Following the protagonizations of a student throughout his formative education.
0. A dispositive
In the seminars at the Laboratório do Processo Formativo we study how bodies produce themselves and in the same act continually produce environments. Many actions compose the strategy through which we plunge into this evidence. In the room, there is a succession of me talking, conversations among and with the group, formative theory, and exercises taken from the event itself, be they individual or collective, contemplation and embodiments of images in the video recordings produced in and by the group, cartographic eggs, solos by participants, precise clinical interventions, participation of collaborators in molecular biology and anatomical exercises… a living process resulting in a production of embodied knowledge about what our constant focus is: how bodies produce themselves and their worlds.
Over 4 to 5 semesters of formative education the group learns the following:
1. A formative paradigm, where the model of the living extends itself from the molecular to the existential forms of human bodies, always following the same rules of connectivity and aggregation, deepening the vision and the body’s experience while an environmental processor always in the process of producing itself and environments, networking with other bodies.
2. An anatomic model that is able to proceed forming out of the lived, or how affects materialize themselves continually into somatic structures throughout a particular life according to the interaction of the embryogenic layers, in a continuous embryogenesis from the beginning to the end of that particular soma.
3. A vision of the body’s growth, from conception to old age, always supported by somatic bonds that can offer a reliable environment and a formative time, which are necessary for the subjective organism to keep developing modes of connection from fusion to cooperation.
4. An evidence that this process always happens inside social history and the interplay of powers and values. At this moment of the embodied learning, the students are already able to recognize, study, and act upon the modes according to which we make body in our worlds with social forces and bonds, and how these ones have molded and keep molding our somatic and connective reality, following the formative logic and grammar that have been studied over the previous three sections.
What we call eggs is a big egg-shaped board on the wall, where we draw diagrams of thought which organizes the formative process experience that unfolds throughout the encounters.
The eggs encompass the how, the when, the where, the conditions, the cycles, the rhythms, the principles with which bodies produce themselves, their relationship to language, social history, molecular biology and neuroscience, mapping what is being lived collectively.
As people assimilate this knowledge into their bodies, in their language and in their notebooks, it reveals itself, as a somatic reality, that these bodies immersed in the bodying field of each group in particular, inside larger and smaller environments, are pulsatory pumps that function as environmental processors “drinking and secreting environment.”
The groups, through this dispositif, have the opportunity of living in real time, the secreting and the molding of the body, the intervening in its shapes through specific practices, the maturing of them in the act of co-bodying with the present conditions, creating connections that keep increasing effectiveness in the production of self and cognition.
At the end of the program, the existential design of each body in its actions and expressions muscularly preserved by the memory of its repeated use, broadens its meanings. We contemplate, at this moment of the group, through the collection of photographs of each one, bodies in their bonding and social molds, their formative paths, their participation and modes in different environments, and the construction of their life story up to the present. Always enlightening the question of how this body, and with what forces and muscular combinations, sustains its present shape. And finally, we discover, inside the formative logic of each body, how to intervene upon this configuration, updating it a little more so that it gives way to the forces of the present, feeding its continuity with such forces. In this environment of images, images are gathered all the time, as video by the camera man present in the group and as photographs by the group itself who passes the camera around for everyone to use…
The images – whether they be recordings or photos, current or from each person’s life – are important to provide the evidence that living bodies are a whole set of actions, slowed-down actions, solidified as tissue and that they are always in action, molding actions… some kind of action… upon themselves and upon the environment… an anatomy of tubes inside of tubes such as Keleman describes in his Emotional Anatomy, pulsating, bringing to oneself, driving, processing, through an infinity of actions on multiple interconnected levels, shaping oneself and expressing oneself upon the environment, articulating oneself or drawing oneself away from other bodies, in almost infinite manners, always producing oneself and the environments, in some way.
This way of functioning in multiple layers of the event in the environment-seminar results in a constant recognition of the modes of functioning there-in-the-present and in a less and less narcissistic relationship, be it negative or positive, with one’s own images, which results in a naturalness that is captured inside of the evident artificiality of the presence of the devices of recording and exhibiting images… Capturing image, allowing one to be captured, watching oneself, recognizing oneself, exercising a formative grammar, practicing the act of bodying…
The different aspects of anatomic design of behaviors, actions and expressions become a language increasingly more prevailing in the groups under my baton.
