hands as being a small wrought iron cage and that his heart had migrated down his arm to enter it; it felt like his heart was a small furry animal like a mouse nestled inside the strong cage, deeply protected. I was very aware of my spine and the need to maintain its vertical, which had to be righted several times during this period with him. Around 4am, realizing I had to go back to my duties, I spoke to him encouraging him once again to take some medication that would help him to rest. He agreed and I gave it to him. I was able to stop in on him before I left at 7a, at which time he broke down and began his next step in the grieving process.

Despite my efforts to keep my vertical I was undone by this experience (naïve to the powers of transferrance at this point). For months, I was unable to make any similar efforts in the practice at the bedside, my nursing was rote at best. What I learned from this was the importance of my own self care before, during and after such an effort, and the unwavering vigilance needed toward this end.

Another example of a grief based experience was a few years ago (and a lot more experience down the pike) working with an 80 yo neglect patient. This woman was in a type of coma, not able to communicate directly. Yet, she writhed in the bed with an open, soundless scream-formed mouth and no amount of intravenous narcotics seemed to obliterate her pain. When I was assigned to her as her primary nurse on an evening, I anticipated the challenge of caring for her having heard about this repetitive writhing and soundless scream from other nurses. Having had the earlier experience with the ‘heart’ patient, I knew this had to be different for me. I decided to stay in my ‘feminine’, preparing by doing a lot of purposeful walking around the circuitous nursing station very aware of my pelvis taking the corners and being quite springy in my hip sockets. That being established, I set my intention for myself to be of service to her as best I could, while staying close to my own truth. I initially spent a few minutes at her bedside watching and being with her. It was clear she needed to be seen, mirrored (although this made no sense to the logical part of me as her eyes were closed and she was in a type of coma). I only knew a few words of her language. I said (probably very poorly!) in her language, “I am here with you. All will be well” over and over (kind of singing it) while I did this butterfly-light type stroke over her chest and down her arm to her clenched fists, while writhing with her (her in the bed, me standing). I did this pattern for a very long time, maybe 7-10 mins (long if you’re in a semi private room with only a curtain separating beds). Something relaxed in her the more I was with her in this way. When her writhing became quiet and there was a significant decrease in body tension, I sat on the bed beside her and was quietly with her and myself for 5-10 mins (it must have been another slow night I guess!). I felt like I was getting the communication from her that she wanted and needed to die. She was a full code at that point in time. I, along with the help of many other concerned staff, was able over the course of the shift to arrange, despite a difficult and complicated family dynamic, that she be made a DNR. She without interference, died two days later.

The creative (unconscious?) seems to be AM’s foundation. When this is self-accepted, the form becomes quite spacious. I tried to stay true to it and myself by: making an intention for my practice, dropping into sensation in my body and my in-the-moment experience, witnessing another as best I could and responding authentically. For me, these are basic AM principles. My experience is when the form is well grounded/known and trusted in the self, it unwinds itself and finds it’s way as it needs to.

I deeply know the benefit of AM in this type of work and also realize institutions aren't ready for it as I have thought in the past to ‘deliver it’. But there I am. And this is what I know and understand. I bring this work (AM) as I can, how I can, having learned to be with more of myself outside the box (both hospital and AM form) through this incredible creative/spirit-based practice. Not as ambitiously routine as I had hoped for in earlier years as a practitioner (I think I used to imagine a big open well-lit room with aware, willing and somewhat well participants—you know, sort of like US! lol), but we do what we can, where we can, as we can.

Perusing the blog the other night, I saw I made a promise a few years ago to write about AM in Life and I’ve been thus far remiss to do so. Maybe this will be my springboard.

Wishing you well in your research and collection of stories, but especially in the evolution of your individual practice, as that is where the work is and also where the hope lies.

Warm wishes,

Germaine Fraser

7 comments:

Ann McNeal said...: That is such a moving, deep witnessing, including witnessing of yourself. Thank you for doing that amazing work and for letting us in on it.

Is that your art work, Germaine? wonderful.; Saturday, January 30, 2010 6:44:00 PM EST
Anonymous said...: Germaine couldn't figure how to comment right, but she says 'anonymously':
Hi Ann, as part of my 'self care' piece during these haiti sessions, i have
been doing a 'postcard from home' collage/assemblage art series. attached is one i made over the last few weeks, that in my mind/body/heart, is very akin to helping me work through the grief work. i work in an AM type way; using a compelling image and whatever calls me that surrounds me from found objects to everyday stuff to collected things that resonate. cut, paste, thread and PLAY! very fun and very healing.

thanks for your warm words and appreciation. I feel held. wonderfully.; Saturday, January 30, 2010 7:18:00 PM EST
Ann McNeal said...: Gorgeous collage. It feels very whole and healing to me--the water and the rounded shapes, the way it is contained and open. I am so glad you are doing this for yourself and sharing it.; Saturday, January 30, 2010 8:40:00 PM EST
Embodied Movement said...: Thank you for the deep sharing. Your sharing helps me again as a dance/movement therapist how to use AM in the sessions.; Tuesday, February 2, 2010 3:37:00 AM EST
lisa Tsetse said...: Your sharing of these experiences is written with such clarity and honesty. I feel as I read that I am with you. I see you move and I see you transition from your "movement". Then I see you speak directly from inside your "movement" . A tenderness rises within me.

The work you do for a living and the work you do from the heart and your art is so essential to the growth and nurturing of our collective consciousness. I send deep gratitude over these virtual waves of energy.; Wednesday, February 3, 2010 1:29:00 PM EST
寶貝 said...: This post has been removed by a blog administrator.; Wednesday, February 10, 2010 10:57:00 PM EST
Anonymous said...: Germaine, Thanks so much for your detailed descriptions of your work, both with patients and with yourself. I like your emphasis on intention and the listening way in which you work with the felt energies between you and the client. You deepen for me the word "witness" to yet another level. Thank you. Judy Funderburk; Saturday, March 6, 2010 10:55:00 AM EST

Life after A Moving Journal

2010-01-08T06:35:00.011-05:00

by Annie Geissinger, Paula Sager, and Joan Webb

Editors’ Note: We asked the Journal editors what they’ve each been doing since AMJ ceased publication. A Moving Journal (AMJ), the first periodical devoted to Authentic Movement, ended in July 2006 after 13 years of publication. The Authentic Movement Community website began in November of 2006, attempting to replicate many features of AMJ, while expanding to an on-line presence and blog. All three editors of AMJ began their work in Authentic Movement by studying with Diana Levy in 1990. They acknowledge Zoë Avstreih and Aileen Crow as teachers and important influences; all three have worked extensively with Janet Adler for many years. They have also worked together as members of a weekly peer group for 16 years and continue to collaborate and practice Authentic Movement together.

From Annie Geissinger:

Authentic Movement is an integral part of my life. It continues to reveal and transform, to be a vital way in which I can understand who I am and what I’m up to—how I work with my big questions about knowing who I am within the unknowing, this dance of creation. It is a mystical, spiritual practice of direct experience. I am so grateful for Janet Adler’s work and for the clarity and courage of her path, which has inspired and sustained me over the past twenty years.

I continue to teach and to work with a community of peers. Sometimes we relate through distance witnessing. Here in Providence, I am able to meet often with a small band of soul mates, including Paula and Joan (my eternal co-collaborators). As we’ve each moved down our separate paths of investigation, we now have the incredibly rich experience of learning from one another, and weaving our different threads into our shared Authentic Movement practice.

After A Moving Journal closed I experienced a time of opening, a kind of empty space, and then I met a teacher. For two years now I’ve been working in an intensive process within a small community under the guidance of Tewa/Hopi Medicine Woman, Willow Tequillo. The work has provided me with a structure through which I can understand and hold the deep experiences that Authentic Movement opens for me. It nurtures my Authentic Movement practice, and is nurtured by it.

Within my Authentic Movement practice, over many years, I often felt in bodymind the experience, perhaps the memory, that we are truly wanderers in the wilderness, cut off from our ancestors and the earth, who could hold and teach us. And we work so hard to search the revelation of our own bodies, to recreate through intuitive knowledge what we have lost. This quest for wisdom through the body seems to have arisen with great longing and integrity out of our western culture, in response to a collective calling out for meaning, as we seek to recreate or re-member our understanding of who we are.

My teacher, who calls herself a “Universal Humanitarian Ceremonialist,” comes from an ancient and sustained lineage, held by many generations of wise ones with intimate connection to the earth. The work with her has been enormously helpful in grounding the clarity and vision of my Authentic Movement practice, teaching me about the integration of my vision into daily life. It is a great joy to experience these two ways of practice inside of me: the one hewn through intensity of commitment to body-centered wisdom without a fully formed or conscious lineage; and one that ancestors have carried through enormous challenges, and share as they will, in great compassion. I am amazed and grateful to experience each one as an extraordinary vessel for my search and questions, and to feel them weave together within me, speaking to one reality within different forms.

From Willow I have learned of the Hopi story of the creation and destruction of previous worlds, and of moving from our current Fourth World, based on separation, fear or scarcity, to the Fifth World of unity. In the past year I’ve begun offering a teaching process called Hawk Dance Ceremonies of Transformation [http://www.hawkdance.com/], which focuses on emotional evolution–specifically, transformation of fears. The intention of Hawk Dance is to support our movement into Fifth World, as we co-create a new world in evolving consciousness. Hawk Dance has been an adventure of experimentation and learning, as I bring together drumming, movement, art and creative contemplations, drawing on many years of studying and teaching African drumming, expressive arts therapy, and all the deep work of Authentic Movement practice.

To Janet, Willow, and to all my companions in learning, I offer my heart’s enormous gratitude.

From Paula Sager:

During the years that Annie, Joan and I produced A Moving Journal, I was always struck by the highly individualized ways in which Authentic Movement practitioners articulate their experience of the form. And not just on a personal level: Authentic Movement practitioners keep finding all kinds of applications of Authentic Movement within a wide range of fields.

Patrizia Pallaro’s second volume of essays highlights this diversity as well as some of the ways Authentic Movement serves as a transformative practice. In one of the book’s essays, Lisa Tsetse (2007) writes about Authentic Movement as “a force that can support the development of personal and global conscience” (p. 406). This idea that there is a relationship between one’s personal practice and one’s activity as a global citizen is of great interest to me, and is the direction I see my work going in.

Ten years ago, when Lizbeth Hamlin and I began an exploration of long-distance moving and witnessing, the Red Thread project [http://www.charleshobson.com/books/redthread.html], it felt very much like a personal process. Over time, the experience has opened us to a sense of greater possible connection to others beyond boundaries of space. Last Spring, we explored this possibility, in a literal way, through an experiment involving a moving/witnessing relationship between a group in the United States and a group in Belarus. The project came about after Alexey Konstantinov, in Minsk, contacted me after learning about my master’s thesis on the Authentic Movement Community Website Blog!

My thesis, titled Witness Consciousness and the Development of the Individual, looks at Authentic Movement’s potential for supporting individual and collective change, which for me means understanding the developmental nature of Authentic Movement as a discipline [http://www.threestonestudio.org]. I focused on the development of the inner witness. It was an exhilarating experience. I loved the process of research and it was amazing to have so many people in the Authentic Movement community respond to the survey which became an important part of the study.

