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It’s a sensation and an image. There is a sense of the hairs on the back of the neck, it’s like an image forms in my mind although it’s from a sensation. The floor is really my, the horizontal plane, my point, my plane of reference. This sort of invisible line of gravity, the vertical axis. Images of the vertical and the image of what I know that the spine is curved - and all the asymmetries of the body that emerge.

My breathing and gravity, it’s also a sort of conversation. This conversation of the breathing and gravitational force, a conversation between two different motions. They’re forces, that in some way has a sort of horizontality to it. Bringing attention to the back, and the gravity and breath. The asymmetries of the body, my body. Something around feed-back from floor or wall, feed-back from surface, desire for feedback from another person, a counterforce.

Embryonic trace of forming. Tuning into the back softens the front, softens the front, it allows front to drop back, expectation drops, time drops, or body drops into another sense of time, eyes fall into the body, front falls back.

Do I really know what it is to be upright? am I even aware of the sense of frontality that my experience is shaped by? This movement to the ground. This awareness of the forward leaning and future leaning sense of frontality. Coming to ground. A kind of resistance to letting go, or a holding onto certain tension. Trying to tune into this relationship between holding on and fighting gravity. Letting myself be held. Can I let myself be held, and what can I let go of, and what can I surrender. It feels quite slow … yes, the dropping and the sinking. This kind of releasing and surrendering and letting go of some of the holding and only then, I think, does the sense of contact show up. Gradually contact shows up.

So, the points of contact. The kind of relationship to the floor as a plane of contact. And this question of what is a back, what’s the back then? Is it all these points of contact or are we talking about the anatomy of the back itself? And if I roll a little to the side is that still the back if it’s in contact with the floor and are the backs of my heels the back, if we are talking about the back, what does it mean really? 

The experience of this back breathing, being able to soften into a sense of the breathing into the back and awareness of the breath. A soft underground, the firmness of the ground is such a relief. A sense of weight distributed. Just the relief from thinking, there is something that reconfigures, a connection to the world. To be low down. Those bits that don’t touch, if I can sense the beginning of the touch and the not touch. Resisting, settling, dropping, sinking, almost goes so low that you start to float. It feels like by heavy heavy heavy somehow lightness comes into the body.

This back to the wall, as something giving back and also to push back. The movements that happen in the stillness of just standing. All these resistances to not move, to let the body move but not to move. Forces acting on the body pulling, holding, releasing. The complexity keeps bubbling up, surfacing, and there’s a kind of restlessness. This desire to do, to move, to follow.

This coming into down ,further down into hands and knees and that has more animal like sensation of different relationship going into the back. A strong sense of uprightness comes because of that transition, and the rootedness of the feet. Turning and twisting. An image of the axis. There are these different forces and resistances and limits to the material body. An idea of delay, what starts a turn or a twist, what is later, spiral, delays that happen.

Having my eyes open or having my eyes closed. Trying to take the awareness to the back of the eye as if the eyes were also dropping back somehow into the head. A different kind of gaze, a really different kind of gaze: it was almost like the liquid of the eye was dropping back into its orbit, into the actual socket somehow.

Flatness of the back can often feel quite lifeless, so it can feel quite inert almost, as a realm of sensation or the qualities of it can feel quite inert. How might I start to activate the back in its aliveness, as a field of live experience, living experience rather than this resting passive inert sort of space? 

I was experiencing and thinking about the back was through a kind of undoing, like an undoing of uprightness, and it was all of this activating these kind of relaxing and letting go and releasing and loosening and stopping holding and. And a kind of move of experience that was in relation to releasing certain expectations and particularly habits of control which also are habits of the eyes in a way. I was thinking a lot about how this experience of the back was shaped by it being not something – with the un, the undoing, this undoing of the head-orientated, sight orientated, future-forward orientation … to try and undo that. And letting go, surrendering, renouncing, releasing, not-ness, not not-upright. 

How might it be to try and tune into what arises, or what unfolds, once you have let go, so for it not only to be about this undoing of uprightness, but actually, just to really tune into what unfolds or what opens up as an experience in its own right, if you really settle into that? How might I be able to get closer to a sense of the agility of the back, rather than its stillness or static-ness or the fluidity or the movement of the back, and how to get beyond it just being about not being upright but actually to really see what does it actually do on its own terms, what can be sensed otherwise?

And there is something to do with allowing the back to have its own agency somehow. It sort of shifts the place of where the movement is orientated from. The back has a liveliness and a dynamic quality; not only being about an alternative to the front, it’s not only not all of these front-facing things, it’s actually got its own characteristics and qualities.

But the physical proximity in touch I think feels so important to that, the sense of contact, and this thinking of sensing in contact. What does it open up for me? To feel the back, my back, leaning on the back of the chair facing the screen. It kind of stops me from talking. And I listened to my voice and it was a voice I didn’t quite recognise from myself, it was really back, a thinking voice and it was a kind of voice where I thought I don’t mind her. Trying to curve my voice around my head somehow, so it reaches you. From a listening point of view, silence felt so much more possible.

That kind of experience of frontality that just forces such a lot of effort in a way. Made me think what kind of effort can be dropped if you take the attention away from the front to the back. What am I guarding my back against? What is it not

Having a sense of force or pressure against which you could push; some kind of force or resistance against which to push with the back. Conversation has that dynamic of a push and a pull, and a force that you are working with. It’s a different kind of conversation, not so much a back forth back forth. Trying to send the voice in a curve in order to reach me. 

To try and be aware through the back of the body, of this experience we are having at the moment - what does it open up really?  The sound coming from behind.… I’m thinking … radio that happens sometimes or something on in the other room, that Those gestural devices that show you are paying attention. Being able to speak and also listen without having to think of what you look like, or that someone is looking at you or you are looking at them. It makes me just realise how attached I might be to that kind of frontal orientation. There was a magnetic tilt in that direction.

The back is not opposite of the front, it’s not falling into a binary, or where does the back end or begin, it’s not even about back-front. The sense of rotating.

Having to listen in a more concentrated way because the visual cues were not there.

How we can just see and let light come in. Letting things arrive rather than reaching out. To do with non-grasping. If you do take the attention more into the back, just letting things come, letting things arise or arrive. How to let things come, but only be how to activate a quality of passivity that is also very alert and active. Not to have a passivity that is inert, or lifeless but actually there is there’s a quality of passivity that is very alive and responsive. Listening from behind it also activates the body. The difference between a narrow focussed concentration, through the eyes to a certain extent and this wider peripheral more expansive experience or awareness.

The sense of the movement of the eyes and wandering of things. Paying attention to within a much bigger sense of awareness of the wider surroundings. Our eyes wander in a way we are dropping back into something, maybe something that is not quite formed yet, that when people start to have to think about what they are going to say that their eyes drop or start doing something else. What does taking the awareness into the back enable? In a way that it enables you to dwell in this space of the not fully formed, residing in this space of the not fully formed in a positive sense, not having to force it into formation, or force it into … , not even to do with forcing it into language because in the conversations with our backs, there was still a speaking, it wasn’t as if not it was without any words but it felt like there was a way of residing in that differently. 

Taking this idea of the blur, the not fully focussed - on the edges of you might know what it is or not. There just being just enough pressure, or just enough resistance, to want to try and bring it into formation. The stimulation to try and bring a thought into formation or a word into formation would just fall away into a kind of silence or into the nana, the un again. Maybe there is something in this rotation that somehow just brings enough pressure for it to start to have to draw on this well of unformness, or to come from that space and to really try and bring something into experience, not into experience because its already in experience, its bringing something into articulation, in that space without fully turning back to the front, to somehow carry something from that formless space but not quite going back to the full front. So there’s something in the turn that’s really important there isn’t it. I wrote down as soon as there is a turn, it stimulates. Just turning to the side and writing something and then going back down. You can slip in and out.

….

My kind of taken for granted mode for lying on my back would be to have my eyes closed. So as soon as I go to my back I shut my eyes. It feels as if I have to almost, very actively, de-privilege that frontal-facing way of being in order to somehow become more aware of the back. I was wondering whether in closing my eyes, I was just shutting off the relationship between the front and the back in some senses. So I had my eyes open but still trying to keep the awareness in the back, so the eyes could just get used to being in a more back-oriented way.

The emphasis was much more on relaxing the back, releasing the back, releasing into the back, all about the back. There is a lot of release that has to happen in the front, there is a lot of relaxation that has to happen in the front in order to really drop into this experience of backness. My eyes need to relax somehow – to take the attention back. The sense that my awareness is so determined by what my eyes are seeing. And that even my peripheral range of vision is probably quite limited, it feels like a third of awareness of three-dimensionality. This is such a reduced field of awareness. So I was thinking a lot about how the experience of the back expands that range of awareness to a much more, not so much three-dimensionality, but more like 360 degrees. There is all of this unknown terrain that is just here.

I had to move – to stimulate the body in order to understand, oh, that is where my body is. There is also something around the eyes, open/closed. I have a sense of – the eyes are so fascinating because of what they do, but also the materiality of them. The sense that when they are opening, when they are open, they don’t have to feel that they have to see or understand. Light it just falling in - it can stay soft and blurred. Sort of scanning, blurring. What happens when they drop back or when some attention drops away from this orientation, a thinking.

There is something about the front and the back which does create a binary, but also that the front somehow when lying on the back, becomes exposed to the air. So there is a sort of voluminous feeling to it – with breath and light and air. A relationship somehow with releasing – maybe releasing the weight falls into the back, and creates lightness around the ribs and the top surfaces, and softens all these exposed areas – the mouth, the skin, the eyes. This sense of flatness - not that I feel like a piece of paper flat, but there is a sense, a sensation of flatness that is coming from the contact with the floor.

I have a sense of a horizontal plane. So maybe there is something about the front that I am understanding very differently, linked with the eyes being at the front. Flipping the body, reveals something. This plane, the plane of contact was also in my mind a little.

Am I really experiencing the sense of the back or am I just thinking about the experience of the back. Is this a direct experience, or a thought I am having about experience, which might not be in the experience at all. There is something to do with this thinking about something, which feels as if it is very much in the front mode of being. This about-ness, whereas dropping into the back feels as if there is something much closer to the experience somehow. I was thinking and exploring this relationship between doing and being, and it feels as if the back is more a mode of being, and the front a zone of doing. But again, there is a risk here that there are these binaries being perpetuated.

