In order to go deeper into the organization of presence it is necessary to go further into its place in the plan of the event.
Event is the state of things in their becomings, environments inside of environments, in which the body also in its state of becoming, is immersed as part of the event itself, by the simple act of existing. Event is that which is contemporary to a body’s actions through which its continuity is molded.
Event is the outside, the inside and the outside of the outside of any body, in its interaction and simultaneity. The event is made of simultaneities, powers, values, images, language in many layers that are physical, affective, social, anthropological, cultural, historical, technological, political… The event can also be called bodying-field, an expression I picked from Stanley Keleman, author of Emotional Anatomy. Bodying field is where bodies meet in their co-bodying activity.
Each body is a place, a here, in the event.
In order to begin, organize this place. As you read this text try to organize an outside for yourself. That’s all. What happens when you organize an outside?
The inside, the outside, the outside of the outside… how do your outside absorbs the outside of the outside? How your outside absorbs and transports the effect of the outside of the outside to the inside?
Your outside outlines a design that is a response to this affection creating at the same time an expression in the outside of the outside. In other words, the outside organizes a certain design that is an alteration in the membrane between the inside and the outside of the outside. This is behaviour. We are talking about a particularized anatomy, a living design, which in itself is a configuration between the inside and the outside of the outside, a configuration of the outside that organizes body parts in a certain way.
I can, as I edit this text, do an experiment, for instance, with my outside.
I want, to fine tune my ear in order to better capture this noise that comes to me and better grasp which melody it is that a hammer is producing, right now, on the floor above. I will organize all my shape in this keen way of listening to. And then disorganize.
The noise stopped.
Then started again.
What do I do with the outside of my head in order to change what is going on inside? How do I shape listening or how do I shape all myself in order to listen? What is just happening is a modeling of oneself that we can recognize as very ancient in the evolutionary processes… I´m talking about this way of isolating the inside in relation to the outside of the outside… If you touch a worm you will see how it thickens to protect itself. This shrinking and the extending back occur independently of one´s participation. It is a reflex which alters the shape of the body. But I can use my cortical animal condition to exert some action upon this.
The hammer stopped. What did I do? Perhaps the here is somewhat rigid and readying itself for the next hammering. But I will again, intentionally, fine tune my walls and expose myself to the startle of the next hammering. I want to see what it’s like. This teaches me. I want to see what it’s like. How did I respond to the hammering? What response did I give to the hammering? How is this ancient response just triggered here?
What is the shape of my outside like right now? What has been contracted in me with these three hammerings that just broke in? May be I´m feeling an increase of accumulated excitation of and perhaps I feel in my arms and legs impulses to shake it off. I can make strong movements with my arms. But I also can keep it in me and capture the design of this response.
The outside is not only what is visible. Outsides are all the walls that encompass the passageways that maintain the pulse in its function of driving the outside of the outside to the inside and the inside to outside of the outside of the bodies, in their work of pumping and processing the environment. Until the end of the day I will go through long moments without hearing the hammer´s sound. Later I will notice some stressed structures for being long immobilized in order to block noise from invading my brain. (See “Pulsatory Pump” in Stanley Keleman´s “Emotional Anatomy”)
I can come back to the previous experience and notice how this here is not only pulsating but also inhabited by words, images, the day, impulses for connection between people, between bodies, between topics… This here is always inhabited.
Before making any statement from this configuration that I am grasping right now, I can draw a somagram (See “Somagram” in Stanley Keleman´s “Embodying Experience”) as an exercise. Somagram is a graphic expression of the interplay of pressures and consistencies that we recognize on the surface and inside the body. It is a cartography of the present state of excitement. I can do either two operations at the moment: one is simply sharing with somebody what it is like and the other is problematizing.
