By Amy Tan | 26 April 2011

Here are a collection of words that became the inspiration and foundation of last week’s workshop titled, Living Our Spacious and Moving Bodies.

In the workshop, we explored the physical and spatial boundaries of our bodies through experiencing our body in movement and cultivating an understanding of how our bodies, not just our mind, can be cognitive in the way we exist and communicate with the world around us.

The sweet moment for me was when one participant shared their experience after an exploration and those were almost the exact words of Godard below before having a chance to read the quotes below, “I am in the space and the space is in me.”

”We can never touch just one thing; we always touch two at the same instant, an object and ourselves, and it is in the simultaneous interplay between these two contiguities that the internal sense of self – different from both the collection of body parts and the collections of external objects – is encountered … my tactile surface is not the interface between my body and the physical existence as well. By rubbing up against the world, I define myself to myself. “

” This dialectic (between body and the world) is lifelong, and its formative power can hardly be overstated. It establishes preferences and aversions, habits and departures, becomes the very stuff in which attitudes are ingrained. The “feel” in my skin and the “feelings” in my mind, what I “feel” and how I “feel” about it, become so confounded and ambiguous that my internal “feelings” can alter what my skin “feels” just as powerfully as particular sensations can shift my internal states. It is not too much to say that the sensory activity of the skin is a major element in the development of disposition and behavior, an element with enough sophistication and plasticity to account for wide divergences of experience and observation. ” – Deane Juhan.

CONTACT & PRESENCE
“The power of presence and contact is in the experience, and it cannot be nailed down to a ‘this’ or a ‘that’. Their magnetism is that they cleave straight to the heart, because they are the language of the heart. Making contact from an embodied presence communicates the essence of living things. At its most profound, it is the voice and expression of the human spirit.”

“When our words, perceptions and actions are born out of a living embodied presence, there is a genuineness that inspires and empowers our life. Presence becomes the basic ground or context in which the communication of information occurs. It is the energetic channel from which knowledge emerges and is communicated. An embodied presence is what exists when our entire body is in a state of attention, and it is from there that authentic contact comes forth. Without presence, contact is one-dimensional. It is like telling about something you’ve heard about, as compared to telling about a first-hand experience.”

“Contact is how we are with somebody or something. Presence, which is our embodied awareness, is the mother of contact. Contact is the process of transmitting meaningful information through language, touch, emotions, nonverbal gestures, and energy fields, and it originates in our living presence. As our living presence is active and dynamic, so is our contact. Contact offers the possibility of relating to ourself, others and our daily situations on a moment-to-moment basis. This notion of contact includes our spectrum of awareness.”

“We learn to make contact by being with our bodies, following our energy and trusting our perceptions, not by collecting concepts or trying to live a certain way. “ - Richard Strozzi Heckler.

“Contact is the appreciation of differences.” – Fritz Perls.

PHENOMENOLOGICAL SPACE
“I’m in the space and the space is in me.”

“I’m never looking just at space; I am already projecting into it. I have expectations, informed by my personal story. The space is full of the vectors of my expectation, the vectors of my desire. If I’m projecting in a space where there is an open place allowed by my history, I can go on; but if in my history there was a black hole – a missing or unperceived space – I will meet a wall. And very often what we are living is a confrontation between expectation, desire and history.”

“Space as a potential for action and imagination.”