So it is not the body, and it is not the floor, it is the plane of contact between the body and the floor. What is that? It is not the body and it is not the floor; it is the plane of contact. It is so paper-like, so fragile – it is touching, there is a touch to it.

How the emphasis on the back takes it more into the plane of contact and the notion of touch … but then actually this felt rather dissatisfying, because it felt that touch was somehow almost compensating in some ways for my de-privileging of the eyes. What seems to happen in my experience, is that attention on the back activates a sense of proprioception much more strongly. The way that the back might be a sort of gateway into that proprioceptive capacity, a way of practicing that capacity, or nurturing that capacity more. There is something to do with really trying to nurture a proprioceptive capacity, and what kind of being and thinking and observing comes from that as a ground. Perhaps rather than thinking about the discrete sense of touch or sight, to think more about I suppose a kinaesthetic roundedness as a basis for experience, which again seemed to connect to this being mode, rather than the frontal doing.

Preconceptions about engaging the back, which are to do with stillness. So I was thinking, is this supine position always about stillness. Exploring and thinking about  the quality of being on the back when it is much more dynamic. Rolling from side to side. Yes, what is my preconception, and why is it to do with inertia or stasis or maybe it is to do with associations of sleep or death actually? I

A sense of active passivity. IHow might that passivity be active and dynamic and alive and vibrant and full of feeling, rather than a bit numb, or dead or over-calm. It felt like the back of my body was underneath the level of the ground, which was interesting. So somehow the front of my body felt more at floor level and then it was almost like in this negative space, below the ground.

Sometimes standing with my back to the wall felt that it was protective, almost a bit defensive. Whereas walking around with my attention in the back felt vulnerable, exposed. So there is something to do with protection and exposure.

If I am lying on the ground on my back I recognize this experience of sinking. I sometimes feel that I am on top of the ground … so I can’t quite join, and then this sense of sinking.

I have to kind of navigate how much effort or how much ease I can work with – it feels quite complicated just standing up and walking. Picking up the idea of axis and twist and turn. Working with this moving up and down a number of times – I suppose noticing many things within that, how complex it is, and all these things of bending and curving and dropping and lifting and turning and all these shifts of weight … and slowing that process down.. Not slow motion

How much am I following, allowing myself to follow gravity/And then all the other choices. Working with the forces of gravity and the possibility of rotating the spine, bending the spine, twisting at the waist, or leading or letting another thing lead. It is a very three dimensional thing. Maybe it is something about the being and the doing – somehow being in the experience of going down. I

So then the back is not so much the back-behind but it is more working with the spine. And I suppose it is back but it is inside the body – so it is an experiential sense of the spine, and then there is something around the image of the anatomical. The muscles that sort of resist or won’t soften or won’t allow. There is the mechanics to this skeleton, and it is built in a way that can turn. There is the mechanical and there is the manifestation of that –the twist, the resistance. Twisting feels more like what happens; turning is a possibility. Sometimes you see a fold on the skin. I was wondering if there is something about what is possible and the mechanics of it and the observation of it, what appears on the skin or in the folds and surfaces. Not just the surfaces outside, but also inside surfaces, all the organs.

The symmetry/asymmetry. Maybe it is about activation but if things are too symmetrical they can become or feel more passive. Sometimes this sense of simplicity is very … often comes after. Asymmetry feeds back into the body – stimulates to understand. It keeps working the mind’s interest, it intrigues. Maybe it triggers some self-generation, the moving that self-generates the body or reminds the body it is a body. Yes, there is something around the movement, the tension and the back – not a closing off, something moving up and down and what does it mean if I keep my attention in the back while doing that. So something about working with gravity rather than this … the pulling of the gravity, even when coming up a sense of moving up through. It

I can feel my eyes grasping at the reflection in the photographs, as a way of bringing a frontality. I am feeling an urge to turn around, to turn back to the front, so in a way it feels like there is a call for rotation. But this feels like a very different rotation to the rotation on the ground.

As you move to one side the sense of the body pressuring on one lung or the sense of the digestive organs being moved. This sense of 360 awareness, I was thinking about it very much before in terms of an external aspect, looking outwards from the body. And this sense of the back bringing an awareness in a more three dimensional sense. But this rotation also brings the awareness much more into the sense of the three dimensionality of the interior.

The spine as perhaps different from the back, just the kind of density and the depth of the body. And whether the back is this plane of the back, the exterior aspect of the back of the body or whether there is a, whether there is a depth to it. Like where does the back begin in terms of the interior of the body? And if I think of this in terms of the frontal and dorsal dimension, it feels like all of the below the skin feels back. It slips between the physical understanding and kind of slippery, abstract sense of the unseen surfaces of the body. Internal.

This listening, to these other surfaces of the body, of the eyes, the ears. I have been thinking of the voice also in a way, that my voice can drop and I am curious to develop other voices that are projecting or at the top of the … yes, voice as a kind of listening. And maybe there is a kind of voice that can drop, something to do with a more thinking, drifting, experiential voice. I am wondering as I now talking, if I can relax into a sense of listening to myself. Oh look, I have gone so much into it that my words are disappearing. There is something really interesting in how I might bring voicing into this, opening up spaces, also taking this – my body here sitting, my awareness of you behind me, these things that are on my wall. And my breath. How voicing, a dorsal voice, creates sort of spaces or is part of listening.

I often think of the dorsal as something that can relieve the eyes but maybe it is something that can relieve the voice. Yes, sort of softening. To explore a sense of unseen, or unknown in relationship to the voice. When we are talking back to back, there is something very joyful about it. Shifting to, shifting from the pressure of projecting to, a kind of voicing like speaking to oneself. I think that … or even listening, listening to yourself really. With the speaking it feels like there is also that sense of being in a frontal mode, almost like grasping, grasping towards the thing that I want to say, or … and what would it be like to really drop in and let it come a bit more. Can I actually do that? Sometimes with voicing it feels like the voice almost comes from the front of the vocal chords, so, I mean I am struggling with my voice, this pressure of projection. And then dropping into the body, the voicing feels like it has the lungs behind it somehow, or the organs behind it. The diaphragm behind it. I think that sometimes the voice is high in the body and shallow in the body. Yes, this sense of a dorsal voicing is very interesting. Or also this mode of dorsal listening, I realize then that I have my eyes closed again. And I am thinking, when did that happen?

Maybe there is a sense of the soft eyes that you were describing earlier, that can activate this dorsal listening to myself in a way, letting the thoughts just come rather than feeling the pressure to speak. I think that this pressure to speak, whatever the pressure actually, is something to do with a preoccupation with what is coming next and the future, so kind of an orientation to what is going to come, what is going to come, and I think that there is something about tense. Actually in both senses – like being tense and the temporal sense of tense.

 Like the back feels as if, it somehow makes a connection, creates a sense of continuity with thinking, it is not always so much about pushing or leaning into what is coming next. But more a sitting back or leaning back or spending or a kind of residing in thinking, or even memory. Maybe there is something about falling back into the memory of things or bringing the memory of things into more vivid awareness. Recollection – something about recollection, there feels like there is leaning back. I think that there is a confidence actually in recollection, or some relaxation in the sense of recollection, where you realize that there is this ground of experience to rest upon. So yes, this leaning back and resting upon, or recollecting rather than sort of pushing forward.

Collecting of one’s thoughts - doing a hand gesture where my left hand is angled back towards me and my right hand is sort of moving around in a circle, kind of gathering. But actually, it maybe should be the other way around? Something about feeling able to rest in the situation, or be able to reside in the situation. To lean back. Taking time actually, there is something about taking time. Like the frontal mode perhaps always feels a bit urgent or a bit hurried or maybe even a bit uncertain.

If someone says future leaning I feel my imagination move, tilt, forwards, which I find really fascinating. I love this phrase – future leaning, but actually, my understanding it is actually opposite to what my actual body thinks – perhaps through cultural conditioning of the future in front, of desire and possibilities. The doing, the rush of desire.

There are these traces of memories of previous ways of going down and I am aware that when I moving I have all those previous experiences and I also have lots of images as well. So I am working between … memories and imagination, projecting, bringing the previous into what is happening now. That is how we, how we lean into some part of what we have experiences, or what we know or what we think we know or get retriggered or reconnected with something that has happened before. I often wonder whether those previous experience inform what is happening now – sometimes they can be so strong that they can block the experience or replace it or muddle it. It is impossible to untangle – this idea of futures, pasts, forwards, behind, projecting and leaning back into the projection. It can really sort of disrupt, even this talking back to back. Disrupting the usual mode or understanding. Our orientation to our own bodies and to each other. Orientate to seeing and listening. There is a kind of void here as well.

There is also a sense that I am just talking into a kind of void, a thinking-aloud. This way of back to back creates a thinking, a kind of thinking space. I like this idea of sitting back into thoughts or leaning back into thinking, listening to one’s own thinking, that emerges through the voicing. This listening-thinking-voicing. Take a moment. And the voice, being behind. The sense of connection with breath the voicing the air the breath.

……

Care of the transition. How do you move between lying and standing? It was almost I couldn’t see or become attuned to the different qualities of activation or release that needed to happen within that.

Stripping out or exploring the possibility of stripping out anything that doesn’t need to be really involved but on the other hand it was to do with testing the potential within that movement. 

So I was thinking what gets lost or what falls away in our capacity if we are not careful in a way, out of habit, or ease, or sometimes inefficiency actually. 

The thing about transition as well was that, it really somehow mediated between the back and the front, I think it can be easy for me to think of the front and the back as these two separated planes that are opposite from one another and I think this attention to the transition activated a sense of awareness of the side. There’s lots more I ..I was also thinking around the sideness of this operation.

The attention to the transition dissolves this binary a bit between the front and the back or opens up a space between the front and the back as a site of a different kind of investigation. 

The body has to roll, has to immediately be asymmetrical, something has to move, something has to move first and the same with coming on the way down something has to drop first. There’s always a sort of curiosity about what will start the movement. 

