context 7: general #513

Movements, especially new movements, make emotional and mental patterns visible that became us in the course of our socialization and are now ingrained in our bodymind. These “past” experiences and “fixed” parts of ourselves can now be seen and dealt with in a new light. The past is not past. We interact with it and permanently create and recreate it.

We in the modern world focus so heavily on mechanistic applications of our intellectual conscious capabilities in our educational systems that we strongly distort the perception of the environments we are living in.

Ancient Daoists emphasized an equilibrium between the spheres and dimensions. They did not give a clear preference to the intellect and the conscious spheres as we do in our worlds. Our worlds are pretty lopsided. This lopsidedness makes it more difficult to interact and communicate meaningfully with the larger environments we are a part of.

The integrated bodymind is relevant for whatever path you are walking on.

Movements in a Daoist bodymind practice are not mainly will-directed. They are also not simple movements of arms and legs. You enhance flows, but you also follow flows. Movements involve the whole body and the environment in complex ways.

The visuals I present provide an incredibly powerful and multidimensional input for the ways my movements organize themselves and my own intellectual input in their organization. The visuals inspire the conscious spheres, but they also deeply support the unfolding of subconscious structures and patterns. The support of the constructive unfolding of the subconscious spheres is seen as profoundly important in Daoist philosophy for the ways we interact and communicate with the world—individually, as well as as a species.