I am also grateful to Janet Adler as a teacher, for the way witness consciousness has unfolded through her work, and for her support as my thesis mentor along with my primary mentor Arthur Zajonc [http://www.arthurzajonc.org/]. Arthur, with a number of other inspiring educators, created a graduate program that integrated academic research, artistic expression and contemplative inquiry with a strong emphasis on the work of Rudolf Steiner [http://www.steinerinstitute.org/rudolf-steiner-and-anthroposophy/index.aspx]. The opportunity to incorporate contemplative inquiry into the research model proved to be invaluable and deepened my appreciation for the ways in which Authentic Movement can serve as a contemplative practice.

Last Spring I participated in a conference at Amherst College, The Contemplative Heart of Higher Education, sponsored by The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society [http://www.acmhe.org/]. My paper discussed the development of witness consciousness in the practice of Authentic Movement and its relevance to other contemplative approaches being used in higher education. I described how, in Authentic Movement, action and perception are embodied and explored within the roles of mover and witness and that the phenomenon of an inner witness for each, develops through the relationship of mover and witness. Other participants at the conference seemed to resonate with the idea of the “inner witness” and the notion that individuals, through their own initiative AND in relationship, can develop greater capacities for perception, compassion, and knowledge.

Another project I’m involved in addresses the earliest phase of learning and education. I’m a co-founder of The Mariposa Center, a non-profit organization that seeks to create innovative learning environments for children and their families, especially in underserved communities [http://www.mariposari.org]. We’re currently collaborating with an inner-city charter school and were recently chosen by the Rhode Island Department of Education, to participate in a Pre-K demonstration project this year. My hope is that as Mariposa develops, there will be opportunities to create training programs for schoolteachers in which some of the principles from Authentic Movement will have a place. I’m especially interested in encouraging teachers to appreciate how the quality of their presence impacts the classroom and their students.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve come full circle. My interest in education began after college when I studied the Alexander Technique and then deepened when I came across Rudolf Steiner's work, twenty years ago. It was the same year I began practicing Authentic Movement but the two seemed like separate pursuits. Now what used to feel separate is becoming more unified and I am finding that Steiner’s very detailed description of the human being as “a citizen” of three integrated worlds, body, soul, and spirit, each with its own constituent aspects, offers a profound way to understand and explore my experiences of Authentic Movement and shape my teaching of others.

Both Authentic Movement and Steiner’s Anthroposophy (Human Wisdom) [http://www.anthroposophy.org/index.php?id=16] offer practices that safely encourage the movement toward the unknown or what we don’t yet understand. At the same time we can learn, with growing discernment, to attend to what is true, distinct from what may be illusory. In Authentic Movement we also learn to attend to the experience of “being moved.” This hallmark feature of the form is so simple and so profound. In my thesis research I came to believe that each of us, out of our regular, everyday sense of self (Adler says, “we begin just where we are”) must be willing to engage a hidden or somewhat unknown spiritual sense of self. In Steiner’s teaching, it is this hidden and “higher” sense of “I” that opens us to the full mystery of being human and is behind the phenomenon of being moved. I think this is why Authentic Movement experiences are always surprising, always helping to reveal new aspects of ourselves, and our relationship to the world and others.

I’m still just beginning to understand my experience of Authentic Movement through the lens of Anthroposophy but, as Annie, Joan, and I are discovering, our practice of Authentic Movement together is providing a vast and strong foundation to explore the intersection of each of our richly distinct spiritual paths. And who knows where the journey will take us next!

From Joan Webb:

We three are grateful that we had all felt the need to move on from A Moving Journal at the same time. And now, by a similar grace, we each have delved into studies of different spiritual traditions. In 2008 I completed a four-year training in Integrated Kabbalistic Healing (IKH) [http://www.kabbalah.org/IKH_first.html]. Annie has been working under the guidance of a Tewa/Hopi Medicine Woman; and Paula completed a master’s degree on witness consciousness, informed by the work of Rudolph Steiner and Anthroposophy. When we get together, we look at our experiences of moving and witnessing from these three points of view and learn from each other. All three traditions strive to understand and bring us closer to the same basic, elusive, mysterious truths but use different constructs and language. All three help to illuminate our authentic movement practices.

IKH is a healing modality developed by Jason Shulman over the last twenty or so years. He integrates Eastern philosophy (he is a Jinen or Buddhist teacher), Kabbalah (the ancient mystical tradition within Judaism), modern psychological theories, and quantum physics. Shulman views problems, whether physical, emotional, or both, in the largest context of the processes of life and creation so that healing occurs on all levels of your being.

I have found IKH to be a wonderful practice: healing for the particular difficulty I’m having, strengthening my ability to be present to what is, increasing my ability to drop a story, to step back, and to let natural healing processes take over. Healing occurs for both me and my clients [http://www.kabbalistichealersri.org/].

Authentic Movement and IKH have at least three important aspects in common: relationship, nonduality and attention to transference.

Relationship

Relationship is at the heart of both Authentic Movement and IKH. Healings occur in the context of a long-term relationship between client and healer. An IKH healer is not only in relationship to a client, but also to her inner healer, her own ego, her spiritual practice (including many meditations and exercises) and usually to other IKH healers. IKH is part of A Society of Souls, a community with annual meetings and several well-defined practices (called gateways): Impersonal Movement, the Work of Return, and The Magi Process. An IKH healer is in a nest of relationships: with self, other, community, and the divine.

In Authentic Movement we begin with the relationship between mover and witness, which mirrors and helps develop the relationship between a mover and his/her inner witness. Janet Adler (1987) speaks of three basic states of relationship: merged, dialogic, and unitive (non-dual). Each of these three states can occur between the mover and external witness, mover and inner witness, and mover and the divine.

Experience of a unitive state comes with long practice and with grace. I can’t count on being in a unitive state with the mover I’m witnessing or with my internal witness; I can only keep practicing and be awake to the times when that grace occurs. Similarly, I hardly go around being in a unitive state with the divine. But because I keep practicing Authentic Movement, I have had many of these experiences of unity, or mystical experiences, and they are happening more frequently. Authentic Movement is for me a spiritual practice; in that sense, it is about my relationship with the divine.

Nonduality

Authentic Movement gave me my first lived experiences with non-duality. My teachers encouraged us to experience the full range within polarities, to stay with uncomfortable as well as pleasant feelings and to feel them fully and watch while they change. We explored the shadow side. We learned to hold opposites and allow contradictions to stay as contradictions. I became able to hold the joy of a moment and at the same time feel the grief that will come when the moment is gone; to let my child love me and resent me at the same time (Teenagers exclaiming: I love you! Go away).

In IKH, through many exercises and practices, we learn to hold “nested opposites,” such as up and down, big and little, inside and outside, and good and evil, until a “third thing” arises. The third thing contains the full range of the polarity and is also a new thing. The third thing represents coming into wholeness, which is what healing is all about. When I practice nesting opposites and the third thing arises, I know it has appeared because a whole set of body sensations comes over me. I was able to feel and recognize this, I believe, because of all my work with Authentic Movement and being “in my body.” To be more specific, I am just now realizing that this set of body sensations is a subtle energetic phenomenon, and my familiarity with energetic phenomena has come through my long practice of Authentic Movement.

Transference

Authentic Movement also introduced me to awareness of projections and the importance of using careful language. Early on, we learned to acknowledge a separation between a mover’s primary experience and a witness’s experience in the presence of a mover. My teachers asked us to contain our projections, judgments, and interpretations and to “own” (by using “I” or percept language) any statements we make. “When I see your hand form a fist, I feel a tightness in myself and connect to my anger.” I don’t say, “You showed anger” or “I could see that you were angry.”

This attention to language and projections was transformative for me. It was a revelation to become aware of how I project my experience onto others and how others project onto me. To be aware of others’ projections helps free me from them. I learned to translate any unskillful language. For example if someone says, “You’re tired from your long trip,” I can separate enough to ask myself if I am tired or not and to wonder if that person might be tired. On a humorous note: I can barely watch soap operas and bad plays now! I cringe when the characters speak in “you-language,” when I hear statements like: “You’re always telling me what to do!” “And you care only about yourself!” Well, unskillful language does lead to high drama.

In IKH we work with transference, which includes all forms of projections and judgments. We talk about “riding the wave of transference.” We’re not so much trying to contain or avoid the projections as to be fully conscious of them. In “riding the wave,” we let the projection become vivid and give it full attention until something shifts. There is always information in the transference: about our client, ourselves, or both. We honor the transference as an obstacle that need not be an obstacle but instead a sacred portal to deeper knowing, once one is in conscious, loving relationship to it.

Shulman says that all our work as healers moves us toward dissolving our transference. As the “hooks” we have from psychological wounding become healed, we have less and less transference and are able to see reality more and more clearly, just as it truly is. Of course, as humans we never reach an ideal state where all transference dissolves. We can, however, have more awareness of our transference and change our relationship to it. In the same way, our work as witnesses in Authentic Movement moves us toward becoming what Adler calls “clear, silent awareness.” Again we can’t expect to achieve that state, but we can have more and more moments in it.

℘ ℘ ℘ ℘ ℘ ℘ ℘ ℘

For me, IKH and Authentic Movement complement and enhance each other. Authentic Movement gives a fuller, more focused emphasis on experience in the body. In IKH we work with body sensations, but we don’t move them in the same way or give them the focused attention of years of movement circles. IKH adds to Authentic Movement a fuller cognitive, conceptual framework. The Tree of Life, Kabbalistic universes, ideas about creation, and my ongoing creative process give me a framework in which to understand my Authentic Movement experiences. I didn’t know that I needed this until I encountered it. For me both are spiritual practices leading to healthy relationships, wholeness, greater consciousness, and ability to be present to all-that-is.

Bibliography

Adler, J. (1987). Who is the witness? In P. Pallaro (Ed.) (1999). Authentic Movement: Essays by Mary Starks Whitehouse, Janet Adler and Joan Chodorow (pp. 141-159). London: Jessica Kingsley.
Adler, J. (1995). Arching backward: The mystical initiation of a contemporary woman. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions.
Adler, J. (2002). Offering from the conscious body. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions.

Pallaro, P. (Ed.). (1999). Authentic Movement: Essays by Mary Starks Whitehouse, Janet Adler and Joan Chodorow. London: Jessica Kingsley.
Pallaro, P. (Ed.). (2007). Authentic Movement: Moving the body, moving the self, being moved. A collection of essays, Vol. 2. London: Jessica Kingsley.

Shulman, J. (2004). Kabbalistic healing: A path to an awakened soul. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions.
Shulman, J. (2006). The instruction manual for receiving God. Boulder, CO: Sounds True.

Tsetse, L. (2007). Moving the outer rim in: Authentic Movement and nonviolence. In P. Pallaro (Ed.). Authentic Movement: Moving the body, moving the self, being moved (pp. 406-413). London: Jessica Kingsley.

Links

Janet Adler’s books link:
http://store.innertraditions.com/Contributor.jmdx?action=displayDetail&id=259

Patrizia Pallaro’s books link:
http://www.jkp.com/catalogue/author/705

Shulman’s books link:
http://store.innertraditions.com/Contributor.jmdx;jsessionid=58EB8C4F9BF02E8C16BA540CEC38903A?action=displayDetail&id=1446
http://shop.soundstrue.com/authors.soundstrue.com/shulmanj/

Authentic Movements in Cappadocia (Turkey)

2009-12-20T11:29:00.023-05:00

(Picture taken from a hot air balloon above Cappadocia:)

by Viktor Raykin, NYC, NY

It’s two months later and I still can’t wrap my head around Cappadocia. Had I gone there as a tourist, it would be a rich memory of land created by some extremist landscaper, land whose cultural heritage dates back to 14 century BC. I’d be happy to tell you about the underground cities (some 20+ floors down into earth), surrealistic “fairy chimneys”, phallic rock formations. About livable caves (my pension room was made in a cave). About early Christian churches carved out in the rock faces. And about the hot air balloons seen out of my window in the mornings.