I am going to give what I´m doing a name: Bodying Practice or the Practice of Embodying the Experience. This is the practice developed by Keleman that accompanies his emotional anatomy view. This Bodying Practice has a protocol that begins with capturing one´s immediate form. As one slows down one´s action, one inhibits the continuous triggering of forms. Then you repeat intentionally the selected form … then you note it , posture intentionally it and draw it… somehow you are stopping the flow for a moment… instead of dealing with the flow of consciousness, you deal with the flow of behavioural forms.
I just put a border in the flow of forms, a border on what is happening. How did I do what I did? What event is this inside of this border? What I want to bring back here and show myself? As I put on a border, I can begin to act upon this form.
The destiny of bodies is to proceed. They are born to always trigger new forms in their growth and actions, but also are born with equipment to shape a relationship to what has been lived with its inside and its outside in relationship to the outside of the outside, always trying to stabilize , aggregate repertoires and make tissue along its maturational journey. We are able to transform the lived into experience instead of letting the lived just to slip away or traumatize us. Our human genetic inheritance allows us to create loops of what has been lived over itself and solidify responses as body or muscular form, what is precious for our adaptation. This is not a luxury, it is an adaptive fineness. The more I refine the expression of my forms, bodies or behaviours, the more finely I connect myself to the present and to the event. There are some that happen without my knowledge and some that happen with my participation. Trauma occurs without my knowledge and learning, with my participation. This is the difference. Trauma is installed out of a reflex of the brainstem. Learning is installed out of a cortical-neuromotor operation on the lived.
When we inhabit each anatomy of presence, we have contact with the pulse that fills this shape. The pulse is not only a mental statement. The pulse is the digital rhythm of the present as grasped in the operation of making oneself present inside borders. We are always problematizing how to build borders, how to move from one outside to another, how to stabilize borders, how to give support to borders.
Problematizing allows for finding a finer adaptation for the structure that we grasp in the present. We are able of self-narrating “I am the one who…”… But the functionality lies in reediting oneself, always in a clearer manner, checking the meeting of one’s body with the present conditions… it’s not exactly that… attention…
The clinic is this, working together to update somatic form, self-narrative and bonding modes, making one´s self present and promoting presence in the bodying field, together with your patient.
Example of a formative updating with a student:
Student: Organizing an outside created for me a sensation of wellbeing, of feeling great. As I organize the inside, it seems like spaces arise for exchanging, creating holes for the entering and exiting to happen. When you said to think about the outside of the outside, I got a sensation of too much, of oppression, my whole body got small and contracted, losing all of the wellbeing, my jaw got stiff, like wanting to bite. It has been hard to get away from this feeling.
Regina: There are many forms of the attack reflex… several structures preserved by evolution through which the animals operate the attack. The jaw is powerful, the masseter is the organism’s strongest muscle, the bite has the strength to immobilize the source of danger. The jaw is an ancestor of the hand. Before the hand there was the jaw. Among fish, when the jaw emerged for holding prey it made the fishs with jaws into the big powerful guys in the oceans. Before this articulation emerged, fish only where able to suck in their surroundings and directly swallow … they didn’t have a biting structure.
Student: now, as I speak and act at the same time, it gives me a very strong sensation of presence.
Regina: When we inhabit ourselves as form, as anatomy, the layers present themselves not only the historical but also the behavioral ones. If you want, you can extend the presence of the jaw to the hands and feet, to the extremities of excitation,
Student: it seems like energy comes to the surface.
Regina: it got more intense, it spread out
Student: It brings an enormous well being.
Regina: This is updating of one´s self, power increase, a possibility of using yourself in a more extensive way. The more you use yourself, the more you identify with the unique logic of your functioning.
The invention of the cell membrane, as says Keleman, is everything.
Membrane as a pulse regulator, a relative separation, the borders of the pulse that pumps the event-environment in and out, in a continuous action in which the event is squeezed, processed, absorbed made body and projected into the environment as a response, from micro to macro, in a concert of parts that produce a bigger processing.
The body wall follows the model of the cell membrane.