Something around an efficiency, as well as what’s having to work and what’s having to release, and how you’re navigating that. Exploring sometimes, how direct a route I can come or how convoluted a route I can come. 

By slowing it down there are more possibilities to create a diversion or a different decision or to drop something that was held or – there’s this huge playground of possibilities. 

An idea of the back wrapping, as soon as I come into movement, especially in this transition from up to down, the body has to curve and bow and wrap itself. More of a wrapping or an unfurling, so it creates a sense of wrapping as well as initiating different kinds of spirals and twists in the body - a complex system somehow of unfolding, bending, twisting.

I can just collapse. I let go of everything and I can fall to the ground.

Trying to move between lying and standing but staying within a symmetrical register, so it’s almost like a kind of rolling up to standing. Using the momentum of, a roll momentum so there is no twist or turn. Using the different kind of momentum or maybe … the way in which gravity gets worked with as a certain kind of force. 

This exploration of moving from standing into lying and whether I could reverse it exactly in the same kind of way and what I was finding a lot was that my way into lying was not the same as my way out of lying quite often. 

Something to do with the relation of the front of the body needing to be receptive and the relationship of the front and the back. The capacity of the back for me seems as if it’s so contingent on openness at the front.

Playing with gravity and being willing to yield into gravity, whereas the torso and the chest was much more somehow to do with vulnerability, in that sense of openness of the body, taking the attention to the back opens the front of the body in a way that feels quite vulnerable, or exposed. Maybe vulnerable is a condition of habit actually, that it feels as if it wants to protect the front, so this opening up feels vulnerable but it actually also feels quite spacious and quite liberated to move into the chest, heart, opening movement. 

The relationship between discipline and curiosity. Daily practice. The sense of discipline of daily practice and also the curiosity of daily practice. And what’s the relation between discipline and curiosity. Maybe it’s also to do with the back and the front. If I think about the back or the front, is the front and the back more to do with discipline or curiosity. How might it be to think of them more as a continuum, I think this notion of the continuum feels important, and also through the sense of the side. Yes, maybe the sides have become really significant because of the dissolving of the binary between front and back, or even between discipline and curiosity. What would be the sides of discipline and curiosity, what is the transition space between discipline and curiosity and how to activate that.

Thinking of the body as a field of cooperation and noticing where I was getting in the way of it being able to cooperate properly.

Something about the relation of the back as a plane and the back as the spine, and the difference in having attention or awareness in terms of it as a surface or a skeletal structure, the kind of rolling down, feels as if the articulation of the spine gets much more drawn into attention.

Allowing - allowing certain movements to happen, not resisting, or maybe not even thinking it, I had to do it quite quick to begin with: How do I do this? How do I drop into?I

There’s something about the awareness of it and the saying of it and practicing does feel important, even to give a feedbacking to yourself of daily practice, to remind yourself.

Internal sound… a kind of falling in on myself, a kind of dreamy state, but it makes me hear the ocean breath. Tuning, resonance, vibration and whether a combination of tuning into the back, or a dropping into the body, that breath gets activated and there is a spacious sense.

Strong back and soft belly. I’m thinking breath and softness that creates a sense of spaciousness if the body lets that happened. Something about the dropping back, not necessarily back, but letting go, dropping something that let’s something else move up and out, interesting how the force of gravity allows the expanse of the body. These vertical and horizontal forces and gravity is … so the breath somehow with these forces .. is resonant in the body. And even thinking that brings me into a sense of the skin at back of my neck.i

Having a duet with my own skeleton, and gravity, oh that’s a trio, a trio of myself, skeletal image and gravity. How imagination can deeply affect the possibility of the body, a body’s physical capacity. 

To roll up is such a gathering of force, of energy. As soon as you settle into the body in how the body is at the moment, it can then cooperate with itself rather than projecting an idea of itself.

Perhaps there is a thinking that is bringing attention to the certain patterns of the body, because I know there are things I can easily slip into, as patterns of my body, but how to be thinking a different way. Sometimes in having nothing more to say, it is then that something comes out. 

Allowing the front and the back to cooperate more, and maybe the qualities of thinking that are connected with the front and the back to cooperate more so rather than it being this either/or possibility to see something more of a cooperation. How do these various modes of experience and of thinking experience cooperate within the whole experience of thinking?

This not forgetting of the front, and recognising the mutual relationship with the front and the back. Bringing a quality of backness into the front. This sense of the back seeping around the sides of the body or holding the experience of the body in a kind of envelope of experience. To allow the sense of the front to exist within that as the wider landscape of experience. That would be very affirmative as an experience to allow there to be some degree of frontality but actually it’s held in this wider frame of backness that has this quality of letting go or relaxing or releasing. 

What happens if the front presses into a surface and it’s not facing out into the world but it’s facing the floor. Like a supporting hand, a supporting surface that allows then the front to soften and be open.

Back/front, up/down, right/left, that in a way that does set up a binary but also its a continuum, it sets up a field of play, a playing field, which in itself doesn’t feel binary in the doing or in working with those terms but at the same time, I fall into them.

The vertical line, the slash line or the hyphen, and in language that also sets up a kind of tension, play between.. 

An image of us back to back in the real-space back to back. Something about back/ground and groundlessness.

That strong supportive round of the back supporting the front and again not so clearly shaped but more of a presence. A strong physical sensation, its behind. The frontal and my eyes, softness, closing of the eyes, or half scanning and this blurred vision. This blur, blurred hearing, and with my ears on the side of the head. 

That zone that is something that is somehow concealed or hidden or not accessible or unknown in a way. It seems this space that feels less known somehow has the capacity to support or hold a certain kind of experience. It seems counterintuitive that, that somehow this leaning back into the unknown of the behind space enables a kind of relaxation or a resting in experience which we talked about before a leaning into the unknown future is quite different.

Something about backness and behindness. Behindness has close affinity to beneathness and belowness, so there’s something to with this proximity between upness and frontness and belowness and backness.

A three-dimensional sphere of some sort and some of the range of experience is in the front and upper range of it and some of it is in the lower range. There is something there about light and shadow and light and dark, and the back seems as if it has an association with darkness or shadow and I wonder how much that binary is actually an experience and how much of it is a product of language. 

That the line between the front and the back or up and down is very graded, or not even graded, it’s very, this term blur, the blurring, the dissolving of those differentiated categories but as soon as you come to language that experience becomes squeezed into certain kinds of binary relationships. I

To try and take attention to the sides of language, to the grey areas of language. Not the up and the down, but to really activate this side space that is neither up nor down, nor front nor back, but is really looking at a range. So

The sense of the blur - looking through the kind of gap of the eye, slight slant of the eye.

This kind of middle point or halfway seems to open up a different kind of register of sensation and awareness. This kind of middle point or middle range that’s neither fully back, nor fully front nor fully open nor fully closed, or there’s this range of experience that falls a bit outside the parameters of language or the tendency in language to fix things as one or the other. 

The ears are more on the sides of the body. It feels like the behind of the body is an unknown space but that’s only really from the perspective of sight and seeing and visuality, but actually, as a space it’s really present in terms of listening.

To try and activate a more three-dimensional sense of listening or certainly a sort of oblique or indirect sense of listening, a sense of periphery, the sides of what can be heard, because I think often my listening is allied very closely with what I am looking at, so it feels as if it’s at the service of sight, at the service of frontality, and it would be very interesting to really tune in to this sense of, activating listening very much from the perspective of the back but also from the sides, like this oblique diagonal kind of listening. 

How sight is often trying to direct, pinpoint, to name things whereas this half, blurred vision or eyes scanning, or almost eye sight touching the surfaces of things, more a sense of scanning, a different kind of possibility with the eyes, more linked to an experience of the eye, light touch, eyes seeing but not jumping.

There is always something tending towards right or left, our bodies are not stable, so there’s always a tendency to lean a little this way or that way, forwards, backwards.

A different of metaphoric imagery around dark rather than light. Low as in not social or not language -based. A link with low and behind, unknown but also knocking the stability of being able to see. A connection perhaps with eyes and language.

There is a dark spaciousness. Walking in twilight, with a sense of light and dark, there gets less contrast, there are more shadows, you catch things in the corner of the eyes, the corner of the eye kind of shadowy spaces between physical things and imaginary things, unsettling as well sometimes. What’s unknown and dark has a lot to do with fear, and there is an excitement in fear. Qualities of uncertainty - a more anxious visual anxious forward future leaning and that behindness has different qualities of uncertainty. It

That I lose the edges of the continuum and the spaciousness of around and through the body. Perhaps the sense of binary can invade the thinking … like I’m cutting off the edges, not moving around the edges. No not edges, sides. The sides of a conversation. Listening and talking from the back, feels very spacious.

And it is drift with someone which is sometimes hard to organise when you are with someone. And also the quality of listening is different because you are not performing your listening to the other.

…..

And this sense of not having gravity acting on the body. I am now thinking of the back in terms of this all roundness sense of the back. On all fours, literally front crawling, on my hands and knees or crawling back. A way of pulling away from the future actually, pulling into not quite present experience, but pulling, trying to counteract or activate an antidote to that next, next, next, next, kind of feeling that I was having in the body.

This movement from the front to the back as a kind of conscious transition. It is very messy and murky… it just won’t crystallize. This dorsal quality or a dorsal tilt. Future leaning, it feels falling forwards. Murky back thinking. And that floating and hanging are states of ambivalence. There is lots of darkness. And I think I often resist those kinds of … though it intrigues me.

With the front and the back and how this can create different sensations of duration and time. Back bone. Back ground. Back track. I am curious, and again it is falling into these binaries, but how these binaries they do create a field, a dynamic field. Trying to complicate or unsettle this sense of the binary between the front and the back. And then trying to explore different speeds – because in my enquiry so far there is this correlation between backness and slowness, and I am not sure how much this is a correlation or whether it is a habit.

So moving forward but with the attention in the back but with the eyes looking, and then with the eyes just being open, quite receptive, and then with the eyes closed. This walking backwards but with the eyes oriented forwards, almost had this sense of reversal. Like the forward facing, forward attention and moving back was a kind of push/pull dynamic but with this one it was much more like, it felt as if I could fall but it was cushioned by air.

To really activate listening … take it into listening, this relation between listening and backness – feels very close somehow. It wasn’t air it was listening, it created a texture that could support me as I was moving backwards.