But I came to Cappadocia not just as a tourist – I came to join the AM group there, and doing the Movements every day has transformed Cappadocia into my personal dreamscape. This is the only way I can now think about the land. And I dream on as I try to recollect the experience.

During the 7 days of the workshop (the group came from Russia, and the workshop was facilitated by A. Girshon), I had a chance to Move in the open spaces and inside a cave, on the elevated and sunken grounds, near the fruit trees and on the barren rocks. Each place has affected the Authentic Movement process by creating a unique circumstance, by projecting the outer space (or lack of it) inside me.

I invite you to look at the photos below. For a closure, here is a memory of the last Movement I did in Cappadocia. It’s just an episode.

……………………..

… I am standing straight, my arms are hanging, and I am screwing my feet into the sandy gravel - deeper and deeper… Here is my root, I grow from this ground, and I belong here. My feet get strength from the soil. My ankles are being moulded; my calves get their shape and body, and go up into my thighs and hips. There is no upper body yet, and I patiently wait until it is given. It seems to be lowered from above and set precisely on my hips. Here I stand – the eternal sculpture.

I bend and squat and grab handfuls of the gravel, then stand up again and start to squeeze the gravel in the hands. I crash it and crackle; and I listen. The sound fills my whole body. The Ocean rustles and rumbles. My body is listening.

I start pouring the gravel over my head – left hand, then right. I get covered, I get buried. I am buried in timeless. Eternity has me.

I pour the gravel over my head again and again.
…………………….

Photos – to view the slideshow of the whole album (which is missing 3 pictures below) click here.

“Fairy chimneys” and Rock waves in Gereme valley:

© 2009 Viktor Raykin

Fabulous photos and wonderful images in your words. Thanks so much for the post. The pictures can be clicked on to be seen larger. The photo slide show can be slowed downed and paused with buttons on the lower left hand side of the slide show. I hope people take the time to look at these beautiful images.

Elizabeth

Sunday, December 20, 2009 8:37:00 PM EST

Christmas Present

2009-11-24T12:08:00.004-05:00

One possible benefit for us all of being a part of the Authentic Movement Community Web site is to meet other members of our group who we don't know. When Kristine Maltrud updated her directory listing with the Authentic Movement Community Web Site, I noticed she was from Albuquerque, NM. Since I was about to vacation there, I wrote her a note wondering if we could get together while I was in town. She was actually planning on being on the East Coast at a conference in Providence, RI presenting on her new project called ArtSpark. ArtSpark is a new web based way to support artists with funding. Her words: Igniting widespread artistic expression via online micro-funding, collaboration and community building.

When it actually came time to meet, I found I was shy about it, but within minutes the sense of community I feel whenever I am with others who practice authentic movement came forward. We met over breakfast at a local place where she asked for Christmas, because she wanted both red and green chili on her eggs. That was the kind of treat this time was for me, like a surprise Christmas present. We talked and discovered more and more people we knew in common, ideas about the practice we were working on, things we had learned over the years that delighted us; we became friends in less than two hours. My dream is to meet everyone someday. Let's get together when we are traveling. Have you ever done anything like this?

