Do What Matters
In the Dance
In many conscious movement practices, such as Five Rhythms, Movement Medicine or Open Floor, it is common to create embodied shapes to integrate sensations, emotions, qualities and concepts.
How can that support us in doing what matters?
Experimenting with Shapes
Embodied Values and Intention
We might just experiment with an insignificant shape, a gesture born from the moment, and then infuse it with a quality. Or we might let a shape emerge purposefully to represent what we seek. How does this shape move, if we enrich it with excitement, calm or perseverance?
Values and Intention
In Dance of Life and in ACT, values are qualities we infuse our actions with. Values are, thereby, distinct from needs. Values express what is important to us. Values are qualities we offer to life.
Intention is about commitment and steps we choose to take. That could be resolving a choice point to moving towards a meaningful life, making a simple step, or flavoring a habitual activity with some values-spice.
”The body says what words cannot.
Martha Graham
Experiment
Letting a Shape Emerge
- Scan your life: Choose an area of your life that matters to you, big or small. It could be, for instance, your health, your relationship, or just coming to dance.
- Play a track to move consciously to.
- Let a shape emerge out of your movement, for either:
- Who is important to you?
- What do you value?
- Acknowledge the value with a simple word to go with the shape, such as caring, trusting, loving,…
- Experiment with the shape; dial it up, dial it down; how does it move in repetition?
- Once the shape and the value word are well-linked in your experience, make a note to remember.
Why Shapes?
When we move consciously we usually want to get out of our head. To start with, it’s simply more fun to explore a shape in the dance—playing with it, dialing it up, dialing it down, expanding it into a repeating movement—than zoning out in mind space.
Bringing a concept into the body opens up the possibility to draw from a wider, embodied intuition. When we drop the project and stop trying to ‘work it out’ with our mind, we benefit from a wide range of experiences—and new insights might emerge. In learning science, this corresponds to diffuse-mode thinking, an essential part of learning something new.
Linking a shape to embodied insights supports us in other ways: When we are getting activated and out of our Window of Presence, when our brain becomes unintegrated, gestures and shapes are still available to us even when words fail us. The shape can remind us to make a pause and recall the insight tied to it. The shape becomes a key that unlocks the insight even if we are agitated.
”It can take a lot of hard focused-mode work beforehand, but the sudden, unexpected solution that emerges from the diffuse mode can make it feel almost like the “aha!” mode.
Barbara Oakley
Experiment
Invoking a Shape
Once you have linked a value to a shape, you can call it into this moment, even when the going gets tough. To practice this activity, recall a shape of a value you have embodied.
- Visualize a scene in a chosen area of life that would normally activate you. Keep it gentle and easy; just a 4 on a scale of 0 to 10 will do.
- Allow and investigate the sensations and emotions in the body. Breathe, expand, and include the sensations. Be curious and gentle with yourself.
- Can you be willing to sense these sensations and emotions and still connect to your value?
- Now, move your arms, hands and legs to recreate the shape of your value. Settle into the shape and pause, permit yourself to breathe, still willing to feel painful sensations, sensing the value coming through.
- What do you feel in your body in when you connect to your value shape? What shift can you sense in your body? Track warmth, spaciousness, relaxation and other sensations that might occur.
- It is important to realize: the purpose is not to get rid of painful sensations and emotions. It is about making space for them as well as for the value carried by your shape.
Taking Good Care of Yourself
- When you are trying to “figure it out,” drop the project. Let a shape emerge organically.
- When you invoke a shape in face of a difficult experience, start small! Bring in curiosity and kindness. We learn with making small steps, to eventually take on big moments.
- Practice to dial up and dial down.
- Should an experience start to feel overwhelming, return to your body and breathing; ground yourself. Dropping Anchor is an excellent embodied practice for grounding. Should you get at war with your self, Tara Brach’s RAIN meditation can be exceptionally supportive.
- Remember to open up: we are not trying to avoid painful sensations, but to be willing to feel the experience that is already here and to make space.