It wasn’t just that I was walking backwards but it felt that I was undoing forward movement. Or whether with more attention a different kind of experiential sensation shows itself which might not just be the opposite of this going forward. But this recognition of this pull of the frontal, the pull of next, the pull of the future, the pull of the eyes, all the time this pulling out of the present, into this … this pull of frontality in a way.

Reconfiguring how we moving brings attention to these pulls or forces that act upon us or can be activated or isolated. What happens when that moves into movement and does movement always necessitate a shift, and is it possible to move into movement with a quality of backness or with the qualities almost of the rest and digest mode, in movement. Or does movement necessitate a different activation? How can that be practiced?

There are qualities of thinking that have much more of a sense of this backness, and qualities of talking, but I know there is this tendency of leaning forward, of forward leaning, this urgency almost, like a, maybe even a bit graspy, grasping for something. This letting aspect of the back seems important.

Not looking back, not looking back. That not-ness. Looking away from the back. It feels like I have a desire to project something, projecting, whereas backwards there is a lot of acceptance, listening, allowing things in. A connection with the environment. This forwards and the next, next, I can feel it, it is a kind of desire, projecting onto something that isn’t there yet. Coming down to crawling, how the back physically feels. It is surrender, it is not giving up it is coming down to a more child, animal, low to the ground, it is a kind of safe space, it removes any sense of having to talk or I think a kind of animal enjoyment in that. It activates another kind of sense of one self as human. The reversal of things. Unraveling.

Because in walking backwards the whole thing has to reconfigure, the pelvis, the limbs, everything has to operate slightly differently. It has to be reconfigured. In that physical sense, there is an unraveling. It is sometimes tricky and disorientates, unraveling of the habit perhaps, it is a surprisingly fresh perspective. It shifts your perspective. A sense of clockwise and anticlockwise, and about operating anticlockwise. Moving backwards, this stepping backwards, taking the joints in the direction that they don’t very often travel in. What an operation that is actually. The habits of movement. 

How does this shift of orientation within the body affect we move through the world and the way that we perceive the world? The awkwardness of the opposite, the awkwardness of moving the limbs opposite to habit, but also the pleasure in this. The dominance of walking actually – as our dominant movement orientation through the world and as we move to these different possibilities of swimming and crawling and dragging the body – how it activates different kinds of configurations and relationships of the body, and different kinds of sense. I am thinking, talking about this turning of the head,

To really explore the participation of the thoracic spine in movement and in being in the world. Our ways of moving and being in the world are shaped by the ways that we move and be in the world. So, this impact of such a strong orientation of frontality, the sense of dorsality as binary, the segmentation of the body, how this then shaped the world that one encounters.

You were saying about desire -, this pleasure, a pleasure in moving backwards, a pleasure in being and moving, a very elemental pleasure … the pleasure of cooperation of the body and the ground and the environment.. In the frontal mode I sort of skate over the surface of the environment to get somewhere. This pleasure of participating - to make the movement happen.

….

Notion of perhaps, what happens, what emerges through happenstance. To just think of this ‘activate the back’, activate the back, or drop back or drop into, at times it felt like it was dropping back into a slowness, so something between dorsality and slow it down, slow it down, stop hurrying but I think there was also this sense of the dorsal and the present. This dropping down and gravitational pull into the present and out of this lean. Almost a kind of sadness in a strange way that the places where I am activating the potential of the dorsal is in this antidotal counterbalance kind of way, a kind of remedy or yes kind of salve, for what I can recognise in my experience as hurriedness, or haste or urgency. So it’s almost kind of used very much in this counterbalance way but not explored in and of itself.

To explore it much more affirmatively, in its own terms, in its own right as an exploration, as a space of curiosity. And what kinds of conditions might I need for that. You only need to start practising it and the conditions appear in a way. I’m waiting for the right conditions but really I just need to make them. If I start, the conditions will appear. I don’t need to wait really.

Something about time, something about the dorsal and frontality and their relationship with past and future. Dropping into the present, - it doesn’t need to resist, doesn’t need to have a sense of retrograde, or pulling back, but more perhaps allowing in of the dorsal, let it seep in quite gently. Perhaps there are these other modes, to allow it come in gently, because then it really does have this possibility to evolve, or change, yes change things.

This word perhaps. And then this per through the doing of. This happen-stance. Stance as in standing. To happen.

That idea letting the practice or letting the attitude of dorsality seep into life, mulling over, this blurry line between art and life. We’ve moved from I guess a kind of concrete explorations of lying, rotation, transition …. into this perhaps, the perhaps, also felt like it was a move into a more explorative sense of movement practice. How to inhabit this -seeking a movement vocabulary that is opening up into something, new forms, new modes of movement or is there something to do, or the more of leaning towards movement as an arts practice, and then thinking about life, and what is it to locate it more in the life part, part of this blurriness between art and life. Thinking very much of dorsality in terms of, attempting to change habits really or kind of transform habits or work with habits, and in particular habits that are really engrained. This kind of very subtle practice of transforming ways of living, ways of life habits of life that might have become more frontal in their tendency. Thinking about this idea of trying to install new habits. So actually, in some senses that felt like this was less about a curiosity in new forms but really trying to stick with something, just stick with the one thing. Not to even attempt to follow the impulse of something into new directions but to kind of just very, very patiently keep coming back to the same thing as a way of trying to transform a pattern of being or behaving.

One felt as if it was this almost like sacred precious time of practice, that was quite bracketed, like studio time, or designated time for exploration, where experience and practice would become amplified, so there’s qualities of absorption and immersion and amplification and on the other hand there was much more integrative, like integrating practices into life, whenever it came to mind, not having a designated time, but doing it when it came to mind, really integrating this sense of dorsality just into every day experience whatever it was. Not special spaces, or special conditions, or special movements or explorative movements, or art but just into the fabric of daily life. And maybe there’s something in the relationship between these two modes.

A kind of connection to travelling backwards, deliberately not sitting facing the direction to where I am going, so there’s a stronger sense of departure than going-to. The sense of leaving and moving away and what’s in front and kind of - it sort of expands and reveals itself rather than going to, racing towards a kind of vanishing point. A mix of travel excitement and going to and also nostalgia; an intermingling of different things and the relationships between which way you are facing, where you are going, and the relationship with those two places and the travel between and together with that. Going somewhere where I wasn’t prepared, to bring that idea of the perhaps and the dorsal as a kind of space of uncertainty and how I might familiarise myself with that, just be in that space of not quite being prepared, not quite knowing what will happen, or how I will deal with the situation. It’s a kind of diversion.

A kind of in-between space, opens up a space for working, thinking, drifting. A kind of willingness to just enter that space of unpreparedness, be with feeling unprepared. The experience of busy-ness and how at times it just feels as if there’s no space for anything and it’s kind of quite dead, a deadening experience, there’s no real contact with being alive. The busy-ness was bound up with this sense of preparedness and the risk of not being in that kind of momentum would be somehow failing or not succeeding or not being prepared or even not being ready or not doing something as well as expected. So there’s a lot around expectation and fulfilling expectation but the cost was aliveness. Letting go of some of the pressures of a certain way of being and behaving, in order to drop into an experience that actually if life, is much more alive.

There’s this habit or tendency or preconception of slowing, its slowing it down, its dropping back into a stiller slower way or really seeing slowness or stillness as the antidote to this hurried frontal way of being. I was trying to maintain a level of speed, trying to just kind of see what happens with velocity and speed but still in this dorsal orientation. The limbs kind of just swing, like particularly around the shoulder girdle, I like to just really let my shoulders drop and walk so my limbs are moved through the momentum of the walking but not at all in a hurried way. It just felt so thoroughly pleasant, not like pleasure like I was grasping at it but just really easeful. Trying to move into this dorsal register so I was kind of experimenting between dropping back into the hurried mode and then falling back into this dorsal register and it was such a different experience - around the limbs really - like the limbs in the experience of hurriedness felt very contracted and immobile almost, like the whole body sort of stiffened and felt like it was completely leaning forward and then as I was falling back into the dorsality, there was something around the pelvis area that felt very fluid and loose around shoulders and just the feeling of the arms swinging with walking just felt really lovely, really pleasant, really fluid, really liquid.

Just noticing sensation. In the speed of activity, I am not even noticing the sensations whether they’re pleasant or unpleasant or neutral or anything else because there’s such a kind of goal or destination to get to. And maybe there’s something in noticing itself having a pleasant quality to it irrespective of whether what’s noticed is pleasant or not, that just noticing has a positive affirmative dimension.

What constitutes exploration? Thinking about this much more in terms of micro movement and micro-sensation and micro-transitions actually feels a much more transformative area of testing. How subtle that is and what a range of complex and simple explorations are happening there and micro-articulations of the joints, which in a way come from the back and the spine being perhaps quieter in that supportive way. A transformative possibility. I was also thinking about listening and seeing and reorganising of the senses and that our sense of gravity is also a sense.

We call it tuning into the back but also the body is kind of tuning into its understanding of how things are organised, the hierarchy of what needs to happen. Its understanding gravity and how you can work with that to walk joyfully fast or saunter or move in another ways. Rhythms and pulses and different relations between the body and the breath that in moments like all come together and make sense. The difference between listening through the ears and the idea of listening more as in picking up resonances and frequencies in and from the space around. There are two different kinds of listening, through the ear, skin or nervous system or just the sensitivity to that everything is vibrating. This idea of sensing vibrations of bodies, objects, or anything really, the street, other people, dogs. Talking about the micro, made me think of micro-frequencies, like we are kind of sensing machines, you can pick up static, air circulating, tiny vibrations of any different things. A sense of being among, being one of those vibrating things. There is another kind of located-ness through vibration being present, more linked to listening. And that actually there are other kinds of listening or ways of understanding how one is orientating. How it can become less and less - if you start somewhere you open up this other territory and go a bit deeper and then another territory and deeper and things get into smaller and smaller details, but perhaps there is also something about less and less. There’s some kind of relationship between micro and less. Not wanting to return, to trace back.