http://art-spark.org or visit ArtSpark's fan page on Facebook or Twitter: @artspark

~~~Elizabeth

Email Correspondence, after a weekend Authentic Movement workshop with Alton Wasson in NYC edited by Aileen Crow

2009-11-23T22:10:00.036-05:00

Excerpts from an Email Correspondence, after a weekend Authentic Movement workshop with Alton Wasson in NYC. Alton started back in the 60’s with Ed Maupin (who was working with Mary Whitehouse) and with Janet Adler, in the 70’s. The exercise Viktor Raykin describes evolved over the years at the Contemplative Dance Week taught by Alton and Daphne Lowell, and was set up in this workshop by Eileen Kelly and debriefed by Alton.

Viktor Raykin writes: Alton Wasson, one of the veterans of AM, has visited New York City. His workshop last weekend was one of the most powerful in my life (I am relatively new to AM but have done a lot of other practices). Not to be too verbose I'll describe a process that has changed my view of the role of Witness. Participants were divided between 2 groups 4 in each, and given following roles:

A - Mover
B - Mirroring Witness: mirrors A, including voice expressions.
C - Expressive Witness: expresses in movement any impulses that may arise from witnessing A; anything is allowed but voice expression or physical interaction with A or B. (NB: it would be interesting to allow interaction between Cs of different groups)
D - "Regular" Witness.

Ds were placed in a separate part of the room dedicated to Witnesses. Bs and Cs moved freely in the space for the Movers, without preventing each other's moves or those of A’s.
Every 10 minutes, by the sound of a bell, roles rotated, i.e. B becomes A, C - B, D - C, and A becomes D. Every participant experienced each of the four roles. After the process had finished the group got in a circle, and each participant could share their own impressions about their own experiences.

I happened to start as C and finish as D, and "regular" witnessing gave me - for the first time - a real pleasure. My mind was stilled by moving in three other roles. My body was also loosened and "allowed itself" free moves (though with a lower amplitude, not to get distracted from observing the Mover), reacting to what I was seeing. I experienced freedom from the role of a Witness as I'd understood it (a composed, "dedicated" observer). I was relaxed, uninhibited and attentive at the same time.

One more discovery. As a C I was moving freely - and stayed in a quality contact with the Mover. I simply loved her - just because I was allowed to be myself, fully express myself while reacting to her moves. This experience goes far beyond AM as it teaches me the new way of a quality contact with another human in "ordinary" life. First thing that popped in my mind was the inhibition I habitually experience when relating to my father. P.S. I had another profound moment in this process, and I think it is quite characteristic of it: a sense of continuum, of unity of all that was happening. I was struck by it when I was in the Mover role. I guess closing eyes was important for the experience: sounds, moves, energy, co-presence of all and everything. Ocean of Life. One Soul.
There is much more, but I'd like to stop here.

Later, Viktor writes: Yesterday morning I posted, in Russian, to LiveJournal “Authentic Move” dedicated to AM. I described briefly the ABCD process that has struck me most. It took them less than 24 hours (accounting for time difference between NY and Moscow) to try out the structure in their AM Laboratory in Moscow, Russia and post back a short but profound analysis!
Here is the link for your curiosity, but, sorry, it's all in Russian: Russian web page: www.community.livejournal.com/authentic_move

Blog editor writes: Can you translate it for the Blog?

Viktor answers: U-uph! I've done it - I've translated it into English as was requested. It was quite a job, but interesting, I've learnt something new. I am sure some of the expressions are not very English (you know, English is my 22nd language).

Any comments, questions, exclamations, mutilations, aggravations, condemnations, exaltations, solicitations - are cordially welcomed!

Here is a comment by Alexander Girshon from Moscow, written after they tried out the process in their "laboratory" next day after I posted.

Alexander Girshon comments: We tried this format out, 15 min in each role. Naturally, more attention was given to the less familiar roles: Mirror Witness and Moving Witness. As Sasha S correctly noted, these roles implicitly exist in the Witness, and this format allows them to unfold. Mirror Witness role allows to define more exactly physical side of the process, but seems to lessen the emotional side of contact. Moving Witness is a borderline role, as you don't stop asking yourself: am I moving from what I am seeing, or these are my personal movement associations? We observed 2 positions: identification (mirror variations) and complementarity (moving in counterbalance to the Mover). Essential contact (meeting of M&W) - or the absence of it - may happen in any of these roles. It was also noted that this format has under taste of performance art, and it would be nice to introduce in it a Meta-Witness as observer of the whole scene. All in all, thanks to Viktor and to Alton.

Germaine Fraser writes: Thanks, Viktor, for this great translation effort. The response from Alexis was very interesting. I was struck by the analysis aspect; the fuller experience (such as you described in your own experience impression) seemingly quite absent. Alton's universal question of 'how does this have to do with me' begs for us to be more whole and all-encompassing in our being when engaging in AM. Empathic compassion for self and others is an integral and necessary aspect of the work. Even though clear structures offer safety and often help create a container, analyzing a technique for its value as a structure solely, kind of misses the point of why we engage in this way.

It is a tribute to Alton that our weekend's experience was so expansive; he (and Eileen Kelly) model holding space in this complete way, infusing the movement/witness space with a sense of holism, allowing others’ (and their own) work to be deeply spacious and safe. I am certain this fact is quite grounded in longevity and decades of practice / trial and error. As simple as the form is, my sense is the 'normal' human factor response to a relatively new anything is prone to initially get bogged down in the 'technique' and structure before it is comfortable enough to allow for other. So be it. Aren't we lucky to be human and have the influences and opportunities we have?

All my best, Germaine

Viktor responds: Hi, Germaine, I totally agree. Alton and Eileen have created a wonderful field where we could work, and play, and experience. I felt truly safe to go as deep as possible, never felt a danger. There was a Field of Acceptance. I was also struck by the dryness of Alex's analysis, but I was told by my friend in Russia, who is a part of this AM Lab, that they use this sort of very concise formal report to inform those who missed the Lab about the general course of events. These reports are always dry and don’t contain any experiential / emotional stuff. This is important to know. I know that at least one participant in Russia had a very deep process, but it's up to her to share. I believe that absence of intellectual analysis was very important in our group. I also believe that absence of direct verbal sharing of witnesses to the movers gave a totally different slant to the process. These two factors allowed deep integration to happen effectively and safely.

Enough analysis!

Love! Viktor.

Lisa Fladager said...

Viktor, thank you. I feel changed and opened after reading your post. I can't wait to experiment with this! best, Lisa

Thursday, November 26, 2009 2:00:00 AM EST

JANET ADLER: The 20th Marian Chace Foundation Lecture

2009-10-21T13:57:00.011-04:00

It was with eagerness that I waited for the 20th Annual Marian Chace Foundation Lecture, on Saturday morning, October 10, 2009, at the 44TH ANNUAL ADTA CONFERENCE in Portland, Oregon. The topic, “Witness to a Conscious Death,” had been described briefly in the catalogue:

Dr. Adler will offer her experience of mid-wifing her ninety-year-old mother’s nine-day fast into death. Witnessing this journey creates awe and unshakable commitment, visions and contained despair, and gratitude, indescribable gratitude for such a privilege.

It had been many years since my Authentic Movement training with Janet and Zoë Avstreih in the mid-eighties, and, from the time I had sat alone in a film-viewing room at the Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library watching “Looking for Me.” However, the effects of my encounters with Janet and her work were formative and remain a vital part of who I am today. What is Janet going to say in this lecture? I am particularly interested since I had lost my own mother right before Thanksgiving in 2006, two years after spending a 23-day vigil sleeping on the floor of a small hospital hospice unit as I said good-bye to my father. The opportunity to hear Janet’s experience with the death of her mother, who also died during the Thanksgiving season of 2006, feels important to me, especially since I know of Janet’s hospice work.

Sitting in the ballroom of the Hilton Portland, waiting for the lecture, I feel excited and sad as I study the large projection of an old photograph of Janet and her mother to the left of the podium. I remember, as I look at the photo, how Janet’s mother’s name was Posy, and how, during my AM training, I had thought it was the loveliest name a mother could have. I pictured Posy as a radiant flower, an eternal blossom always in bloom for Janet, who had talked about how she and her mother were close. I was intrigued by their loving kinship, by Janet’s openness about her mother’s emotional support and love of dance. Someone must have pushed a “show slideshow button,” because, suddenly, there begins a flow of other photos of Janet, including one of Posy alone – looking not young but not terribly old – and it hits me that I am about to hear Janet speak about a relationship and a person I really know nothing about.

Janet begins her talk in a quiet but always audible voice, first thanking the Marian Chace Foundation and then several people, culminating with thanking her youngest son who is there as her escort. Emotions begin to well up inside me, but I feel compelled to hear what Janet has to say; so I make every effort to focus. It feels as if everyone around me is listening hard, too, as Janet sets out to describe an end-of-life decision that had been made by her mother many years ago. Janet takes a long time to outline the background for the path her mother had chosen. Her subdued voice conveys a complex story of her family’s journey to and through the fast that ended with her mother’s death, and never wavers. I feel Janet attend to every word. Listening is often painful. Tears burn in my eyes. It is work to follow Janet’s story, because questions keep competing with my emotions.

Even though much of the death process is recognizable to me, I soon realize this had been no ordinary decision and no ordinary ending to a ninety-year life. Not surprisingly, Janet does not hurry her talk, which is filled with exquisite details I want to savor the way they did the last morsels of their Thanksgiving leftovers: the beautiful table, the prayer reworked for the occasion by the Rabbi who was both son and grandson, the image of mother and daughter lying on their sides facing each other in bed, and of the neighbor approaching her 100th birthday, who would no longer have Posy across the street. My imagination stirs, my eyes burn, and I push away worries and questions.

I was seated between two friends. The friend on my right had lost her mother very young, and I worry that this talk about an end to life that was “chosen” might be troublesome for her. The friend on my left lives near her 86-year-old mother, with whom she is very close, and I also worry that she might find the talk difficult. Keeping my anxiety at bay, I remain focused on Janet. I notice this is not a clinical talk, and it is not about dance in the traditional sense. Nevertheless, I resist my questions and fight to listen and not become flooded by my personal experiences of death.

When Janet finishes, the room is silent and slowly everyone stands. We stand for what seems like a long time in silence. It does not escape my notice that this is unusual, but I have no impulse to clap or sit back down, or to say anything. I think about Posy being gone from Janet’s daily life, and I feel an excruciating love in Janet’s choice to honor her mother in this way. I also feel the presence of other conference attendees, standing in front, behind and on either side of me. It is as if we are treading water in the sea of the life of Posy and Janet together; as if we are underwater creatures come to the surface as witnesses to what happened after the moment we had seen captured in the projected black and white photo of Janet as a child: Janet wearing big sunglasses sitting in a boat with her legs spread wide apart and smiling at the camera; her mother, also in sunglasses, sitting with her legs toward the water, seeming to be holding a fishing rod.

I feel overcome with the wonder of being a witness, of being part of a community of witnesses, as we hold a deeply felt and complex rendering presented by Janet Adler, a woman whose life has been dedicated to the role of witness. My heart aches and tears fall not for Posy, or even for what Janet endured, but they spill in a wave that wishes for Janet to feel herself witnessed by all of us standing before her, who owe her so much, and, for her to have plenty of time to bask in the light of her own voyage knowing she is not alone.

4 comments:

viktor-raykin said...: Deeply moving article. Thank you, Cathy.

Viktor.; Tuesday, November 17, 2009 12:15:00 PM EST

yogidancer said...: Thank you, Cathy. I feel that it is possible to be a witness via the internet
Teri; Tuesday, November 24, 2009 10:25:00 AM EST

Roberta said...

Thank you for the sharing. You brought me to my own witness with such beautiful relating of Janet's experience and your own...how many layers of witness are there, especially in these major turns of life? Funny it seems that we should ever think we are alone.

In me, I also felt deeply the connections, past and present between mother-daughter and student-teacher. May they be with you always.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009 9:12:00 PM EST

Cassie Bull said...
Thank you. I love that we can stand in silence and hold each other any time/at all times when we remember, when we choose to remember, the flow of all who come before and...all who will follow. I sit in front of the warmth of my fire and remember the movement of choice opening to possibilities, in living and dying. with gratitude, Cassie
Wednesday, December 2, 2009 5:40:00 PM EST

AUTHENTIC MOVEMENT and HEALING By Aileen Crow and Mie Sato

2009-09-16T00:21:00.034-04:00

AILEEN SAYS:-

This story of the healing through AM of a minor catastrophe begins in my kitchen. I’m home alone one evening, calmly sitting at the table sewing and watching TV. Suddenly the chair I’m sitting on breaks in half and falls apart. I am dumped down on top of it and my back is badly hurt. Shocked, and not moving for a few moments, I switch into my healing mode, which is mostly not pathologizing what is happening by going into “Victim”, with her familiar trauma-derived “catastrophic expectations”. I move gingerly --- is anything broken? No, I can move. I am humming as I put my healing hand on my back and lie there a while. Will I still be down here on the floor on top of the askew chair when my husband comes home? A funny picture.