Conducting the group process, for me, Regina, in its continuous flow of somatic presences and actions that sustain it, is, par excellence, the exercise of immediate and embodied contact with the living event that feeds me in the creation of language and formative knowledge. The living event, in its permanent morphogenesis and metamorphosis, requires a posturing of affects, a poetics and an orality, all specific to this communication.
A well-assembled collection of transcriptions, video recordings, photographs of a dispositif of production and capture are a treasure of registered events to which we may always resort, as we are going to do next. I believe that this is a great instrument, if not the instrument, for producing knowledge and its transmission to people who thinks and works upon embodied reality.
1. A body that thinks
Student– thinking is making me suffer…
Regina – Try to be a little more permeable… your design communicates to me that you have an evident fear of losing your thought if you get less dense… try getting a little less dense and see if you can think better… let your gaze get wet and not so focused. Organize in your eyes an expression of looking for … yes, blink wetter. Let yourself breathe a little more in the environment and you’re going to see that you will grasp better: bodies communicate what they are living and doing out of their design. Each one’s designs are understandable to others.
Regina – Look at me … see what I’m doing…
Student– It’s hard to understand…
Regina – Actions are their anatomical shape… look at me… I am giving you some time… look…this is my action…. I’m stopped… interested… in you… without pressuring you… that’s what I’m doing…
Student– I feel a strong intensity that comes from the belly as I am here… it’s hard to keep it and connect with people at the same time… then, I lose it… it is too much to manage.
Regina – Yes, you lose it because it’s too much for you… you don’t trust that you can shape and express intensity through your chest… as if you didn’t want it to go through your chest… making it go from the pelvis straight to your head.
Regina – So, let’s open up some more space in your chest, creating a field behind the breast bone… at this level that is more relational… You lack the experience of having a chest. The intensity of the belly is pre-personal, the chest is more relational, more personal… See if you can create more space in your chest, in order to grasp the environment and let the excitement fill you from behind the breast bone. Notice how your lungs fill, rotating inside… the heart talks to the lungs… give yourself a time to grasp their action of the in your chest.
Student– It feels much better, it gets cooler.
Regina- Excitation starts to be distributed throughout more areas. Try to grasp from behind your breast bone, your feeling of the esophagus, trachea, lung movement and see how you get a whole landscape of intensities within your chest.
Student– My eyes calmed down…
Regina – Now you’re feeling … before, you wanted only to see through your eyes … see how different it is to feel with your chest. You can keep a pulsation in your chest as you keep it a little inflated… your chest deflates very easily…
Student– Here is better, somewhat aggressive… I have a certain fear of coming into contact with my aggressiveness… but one needs aggression to grab the environment.
2. Grabbing the environment is an aggressive act
Regina- I have a fantasy: big bodies fear their own aggression. Look how you can fill your chest and become more powerful… with this feeling of being a lion, a king, a big man.
Student does it and laughs
Regina – To be able to be a handsome, big guy… a man who shines.
Student – It’s really hard, so many things happen and one starts to make distance…
Regina – You just described how a body takes a protective shape… life happens and bodies keep shaping, finding adaptations to situations that are sometimes overwhelming… this is what we call unbearable present… we have an extraordinary muscular adaptability, we keep molding ourselves in each condition… suddenly the defensive behavior that one day has been useful, is already stabilized itself muscularly and you no longer realize it… you just notice that your field of possibilities has narrowed.
3. Chest: more tame, less tame.
Student- I feel a stiffness in the front part, a lot of pressure.
Regina – Show it … let’s focus on it … if anyone in the group wants to imitate him, will understand what goes on with him … You can lie on you back and organize yourself the way you see in your image projected on the screen right now.
Student– I see myself looking for something…looking for a place in the space…a big rigidity…
Regina – So, you have an idea of what you were going through at that time.