My experience feels as if in the dorsal mode, the limbs of the body in cooperation or the body in cooperation with the environment and my feeling is that the senses feel much more cooperative in the dorsal mode whereas perhaps in the kind of the typical  frontal mode, we’ve talked about the sight dominating, where actually kind of the senses having this directional dimension to them searching or seeking actively moving towards a sort of, kind of maybe kind of sympathetic system and parasympathetic system.

Cognitive capacities, maybe that’s a way of thinking about it, that certain kinds of cognitive capacities or modalities dominate in the frontal mode. And in the dorsal there just feels as if there are registers of sight and language that drop back into a more equal footing with the other senses of touch and listening. A kind of global experience, it’s harder for me to differentiate the one from the other, I feel much more like a sensory being.  Maybe this is this more like sentience. It feels much more like an experience of sentience in a way. And then I think do I really know what sentience means. You were talking about delight, delight is such a strange word, delighting, what does this mean, what’s the light in that, but then there’s this de, this kind of unlighting.

This sense of sentience or being, I think we talked before about this differentiation of doing and being and the frontal having more to do with doing and the dorsal being more of a sense of being. There was something about the frontal having more of a sense of identity to it in a way and the dorsal having more of a sense of subjecthood, or subjectivity. If there were obstacles towards my practising a dorsality, it’s actually identity more often than not or habits of ways of being that have got some kind of correlation to formulation of an identity - and self-consciousness I think also that comes with some of that identity formation. And subjectivity just feels really liberating, a real sense of like being a being that is alive, that’s free of all those habits of life that accumulate over time and very, in these practices especially very alive in the sensations of exploration and sort of unhindered by habits of identity, or at least, that feels a bit utopian in a way, but that there are moments where it just feels as if there is a glimpse of that perhaps, of this kind of pure being , joyful actually.

Imagining the hand or a palm at the shoulder blades and leaning back into the palm, and there was a point when the sun was on my back and part of the sun was on my skin, and it just felt wow it’s been such a long time since I felt that sensation of warmth, warmth from the sun and this leaning back into the palm of the sun in a way. And just really very immediate and kind of bare of, bare of identity somehow, just very sensory, or cooperative I think, a sense of the cooperative dimension of it of feeling part of all these vibrations you were talking about and all of these resonances. There is that sense of identity kind, it feels like it binds you up in a bag that is separate from all of the rest of life, it has much more of a sense of a contour. I think that the dorsal releases that contoured sense of being to a much wider sense of participation of forces and agencies. And quite scary in a way because of that, this sense of sort of really letting go,

This sense of confusion in this just letting go of your edges in a way. Really beautiful, almost like an emotional confusion of spaciousness that’s a bit frightening but really liberating at the same time. And that sensation happening very much in waves of opening into that sense and then maybe contracting back into more of a sense of form or a body or self-consciousness or thought even. This kind of pulsing dimension of the practice of opening up and then maybe solidifying.

 Another image of these soft eyes, not not seeing, but seeing otherwise, seeing differently, seeing, not that there are different things to see, but that perhaps seeing is not dominant, as you said, that in being dominant it’s not participating, and when it’s participating it means there is a softer quality, scanning, because its co-operating with the other senses. It’s actually quite fascinating, cooperation which then creates a different sense of participation, which puts us absolutely just amongst the other things.

But there is a lot more unconscious cognition than was first thought and this is also shared with many other forms of life particularly animals, which also creates a kind of space of being more alike than other things, or being more animal-human. I’m wondering if there is a link there with the dorsal, and perhaps there is a quieter micro-sensing with which maybe we are getting a glimpse of what is normally not conscious.

It’s just a delight actually to listen. You know the sense of the silence, or the not yet coming of language would very easily be filled by somebody, myself probably if we were facing one other and having conversation. Back-to-back, the way we’re doing it, it’s just very easy to let that space, to really enjoy being in that space actually. The sense of being able to sense somebody’s vibrations, there’s just such a very tangible vibration of this kind of almost like formless thinking as its just about coming into words and the space that that occupies, that I don’t think I notice in other contexts. Here it just feels very precious actually, to witness that edge between the not yet finding the language and coming into language. Precious is I think quite an adequate term for that. And maybe that is that sense of this dorsal language is attentive to that edge. It made me think of the kind of the murkiness, the murkiness of the thinking that we’ve talked about before and just really giving it the time to come in its own way.

What a pressure, what a pressure there is under normal life circumstances. There was something there about this efficiency. I’d written down this word efficiency today and I think my association with efficiency is rather utilitarian, so as I’m talking of language I feel it’s about getting to the point quickly, not deviating, not taking tangents, being straight to the point. So my association of efficiency is joyless, it’s very stripped of joy, stripped of sensation, and kind of direct and pointed but in the practice the sense of efficiency was very different. It was about removing the obstacles that get in the way of spontaneous fluid movement. And efficiency was much more like spontaneity. A short cut language often misses the complexity.

You had been talking about efficiency, also of removing of obstacles, or having things, to somehow strip things away, the things that don’t need to be involved, which is a clearing the way. You were also talking about conversation and meandering, trying to remember what the other had said and the evaporation of the things so quickly and you had talked about this sort of noticing that you can’t get to it directly and that you have to go around another way in order to get there. These half thoughts, these thoughts that aren’t yet formed, they sometimes don’t get a chance to form as something else perhaps then that is already known or understood can push them away.

I quite enjoy how we can fall back into a kind of talking through, a thinking through the process, talking about thinking through the process. It’s sort of fascinating, In a way you’re trying to sort of follow what’s happening and speak it as it happens and speak about what’s happening. There are moments where the thinking and the speaking and the reflecting and the circling around are folding back, in and out.

…..

This experience in a way of the dorsal more as a quality that can seep through rather than be more conscious activation. And I thought this is how reading also works. I think it feels quite poignant in relation to this attention to the dorsal that theories from others and ideas can also work in that way – that they are not always immediately understood or that we value. Even though you think you understand, the next day you do not understand or you understand something different. If I need to speak it back to myself, or write it down, or tell someone else, it slips through my fingers again. A different understanding or processing that is going on there. And some of these ideas they come into the body or they create images almost as a choreographic prompt to work with in the body. There isn’t a beginning point and an end point - this circular writing and reading.

Maybe these ideas seep into the body, when someone has written this whole book – difficult, philosophical and theoretical – just to take a little micro-feeling, or a micro-sense or a micro-image of it and how that can then, how that can open up a big territory of exploration or an ongoing curiosity or intrigue or working-with. Like the turning, the turn. That just continues to resonate in the body, there is a lot of resonance. The excitement of reading and yet it slips through your fingers. There is something very much to do with a kind of animating spark that gets set off in reading, and I think that the places where I notice it most is when the reading is brought to mind or arrived at accidentally or by chance or by the trigger of a word.

The relief of lying down, relief of coming into the body. Dwelling. Lingering. “Releasement”. This idea of releasement. It feels like the movement led it there in a way, but there was also this sense of a chance encounter. It feels like chance constellations in a way, and sometimes it is easy to miss, as it feels so fleeting and fragile, that flash of connection gets lost. At other times it is just possible to catch that kind of chance stimulus of a word and a reference comes to mind again. And to follow with it. But I think that there is also something there about not grasping into it, to hold it somehow lightly. To not look towards it for explanation, to hold it lightly within experience somehow. To move with it, yes, to move with it.

It is windy today, and so the notion of ‘sway’ was quite present because the trees were really moving. There was this point where I was swaying and I think of this with reading as well, just swaying with it. This sense of having something in mind, quite lightly. So having the notion of dorsal practices lightly in mind, held in the background but not looked at too directly. I think that there is something about this with reading as well, for it to sit there but it is not studied as such, so it informs but in an indirect way.

Lightly so that things can still move and don’t get stuck or fixed and weighty so that they can’t move. So there is a fluidity. How ideas, sometimes they pass through or they stick around for a while or they connect with other things, and perhaps there is something about this lightness and taking things with into walking, into talking, into working. Then ideas start to come into all of these different activities and processes, and come into experience when I don’t try to grasp.

There are different ways of being able to process and how perhaps giving it a bit more value - there is something about this skimming and sketching rather than in depth. It picks up on something else, and maybe can be more easily taken with, or be brought into experience.

To pause and lie down. Joining in with the other things. Something about coming away from the upright always, often, surprises me after I lie down and have a couple of breaths. how the body starts to settle in a very different way and the breath, the muscles, the heart, the pulse, the whole configuration of the body and the senses change again.

An involuntary movement of the leg - like out of my control in a way, the impulse of the body or of the mind was not allowing me to drop into this settled experience, but was compelling me to get up and do something. Something to do with this notion of letting go in the sense of what needs to be let go in order to, in order to release. So this quality of loosening, and relaxing and renouncing. Letting go, paired with this idea of letting. There is this correlation between ‘letting go’ and ‘letting’. Letting has much more of a sense of opening up and allowing and following, but it seemed that these two momentums were really somehow working in a sort of complementary way or certainly there was something about letting go in order to let. And I don’t know which comes first – maybe you have to first let in order to let go. The letting had much more of a quality of fluidity, making me think of bloodletting - the incision that lets the blood flow, the blood flowing or this kind of opening into something more playful and curious in a way. This curiosity about certain etymologies and this play between letting and letting go, or letting go and letting. It was also making me think of “let’s”. So a “try this”, “let’s try this”, “let’s”, “let us, let us do this” – it opens it up, it has this invitation. There became this almost poetic field emerging between letting go, and letting and let’s - that started to emerge. This let: I really want to explore it now – this notion of letting, or opening or allowing, or … I don’t know its etymology fully, I am curious about it in that sense. And the relationship of those three fields.

Each direction has a number of histories and cultural aspects circulating around each of them – North, South, East, West. The idea of how we navigate differently now, or how many of us have lost the ability to use a map or a compass. These ideas of navigating by the sun, the moon, the stars and wind. When you were talking about the swaying trees in the wind, in that there is a technique there for understanding where you are in relationship to how the wind is blowing in certain places. Orientating and navigating and understanding where you are in relation to other things. In relation to located-ness, a wider sense of located-ness, in terms of understanding where you are in relation to other things, other people. But even wider than that – political or cultural or social or material. There was something in there, coming back to these ideas of orientation and oriented towards the East and the North, which is always up on a map, we always point up to the North. So these systems of navigation and in a way what we have been talking about is different because this is in relationship to forwards or backwards or around the side.