It is interesting to me to see my beliefs about healing jump into action in emergency. What is healing, anyway? To quote neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, “Joy is conducive to health.” And, in “the ultimate state of well being”, there are “sustained feelings of harmony, ease and joy.”

Although my back hurts and I have a huge dark purple bruise and I feel sick, two days later I have a scheduled session with my phenomenal Gyrotonic coach and Graham dancer, Jennifer DePalo. I know I won’t be able to do the usual strenuous and ecstatic movements she usually leads me into. I fantasize in advance that I will roll around carefully a la AM, with her knowledgeable and intuitive hands on my back. She does just that. Yes, it is certainly healing to me to get exactly what I want in a completely mutual interaction.

Two days later I fly to Maine for our annual Authentic Movement gathering at Carol Zahner’s great house. It’s a loose group that has been meeting for years to move, play, make art, dance and eat. We are six this year, only one of whom, Mie Sato, I don’t yet know well.

Feeling sick and hurting, I am treated lovingly. Carol gives me her bed and giant bathtub, and we all make and eat scrumptious food. I am given soft foot massages and Germaine Fraser gives me a beautiful aroma therapy massage in which I am more than happy to be completely receptive. Not just a massage, it was like being completely cared for by a perfect loving mother. Who could imagine more wonderful healing?

One afternoon between our AM sessions, I’m sitting on a bench at Carol’s dining table with my hand on my hurting back. Mie says, “Would you like me to put my hand there?” Yes. We are quiet for a while, then my body starts to do AM and Mie follows. After a while I think of saying, “Follow your intuition”. I say, “Move with me”, and she does both. Mie does not initiate, but follows, matching me. We are equally active, both of us following my AM impulses. We go on for a long time, as the leading/following gradually turns into mutually matching AM. Perfect. I open my eyes and see Germaine watching. I say to her, “Will you get a camera and catch this? It’s so good.” She does. Mie and I continue in our mutually matching AM. Perfect. An “ultimate state of well being, with harmony, ease and joy.”

Authentic Movement in real life, not just during official sessions within given forms. No designated external Witness, just two movers with Inner Witnesses in relationship. Being in one’s own AM while following another mover’s AM. Mutually matching AM. AM as healing without a program, protocol or system. Healing without solicitude. Love without sentimentality.

I am reminded of Shelley Tanenbaum’s intention in her “Intuitive Life Movement”, a form kindred to AM, to come to have one’s everyday open-eyed interactions enlivened by the continual presence of one’s spontaneous impulses. (See A Moving Journal, Summer, 2004.) And my AM buddy, and contact dancer, Lucy Mahler, tells me that mutual matching, a la AM, is not uncommon in Contact Improvisation.

My goals in AM are: (1) To use AM as my main resource in my on-going project to undo the trauma-induced patterns in my life. (2) To have my AM impulses and feelings present in my daily life and during my interactions with others. (3) To identify at least half the time with my understanding Witness/Listener, who helps me go into problems and projections without getting stuck in them. (4) To easily be able to choose to move out of my old trauma victim’s kyphosis and scoliosis, into the liberating high twisting chest arching that Jennifer and Gyrotonic and my spontaneous twistings in AM have taught me to love and trust. My twistings tell me, “You’re on the right track.”

I am fortunate. The main source sustaining my well being in life is living in love with my husband of nearly fifty years. Thank you, Bill.

My back still hurts and my bruise is still colorful, but it is talking to me. It wants me to be a loving mother to it. It wants me to call it, not ‘Hurt Back’, but ‘Honey Love’, (seriously, and without embarrassed joking) and give it all the time it needs. So I’d say that my (5) goal is: (as Germaine says), To be in love with myself. Harmony, love and joy: that’s healing.

MIE SAYS:

Initially, I responded to Aileen’s gesture of self care because I was in a better physical position to hold that spot on her back.

I was willing to be there and knew that my warm hand would be soothing on her sore back.

I was also willing to be there without doing anything, just witnessing and holding space.

When Aileen started to move I began by following her impulse.

When I surrendered to the dance of just flowing and following I felt my heart open to trust and caring.

There were times when we switched back and forth gently moving energy between us. It felt effortless and healing for me as well.

The other gift was I got to know Aileen intimately as well.

Comments...

Martha said...: Aileen and Mie,
Thank-you so much for this post! First of all, I could picture and follow you, Aileen, as you sat, fell, talked and un-talked to yourself, moved, opened yourself to caring, discovered, twisted in those yummy gyrotonic moves....

And then, what came up for me was the "choice" we have in witnessing ourselves, in choosing to heal, in choosing the form that healing takes in any given time, in particpating in others healing...

I hope your back continues to feel better and better...

Thanks again,
Martha Lask; Wednesday, September 16, 2009 9:20:00 AM EDT; Anonymous said...
I so appreciate your gentle way with your self. I also hope your back continues to heal. Elizabeth
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 2:34:00 PM EDT; Dawn Pratson said...
I really ejoyed reading this. I especially enjoyed hearing the account of the expanded-upon AM form "No designated external witness, just two movers with inner witnesses in relationship. Thank you.
Friday, September 25, 2009 5:30:00 PM EDT

Margaret Knight (by CZ) said...: Dear lovely ones, I just read the blog entry by aileen and mie. couldn't figure out how to comment so I'm commenting here. Thanks for writing that up. I also want to have AM be me, be authentic, be moving, be whatever is needed. When I was just camping in northern VT and the tent was covered with snow and I had to undress to get in my sleeping bag, I found myself making all kinds of sounds. They helped me deal with the cold. I think your spontaneous session at Carol's table could happen because we did authentic living while we were there. Love to you all, Margaret; Monday, October 19, 2009 11:43:00 PM EDT

Minsk Peer Group Rules by Alexey Konstantinov

2009-06-30T22:00:00.003-04:00

The Blog editors asked Alexey if we could post on our Blog this policy from his web site in Belarus (alexey@authentic-movement.by) to stimulate discussion of the different ways peer groups practice and set up safety.

Here is his response: "Hello Elizabeth, I attach a file (copied below) with our peer group policy.
It is also posted at our web site:
http://www.authentic-movement.by/ilab/ilab-en/group/policy
I'm looking forward to an opportunity of discussion of peer groups policies.
Best regards, Alexey.

Minsk Peer Group Policy

Common Goal
Our common goal is to practice regularly and successfully the amazing and fine discipline of Authentic Movement in its classical form. We regard it successful when the practice becomes supportive, challenging and meaningful, letting us achieve our personal goals in this practice.

Vision
Sharing the value of a regular practice we group together to create and sustain necessary conditions and to facilitate each other’s personal practice within the discipline.

Policy
After seven months of weekly practice during the first season we came to an understanding of the necessary conditions for our AM peer group. We state them in the following rules. The rules cover safety, processes and organizational issues.

Organizational Issues
1. We have the common goal, vision and group policy. The facilitators have an executive privilege to ask you (a participant) to leave the group in the following cases: your participation does not help attaining the common goal; you don’t share a value of the classical form of AM; you permit
yourself to break these rules
2. The facilitators have an executive privilege to make a decision in case group discussion is deadly dragging on
3. We practice in a closed group.
4. A participant should be able to attend a major portion of sessions.
5. We meet only on a monthly prepaid basis.
6. Being late is not acceptable.
7. We use a mailing-list to discuss various issues. It is private and only for current participants.

Safety issues
1. Participants are responsible for their behavior with respect to themselves and others as well as for observing these rules. Those who are in witness position take additional responsibility for observing group and individual safety.
2. If a participant has any acute complicated experience (disease, trauma, mental stress) or abnormal sensations in the body it is important to let others (or just to the witness) know before session. Such particular personal information will provide more adequate and secure work of the witnesses.
3. We keep all the content of the sessions within the group. All personal and processes information is confidential and cannot be shared outside the group and session time.
4. It is prohibited to express aggression directly to another mover. If you are going to commit abrupt and vigorous movement, make sure you will not harm anybody.
5. It’s prohibited to express sexuality directly to another mover.
6. Experiencing severe affect or distress as a mover it may be proper to open eyes or become a witness.
7. It is possible to deviate from earlier agreed format of a process in case it is a matter of safety orand psychological ecology.

Processes issues
1. The ritual of beginning and completion. We open and close each process standing in a circle with our arms stretched aside.
2. A witness in order to become a mover enters the circle’s space and establishes an eye contact with one or several witnesses (‘I see you’). When a process is over a mover opens hisher eyes and again makes an eye contact.
3. We use a bell ring to indicate a completion of a session. It can be done by any witness, usually the nearest one, after previously agreed time is over or agreed event has happened.
4. When a witness is going to ring a bell, heshe should rise hisher hand up to signal to other witnesses about it. And heshe is waiting other witnesses to raise their hands in respond to indicate their movers are not experiencing a culmination and that ring will not cause explicitly unfinished process.
5. Witnesses are responsible to maintain a safe circle space. They change their positions along the perimeter behind others if possible.
6. A witness should have enough energy to sustain an act of witnessing. It is recommended to become a mover (even motionless) when a witness feels exhausted.
7. When a witness observes a scattering attention heshe may raise hisher hands up for other witnesses to give support by raising their hands in respond. It’s OK to do it as often as necessary.

The Second International Laboratory of Authentic Movement, Belarus

2009-06-16T15:08:00.014-04:00

April 29 – May 3 2009

Alexey Konstantinov

The second gathering took place in Minsk region of Belarus in April 29 – May 3 2009. There were 34 participants from five countries (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania and Netherlands). The laboratory was facilitated by Alexander Girshon and Alexey Kapterev.

A special visiting teacher and guest – Linda Hartley, who was supposed to introduce aspects of Body-Mind Centering work with the senses, organ system and developmental patterns, and integrate them with Authentic Movement,( focusing on witnessing movement, sensation, emotion and image) was not able to come due to unforeseen circumstances. Vitaliy Kononov – a co-facilitator of the first gathering was also not able to come.

Nevertheless participants discussed, planned and shared experience of more than 20 AM processes. There was a variety of experimental formats, classical and related forms: AM and New Code NLP, AM and Systemic Constellations, AM and Meditation. A unique Long-distance format with a group in USA. 3-hour AM marathons. In total we moved through about 17 different formats.

Overall conclusion: During the first laboratory in 2008 we focused mostly on processes’ content and experimented with contexts. At this laboratory our focus was upon the form itself, a spectrum of feedback formats, rituals, boundaries and rules.

A significant influence on this focus was exerted by participation of Alexander Girshon, Denis Turpitka and Yulia Morozova from the Authentic Movement Gathering in Vienna in 2008. At that Gathering there was a high level of ritualization, “the taste” of the classical approach, and a great value placed on integration processes – all was practiced and discussed.

Among valuable findings we note a “contract witnessing” which enables a mover to choose a particular form of feedback before a process. A long-distance format taught us about creating and maintaining the conditions to experience a collective body with its deep level of participation and pervasive ritual.

A combination of AM and New Code of NLP again displayed its high effectiveness as a “body-storming” technique. Our attempt to combine AM and Systemic Constellations resulted in a number of serious questions necessary to solve in order to continue. AM with a meditative preface is a very interesting format which creates a unique state and space. We repeated a 3-hour night marathon format to clarify the necessary terms, advantages and drawbacks of the format. AM and performance is as usual, a highly workable and inexhaustible theme.

Important issues of the laboratory were – integration of AM into ordinary life, AM community

Preliminarily, we are planning the third laboratory in early May 2010 in Belarus. A week-long event will consist of three days retreat with classical forms and four days of laboratory work.

Organizers: Alexey Konstantinov and Yulya Korzunova

http://www.authentic-movement.by/ilab

Alton Wasson on Movement as Spiritual Practice

2009-05-24T06:44:00.013-04:00

At the Contemplative Dance – Authentic Movement weekend workshop led by Alton Wasson, which we attended in NYC in March, 2009, the theme was Movement as Spiritual Practice. Alton invited us to be aware that we each have our own spiritual practices – that spiritual practices include more than the standard ones we usually think of, such as meditation, yoga, tai chi, etc.

Alton asked us to share the things we do in our daily lives which are spiritual practices for us. Alton set the tone by starting with a couple of examples from his own life. He does authentic movement in bed before getting up, for five or ten minutes; or in the bath: resting in the bath, letting movement happen, going under the water, etc. He rises to greet the sun, a Navaho and Hopi Indian practice, getting up at dawn and running to greet the dawn. We can all do this: go toward the rising light and introduce yourself (Indian names hold their ancestry and history) by saying, “Good morning, I am the son/daughter of …..” and list your ancestors as far back as you know.

After you have read the following practices participants in the workshop came up with, you are invited to respond to us via this Blog with any of your own practices you want to share.

* * * *

Doing a gratitude inventory: lying in bed at night before sleep and asking, what was my favorite thing today?

Riding my bicycle.

Doing the yoga Breath of Fire – doing it for 3 minutes (in a position lying with legs long and slightly off floor, head and shoulders off ground).

At any time: pausing, noticing my breath, coming back to my body.

Identifying myself as a spiritual being.