Student– The difficulty of letting go and just be myself.
Regina – Do that again now… imitate what you see yourself doing…. the belly movement, the back and the shortening… do and undo the same action.
Student– I was trying to release my body, to let go, to lower my belly, to find a state of more flexibility.
Regina – Notice the relation of the three pouches … head, chest, and pelvis … what is this experience of you trying to coordinate the three pouches…
Student– It seems like there is something that prevents it…
Regina – Keep trying to grasp this place that prevents it and see what kind of experience you get from there.
Student does similar movements to those on the screen’s image…
Student– It seems like if I can stay in this place, if I slow down, I find more space… it stops being simply bothersome.
Regina – How do you use your back?
Student– The front gets collapsed… if I squeeze a little below it seems like it goes up.
Regina – Lie down again… as if you were a lying map of yourself … bend your knees and put your feet on the ground. How do you compare your belly and your chest?
Student– In this position my belly gives in, but in the thoracic diaphragm there is a strong pressure, it prevents communication between the pouches. And there’s a lot of pressure in the back. It makes me feel very uncomfortable … it tightens…
Regina –Remember what we talked previously about the big and tame you. See what is the difference between making firm the pelvis and letting the belly go.
Student– I don’t like to let the pelvis go… it seems too nice to me… it is like energy doesn’t get to my head… it makes me long for isolation and nothingness. As I close up the pelvis, I have my mind cleared up again.
Regina – Close your hands at the same time that you close your pelvis
Student– Then my chest rises and my throat opens.
Regina – You can organize in this position, a more affirmative shape of yourself… keep sliding yourself along the connective tissues… go from the affirmative to the tame shape and back… your feet?… what happens?… the feet look loose, useless … see how you can get affirmation also from your feet. Notice your hands. Organize more firmness in your hands and another degree of firmness in your feet. What about your throat?
Student– It opens up, it grows from within.
Regina – Make this statement: “In this position I affirm myself”.
Student– Here I affirm myself.
Regina – Is it good?
Student– Oh yeah!
Regina – Repeat it… press into your feet and go ahead… use your voice… let us increase the relationship between voluntary muscles and the cortex
Student– Here I affirm myself, here I affirm myself.
Regina – You just moved your pelvis and pulled in your belly. Keep saying here I affirm myself, here I affirm myself. Now let’s make an experience: let your pelvis go and get tame, intentionally. Say: here I become tame. A big man who doesn’t threaten. Does it make any sense for you to embody the big and tame? Experience yourself going from soft to firm. And vice-versa. A few times.
Student– I feel better, it gives me the feeling of going more into the world. This position is even comfortable and not too aggressive…
Regina –It seems like you are learning something about your own formative rules… you are fuller of yourself… it’s important to pay attention to that… when you let your belly go, your chest loses expression… the presence loses its integrity… the shape’s integrity.
Regina: Stand up again and try to find the relationship between the pelvis and the impulse from your feet for you to grow into your real size… see how you make the connection between pelvis, chest, head, through the throat, thoracic diaphragm, perineum and soles of your feet. It’s the accordion man that you can see in Emotional Anatomy book… in you… do a little more and then a little less of that shape… this is how you can regulate your intensity and learn how to sustain a higher degree of excitement. The time you turned off aggression, you must have been scared about this lack of control over your strength. I figure.
Regina: Identify how your body is right now… Let’s rehearse this: more tame, less tame, more tame, less tame… Do it with your eyes, too. You have very expressive eyes, quite integrated into your general shape. How do you feel about your vision when you build up more assertiveness?
Student– My vision changes a lot, it seems that peripheral vision expands and gives me a better feeling of space… I see more around.
4. Deepening the problematization
Regina – If you lie down again, maybe you can receive the pulses from deeper muscles. We are problematizing your taming, how you do it… its anatomy… and its meaning for you. Let’s repeat it with variations: more passive, more aggressive, more tame, more assertive. Now we’ll wait a little and pay attention to the motility in the deep muscles. Rest and let your depth express itself. Is your depth contracted?
Student– A lot.