Perceiving through the senses. Wayfinding, finding the way. Having to go around the back of things, or meander a little while in order to find a way in, or find a way back. These different systems of locating, navigating, orientating. Or a sense of orienting backwards, towards the back. This sense of facing to the back, or face-to-face, or back-to-back. Way finding, to find the way. And finding a way, finding a way, rather than looking for the way. You are not focused on where you are going or don’t have a plan of where you are going but you find, you discover, you come across. Perhaps, per-chance, a way. You were talking about the score again, and the ‘lets’, and how the let’s, the different ways, invites, whether a prompt might invite, invite in. The let’s is very inclusive, it includes the prompter as well as the prompted. Which is very different from an instruction which somehow puts a distance from where it has come from, it puts the onus on the person receiving or engaging with it. The ‘let’s’ is a very gentle and inclusive way, it does not have the authority that an instruction might have, or a sense that the someone ‘behind’ that prompt knows something that the other person doesn’t. It is much more of a testing, a trying out, let’s see what happens if we do this. And there is something coming back to this wayfinding, this place and direction … now I am thinking aloud, the let’s or instruction, and how these different forms of prompt might operate.

Interesting this experience of listening in this way, it almost feels like there are all of these melodies of possibility and I cannot quite hold them, they are in the air. I don’t have a direct path to get to them somehow. This sense of wayfinding. Just trusting that something would come from something, and just being willing to enter that space. A sense of relief or of release in that. Just not needing to plan all of the time, but to just trust that with a degree of openness something will lead to something, and some place will be arrived at, some experience will be arrived at that could not have been anticipated at the outset. And yet, often I don’t trust that. I can have such a struggle in trusting that, and in having confidence in that. But when I do it, when I do have confidence in it, it is so liberating, getting out the way really of what is unfolding, and allowing things to take their course in a way. You were talking about wayfinding, I was thinking about, not me finding the way, but the way finding me. So it is not that I find the way but that the way finds me. And actually sometime this does feel closer to experience. Yes, I am found by the way, rather than me finding it. And today the path called me. It was not like I had discovered something I had never seen before, I know it is there, I have seen it. But there was never the sufficient curiosity to follow that path in a way. And today there was. There was this dropping under, this sense of dropping under the usual experience of the space - a sense of orientation and disorientation.

I was again struck by and thinking about how things are not always what they seem in a way. This idea of North-facing, and the idea of the uprightness of the North, the up-ness of the North. But I was thinking maybe it is like the experience of being in the woods, the Northerly side of trees is often mossy, because it is the most shaded area. So the North side is always the most shaded or the most murky. So I was thinking about this murkiness, this shaded, this shadow. The shadow side - it is like the reverse side or the back side of things. I was thinking, does the dorsal have more of a Northerly dimension, this mossy, shadowy, shady side? Is this only true of the North hemisphere? Is it that the shaded side is only like this in the Northern hemisphere – I don’t know? A sense of how the radical positioning of ourselves on the planet takes - all of our metaphors, all of our language is so determined by the position that we have, positions that we take, where we are located even in the world.

The North and the South hemisphere of the planet, and then as you were talking about the right and the left, I was thinking about, what it brought to mind, was a sense of the hemispheres of the brain. And how, they are opposite to what you think, I think that this is true. That the right hemisphere of the brain is more connected to the left side of the body. So they work on that kind of diagonal. So the right side of the body is more connected to the left hemisphere of the brain. The left hemisphere is more involved in analytic thinking, maybe even future-leaning thinking. And the right is associated with a wide expansive, perhaps even creative, form of attention. It does feel as if dorsal thinking sits more in that right hemispheric thinking of expansiveness and opening and not the narrowing, analytical thinking of the left hemisphere. All these orientations – of North and South, and left and right, and narrow and wide … these different momentums. And the thing that you were talking about … not having a straight path. Maybe this also connects to the wayfinding, that the path is not drawn like a straight line, it meanders and it takes tangents.

‘Straightforward-ness’ - what does this mean?  What does it mean to be straightforward? And, why is that a value? It seems such a strange value – so one dimensional in a way, to just be straightforward. What is this straightforward-ness? And, how is a dorsal way of practising not straightforward? This sense of not being straightforward is often used in a derogatory sense, and this struck me as interesting. Why is that so? And what might it be to reclaim the sense of not being straightforward as a positive quality in a way, not being direct? To do with the diagonal of how the brain is working, with the diagonal opposite of the body. It is interesting how different feelings of right-ness and left-ness, and how the left if often thought of as more mystical and the right as more rational. What you were saying about the brain and the hemispheres - yes, how we understand how we are, or who we are in relation to where we are, in amongst, who we are with. Yes, now I am really meandering, but there is something about ‘straight-forward’. If you are not straightforward you can be easily dismissed, or passed over, or not taken seriously, and these things which are a little bit more, which require thinking through things, or indirectness. Yes, indirectness – it is not straight to the point. There is the pressure of time and people are impatient, and things need to get done and sorted. It is so valuable to have these indirect and not-quite-knowing states, even in work situations where things need to get done. It somehow feels important to be able to value those things in order to bring them to the table, into the workplace, into living spaces, so that they can manifest.

And sometimes there is a wonderful pleasure in going straight-forward. Swimming - there is a sense that there is a straightforwardness to it. I often do front crawl, so going up and down, swinging arm and pulling water, and breathing to the right and to the left. And in and out, so very much a whole set of these binary things – front and back and right and left and up and down and front and back. It is almost that the straightforward-ness creates in a way a score or a prompt. Swimming in the sea or in the river is different, and somehow more about, more a sensual immersive experience. But the pool, it is also a rectangle. You have lanes. There is very much a square straightforward-ness in the architecture and in the activity. But it also acts as a possible score with which to play and to explore, and certainly the back for me is very present in swimming. This diagonal relationship - that is why we have to turn then, to keep turning and to keep moving the spine to turn, to activate these diagonal relationships, and the criss-crossings and the meanderings. The turn is in a way – it is not straightforward. Maybe that is why the turn is so fascinating. It is constantly pulling you off the straight, the upright – pulling you a little this way and a little that way. It is like the swaying, swaying this way and that way, even as you are progressing forwards. There is something interesting in how a straightforward situation might be a playground for a very detailed, nuanced, subtle, fluid, light, murky, dorsal activity. Swimming and being in the water does create immediately a different relationship to gravity and a different relationship to seeing and hearing and I suppose touching – you are immersed in something rather than being on something, rather than on the ground. The floating and the different relation to gravity and the not being upright, also I think reconfigures the relation of the body and gravity. It is not a social space - people are passing but there is an understanding of not being in a social space. Swimming together, alongside, passing or overtaking - perhaps because it is disturbing this uprightness.

When something is simple in the sense that is it naïve or has not been understood or even looked at… but sometimes a simplicity, the simplicity has absorbed a lot of understanding and a lot of practice and finds a simple suggestion. This image of the diagonal or this sense of the diagonal feels very strong. To swim the diagonal makes the space longer. So there is this sense of a diagonal orientation somehow creating space where there appears to be none – this cut of the diagonal and this triangulation occurs through that, it make things longer, it give space. The sense of the diagonal as a desire line. Again, maybe thinking of my experience in the wood and all of these diagonal paths which cut across the path or cut the corner, so it has got this weird quality of extending space but also the desire line of cutting the corner. Refusing to be one or the other but being both. And then the movement of front crawl and that bringing to mind some of the experiences or exercises from Feldenkrais, and that sense of the diagonal between the pelvic girdle and the shoulder girdle and how that carries into walking. That sense of when you really move into walking and really allow this sense of the diagonal to be operative. And in swimming as well. When you really go into swimming and you really feel that diagonal. Thinking of front crawl as this really weird operation that you are really working the diagonal in order to go forward. And it is just really efficient. Again that notion of efficiency in a really pleasurable sense. Yes, and then something about desire. When I was talking about the desire lines, I don’t know, thinking about the sense of desire, at times it can have this wilful dimension to it. That idea of grasping towards something which we have mentioned earlier, but I was thinking about another kind of desire which is much more receptive, a receptive desire. I am not sure where I am going with this. Maybe it is not so much a desire, but a pleasure or a joy which is not a grasping kind, but really holding a space open and being receptive to things, of feeling in movement with things, feeling in movement with the world. And I had a sense of this, this morning when I was exploring this swaying.

Using touch as a way of sensitising the body before then releasing, and I think that these are practices that are used in somatic practice – touching, or tapping, or activating the body through active touch. And then shaking, really activating the body before coming to the ground. There was a tingling and vibration of the body which then spread into groundedness. Taking this touching and tapping and shaking of the body into the woods and into an outside space, and as I was doing that, there was this strong sense of sway or of movement. I am like an arrow cutting through the experience of life. But then standing and moving, it was really a movement with the world. Maybe again there a sense of the multi-directionality of life becomes really apparent then. It is almost like my orientation, particularly if I am in a hurry feels very horizontal, or directional. Singularly directional, straightforward in fact. But there was something about the movement in this space, where everything was just moving in so many directions and it sensitised me to that. Almost a bit chaotic in a way, the vibrancy of the situation was almost too much, in its vibrancy.

That idea of lingering in it and being with the movement of the world in a different way felt very vibrant. Heidegger on releasement, or the term is, a German term, Gelassenheit -talking about non-willing, or letting go of willed action. This non-wilful dimension. A kind of thinking, which opens up through non-willing. There is something about weaning ourselves off from will. And it really feels like that sometimes, that the wilfulness, or the frontality of action, keeps creeping back, time and time again. I feel that with this work I am weaning myself off it, but it is hard. You know, it is really hard. And it is interesting to think, why is it so hard? Why is it so hard? I don’t know. And something in this releasement is this idea of opening to something that is not known. So releasing into the mystery or the not known or the unknown. The unknown is really frightening actually and uneasy. Maybe there is something here about uneasiness. Yes, uneasy. Like uneasiness, and all of the different dimensions of uneasiness. So there might be difficulty. Difficulty is the opposite of easy. Uneasy is difficulty but also that feeling, as you say, of not knowing. So it is unsettling. An uneasy uncomfortable. It is not only to do with difficulty but also creates a strange, murky unease, when things are not quite known. They disorientate, they pull us off that strong feeling of being grounded. Yes, linked with fear. I like this unease, this slight unease, something that is lurking a little bit.