Gardening – watching the perennial flowers bloom again in Spring.

Writing and drawing in my journal is my practice in overcoming self-censorship and focusing on finding my most authentic words. I write dialogues between my different partial selves, draw them, and make clay figures of them.

Writing my morning pages (from The Artist’s Way). Upon waking each morning, I write three pages, free form, without stopping.

Sewing – getting lost in making a tactile thing purges things and puts love into each stitch.

Sounding, harmonizing, making harmonic overtones.

Doing a specific practice a yoga teacher taught me (in India), which takes half an hour: in the morning I start lying down. During the half hour, I move to standing up, in any way I can/wish. Then in the late afternoon or evening, I do it again in reverse, I move from the standing up position to lying down – also a half hour process.

Talking to my cats, feeling blessed to have them in my life.

Saying three Shabbats (blessings), every Friday, lighting the candle, following the tradition with grape juice and bread.

Integrating spiritual practices into my daily life, not split off from daily life or rarified.

Upon waking, watching the light come in through the window, watching it suffuse the room as it lights up the objects in the room.

Acknowledging and orienting to the directions of the medicine wheel.

Dance movement is my spiritual practice. Before performing, before stepping on stage, I pray to be a channel, to let something bigger than myself work through me. Dance is also physically grounding, and focuses me.

Embracing all of who I am, all that life is.

Parenting, especially the challenges.

Holding an overarching view, a big vision, so that everything in my daily life is part of it. It is sacred. Every mundane thing as I go through life is sacred.

Making images, collages, colors when I have fear, not “thinking” about it.

Practicing not pathologizing my experiences.

Bringing heart to all that I do, from washing dishes to going to work.

Checking in with myself: asking, ‘what sensory channel am I in?” or, like a chest of drawers, asking, ”which drawer?” (emotion, visual, sensation, story, ritual, archetypes, spiritual, etc.)

Or asking myself, “who do I think I am? Which part of myself am I identifying with now?”

* * *

Again, please do let us all know what your own spiritual practices are, via this Blog.

© 2009 Janet Charleston and Aileen Crow

Germaine said...

everyday spiritual practice... (perhaps not EVERY day, but I'm aware of the potential in it often engage as I can)

preparing a meal, sensing the life of the vegetable, herb and how it asks to be cut and used.

eating a meal-- aware of the colors, textures, smell and taste. spine very related.

dragging on a cigarette squatting on the step of the back porch the potted plants sharing the stillness while something grateful (grief? loneliness?) in the lungs meets the smoke churling downward.

facing a patient, awareness of my self standing there, the weight in my hips and feet, awareness of them. i breathe, they breathe. i see them, i see myself.

Annette Geiger, Zürich said....

This article is very inspiring. Thank you Aileen and Janet.

I practice Authentic Movement while I pray. The movement happens on a very subtle level.

Inner waves move through me like a constant adjustment into the now.

When I walk my dog I allow these „inner“ adjustments to happen – while I am aware of other people, children, other dogs and traffic. If there is too much happening „outside“ it is a constant going in and coming out and going back in.

In nature I sink into colors, shapes and smells of trees and plants and the air and move along getting a sense of the big Oneness – and sometimes I even succeed to say a prayer while exhaling. All at the same time. That is Heaven on Earth.

Playing music or listening to music is a great inspiration to be with the inner Movement and enables me to listen and to hear very differently than when I use my intellect. It sharpens the perception and appreciation.

When I do bodywork with people I connect with this inner Movement. While listening and watching my client I ask the Oneness in me to unfold and to transmit healing energy through me.

Spiritual practice can happen at any given moment and anywhere if I allow it to happen and step out of my way.

Annette Geiger, Zürich, Switzerland, June 15th 2009

Wednesday, June 3, 2009 1:31:00 PM EDT

Anonymous said...: Sitting anywhere in nature watching the smallest things--bugs flying, spiderwebs. Not waiting for anything to "happen," just seeing what is.

Opening my eyes to people as they hurry by on the streets or in the stores.

Just stopping, letting be.

Ann Mc, Pelham MA; Monday, September 21, 2009 9:00:00 AM EDT
yogidancer said...: All of the methods mentioned above work for me to help me get out of my little egoic monkey mind and remember the emptiness and impermanence of this moment. But the kinesthetic or sensory awareness seems to be the path that comes spontaneously. This morning it was the sight of sunrise clouds from my window during an hour of yoga.; Tuesday, October 13, 2009 2:51:00 PM EDT
Jaime said...: Right now for me it is allowing myself to cry. To alllow myself to feel the grief of the loss of so many things, material abundance, my parents, my home, friends, to feel the shuddering motions of my body, the wet salty tears, the heat rising to my face ... and at the same time the gratitude for what is, and the learning that is happening through this surrender ... it seems important to hold space for this.

Jaime; Tuesday, October 13, 2009 9:19:00 PM EDT

Learning to be a Facilitator

2009-04-28T10:01:00.008-04:00

By Elizabeth Reid, Averill Park, NY

For the past three years I have attended Alton Wasson's Facilitator workshop. This year Daphne Lowell joined him in leading us through a very rich three days.

Ann Mcginity said..."Once again I'm noticing those ripples that spill out into my life after our time together...confidence, contentment...Thank you all so much."

Here are some of my(Elizabeth) thoughts on what I learned from the weekend:

On the practical level I learned again that set up and sharing takes more time than I think it will. I learned to practice reading the poem I want to read a few times out loud so I don't stumble over the words quite so much. I learned that if I do stumble or loose my place or lose the poem to take a breath and slow down and just be kind to myself about my humanness and lack of perfection in the leading process. I learned that if I cry a bit it is just because I am touched and that is a special part of the process.

On a more reflective level I learned that my own ambivalence for being a facilitator has do with the leadership having a performance quality to it. So the more I can focus off of performance and onto presence the more deeply nurturing it is for me to be a facilitator. I learned that even when doing a simple leadership structure I will likely be nervous, but by the end of the time my nervousness has transformed to excitement about what has unfolded in the session together.

I learned that my own design of workshop time is likely to reflect who I am and what I need, so I want to be sure to give lots of room for other choices beyond my own design so other participants can find what they need. At the same time designing from my own authentic place of need and desire likely enhances what I have to offer. I learned I want to make room in my design for my own participation as a mover because of my own needs for that and because it reminds everyone that we are all in the end peers in this process.

© 2009 Elizabeth Reid

Hi Elizabeth,

I really enjoyed your blog entry. Thanks for sharing!

I wish I had more time to contribute to the blog, but I'm soooo happy to have this as a resource.

Thanks so much for all your efforts.

Be well,

~Mieke

Hi Elizabeth! It is lovely to read your thoughts about facilitation. So honest and resonant!

I hope to take another workshop soon....

Love,
Dawn

Germaine said...: Elizabeth, you write so practically and yet with a burgeoning wisdom. It is so good to hear your clarity. thank you.; Wednesday, June 3, 2009 1:36:00 PM EDT

Poem Inspired in Peer Group Meeting 2008

2009-04-28T03:10:00.019-04:00

By Stig Hjelland, Norway

Gods Touching Everything Human

In the authentic movement much energy is moved,
in simple, godlike ways.

Nothing is wasted, every condition used-
contacting the furthest reaches of human beauty.

Every single gestalt is beauty,
never is anything off the track.

The crawling, the walking, the snake and the prey,
the shivering life of an innocent sinner-
unfinished gestalts, almost deepest of all.

A being tries to crawl, but cannot fully,
a spear is in its side:
We see gods, touching everything human
turning it to perfect beauty.

From this is all and every art derived,
every drama and poem, any dance or display-
are like stills, humbly pointing at the actual movie.
This illumination of souls,
this abundance of energy-
where God´s beauty emerges in human form,
in time will call forth
the willed love, in every witness.

© 2008 Stig Hjelland

Irina Muterperel said...: Seems like I hear your voice again and I see you reading your poem to us as a witnessing respond.

It's inspiring for me to hear it.

Germaine said...: we are so lucky, aren't we?! yow.; Wednesday, June 3, 2009 1:41:00 PM EDT

Query: AM and Creative Process

2009-04-11T09:45:00.011-04:00

Hello,

I am a student at Marlboro College and I am doing part of my senior thesis on Authentic Movement. I was wondering if you know of any, or strongly remember, any articles that were published in A Moving Journal that have to do with Authentic Movement and the Creative Process. I'm researching how and if AM has been used by anyone as a place of harvest for the choreographic/dance making process.

Michaela Wood

5 comments:

Ann McNeal said...

Hi Michaela,
if you look in http://www.movingjournal.org/ you'll see the titles of back issues, one of which was on performance. You can order these or perhaps find in libraries.

Also, see the Authentic Movement Vol 2 edited by Patrizia Pallaro.

Have fun with your thesis.

Ann
Monday, April 13, 2009 6:47:00 PM EDT

Elizabeth Reid said...

There is a complete index of all the articles from AMJ at:

http://www.movingjournal.org/amjindex.htm

Amazing resource still available to all of us.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009 5:56:00 PM EDT

Kathryn Kollar said...

Thanks for listing those sites and making it easy for us to research other questions.
Though I have such limited time now to visit this site when I do it's like an old friend.I am always grateful to those of you who keep it alive and moving.

Kathryn Kollar
Saturday, May 2, 2009 10:36:00 AM EDT

Paula said...

Hi Michaela

I recommend the AMJ interview with Eva Karczag in the last issue Vol. 13 #2 also, Lauren Baldock in England did a dissertation called Finding A Voice about sourcing dance from AM. You might be able to reach her via LBALDOC1@ucc.ac.uk

Good luck with your research!

Paula
Saturday, May 2, 2009 11:15:00 AM EDT

Meg Cottam said...

Hi Michaela,
In addition to these other great ideas 'Contact Quarterly' also published an issue on Authentic Movement including a variety of articles relating to sourcing and how AM works with performance/choreographic interests. I believe it's CQ, Vol.27 #2
Best wishes,

Meg
Monday, May 4, 2009 12:57:00 PM EDT

From INGRID BAART, an Authentic Mover in Netherlands, a witness response to the recent election in the US.

2009-01-23T07:01:00.002-05:00

Congratulations, American women!

Today, even in a small country such as the Netherlands, I was clustered to the television and followed with joy and passion Obama's inauguration. For you I imagine it is a time of celebration and change. But also for many others all over the world it feels like that, celebration and responsibility, so clear in Obama's speech.

I was 10 years old when Martin Luther King was shot. It was a traumatic event, I couldn't believe people were able to do such injustice to other people. Because of that, I wrote his speech "I have a dream" in a little notebook. I wanted to save his words. I can still picture myself sitting, carefully writing on those pages. I expressed my feelings of helplessness and of hope by copying his words.

"I have a dream" and "Yes, we can," are both expressing so much our dance of life, our life energy and life power. The dreams we express in our dances are the embodiment of our dreams and life energy. In the act of dancing, we express we can, and I am. While expressing our dreams and images, we share an universal mind and a common hope and faith.

To me, but not only to me, this is an important day, the little child in me is heard and thrilled with joy and new dreams!

With love,
Ingrid

New Developments on our Web site

2008-11-20T21:38:00.001-05:00

We are close to 10,000 visits to this Blog.  Amazing. People visit from all over the world.

Currently 170 of us are listed in the Authentic Movement Community Directory:
http://authenticmovementcommunity.org/directory.htm

This month we have added the option of being listed in a Facilitator/Teacher Directory that is visible to all.  You can check the Directory section of the Authentic Movement Web Site for more information about this new option.

Thank you so much to everyone who has contributed to the Web site and the Blog!

Elizabeth Reid and Ann McNeal editors@authenticmovementcommunity.org

Mary Starks Whitehouse Web Contributions

2008-10-27T19:33:00.001-04:00

Janet Thompson is working with students of the Wellesley College community to create a website honoring Mary Starks Whitehouse as an alumna and as a pioneer in developing Authentic Movement. Janet seeks writings about how Whitehouse has inspired the work, creativity or growth of authentic movers throughout the world.  Do you have a poem, art piece, writing, word of thanks you would like to contribute? 

Please forward directly to Janet at:  janetthompson@comcast.net or Roberta Whitney at: rhwhitney@earthlink.net.  Although contributions will be taken as they come, students are especially interested in submissions on or before 30 NOV 2008.  Thank you!

Roberta Whitney

"AM is about not Knowing"

2008-10-25T09:36:00.004-04:00

This summer from 13th to 17th of August International Gathering on Authentic Movement took place in Vienna, Austria. People from different countries: Brazil, Norway, Russia, Austria, Ukraine, Holland, Germany, Switzerland got together to practice AM. Initiative of organizing an International peer group (without a leader) belonged to the wonderful and hospitable people- Isaias and Clarissa Costa who invited us all for the practice of Authentic Movement in the Therapeutic Center "Gersthof".

It was mutually enriching experience for the practice AM, for personal and professional development. We clearly felt the importance of this meeting, the process and the connectedness.

Every day meeting yourself and the others we received new experience, new embodied understanding, went through the stories of the present and created the stories for the future.

The peer group experience was quite new for the AM community in Russia and certainly it was interesting to observe and participate in a such process of the group without a leader. Attention to details, tolerance – these are the other lessons of this meeting.

"My trip to Austria was following the flow. Everything: deeply touching Meetings that were happening, the process of Authentic Movement itself, magic of Vienna and responsiveness and care of the space in the Center "Gersthof" nourished me and the process that led me further. After that I traveled around Austria, to its towns and Alps allowing the new impressions, awareness and people to come into my life and get close to myself". Irina Muterperel.