Regina – So, you’re going to contract your depth more than it already is. Intensify what already is. Keep it for a while. And now you just undo step by step the contraction of the depth. Go down by degrees. And make a stop each time. Rest now. Stretch your legs. Just wait … whatever happens. You stimulated the pattern by intensifying it. Now it is responding by swelling in the opposite way.
Student– There are two events in there at the same time… my spine is sparking inside, deep inside….
Regina – That’s it… put your feet on the floor and you are going to receive this excitement going up your spine… what is happening in the deep muscles?
Student– It’s ok…
Regina – See if you can now let this excitement go further into your chest… that’s it, now you’ve got it, using your feet and using your pelvis. That’s it.
Student– It seems like there is someone sitting on my chest.
Regina – Who is that you that is seated on top of your chest?
Student– Myself.
Regina – Who is that you? What is the story of sitting about? A fear of change, an old accommodation?…I wonder.
Student– I feel a split between the left and right sides of the spine… a difference in tone… the right side is tenser, I am more supported by the right side.
Regina – Perhaps it means an impulse to turn over, avoid the contact that maybe is invasive for you right now… I see an outline of twisting in your general shape. What happens if you do the movement and deviate from the confrontation? (Regina helps the twisting in the floor)
Student– It’s good… it’s like running away. I need it… but like you did is too much.
Regina – Maybe it will be enough if you just turn your face and change the focus of your eyes. How do you feel?
Student – A lot better.
Regina – So, don’t look forward, don’t put your face forward. Only a slight movement to the side. See if it creates a feeling of privacy for you.
Student– Better.
Regina – That’s it. See what happened with the tone of the two sides.
Student– Now there is more balance. I feel more support in the lumbar area, my hips are firmer.
Regina – See how this movement of firming the hips gives you a center which is yours. You can also carry this feeling of privacy to your hips.
Student– There is a feeling of confrontation, down in the hips. It gives me power. It provides strength.
Regina – Is that good for you?
Student– It’s great.
Regina – You can keep practicing this form when you go home, first for yourself. Then you will see the effects on your relationships. But you need to practice it. I think there is another thing that we can observe from evolutionary theory, animals have all basic actions in common – turning, contracting, firming, rising, descending, closing, twisting… but there is a Who… and that changes everything.
5. Bodies understand each other
Student stands…
Student– Anger… I felt like I was losing my balance in the posturing of presence…too tense to stand on my feet.
Regina – How? What’s quality of the experience? What’s its pattern?… Show me and tell me… Keep saying and doing it… Make your pattern and say at the same time: that’s what I’m talking about… that’s what I’m talking about… don’t rush… you just described it but what is the existential condition?
Student– Feeling angry in the pouches. When I do the pattern I can feel a big pressure on the belly, pulling down, like it is about to turn into something crazy, too strong. It seems to me like the way to the legs was blocked. But as I manage to open it, the ribs go down, the throat opens, even my voice changes. And it looks like I see the world differently. I get more excited. Thoughts can flow better.
Regina – That’s it, thought is meant to go back and forth into the world. As you unblock the way down to the legs, you de-isolate yourself.
Student – I can already grasp a lot from outside. But I have trouble working with myself, feeling myself, grasping my inside. But as I stay here with your help it seems better.
Regina – To be more present and in contact…this is better… we’re in no hurry
Student– I feel damn hot…
Regina – You’re expressing yourself.
Student– That which was stuck starts to flow.
Regina – One thing is to grasp outside (exteroception), another thing is grasping inside (interoception). And there is a third function which is grasping one’s form itsel, how do I respond to all of this… and it is the proprioception. You are good at grasping outside and feel excitement rise inside, but for some reason, you don’t identify the nature of this excitement as experience… what am I living? I don’t know, I’m just feeling strange…
Student– There is a lot of fear that comes in the contact, I have always been very afraid…
Regina – That’s the first time I’ve heard you say that… “I live excitement with a lot of fear”.
Student– Fear of not being able to control… that’s why I hold in too much
Regina –You can grasp by proprioception how you control… let’s isolate this experience (he does the gesture of containing)… then you can say: ‘that’s how I try to control excitement facing a world that causes me fear and excitement.’