There is this sense there of the before-thinking, before-articulating, which is also perhaps uneasy, and is unclear and ungraspable. I am thinking of all these un- words now – uncertain, unsure. Un- is making me think of re-, when we did this etymology of re- as in back, as in return, and recollect. I have lost my thought. It has disappeared. Yes, I am now in this image of swaying, of you swaying and of trees swaying. Deviating from right to left and being a bit off kilter. But the sway is a very gentle, fluid, subtle way, it is different from stumbling. There is fluidity to it.

Sway and to be swayed. Being swayed and easily swayed. There is so much of the habit of my body resisting that sense of swaying. I was looking up at the trees – and how the strength of the tree was also coming from its capacity to be easily swayed. I think it even strengthens the roots in trees, right, the sway, the sway in the wind. There is something about not staking trees for too long, because the sway really encourages root growth and stability. And again, there are all of these phrases that are written into our culture that have positive or negative connotations. Straightforward-ness has this positive connotation. Easily swayed has a negative connotation. And there is something about the kind of voluntarily swaying or moving into a sense of sway that feels really delightful, again this sense of delight. Having a sense of groundedness on the floor and this sense of the planet moving. Just the bizarreness of that, that there is this huge land mass, and there we are on the surface of it. And wow, why are we not swaying more, you know. And that play with gravity. I guess that gravity is also the thing that stops us from swaying in a way. Now I am thinking of vertigo, and that sense of dizziness and the sway that can be experienced in vertigo, of not being steady. All these positive and negative connotations – of sway, and just the navigation of that, the untangling of that, of the properties, or qualities or characteristics that might be worth redeeming or investigating, from those that are somehow paralysing. Because there is a sense of vertiginous, dizzy sway which is undesirably disorientating.

And maybe it is back to this sense of cooperation between seemingly opposite orientations or tendencies, between directness and indirectness, and steadfastness or stillness and swaying, and groundedness and ungroundedness. There is something in this transitional movement or range of possibility that opens up between these poles that seems interesting somehow. That they are in cooperation, creative cooperation.

And maybe the straightforward is only that, it is only one-dimensional. And it is making me think again of that full sense of you know, 360 possibilities, you know, the multi-dimensionality possibilities of being alive. And how to really activate that. And now I am bringing to mind the sense from the ‘round’ before of the lateral and the sides. This sense of the lateral being activated in the diagonal. So beyond this split of the front and the back, the roles of the sides and the diagonal and the lateral. And bending in a way.

…….

Some things I notice really physiologically in a way, or, yes physiologically, in terms of anatomy. Just the change of tread - walking backwards was really on the tiptoes so there was this kind of lightness and springiness, this sense of treading lightly as a practice. Having much more shock absorbency somehow, it felt much kinder on the joints. The length of the tread walking backwards was much bigger. Working in a way that I was quite unfamiliar with or it was taking the joints in a different direction, so there was kind of a lot of effort involved in some ways, but the kind of quality effort compared to walking forwards was quite different. It was a practice that I couldn’t hurry in, it wasn’t possible to hurry it, it had to have its own time. Whether that unhurriedness was through its unfamiliarity that I was having to really think about what I was doing. But bringing my full attention, noticing what I was doing and whether that unhurriedness was a kind of consequence of that.

The delight, this delight of, the ease that that seemed to bring, it sort of brought a kind of release to the front of the body. How weird it is that we are kind of designed for walking forwards in a way and yet operating in this alternative way, this opposite way, this reversal brings such a lot of ease and relief. It just seemed counterintuitive that are habitual ways of moving forwards actually perhaps bring more stress than this sense of walking backwards which felt very releasing and relieving in a way. This moment of turning, turning from moving and navigating frontally - how the body has to reconfigure the weight and how it works with pelvis and the joints. It takes a little while. The puzzling of the body - things have to come into this other understanding of how the joints and gravity. Cooperation - not only of the senses, but anatomically in fact, together with the sense of gravity and the sense of understanding direction.

Trying to find split seconds when you don’t have to worry what’s behind you and you can actually let your eyes be forwards and watch what’s in front of you expand as you move away from it rather than converge as you move towards something. So there is something that the body has to slow and there is also an expansive sense of leaving space rather than moving towards a point on the horizon.

A light tread – you are stopping yourself from falling, you’re allowed to fall, rest backwards and you are catching yourself from not falling. There’s an easiness of letting the weight move backwards and the legs organise how to catch that rather than having to push and project the body forwards and I think that does bring a kind of weight through the pelvis very differently as ort of landing, landing, landing rather than a pushing up pushing up pushing up.

Walking backwards - looking down at the floor and it made me feel really dizzy like I really was going to fall. Watching the closeness of the movement of the floor moving away from me - it felt like the world was rushing away from me and that maybe sense of falling backwards. I noticed my eyeline was higher more out into the world. There was this quality expansion - I felt it in my lungs and in my chest, something about the shoulders were able to drop back more in walking backwards and there was just this sense of more expansiveness in breathing as well.

This dwelling with what’s been or where ones been, not even where you’ve been but not rushing towards something in the future, but just sort of letting in this sense of seeing even. This idea of regarding, just having a regarding quality to what was being observed. Walking forwards I feel like my eyeline alights on things so it‘s much more spot focussed somehow, and this was somehow holding a sense of vision in a much more expanded holistic kind of sense, I was not looking for specific things I was seeing all of it. Trying to explore not looking where I was treading but to really feel with the foot, so allow the foot to meet the floor but to feel the sense of the floor more tangibly.

What a practice this is to feel confident to be able to move without seeing where you are going, just felt a really enriching practice, this sense of preparedness to move without being able to see where the tread is. This capacity to be in the space of uncertainty and to feel safe within that.

Neural patterning and the ways that we forget particular movement patterns through various reasons. Re-establishing neurological pathways that might have got lost or forgotten through inaction or through not being used. Moving backwards, because in some sense it is not a functional movement – it does is enables a real range of options in terms of capacity to move and getting a sense of really building confidence in balance, even that sense of proprioception and the awareness of being in space through means other than through sight. It

But that sense of affirmative to be resilient towards changes that happen, transformations that happen over time. To be prepared actually, for dealing with these uncertainties of ageing maybe. To feel really confident walking backwards and not to be so concerned about the necessity of sight as a dominant sensory means for navigating through space and for moving. Interested in the sense of what are the conditions of movement. So one of the things I was exploring was in the transition from walking backward and walking forward was to try and retain the quality that was there in the walking backward as I turn and to try and not shift but to allow that quality of expansive view, expansive lungs, shoulders to turn into forward movement.

And then I decided to not turn to walk forwards but to just walk forwards in the opposite direction, like the way I had already come. I was walking back, or I was returning to the direction from where I had come, but in a forward facing way and then switching to backward again and sometimes turning. And it became extremely disorientating in a way, like wow, which direction am I coming from here? Am I heading forwards even though I’m walking backwards and then am I returning even though I’m walking forwards? So this question of the binaries became super blurry in this experiment – of rotating sometimes between forward and backward and sometimes shifting the direction but remaining facing in the same direction. Sometimes rotating 360 degrees, like fully rotating bet forward and backward or sometimes just doing it on a 180 degree axis. I started to think about groups of people doing this.

This sense of spaciousness, this expansiveness, almost how the visual expansiveness also comes into the body, into the lungs, into the chest, into the shoulders, giving a sense of opening the arms, but maybe it’s more opening the chest. There’s also a softening because it’s allowed to fall into the back, the front fall into the body rather than hold the body up. A kind of relief that I often experience in walking backwards because it has to slow down, and the eyes are allowed to settle. Everything, it feels like everything, like the eyes and the lungs are allowed to settle into the body be soft and even though it takes a certain strength and sense of balance.

It reminds me of this phrase ‘take a line for a walk’, often after working with attention of the back, to then take the back for a walk. The hand in the back , maybe imagine a hand in the back and the attention given to the back and then to walk forwards with that – to be taking the back for a walk, feels like there is this support that moves with a similar to when you are actually walking backwards. This way of regarding, or noticing, that those these things come from behind, it can be surprising that there is suddenly a tree or a person in sight.

Almost like a choreographic score, this walking backwards and retracing your steps forwards and the different combinations of turns and half turns as a way of, not as an intentional way of disorientating.sHow we orientate in relationship to a sense of direction., A walk forwards but with an intention of walking backwards, so there’s a kind of double focus. To walk backwards but still somehow hold some kind of awareness to the front, so I can feel a double focus, but that one is different, you’re actually trying to resist walking forwards - you’re walking forward but it’s almost like someone is pulling you back.

Walking backwards lengthens life because of this being able to reverse how the joints and the tendons, this aspect purely muscular aspect that it is rejuvenating, rather than constantly doing the same movement, the same muscles, the same patterning and that reversing the use of the pattern of the muscles is rejuvenating.. Becoming more comfortable with not being able to see so well, to be able to feel through the feet and feel what’s behind and awaken the peripheral sensibility. There’s a similarity that walking in the dark is also a kind of practising of feeling more comfortable in the dark, the shadowy, and when you can’t see.

Walking forwards but with the intention of backwards, of holding back. To feel that as a kind of intensity in the body - something about backwardness and this amplification of feeling, sensation in a way particular in terms of movement. I think about kind of the tactility - using touch or the sense of tactility as a way of orientation when the visual field is diminished.

Maybe all of this is to do with expanding the sensory capacities of the body to be able to do things in different ways and not be limited by certain habits. Not even habits – its capacities isn’t it – that things develop through practice or capacities develop through practice.

That there’s something almost anatomically or physiologically there about how the body moves when it moves backwards which is not only to do with unfamiliarity but just simply to do with the organisation of the body in a particular way in relation to gravity and support and balance. So before things become fully automatic there’s this kind of interesting wrestling area, it’s not quite familiar. The awkwardness actually of certain movements, yes what does that awkwardness do. So yes there was something around automaticity and whether rather than it becoming routine and unnoticed, it could become fluent and highly sensitised. Does fluidity always mean automatic and might it not just allow for a heightening of sensation around certain movement practices.

