Open to read: the responsive body - By Alexandra Baybutt

Open to read: the responsive body

            It is remarkable that those who regularly practice meditation are reported to have smoother fascia. Fascia is connective tissue, running in waves throughout our whole body in deep and more superficial layers. It means things get to stay together, but also glide against each other. Fascia is necessary. Yet it varies in the degrees to which it is more responsive, making movement easy, or to the degrees where it is more held, making movement less easy. Like so many materials, it is transformable, mutable through changing conditions.

In movement terms, what constitutes 'open'? Smooth, pliant fascia, lubricated joints, being adaptable to a range of stimuli, having access to full range of motion and dynamics. Translate that into aspects of simply 'being', we're looking at the actuality of responding, choosing to respond, adapting to a change in an environment and other people, or even simply surviving.

We need to expand out a bit, put this act of opening in relation to something, someone or somewhere. Being open or closed, as an end point, is subjective. Even when we explore an act of opening or closing in a particular context, it is still governed by the margins and colours inherent and unexpected in that context. The flower opens towards the light, but it needs water and good soil for that growth to proceed.

We open in order to grow. This could be to take in new information or new sensory stimulus. The flower opens to reveal its centre so the bees can be received. Opening implies change, primarily the change in the state of the thing or person opening, a change in the quality of the body’s tissues, and secondly in its relationship to its environment. However, the degree of change is on a personal continuum, or personal scale.

Opening is useful, actuated through change and simultaneously activating change, and when manifested through the immediacy of the body, change is sure-fire. But then, closing is also useful. From the perspective of survival, we resist, literally recoil, back away before we go with or advance, where there is shape change in the body’s core. It is important to acknowledge this reflex.

In order to resist, we open a small way in order to perceive something, then 'know' to recoil, though this 'knowing' is at such a deep layer it can hardly be considered 'knowing' in cognitive way. This is the information of the tissues and their vast intelligence. If we accepted everything we encountered, we would be subject to imminent death through lack of discernment. Closing off then, is necessary. Exploring harmony between open-ness and closed-ness seems to be the game. Closing off, turning inwards for reflection, digestion and consolidation are equally valid parts of the growth and learning process.

Actively open could mean awareness, the capacity for empathy or a high degree of perception of the environment. Being open to perceive, however, doesn't necessarily lead to less prejudice or acceptance, but perception of things 'different' to you - in mass, velocity, quality - can still be included as part of a shared landscape.

Being actively closed could refer to high levels of muscular tension, stubbornness, or even deliberately ignoring or not seeing the position of another. But beware of associating closing with negativity.

If we return to the materiality of the body and its many kinds of tissue, some muscular tension (or tone) is needed to protect as well as to move. A lot of muscular holding could be considered a container, a physical barrier between me and you, as well as a shell protecting, defending even, the contents. Necessary then, in times of trauma and recovery.

Greater pliancy in the body isn't a direct route to an increase in the ability to include and accept others, but maybe it helps. Whilst also overly simplistic, this notion is highly difficult to begin to measure. The appearance of being open may not be the same thing as being open; how you perceive yourself may not be as others see you and physical manifestations of open-ness continue to exist on a continuum. How we transition from open to closing, or closed to opening does not have a set speed or even a necessary linear progression: it is sometimes subtle, imperceptible. But working from the perspective of the body and the senses, this transition can be more tangible.

Let us return to the importance of taking account of personal continuums as relative in exploring the notion of 'open'. Granted, there are a multitude of versions of open. Perhaps closing off withdraws the attention to the environment, retreating to no longer notice sounds, smells and light. This could be a kind of numbing, where tissue is held tight or where it loses so much tone it is limp: either way, information cannot easily travel through. Perhaps, though, closing off from the outer is in order to open to an inner landscape. This is opening attention towards meditation or to imagination.

Smooth fascia, as supportive of a state of being open to receive, transmit, connect and exchange, allows movement impulses felt from within and without to travel through the body. We could be seen as constantly in a process of opening or closing: towards, away, inward, outward.

Alexandra Baybutt

For more of Alexandra's work visit: http://alexandrabaybutt.wordpress.com/

Truth, flux and movement - By Alexandra Baybutt

Truth, flux and movement

          Movement is required for life: beyond that we can debate many possible truths. Even in the comparative stillness of lying down or sitting we can feel the heartbeat, sending a pulse throughout the body, and the motion of ribcage and abdomen in breathing. Even if asleep, these motions happen unconsciously, wonderfully. We grew from motions of cells subdividing, compressing, giving space and different densities and qualities to our human form. Even recuperation and recovery involve movement, cells grow and decay. Without movement, regardless of size and scale, there is no growth and renewal. We can but zoom the microscope further in, or telescope further out. The earth spins, the universe expands.

