Friday, September 27, 2013

A Sense of "I"

"Is this the mind or is this the body?" Anat has been asking us this during training.

Today I have been feeling seriously spacey. The song "Space Oddity" comes to mind because I have been really moving. I have been moving myself--my body, my brain....and shifting around and exploring. I am going to places I have never been before. For example, I have been getting my body into positions it has never experienced. I have been doing it also with my mind. All of it has caused me to rethink what learning really is.

Yesterday, during a movement lesson I lost the concept of time. I didn't just lose track of time. It was an abstract experience that I can't quite put into words. There were sensations that cannot be categorized into any of the five senses that I became aware of. Almost like deja vu, but instead of it randomly occurring, I got there somehow by movement. I knew who I was both as an adult and as a child. I knew myself as who I was and where I was physically, but also I knew myself via the experiences that I've used to make sense of my world and the self I have constructed to navigate it.

So, learning. I'm trying to formulate words that express what I am experiencing and what I am starting to know. Instead of using what I already know to perform a certain way, I'm trying to describe something I have not known before but have recently encountered.

There is a magic that happens when a young child does something for the first time.  That kid wants to do that thing over and over again and is so enthused about it that they have to say, "Mom look! Mom look! Look, Mom, watch this!" They are in that magic moment. They are not performing or trying to meet an expectation. They are learning.


"And I'm floating in the most peculiar way. And the stars look very different today." --David Bowie

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