What do I mean by shapeshifting?
Shapeshifting is the word I use to describe the feeling when all of myself is moving. It’s not so much a feeling of all my parts moving in coordination, but rather a feeling of moving as one unified field of activity.
For me, this feeling of shapeshifting emerges from a different way of conceptualising and experiencing my body: not as an object but as a collection of unfolding nested processes; not as being made of parts, but buzzing with life, continually growing; not of being apart from the earth but emerging from it.
What will we do?
In this movement workshop, I’ll guide you through a range of somatic processes through which I aim to share this experience.
Along the way, I’ll also introduce some of the sources which underlie my approach – biotensegrity, embryology, systems theory and more.
Background
Somatics often works through a process of embodying images. This phenomenon is called ideokinesis.
Years ago I had the insight that the images in our anatomy books shape our experience of ourselves in just the same way as ideokinesis.
But medical anatomy, so often received as authoritative, has a specific cultural history and presents a narrow view of what bodies are and how bodies move.
Over the last 30 years or so, the different biotensegrity model of human structure has begun to emerge from within medical science to challenge this centuries-old paradigm.
We’ll explore how to embody through movement and embodied imagery some of these new ways of experiencing our human structure.
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This is an opportunity to go deeper into the practices and thinking behind the Tuning Class though could be of interest to anyone working with or interested in human embodiment.
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image: detail from “Floating Thoughts” by Martha Friedman marthafriedmanwork.com