Embodied Living
Ok, I’m writing! It’s been a while – how exciting! I watched this interesting instructional video yesterday on Insight Timer on “somatic shaking.” My first thought was interest (something different to the standard meditation), then my second thought was “oh this could be really corny or annoying,” and then my third thought was “I’ve been living too much in my head recently – this could be good for me.”
As I watched the video, I was really impressed how at the start, when the teacher had only just started to move a bit, she referred to other species in the animal kingdom and how they shake to release or discharge energy. Full points for the ethology reference! It reminded me of something I’d read about dogs a while back, which said that they do full body shakes during times of transition to sort of “re-set” themselves for the next thing. It made me wonder how many other species do this, and my mind perked up at the sight of the entrance to another fun intellectual rabbit hole. I quickly pulled myself back, though, remembering my original intent of getting out of my head and paying more attention to my body.
It also made me think of just how many situations there are in which we humans force our bodies to stay perfectly still, or mostly still, in order to fit in with social convention. I’m reading a book about integrity at the moment, and it’s inviting me to realize just how much we change our own natural behavior (what feels good to us) in order to fit in with culturally prescribed norms.
I’ve always been drawn to full-body movement. I started dancing creatively at a young age, although I never took formal dance classes until I was old enough to drive myself to them. Then I focused on Latin dance, I think because I liked the freedom of movement and expression inherent in it. It seemed to me like a joyful dance, and that’s something that called to me, especially in the bland, overcast winters of Missouri. I used to drive myself to workshops at Amore Dance Studio in downtown Kansas City, back when downtown Kansas City wasn’t the safest place to be. I loved the energy of my teachers and the fluidity with which they moved. It seemed like a level of somatic freedom that most other people I knew and saw in my everyday suburban life weren’t allowing themselves to have.
In many cultures, dance is such an integral part of their self-expression. They dance in church, dance at birthday parties, dance in each other’s living rooms and kitchens after group dinners. I had the pleasure of living in Miami, Florida, for six years, and there the Cuban and Brazilian populations bring dance and vibrant life to every corner of the city – I was in heaven there. In Brazil, where I travelled a lot in my teens, it’s not unusual to see someone randomly start dancing at the beach or in a park or really just anywhere out in public. It almost seems like an automatic behavioural response to the sound of music, at least in cultures where this type of response is permitted. Hell, Brazilians don’t even need music sometimes – they’ll start dancing to the music playing in their own heads and only later fill the silence with song.
We took a guided tour of African American history in Memphis a few years back (it’s called A Tour of Possibilities – this is well worth doing!). Our guide, Ms. Queen, had an amazing voice. As she was driving the minibus around Memphis to the historical sites in African American history, she would stop at a place and burst into song before even explaining a word about the site. She stopped in front of the church where Aretha Franklin’s father was a pastor and where she grew up singing gospel music, and before giving us any context, Ms. Queen burst out into “R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me…” Later in the tour, she stopped in front of the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was tragically assassinated, and she sang a song in memory of him that brought us all to tears. Her singing was truly soulful, not just fulfilling the obligation of uttering the words. She swayed and closed her eyes and lifted her hands when she sang (yes, the bus was stopped!). It’s like it was a whole-body behavior for her, not just a vocal one.
I’m about to take a workshop with Patsy Rodenburg, a world-famous voice coach, and I already know one of the things she’s going to tell us is to speak with our whole body. In her book she talks about asking students to push against a wall as practice in using the force of their whole body. I’m not sure of the details of her method because I haven’t done the workshop yet, but I like this approach already, because it reminds me of whole-body self-expression in the Latin cultures I’ve experienced and the full embodiment of singing that our tour guide expressed in Memphis.
The somatic shaking video was a good wake-up call for me and a reminder that our bodies are one whole organism. We don’t need to live so much in our minds, as if we’re simply big, heavy heads perched atop lollipop sticks, floating around the world. We can live as one whole body, one that’s grounded on the Earth beneath us while still free to move around. Our self-expression can be visceral in nature. To the extent that we’re physically able to, we can move all parts of our bodies in ways that feel good to us, ways that express the type of energy that we’re feeling on the inside. And who knows? Maybe as we experiment more with things like somatic shaking, free-expression dance, full-body singing, body-directed speech, and other forms of embodied movement…we may discover that this is a freer, more natural, more authentic way to live – one that preserves our own integrity, quite literally.
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