Student– It hurts… it seems like an impulse to stretch and the body doesn’t want to…
Regina – This is what direct experience is all about… the body doesn’t want to… this is what I live right now…then I can understand that I’ve learned in my upbringing that excitement is not a good thing, that we shouldn’t trust excitement, it leads us to things that aren’t good…
Student– I was a rebel but an isolated rebel… I protested by remaining stuck. (He does the gesture)
Regina – Stuck, revolted, but guilty and afraid to express yourself. To express yourself is, in this case, letting your legs grow, your chest open and presenting yourself… but you can’t… because there is fear of expressing yourself,… this would make you feel guilty… it will make me vulnerable to the world… then I’m going to be very anguished… with my head full of thoughts… this is guilty…feeling alone in the world, feeling excluded, asking yourself what it was that I did…thinking, thinking, thinking…reviewing the scenes inside your head… you are telling a story that I can imagine because you are showing me how you live it with your body… bodies are made to be intelligible, bodies are no mystery, all parts of nature understand each other… nature is intelligible.
Student– It seems like everything is getting lighter.
Regina – You just did a performance of yourself in the present… producing experience for yourself… I’m very happy for you… notice that when languaging and doing at the same time one can find out that there is continuity between body and language, verbs and actions.
6. Talking about he maturational continuum of somatic forms
Student– I’m thinner than I used to be, I used to be thicker. I get the impression that if I had more muscle I could hold myself up better.
Regina – Is that a question? How old are you?
Student – 52.
Regina – Now is the time that you’ll start gradually lose muscle mass… there will be a time that you will have a great loss… you’re entering a mature stage (fetus, baby, childhood, adulthood, maturity, old age). An adolescent is an unripe adult, followed by the alpha adult… then the alpha adult maturates … then comes a stage that is of de-hormonization, the decrease in hormones that leads you to this loss, the reduction of muscle layers and a change in shape. Keleman deals with this a lot… in the mature adult, there is an increase of sensibility with the increase in muscle porousness and the increase in the belly pouch and the reduction of the young adult’s big chest… with this, muscular layers get thinner… then levels of resonance regarding the lived can become incredibly more profound… power gets different at this phase, it’s not the physical power to go fight and win… the strength for procreation and all the things of youth … but you enter more levels of ability to capture, absorb, digest, assimilate events… you’re entering this phase. You’re in a full transition.
Student – And what about the maturity of the chest?
Regina – You have to update this chest that belongs to your former story, it a preserved response of the unbearable present of another time, in order to form a more whole, deeper, mature adult who is able to give support to thinner layers… this is from the biological maturational program, this body is presenting itself now, one body shape follows one another along life… as is now visible to us … When did this chest expression has been formed?
Student – Adolescence.
Regina – This point already has to do with hormones, the acceleration of the body’s growth… that is where we find this unbearable present where he formed that full, dense chest. , which cannot be emptied, preventing you go down both legs, firming and affirming as we did before…
7. An experiment belly down with the subjective anatomy
Regina – Now, please, lie on your stomach and feel legs, chest, pelvis… but stay still resting on the floor…and capture your own shape, feel borders, the volume and weight, just breathing the environment in this lying down position… you’re going to grasp the relationship of this chest with the belly pouch and the head pouch… the relationship of this chest with your arms and legs … it’s an anatomy that puts you back onto what your pattern does for you to live.
Student is lying down on his belly.
Regina – open your arms a little more in order to check this relationship: arms-chest and chest-pelvis. There is a small lumbar movement… tell me what you are living, experiencing, understanding.
Student– It seems like my body is more adapted to the floor, at first my pelvis was really high, it seems like it softened a little more, at first I had a lot of pain in my shoulder, it was impossible to lie my right arm on the floor. There was pain in the deltoid, now it’s better.
Regina – See that you are learning how to give yourself a more mature time to capture your on going process.
Student– My diaphragm is more permeable.
Regina – The diaphragm is more permeable, the pelvis can talk to the chest pouch… it is not shrunken, scared and angry all at the same time as it used to be… you are more calm, with a calmer presence, your shape resting on the floor.
