One year into movement

It has been one year or so since I started delving into free conscious movement (I’m still reluctant to use the word “dance” as it has so many associations). I started on my meditation cushion, then moved to ecstatic dance (16 Sept. ‘23 was the first time), then added “contact beyond contact” (5 October ‘23), then some 5Rythms. On January 14, ‘24 I met CI proper, and now here am I, eventually going to classes and jams 5 times a week, leaving the meditation cushion and the yoga mat in the closet.

My reflections over these activities mirror also a progressive emancipation from my previous mental schemes. In the beginning, I could allow myself to do any of these practices only by demonstrating to myself that they were consistent with what I was already doing qua spiritual practice. I could allow myself to move freely only at the condition of framing that freedom in a system I knew already. I couldn’t accept abrupt and random changes, it had to be smooth and coherent. I needed to make sense of myself and my new interests.—A clear instance of clinging for controlling the evolution of a process, especially when a part of me is scared by the fact that it doesn't really know where that is heading towards. This need has been eroded over the past months, as I am more and more aware of the fact that the way in which I tend to frame my activities and give meaning to them is actually a way of restraining and constraining what I can or should do—and how I can or should move.

I experience this as if I had to convince a recalcitrant child to go to school, and reassure them (my childish self) that it will be fine, it won’t be to challenging, all will be familiar enough. Luckily it seems that the child is growing up and this sort of justifications are less and less needed.

Yesterday, after a CI class, it became really clear to me that what I’m after in this whole development is not really the need to embody a certain idea(l). It’s rather the possibility of cultivating a certain way of moving. It’s a somatic goal, if anything, not an intellectual one. I’ll stick for now to the qualities of awareness, availability, and viscosity that I’ve described (here) just to make this a bit more concrete. And up to know CI seems a very suitable space to cultivate them (although not everybody doing CI will necessarily embody them or even be interested in them).

The kinesthetic state I now often experience and I’m trying to cultivate (bhavana) is a sense of fluid, spontaneous movement, which is soft and firm at the same time, open, ready, strong, gentle, funny, and deep. This is no longer the way in which a certain disembodied idea allegedly incarnates itself in the flesh. Rather, it’s the attempt at reshaping the ground of all other experiences, including intellectual ones. 

I start looking around and I see less and less persons with bodies, and more often bodies with personalities. It sounds a play with words, but it actually makes a huge difference in perception. CI has also originally been understood as a form of communication based on weight sharing and touch. But it can’t be a communication in the sense of a transfer of a quantum of information from A to B (although this sometimes also happens). If CI is a form of communication it is so in the sense that it creates a common space, makes something common. More specifically, it makes the body a shared space, it allows this body that conventionally I call “mine” to become a piece of public landscape, to operate and be used by other bodies that share that same landscape—that accept to have it in common. 

In doing so, we’re not going anywhere, we’re rather creating a sense of “here”, of this shared space of communion that is created, emerges, inflates, and then collapses, disappears, and is recreated again (I’m paraphrasing the experience of a Jam). 

In all of this, I still think that my previous reflections on the unknown (here) and anarchy (here) remain somewhat valid. But there is something still slightly unsatisfying in them. They still smell of the sort of talk I would do with my inner child to convince them to go to school. They are still ways of explaining to the mental consciousness what the body is doing in a way that is comprehensible for that consciousness (it entails certain necessary simplifications, precisely like stories you would tell to a child to let them do something good for them that they otherwise wouldn’t like to do).

My hope for the next year into movement is to keep moving, with much less need for intellectual justifications. I am currently in a phase of learning and orienting myself. I’ve now got a sense of the specific practice that is worth delving deeper into, and I’m busy with the delving. I expect this will take until summer 2026. What I wish for my 40th birthday is to have around a little but relatively cohesive community of people to keep creating and reshaping common spaces for movement, investigating, sharing, and have fun. Nothing more, but nothing less.