Beyond this necessity of movement for simply being, we can speculate over the various 'truths' of movement. There is an increasing understanding and appreciation of the notion of 'body language'. It is by no means new to acknowledge the huge, inherently communicative capacity of the body moving. What can reduce and oversimplify human movements are observations that do not take into account context. For example, crossed arms being an indication the person is closed-off. Such limited deductions diminish a complex collection of a body’s actions, dynamics and use of personal space to an implausible and perhaps even damaging conclusion (maybe this person is just a bit cold).

Due to the constraints of space and time, the media's use of ideas stemming from 'body language' research can reduce and label some aspect of movement or posture, which becomes, perhaps unintentionally, insulting. The next stage of appreciating and exploring 'body language' is to look at changes in a person's movement over a period of time. Like a classic novel, we can look for a sense of the beginning, the middle and the end. Maybe there isn't an obvious 'resolution' to a particular movement, maybe it comes out of nowhere with no preparation at all. As we already found, relative stillness has motion in it, and either side of it, giving more nuanced detail as to how it emerged, rather than simply the snapshot of a single posture.

Responding truthfully within a given set of circumstances can be a definition of acting. For attempting a degree of consistency and creating a convincing character, this is a useful rule. Movement is change, the very nature of being is its inconsistency, or impermanence; that cells decay, and each breath changes the air and gasses in the body. She was standing by the table, now by the clock. This rather flippant opening statement leads, of course, to increasing complexity, then recognising these notions as being by degrees is vital. How we perceive is also subject to change.

We learn through touching the environment around us, and our other senses are constantly in communication with this sensing of touch. From this corporeal experience of one's own body, the environment and others in it, comes the brilliant faculty of language; an abstraction of experience. It is in our language, this echo of movement: I'm stuck, she's an immovable force, I remember (literally re-organising through the body, the members).

For health and greater access to more movement choices, experiencing body parts in conversation with other parts is useful. Where there is less movement, it can be said there is less sensation there, for example in parts of the back, vertebrae could be less mobile due to muscular tension. Feeling the whole of me, the mass and vibrancy of my body gives the sense of being at-home, present to the resilience and endurance of my body, and a recollection of how movement, and change, are necessary. Less movement somewhere can be protective, and the result of the valuable protective mechanisms to contain injury, for example, but after an injury is healed, the holding around the area is no longer necessary. The process of re-finding mobility in the body after such increased stability can be neglected. It requires practice to distinguish the difference between protection, stability and passivity.

In remembrance of Colombian singer Shakira, and her catchy message that the “Hips Don't Lie”, seeing a walk where there is very little weight shift across someone's pelvis with each step, I am reminded of what Irmgard Bartenieff referred to as the “dead seven inches.” The intention of her work as a physiotherapist was an attempt to mobilise and alter patterns of where movement comes from and how it travels. She did this in order to help her patients recover from Polio to gain independence. Ideally,  this would transpire with her eventually drawing herself out of the picture.

Mobilising the conversation of each leg to where it meets each side of the pelvis means shifting weight. This activity, so acutely obvious in infants, can diminish with age due to many factors (expectations, culture, work, sense of self, perceptions of gender to name a few). Weight shift means sitting, standing, walking, and running. I urge putting observations in a greater context so: sitting up to reach for a glass of water, standing to see over a fence, walking in the park, running to greet a loved one.

So, we find no concrete truths in movement, but perhaps an exploration of what is appropriate in that moment. The body is in direct relationship with its environment, others in it, and itself. We are not sealed units, isolated or above contexts. These relationships inform and are informing at every level. We think and learn through moving - tasting, retracing, consolidating, testing, asking, retreating, advancing, expressing needs, wants, and inner attitudes. How and where we move is highly complex, but whether one discrete part could be considered the truth or a lie is impossible in a system that is always changing. This flux is reflected in a day: what is the centre of attention and what is on the edge changes at different times and places. Rocks erode into sand. Tectonic plates push up mountains.

More access to more choices in how and where we can move increases the ability to see different perspectives, both literally, and conceptually. Noticing how we see, having the skills to get up when we fall, using gravity and a solid base of support, and what is necessary in the moment takes us beyond mere coping but to mastery in a huge range of contexts. The admiration of athletes does not mean relinquishing one's own sense of personal mastery; simply the context is different, and the competition isn't necessarily quite so obvious. Your life and work may not call for an extremely refined level of fitness or risk, but nevertheless there is considerable reward in the increased well-being and presence through being at home in your body.

Alexandra Baybutt    

For more of Alexandra's work visit: http://alexandrabaybutt.wordpress.com/