We can grasp different states of wall: distant, close, mixed, dense, threatened, invasive. The state of wall gives us back the sense of body image. Then, I can apprehend how I do what I do… how do I make presence? Backing away, with fear, invading, mixing… how do I do… what am I doing right now? In this picture I can identify lots of excitatory activity here , little there… it is a motile geography of excitation or events of intensification and de-intensification, all over the whole body, molding a set of connective shapes to the environments I´m part of. This grasping of body image allows for such an instantaneous mapping. All the time we can grasp what we are doing and how. This is how bodies recognize themselves and then regulate themselves through all the actions they perform all the time for being in the world.
But, we can do this more finely, intentionally. It is from this configuration of the intensities in us that we can know what we are living. It is from inside of my form that I can have the experience of being who I am, of doing what I do and how I do it.
Several pulses coexist in an excitatory pulsating concert. Every cell, every tube transmits in waves, every organ and tissue, every shape in a set of several frequencies at the same time, play the silent music of the event in each organism, like a Zen evidence… a direct experience.
I can call myself again to organize an outside. How is it organize an outside?
How does one organize an outside? What do you do to organize an outside? That is an important know-how because slowing down is necessary to organize an outside, it is a delimitation of a here, the where where I am processing the event as a pulsatory pump.
My state of organization contemporary to this event is a here, immersed and processing the event of which I am producer and participant, in the larger formative process.
Organize again an outside. Capturing the form we are making is not simple, but it’s all one needs to be present and is all one needs to give singularity to each presence. Again,directly capturing what we do and how we do it is all we need to be present. To capture is different from observing, being conscious or being aware.
You can capture, in the 1st step of the Bodying Practice, your membrane, this configuration between the inside and the outside of the outside. This shape is always about the moment but this response is what my present form can give to the environment. It is its historical construction that makes it so that a body grasps itself and the event and responds according to its shape. And the alteration upon this (the self) is slow and happens in the biological time no matter event happens in world time. The form grasps, responds and organizes a response at the same time. It’s not easy to just think about this because it is profoundly anatomic: thinking-bodying.
Make an outside. Make your outside. It is not a feeling but a grasping of a concrete shape. And when we turn the outside a little more muscularly distinct adding an increase of tonus in this shape so it gets a little more distinct as a mental design as well.
This is what Stanley Keleman teaches for giving start to any process of embodiment. Then the brain grasps the form. This is what we call proprioception. It does a grasping or a capture not just mechanical but the grasping of a sense because the form in itself has an intelligence, the intelligence of its functioning. What form is this? It is a form that has a sense. It is the shaping of my presence, the form through which I make myself present. It contains my being alive, my pulsation and regulates how much and how I am connected to the event.
Then, outside is not just appearance. Outside is the containment that keeps the walls that sustain the pulses in a certain way. The symphony of pulses in me transmits to me what I am living, the quality of my experience in connection to different fluxes in the present, this is how event is in me.
In this pulse of my thorax, for example, where the walls are organized in a certain way, the event of the outside of the outside is interpreted in a pulsatory and digital language. I can not only organize, but I can also disorganize the configuration of my outside. Step by step. This is part of Keleman´s How Metodology. Then act on your experience.
When you make updates on your form, you enhance the proceeding of your journey towards the future. In the design of doing the same, you introduce difference and continuity. One’s form also gives form to the outside of the outside: it cuts it and interprets it. Elaborating the question of presence allows us to manage our connection and belongingness to the different event-ecologies in the collective production. This is to be alive as any living being…to be a living element of the environment.
Slowing down of the continuous flow of forms teaches the muscles, the nervous system and the excitation. To be present is a question of tuning the muscles and nervous system together thereby working to updating and realizing the form of our presence. This way we begin to conceive ourselves as an unique anatomy with its unique rules of aggregation and connection. We need to learn from experience what are the rules from which our body is produced and the practices that allow us to capture and influence this reality. This way I can work continually on updating form, connections and self-narrative, regarding presence configuration inside event.