Student – A calmness.
Roberta – How could you show me the adolescent angry pelvis?
Regina – Shrunken and charged.
Regina – Excited, full of energy, but without an allowed expression… can you show us the raised pelvis. What would this adolescent with a raised pelvis be like? What can he do with all of his excitement…
Student– Do a retracted pelvis…
Regina – It ended up retracting… whoever wants to, in the group, lie down and imitate this… imitating serves to understanding… make his pelvis… please do it so everybody can see… look you guys where he pulls his pelvis away from the floor, where contraction is… the pulse stops as you shape the pelvis like this… it reduces the expanding and contracting actions of the living pulse… it’s still the response of his form to excitement… his form still doesn’t know fully how to do otherwise… as it didn’t know, at the time, what to do with adolescent excitement… a big boy who didn’t know what to do with all the excitement… his familial environment was guilt-inflicting, moralist and the boy became revolted… didn’t dare do it any other way… look at how there is a shortening in the lumbar sacrum and tightening in the gluteus and with this the iliac rises from the floor… this is what memory is all about…. a structurally stabilized response… in his case, still tightening… this is the anatomy that you can identify, formulate and show after having this long formative time in this group… nowadays, you are able to lie on the floor and do this performance… Keleman calls it biodramatizing… now you can… the form already has an understanding of what it could do… what is the point of knowing all of these things?
8. An experiment standing up with subjective anatomy
Regina – Think about this pulsatory anatomical language… how do you apply it without failing to be personal… an embodied language… we don’t stop being ourselves in order to use this anatomical language…
Student– This is the hardest area, the diaphragm. Since the last time we worked, it got much better, I am able to roll in my body better… my chest was too rigid to bend down, I felt like there were so many things holding me…
Regina – Things holding you… hmmm, you have already much more language than that… think a little about the shortening, about its relationship with intensity…. you have increased the degrees of expansion and flexibility in the shortening pattern and ,also, the degrees of filling and emptying the pouches. So the excitement doesn’t stay anymore that stuck and protected by shortened and hard muscles, an excitement that, before, only could go out like a blast from a cannon or stays inside ending up depressing you.
Student– I noticed that the issue of the inferior members is much different… here it got a lot better…
Regina (to the group) – So, we are going to do it together with him. We are going to grasp this way out of pressure/excitement from his pelvic pouch. Instead of letting it go up and getting stuck in the chest, we are going to send it back to the pelvis… how can the excitement go down to the legs instead of rising to the chest? You are going to notice the three pouches… how to find possibilities of going down from the chest to the belly.
Student– Contracting the gluteus and the oblique muscles and also moving my weight towards the front… moving my center of gravity towards the front… it gives me the feeling of flowing more.
Regina – And what is it like, this flowing experience? It’s not just a mechanical experience… making this passing through the groin and sliding the intensity down the legs. This has to do with your pelvis… you begin to have an accordion experience in the thighs, in the calfs, on the soles of your feet, in the gluteus, in the oblique muscles. And there you begin to promote the contracting back of the pouches.
Student– My feet feel like opening and the same happens with my hands.
Regina –Do it with your hands… like this you organize a different expression of yourself in the environment… notice that you can place your legs…. but you keep retracting at your chin and throat. There is a whole mobilization of your high back and your face in the sustaining of this retraction. There is confrontation in your gaze and muzzle which has to do with a long history of retained anger. A confrontation that is not meant to be visible. Coming forward on the balls of your feet allows you to come forward with your face as well. That’s it… you are going to use a little of this pelvic dislocation you just learned… so you can let go your belly pressure down through the groin.
Student– Now I realized the internal connection between mouth roof and pelvic floor.
Regina – So, you are going to organize your inner hollow. You say that you have little internal resonance towards the events. Now you can assemble your mouth, the diaphragm at the roof of your mouth, the sphenoid diaphragm, the whole larynx, the chest, the pumping of the entrance of the bronchi right above the heart. The thoracic diaphragm, the belly…
Regina – Now you are going to find the connection between throat and face… do it now. That’s it… try to grasp it… in your face, in your cheeks and your jaw muscles… can you feel the effort for tightening? the density of it? there is a lot of anger, in the mouth, in the teeth, in the eyes.