"For me Authentic Movement practice is a moment of bigger awareness of myself in life, in the relationships with myself and with the others. It was important for me: the experience of being, connection in the group, contact, following the flow of the present moment – authenticy which the space brought up. Vienna gave me the feelings of beginning, inspiration and trust in the process". Elena Starikova.

"The Meeting in Vienna became for me incredibly refreshing and inspiring event. It is the meeting with the old, tenderly loved friends and meetings with new interesting people. It is the comfort space of the Center "Gersthof" and supporting atmosphere allowing to deepen into the own process. It is a lot of movement and long midnight talks about Dance and Movement Therapy and more… And the most important was the feeling of connection to the community. As I told on the ending circle: "I feel as some part of me came back that was lost and which I missed a lot"." Julia Morozova.

The other wonderful event following from AM International Gathering was the workshop "Authentic Contact" led by Brazilian participants Guto Macedo and Soraya Jorge, where the object of research became Contact Improvisation and Authentic Movement. It seems that Contact Improvisation can be enriched with the practice of witnessing, the "present moment" meeting and safety that gives AM. Guto and Soraya are the pioneers in this field of Authentic Contact; we wish them further advancement in their research and ideas.

The experience that we received in International Group of AM can provide the base for the going on AM projects in Russia and SNG countries. The following Gathering 2009 is scheduled in Brazil and 2010 in Russia.

© 2008 Irina Muterperel, Elena Starikova, Julia Morozova 21.09.08
First published in Russian Dance/Movement Therapy Association Newsletter

germaine fraser said...

It's so great to hear international voices! Thanks for letting us know of your very interesting experiences and invite me next time! (I'll come!)

warm wishes from a safe-to-come-out, about to reclaim her country (finally) American. Germaine

PS. I think a book should be written on your title alone. It says it all. If you need contributors, let me know.

Saturday, November 8, 2008 8:12:00 PM EST

Thank you so much for your comment! So let the international AM community be strong and grounded in inspiring meetings, new understandings and books with meaningful titles!

Irina

Tuesday, December 16, 2008 9:45:00 AM EST

Second Year Anniversary

2008-10-08T01:29:00.009-04:00

Elizabeth Reid

We are celebrating our second year anniversary of the Authentic Movement Community website this month, and the first year anniversary of the AMC Blog as of last month, and something new is happening. A number of people when they are updating their listing in the Authentic Movement Community Directory are asking to pay for a number of years ahead and including a contribution with their update. This is a very touching vote of confidence for our work as a group. I guess it seems to some that we might be around for a number of years.

If you look through the Directory many who are participating have over 20 years doing
the practice. Is their long term commitment influencing our web site. Everyone who signs up to be part of Directory or communicates with me in any way expresses so much gratefulness that our web site exists. I feel the same way... kind of amazed and grateful to have this easy way to be connected with others who
share the same practice.

The web site averages about 500 different visitors per month from all over the world and has consistently for the past year. The Blog has had over 8,000 visits in one year.

Do you wish we could do something more with the web site and blog? Once again I
want to apologize for the learning curve on the technical glitches that happen with
the web site. I try my best to avoid mistakes, but because the technology is always
changing, sometimes glitches will just happen. Last month the blog letter error
was something I had no idea could even happen, but I keep learning..... and learning.

But also because things are always changing, maybe you will see something on another
web site that you think we should have. Or maybe there is something that you are
dreaming about that you could let us know about. Maybe you have something to contribute
to the Blog. Maybe you will want to announce your next event through the web site.
We so appreciate everything that comes.

Thanks to all who read and add to the Blog, who participate in the Authentic Movement
Community Directory, who list on the Events and Resources pages, and who contribute.
Your energy keeps the web site a lively place.

Looking forward to our future!

Dear Elizabeth and community,

A Big Open Arm Open Heart Thank you for everything and for your good words and feeling in your recent posting.
Just before opening this email I opened one from Unity saying to pay attention to experience one has when someone apologizes to you. Then - bingo! - your apology for technical errors last month.
Thank you so much for your conscientiousness.

Happy Happy Anniversary!

In Gratitude,
Roxanna

the window

2008-09-14T04:19:00.000-04:00

 2008 amanda judd

cornered

2008-09-13T05:44:00.002-04:00

 2008 amanda judd

Living within the world of appreciation

2008-09-07T12:16:00.001-04:00

Is it not wonderous that this growing desire to move into our authenticity, our original sense of ourselves, our given selves, is being so supported and reinforced on every possible level

That the invitation to embrace all that we are is being presented within our ordinary lives and appears to be perfectly tailored to honor our own uniqueness

That not only the possibility but also the actuality of this emerging awareness of our existence within a joined reality is upon us

That the truth of who we are is being shared in so many ways, is becoming visable and felt by so many, that there exists a true livable sense that something both natural and miraculous is occuring within and around us

And at every instant that we bring our willingness, wholeheartedness and choiceful participation to bear upon our own arc of unfoldment, our embodiment of wholeness, that all of existence is simultaneously and mutually enhanced

That our aliveness and awareness exists within the means of this accomplishment being so, to live fully and uniquely as the love that we are

 2008 Forrest Smithson

Your words sparkle like diamonds,
Teri V.

Psychological Gestures as sculptures by Aileen Crow

2008-08-16T15:56:00.010-04:00

The Censor

Pathology / Catastrophic Expectations

Party Girl

Left/Right; Rebel/Delight

I got very excited reading Mark Coleman’s piece about his theatrical combination of Michael Chekhov’s Psychological Gesture and Focusing with his personal invention of Authentic Movement. It brought back to me my experiences as an actress when I was a member of an acting company that studied Chekhov’s work and did those exercises and psychological gestures. It’s also exciting to me to see how all that is still present in me in the form of the small sculptures that I make of the dream figures who come to me in my authentic movement. (And who speak to me via focusing.) I see that each of the figurines represents the essential movements of one of my many partial selves distilled into a psychological gesture.

Above are three photos and a drawing, only a few of the more than forty figurines I have made.

Martha said...

Aileen,
I totally love these! They add so much to the site and to the whole discussion. Thank-you!
Martha

Sunday, August 17, 2008 11:06:00 AM EDT

Mark said...

Aileen, I very often describe PGs to Chekhov novices in my workshops/rehearsals as "moving sculptures". I agree with Martha: these are truly extraordinary pieces of work, Aileen.

Monday, August 25, 2008 4:35:00 PM EDT

Michael Chekhov Psychological Gestures

2008-08-11T18:35:00.001-04:00

by Mark Coleman

I am an actor/theatre director/drama teacher who recently stumbled across Authentic Movement through my interest in Eugene Gendlin's Focusing, after I recently came across some very illuminating articles about movement on the internet which drew parallels between the two methodologies. One was Barbara Chutroo’s Meet Your Body,
( http://www.focusing.org/bodywork.html )

I am new to the idea of AM, but I think I have been using it for a number of years without being aware of it, in my synthesis of Michael Chekhov's Psychological Gesture (PG) techniques with Focusing. I was immediately struck by the congruity of the creative/performance applications of Chekhov's PG & Focusing with the Authentic Movement process.

Chekhov taught actors what he called the Psychological Gesture: “the embodied essence of the character” which would condense the intricate psychology of a character into a powerful, clear and simple movement; an organic, moving metaphor.”

Of course, both Focusing and Chekhov’s exercises are psycho – physical processes and have much in common with Authentic Movement as I see it. All three connect the inner life to a communication with the body, which is really the essence of acting, it seems to me. All three techniques seek pathways by which the heart and soul can be fully em-bodied and in-corporated, the inner made outer, the invisible made visible.

I would love to know if anyone else out there has any experience of the extraordinary complementarity of these three techniques, particularly when applied to the actor’s creative process.

copyright 2008

Betina said...

I have just read Mark Coleman's text and also Aileen Crow's comments on acting as an experience of embodying for communication. I have worked as an actress for 20 years in a group with a deep commitment to investigation. I have been practising AM for 13 years. Now I teach in an acting studio in Spain and have been using AM as a powerful resource for investigating and deepening the actor's relationship with the material being worked (characters, text, author, period, space). Although I am familiar with M Chekov's technique and with Focusing, in my work with actors I have concentrated my interest in Authentic Movement and in other expressive movement techniques (www.rioabierto.org.ar). I feel very stimulated with the possibility of exchanging more about this! Thank you. Betina Waissman

Wednesday, August 20, 2008 2:03:00 PM EDT

rebecca vernooy said...

Hi from Ohio University. Nice to say "hello" to my fellow movers, and touch base with this community. I have been doing Authentic Movement for over twenty years, and teaching Movement for Actors for over a decade.

Responding to Mark Colemen's discovery of aligning AM with Psychological Gesture....My currculum for Movement for Actors is based in AM, and incorporates several somatic methodologies. I have also seen the similarities between AM and Chekov's PG.

when working with text and character, I guide the acting students into a sesion of AM. They allow a movement/gesture to emerge that feels intuitively right for the person they are to embody. After refining the gesture, and making it specific, the movement becomes an anchor. It can be one in a series (ie: for a monologue or within a scene)or it can be a physical "emotional prepartation". The result from this way of working is the same as Psychological Gesture. It is the approach that might be different.

I have found that the initial, intuitive movement impulse that the actor uncovers connects that person to a "character" in a very visceral, raw and dynamic way. When they get lost or in "their head", they can immediately return to the body via the original gesture/movement anchor. It makes for very truthful and embodied acting.

I have written alot about AM and acting training, and will be writing about aligning AM and Chekov's work in the near future (my plans for an article on the subject had to be postponed since I am trying to balance life with my seven week old and my academic, creative life).

I can be contacted at vernooyr@aol.com, and welcome any inquiries.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008 3:09:00 PM EDT

Requesting a French connection

2008-08-02T11:45:00.007-04:00

Catherine Drum Scherer (Spokane, Washington)

Dear Ones,

I will be visiting my daughter in Paris from Dec 13, 2008 -Jan 2, 2009, and would relish a connection with someone there who is practicing Authentic Movement...

Anyone?

Catharine
jashoda1@earthlink.net

© 2008 Catharine Drum Scherer

MYSTERY

2008-07-07T21:08:00.012-04:00

By Germaine Fraser

"Thirty spokes meet at the wheel's hub.
It is the center hole that makes it useful.

Shape clay into a vessel.
It is the space within that makes it useful.

Cut doors and windows into a room.
It is the holes that make it useful.

Therefore, benefit comes from what is there,
Usefulness from what is not there."

—Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching

Here I am in Beijing 's White Cloud Temple, one of the oldest temples in Beijing . An ancient walled-in refuge from the bright shiny new Beijing face the Olympics will be exhibiting shortly. I am in China with a group of Taoist Qigong practitioners, studying at various places in the ‘middle kingdom’, Beijing being our first stop. We will learn a shamanic form from a Female Immortal lineage holder, climb vertical mountains, explore and live in temple caves and search our individual practices in a place that has deeply cultivated these activities for over 4,000 years. Beijing is said to have the best fenshui of any city in this enormous country. The city planned 3,000 years ago, is very intentionally placed at the base of a ring of mountains. Even in the most hectic places in this hugely populated city and in its parks, there is a softness. Having walked through TianTan Park (their Central Park) and spent time watching and waiting there, I can tell you there are thousands of Cypress trees which aid and support this softness. I am intrigued, beguiled and charmed by them and how they diffuse energy.

My main intention coming here is to find a little corner to do some Authentic Movement (a spontaneous Qigong form which is very like AM). Since I woke up this morning, it has been very clear this is what I am needing to do today. The temple, like most temple compounds is maze-like. Composed of little houses juxtaposed and connected to each other, divided and related to narrow pathways that take you to yet other small squares of one-room clustered buildings, small gardens or temples. Fat sticks of incense burn in large cauldrons outside specific temples which house huge ceramic figurines bedecked in ornate silk clothing. I meander, mostly alone, happily getting lost in the maze. I find a temple dedicated to Kwan Yin. She is the bodhisattva goddess who refused to become immortal until all suffering was alleviated from the world and who is very present in all our travels on this trip. I credit the softness in the mountains and in the country at large at least in part to her radical spirit of selfless caring. Her spirit is very active. She's everywhere. So I try to keep her message of compassion close, to keep my heart open as I travel forward or sideways (or backwards!) in these alleyways. Her temple, not surprisingly, is very crowded; not the place to do moving so I keep wandering.

At the farthest backend of the compound I find a lovely open square pleasingly framed off on all 4 sides by open corridors and small gardens. Someone’s laundry hangs on a short line. There is a large square raised platform, off the uneven stone ground 10-15 feet. The side near the building’s wall has an exquisite painting; the other three sides are open but have a protective wood railing serving to contain the space. The floor is wide red-painted wood planks. Here I am. I’ve found my Authentic Movement space.