Student– The space in my mouth just got a lot bigger…
Regina – Brest bone… all of this is stretching right now… can you realize how you are stretching?
Student– Everything comes from below, it seems like everything up here has just relaxed. It even seems like my jaw got lighter, also my skull. Wow! It feels like I grew, even my head expanded…
Regina – Do you realize the state of density in which you live? And how it is organized? And what its meaning is?
Student– This gives me a lot of inner strength (he sways on his firm feet). Here I really can. My head is opening, my skull cap too.
9. HERE: the somatic subject
Regina – HERE I am responsible for what I do, HERE me my self… keep looking for your HERE, the HERE, an inside of voice, of vibration, of presence…
Student– HERE I affirm myself.
Regina – HERE I think for myself. … your legs are going down… HERE I am going to look for what I need…
Student– I feel that it no longer requires so much energy to keep myself up, it seems that everything fits better.
Regina – Certainly… that is a possible organization, it’s going back and forth between the previous shape and this… (look at the TV monitor). Look at the difference in density… that arm, that back, how the density shortens them and doesn’t allow you to go down… how the chest remains full…
Student– As my shoulders drop I feel mobilized emotionally.
Regina – I want you to experience this dimension… it’s not easy. Your shoulders go down as you find the way to de-densify, allowing for elongating.
10. Outlining a formative task.
Regina – Do you want to talk about your shoulder’s problematic experience? or would you rather stop here?
Student– It’s too difficult for me to disorganize the density of my shoulders. I went back to the last experience and I had the feeling of strength again… but it seems that at a certain level I get lost.
Regina – Power is the question. To find a proper place for your shoulders has to do with power, because real power has to do with being able to express oneself fully in the world. The shoulder girdle is extremely expressive. Shoulders and arms have to do with exchanging, talking, showing… all of these actions, we shape them mostly with the shoulder girdle: clavicle, shoulder blades, arms, articulations, hands… There’s a whole world inside of the thorax. A lot of the experience of oneself and the reality of one’s experience in the exchange with the environment happens in the thorax. Inside the thorax is what I am living and how I am living the environment. There is a whole relationship between the shoulder girdle and rib cage. Power is made up of an incredible regulation of actions, in order to be in accord with the truth of what you live. But in you, there is a lot of density packing it together, preventing distinctions between different actions.
Student– yeah…
Regina – there’s something that’s very interesting about the direction of forces in the rib cage in relation to the shoulder girdle. Many people think that inhaling means just filling the chest. They don’t make the distinction between the inner layer and the external layer, just as we also don’t see that there are different forces between what the rib cage does and what the shoulder girdle does. In general, people think that all is the same structure functioning together.
Let me show you, I’m going to touch your breast bone. See how your rib cage is placed under a big muscle mass and how it immobilizes the breast bone, attaching the shoulder blade, pulling the throat and pushing up the upper back. You can see that there’s no way to make a distinction between the elements to allow a variety of self expressions when excitement fills your thorax. This requires distinctions to be made, otherwise there will be a feeling of imprisonment and limited actions. You will not get full satisfaction with your expressions. It gets difficult for you to have your own expressions. There is not much choice and the chest is the place that is full of choices. Here, relationships with the environment are made because precisely man’s encephalization and bipedization allowed us to free our arms, so that we could not only gather but do millions of things, relationships, instrumentalizations, uses… all of this comes out of the arms in resonance with the thorax and the brain. Period.
All of our shapes are connective, relational and are sustained by a whole set of deep pressures preserved by the shape of the pouches, tubes, diaphragms, muscle organization, a certain tone of muscle. This results in a certain pattern that is each one’s pumping pattern of the world which generates a who, who acts like this, who dreams like this, who relates like this, who does this and that likes this…hopefully in continual metamorphosis…this is what we are studying about.
Regina Favre
São Paulo, July, 18, 2012