I am one of the more furtive seekers looking for a movement space from my group of 40, so I have reached this far end first and am quite alone. I go up to the space and walk around it a few times and take some time to look at the floor to ceiling painting. It’s one of these impossible epic odyssey paintings that has ten plots happening at once. It is depicted from the angle of an angel looking at the aerial side of a mountain. There are deities riding chariots through clouds, expressive humans and immortals creating peace and havoc at various landing spots, while different precipitations and weather patterns move through and flying dragons get ready to make their move. Beautiful. Overwhelming. I feel humbled before it. The rafters in this covered platform are brightly painted and gorgeous with little vignette paintings in the center of each beam. I am surrounded by nature and art, my favorite place to be.

I sit quietly for a bit, sinking into the depth of the space and the self. I am aware of the light white pollution soot that covers everything and which is everywhere. I feel it on my skin, in my mouth; my clothes are dusted with it. It’s impossible to escape. So, I take it along with me. Some of my qigong colleagues are beginning to filter in and out of the space below. I feel quite safe and unencumbered up on the platform. A couple of dour monks have walked by, hands behind their backs, scowling as they inspect today’s invasion. Some young assistant-initiate monks, their long black braids swinging, look curiously from one side to the other. And there is a nondescript old woman. She is sitting on one of the high thresholds of the corridors watching me. She is my Authentic Movement witness. The distance between us is considerable, but even from here I can see how centered she is in her own body and I can feel her female interest. I decide to have a relationship with her from 200 yards. I move into the space exactly when it feels right, rising to stand to face the painting.

One of the great things about being fifty years old is I’ve stopped caring who sees me do what anymore or how I look doing it. (Or maybe this is from doing AM for 20 years?) I feel very free, unrestrained, un-selfconscious, caution is to the wind. I am only interested in this Moment, Now, and how this body’s intelligence stays with that. And it’s a ride, alright. Perhaps the dragon, chariot and deity energies have jumped off the wall and entered this body. The movement starts off in large fast dynamic arcs, eating up huge quantities of space in short periods of time. There is leaping, arching and high legs, deep dips and extremely fast pivoting turns. The panting is surprisingly minimal. I am wearing a loose opaque rayon shirt over a silky camisole. I find myself enjoying the shirt lightly gather around my ears as my torso is thrust forward, or whipping around the back, sliding easily over the slippery camisole as the body torques left and right and legs/arms whip along with it. The raised wood floor makes its uneven heaving sounds as I pounce and flash about. I find myself running the circumference of it at fast speeds, the inner arm playing the sharp stabilizing point on a compass’ needle.
My witness has moved to a different viewing angle, but is still quite strongly attentive in her body. I think I see a small smile as she sits very still on a step under one of the corridor arches. There are a few still points in the session where I find myself facing her, these many yards away. There is something so liberating in just facing another person, a person you don’t know and they are facing you, and you are breathing together. For some reason, this is such an unlikely occurrence in this world we live in. But there we are, in the back of the temple compound, steeped in time, simply facing each other. Open. Don’t know each other. But do. She’s my grandmother, mother, my sister. She’s me. She is the cut door and window in Lao Tsu’s room. Maybe I am the spoke to her wheel hub. Or maybe I’m an eccentric Caucasian woman leaping around her temple’s compound. When I see her as I am standing there, I have a sense she is seeing something she never thought she’d see, something imagined or hoped for. I feel like I am making her day. God knows she is a part of making mine. Her gaze is very strong and steady and she is very planted in herself. I too am reflecting this. And I think maybe this raised platform was meant for a woman to move ecstatically on it and here I am answering some ageless bequest or perhaps, the prayers of masses of others, be they painted on a wall or delivered osmotically from ages past. Obviously, this movement is not my own; hugely influenced by antiquity, this place and a time. I am somehow embodying something someone in me understands, but damned if the rest of me knows what it is. Mystery. China exudes it. And it is the Authentic Movement form’s unspoken understanding.

This session is about 45 minutes long, during which time I occasionally slow up and look around to see my colleagues doing their slow, focused practice, sometimes watching each other, sometimes quietly moving out of the space. I feel supported here, whether I be sweating profusely, sooty whiteness sticking to wet flesh or crossing diagonals backwards in large swooping gestures. I finish by sitting quietly as I began, on the dusty ground. I feel released, that universal prayers have been answered, that wide red planks have felt a woman’s thunder. Upon rising to go, the air is clear and cool against my damp skin, my body is loose and grateful. I see my witness’ back enter a door into a small house beyond the corridor. I pause, face the maze back from where I came, transformed from when I entered.

ⓒ Germaine Fraser 2008

On doing and not doing AM

2008-07-05T16:41:00.005-04:00

by Teri Viereck

When describing AM, I would prefer to use some verb other than "doing" AM. When I use the verb "doing" AM, it seems that I am not receptive enough to invite the witness or the messages from the unconscious.

We are not human doings, we are human beings. The same issue arises in yoga, tai chi, etc. And it sounds so much like a duty to say that I "do" my AM. Then I might feel guilty because I did not do it. How about "I practice my AM" or "I get in my yoga practice". Or "I explore AM".

Words make a difference in our bodies. Consider the difference between "Lift your arms" and "Allow your arms to come to lifting". Try it.

she who

laughs

lasts

Meet your body – Bringing Focusing to Authentic Movement

2008-06-24T09:40:00.002-04:00

by Barbara Chutroo, bchutroo@earthlink.net

I first encountered Focusing as a dance/movement therapy student. I came to dance/movement therapy because of my conviction that the body is central to psychological healing. I could not imagine an effective therapy that didn’t include the body’s responses and stories. In that first encounter, I felt my body respond with that famous “felt shift” Focusers speak of that happens when an issue is understood on a new mind/body level.

It was natural for me to continue to work with the relationship between Focusing and movement and I studied Wholebody Focusing with Kevin McEvenue. For many years, I have also been involved with other internally directed movement practices including Authentic Movement, Contact Improvisation, Continuum Movement, and Body-Mind Centering®. These processes all invite us to explore inner sensation with curiosity and to follow subtle movements of our bodies, emotional responses, and energetic shifts as they unfold in action. They can be looked at as Focusing in movement

For the past two years, I have combined Focusing with Authentic Movement in a small group created with my friend and authentic movement practitioner, Aileen Crow and in a personal practice. These excerpts were drawn from a paper I wrote which grew out of this experience. The complete version can be downloaded on the Focusing website at http://www.focusing.org/bodywork.html . In it I look at the contributions of inner directed movement to growth and healing, the ways in which Focusing and Authentic Movement differ and support one another, and the role and experience of the listener or witness. The witness, in Authentic Movement, corresponds to the listener in Focusing and the mover corresponds to the Focuser.

As we know, in Authentic Movement, a person moves with eyes closed in the presence of at least one witness. Witnessing is based on the premise that there is value to being seen and value to the experience of seeing. In being seen without words, the mover senses his or her whole being as acknowledged by the witness. As the witness tunes into the mover’s presence, disguises and pretenses fall away in the simple attentive awareness of the physical, energetic being before her.

In Focusing, a Focuser usually sit quietly and waits for a sensation, image, emotion, or life situation to arise. She says hello to it internally with the same friendly and careful curiosity of the Authentic Mover and waits, again, for her body’s response. Focusers call the unclear, inchoate, sense that sometimes surrounds an issue or feeling a “felt sense”. The Focuser, then, describes her experience out loud to a listener paying special attention to the quality of this felt sense as it shifts and changes. The Focusing listener, unlike the Authentic Movement witness, reflects back the Focuser’s own words trying to precisely understand the Focuser’s meaning. The Focuser’s process goes from felt sense to verbalization and the listener accompanies her without leading or directing. This active listening helps the Focuser bring the felt sense into cognitive clarity and accurately verbalize an inner experience. Projections can jump out in the use and choice of words so the listener is careful to remain true to the Focuser’s meaning and experience. The listener’s intention is to support the Focuser’s process. There is no invitation for the listener to offer her own experience as is done in Authentic Movement. Instead, the Focuser, in touch with her felt sense, is helped by the listener to bring forth and illuminate her experience. This forward movement continues until the Focuser is satisfied.

A main difference between the Authentic Movement witness and the Focusing listener is the intent. In Authentic Movement the witness and mover each offer their experiences. Although enhanced awareness and a sense of connection may blossom from this exchange, the mover's inner process ends when she stops moving. In Focusing, the listener’s intention is to enable the Focuser’s process to continue. The listener’s verbal responses help the Focuser’s investigation sharpen and evolve. As the experience is heard and acknowledged, as well as seen, it gains dimension.

The role of the witness and listener can bring a sense of awe and humility. In not taking center stage yet being active, there can be profound pleasure. It is sometimes a humbling revelation to see how misguided we can be by our own identifications and projections. On the other hand, there is the excitement of being with what is revealed when our projections are put aside.

Moving helps us explore our bodies as the basis for our experience in several ways. It brings a fullness and authenticity to emotional expression that goes beyond words. It opens the door to enlarging our emotional vocabulary and to further investigation and understanding of the complex human drama we all embody. Emotions find their affective expression in the movement and neurology of the body. Anger, joy, and grief, for example, have gestural and affective components we all identify. Movement, also, has the power to awaken mythic images and connection to primordial life forms. The mover becomes wind, earth, snake, eagle, root, and water. These images carry a rich complexity. The felt sense around them can move us toward a deeper knowing of life's fullness.

Growth is a neuromuscular reorganization. Through movement and sensory explorations our bodies discover and develop their capabilities. Likewise, through active touch and movement we interact with, and bring the world into, ourselves. A Focusing awareness and an inwardly directed movement practice enables the reorganization of our cellular bodies - a formulation of new meanings that inform our personalities as well as our physical selves. In this way, the knowing of who we are is physical, emotional, and cognitive, as well as a living, breathing process.

Witness Consciousness and the Development of the Individual

2008-06-03T07:09:00.002-04:00

Thank you to Catharine Scherer (see post re. Thesis Survey) and others for asking about my thesis on Witness Consciousness. The whole thesis is posted on the site of the Barfield School where I did my graduate studies. If you’d like to see it go to: www.barfieldschool.org/works.html
I welcome any responses. Paula

Abstract
Witness Consciousness
in the Development of the Individual

This phenomenological study documents the development of “witness-consciousness” through three data sources. A survey of forty Authentic Movement practitioners, representing a thirty-year span of experience, shows long-term transformational development of the individual. A six-session group study of four “movers” and two “witnesses” reveals how cognitive capacities develop within individuals in the context of relationship. The third source of data highlights the
connection between Authentic Movement and contemplative inquiry and offers evidence that movement, stillness, and perception play a role in the act of bearing witness to the unfolding of consciousness. Through the triangulation of the data sources, a continuum of cognition becomes apparent that is inclusive of intellect, imagination, and intuition.

The findings of this thesis confirm the rich contribution of the moving body to human development, and emphasize how quality of relationship shapes adult transformational growth.

© 2008 Paula C. Sager

Women's Peer Group

2008-05-11T09:33:00.001-04:00

Roxanna (Larkspur/San Anselmo, CA)

I am interested in meeting with a small group of experienced witnesses/movers who would like to use the discipline of authentic movement as a vehicle for anchoring and amplifying one's vision & focus in the creative/expressive arts and teaching. Interested in once/month studio meeting in Marin area. I have access to a sweet, clear, clean studio in San Anselmo.

© 2008 Roxanna

Therapy for Women/Teens with Eating Disorders

2008-04-04T21:24:00.003-04:00

Sara (MA)

I am starting a program for women and teens with eating disorders to use authentic movement as a means of self discovery. Would love to hear from others who may have taken the work in this direction.
thanks.

© 2008 Sara

The Authentic Movement Community Directory

2008-04-03T12:28:00.001-04:00

Elizabeth Reid (Averill Park, NY)

The Authentic Movement Community Directory has a listing of 140 people who want to be connected to each other in practices of Authentic Movement.

Here is a small sample of recent requests (with permission from each person) that were made on the Authentic Movement Community Directory.

Lucy Mahler.....would love to start an AM class and/or peer group in upstate NY in the Catskills near Phoenicia, NY. Call if you are in the area.

Laura Hays....I am looking for other experienced committed movers to form a weekly peer group in the Berkshires of Western Mass. Please contact me via phone or e-mail interested.

Jeannine Salemi: I am a dance artist and dance/movement therapist (finishing my thesis). I would like to find a community of like minded movers/explorers/artists to practice with.

Joan Webb:Co-editor of A Moving Journal. Authentic Movement and Jewish mysticism. Integrated Kabbalistic Healing

Paula Sager: I teach Authentic Movement to individuals, small groups, and in workshop formats. I am interested in how Authentic Movement serves contemplative practice, creativity, and social change.

For more information on the Authentic Movement Community Directory go to:

http://authenticmovementcommunity.org/directory.htm

© 2008 Elizabeth Reid