This notion of unthought - unthinking movements and the unthought, some of these differences really between unthinking and unthought, one feels superficial and the other, the unthought feels like a dark well, like a deep dark well in a way.

The spine has to turn and this ease of the neck to turn rather it be an awkward thing, how it can just become part of how I need to move backwards. Curious about the back of the neck, almost this, like the air as you move backwards, that the air touches the neck, these little hairs. I become very aware of the hairs on the back of the neck. This sense that the neck opens because its moving towards the back, so there’s a sense of it pushing the air, or rather of moving into the air. It also creates a lightness in the body and maybe there is this other way of navigating as you say through the feet trying to find ground or balance or being more comfortable with not quite knowing where you are going and having to figure that out which creates, which enables the top of the body and the neck and the head to actually feel quite light and feel well supported by the pelvis and the legs. It’s coming back to these tiny tiny micro movements in different parts of the spine in relationship to the sense of spaciousness. 

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Something about the immediacy of the turn, from walking forwards into backwards - how quickly the body could reconfigure but also how immediately the difference felt. These pathways - there are these trees, with their branches coming over the path, so my attention was also being drawn to be looking, sometimes on the ground, sometimes straight ahead, but also sometimes up. Being free to be able to look what was ahead of me while I was walking backwards. I know I am walking backwards and the body sorts that out, seeing is given permission to look, and a light feeling in the neck, that I can just look while the body takes me back. It is almost, it is almost releasing the seeing from responsibility. Normally, if I am moving forwards I have a feeling that the eyes are responsible for guiding me, for making sure I know where I am going, for not bumping into anything. Then walking backwards it feels that seeing, the sense of seeing and the actual receiving of visual things, feels it is allowed to happen or it is being taken for a journey or is allowed to wander. And the looking upwards, this revealing of or this unfolding of the view, rather than moving towards, or moving into what you are seeing.

The releasing of the eyes, releasing, releasing the eyes from orientation, from looking where one is going to. This sense of easiness in the eyes, the sense of what the pressure feels for the eyes to be always orienting, always looking for where one is going. Two ways of attention, so narrow attention and wide attention. And it felt that the narrow attention was much more concerned with this finding of a way, you know, pragmatic, looking for the route. My eye is very busy, it is darting, it is looking around, it is one the one hand looking forward, but also trying to get a quick map of the bigger picture. Surveying and busy, cognitively busy, sussing out what is happening in the space. And then turning around and walking backwards, the eyes do not have that role to play, so it is releasing them from a particular role of orientation, or searching or protection or route-finding. And this sense of the eyes being able to inhabit a different kind or mode of being in a way, where they are released of their usual function. Just allowing the eyes to be, and moving from an upright position to a horizontal position. Just that letting in of the sky and the clouds and yes, moving the orientation of the eyes from looking backwards or being oriented backwards, but still in an upright position, to a horizontal position. A quarter of the view, as you move from the vertical to the horizontal. And, I then was experimenting with moving backwards, walking backwards with my eyes in this more receiving mode. Or taking the pressure of them needing to look forward or needing to look where I was going, and then when I turned to walk forwards, having my eyes closed. It was much more possible to walk forwards with my eyes closed having been practising walking backwards. Letting the eyes being released of orientation in a different way, this time by closing them. Surprised by almost the confidence I could feel walking forwards with my eyes closed, having been practising walking backwards. My balance and sense of orientation felt much more possible in a way.

Coming back to this territory of low orientation, with a dorsal orientation. In a different way, although there is this 90 degree tilt, there is similarity in how the eyes are released and how seeing has to reorganise itself. I suppose with lying down the sense of touch is coming, is coming up much more. The surface area of the body being in contact with the ground.

Yes, backward away, I wrote it down here, some sort of nostalgia or almost poetics. You have that sensation and you are totally in that situation, but there is also something, like an outside eye, that imagines that you are in also watching a film, or that you are in a film. Maybe a heightened awareness of being a particular situation, in the midst of it, but also a sense of the particularity or the specialness of that situation. Yes, back away from people, leaving something behind, it is very different to turning you back on something, and walking away from it, forwards. Like the turn is a kind of recognition of I am leaving, and then you go. But this is, perhaps a suspension of leaving. And at the same time, maybe it the suspension of leaving something behind at the same time as this viewing unfolding or unravelling along the edges. And things appearing, from behind, suddenly there were these pink petals that had come from a Rhododendron or Azelea – so this patch of pink and how that gets revealed as you walk through it, so you walk through it, and discover yourself in it, rather than seeing it before and walking into it. this being in the midst, it puts you there, amongst, present, amongst the other things in that situation or environment. The things around you but also the sounds, you are in the middle. Yes, you are in the middle of it all. And also the sound, the sound of my feet became much more pronounced, a different kind of rhythm. A kind of rhythm and for me it felt louder, it might just be how the toe or the ball of the foot has to find its way first.

Approaching people walking forwards and then once they have gone past, turning to walk backwards, as if I had turned to stay with them for longer. This idea of wanting to stay with something, or look at something for longer, or allow something to remain in view for longer, remain in view for longer, this has felt very present in walking backwards. In walking forwards, things are endlessly passing, and going behind, disappearing into peripheral vision and then no longer being in view. Or the eye line feels as if what stays in view is the furthest horizon, the far distance. Yes, So as you are walking forwards, the near distance is endlessly passing, and disappearing from view, and the far distance stays in view for longer. However, when you are walking backwards, this is not true at all – the near, the middle and the far view, all stay in view, all of the time. And in particular, the near or proximate sphere of space does not disappear behind you, like when you are walking forwards – it really stays. And then gradually, starts to become the middle ground. But this idea of staying with something for longer has felt very strong with walking backwards. Keeping something in view. this idea of reflection, in the sense of turning back. In its etymology, re- and flectere: to turn, to turn back again. And I was thinking how we often talk about reflection in this sense of looking back on something, turning back on something. And in this act of turning whilst walking, there was this sense of re-flect, in the sense of turning back. This action of reflecting, in the sense of turning back, simply turning back, but that it stays in the present. And this staying with something for longer, remains in the immediate experience, rather than bringing to mind something later, after the fact. So this weird temporal confusion that starts to arise through a focus on dorsality, or temporal stretchiness or elasticity, how attention and movement through the world feels as if it has this tense to it.

So yes, allowing things to remain for longer in view. It kind of suspends, it suspends a sense of, I am trying to recall that sensation, I am repeating myself, the moving forwards has more functionality, the moving backwards it does, there is a different sensation. Dropped into a different way of experiencing what is happening around. So in a way it feels a timelessness, almost like if I am walking forwards I roughly know how long it is going to take me, half an hour to get here, or five minutes to get there. There is a measure of time that just clicks in automatically if you are walking forwards. Whereas with walking backwards, it is not really important.

That is because of the pausing and the rotating, it gives a difference sense, because you are not travelling. You have a more radial sense of space, feeling my body as a centre of rotation and in moving around – maybe my ears are scanning around me and I am listening to the shifting sounds. I am bringing attention to the immersive nature of, the immersive quality of being in the space, sounds close and far, and different volumes. frequencies – picking up or listening in a different way as well. So temperature and air are combining with different senses of listening, listening through touch and through the skin as well as through the ears, to sound and noise.

I walked forward and actually tried to pull my mind back to where I had just been or to the person I had just left. it is a real pull back. It is useful in a way, it is a very different, it is a very different manoeuvre. It is not really to do with the dorsal manoeuvre that we are interested in, in the pulling back there was almost a weight to it. it actually pulled me out of the body. Maybe these different kinds of re- and some of them have more resonance, there is a mode of dorsality that we are trying to explore as an embodied practice.

But trying not to grasp to strongly, not to pull too tightly into order in a way, that idea of release, releasing of this tendency of organising and coordinating and finding the route, also applies cognitively as well as with the eyes. And this idea of release, this idea of temporal release, was it this, temporal releasing. Being released of the sense of time, or maybe even time being released and it opening into this atemporal timelessness in the act of walking backwards. Strong experientially, from this small shift of orientation. How it has such a transformative effect in the sense of how time and space and body and surroundings are experienced, very radical in a way. And this sense, I think that this is almost present in the scores, the two dimensions of that, one could be recorded as a score for action – so turn the body and then walk backwards. And then the other is a score for attention – so notice the change, notice what happens. So these two aspects of affecting an action or changing an action and noticing.

What is it that I am exploring here, or even this feels too forceful, so what is it that I am noticing here? What do I notice? What am I aware of? This noticing of the change between walking forwards and walking backwards and then doing it again, and doing it again. Testing in a way, or exploring, testing again. Is this my experience? Is this my experience? It feels like it opens up? Is this my experience doing it again? Confirming through experience, is there something that changes? How is that? How can I bring, not bring more notice to it, but what do I notice, how can I notice in a fuller way what is changing or what is transforming? To retain the quality or extend the quality of moving backwards into moving forwards. So almost inhibiting the change back, this carrying over of a backwards quality into the forwards direction? This moving forward into frontality but keeping this quality of the dorsal.

That sense of disembodiment that comes from that. This disembodiment of being in the past. that our explorations are very much concerned with staying in an embodied experience of dorsality, even if that might also include an awareness of memory. That the memory is embodied rather than being a departure of the mind back in time. So there is this disjuncture between the past and the present. And again there is this temporal elasticity, listening to what is either going or coming. But very in the present at the same time. It brought that to mind, this disturbance of linear time in a way.

There is that emotion of smiling and that is to do with releasing, release of, permission to lose control I suppose. I think that there is something to do with control, expectation, responsibility, control, the sense of ourselves or how we think to present ourselves in the world, to ourselves and to others. And that is allowed to shift, it is a psychological and emotional shift as well, a twist, and a turn and a drop.

Even a desire to let go, to actually totally let go, to abandon, leaning back, which also links back to this sense of trust, trusting oneself. Trusting that you won’t fall, and if you do fall, that is also fine. There is an interesting relation, of the psychological and emotional entanglement I suppose, in relation to trust, the relation of control and trust and the rebalancing of that in the dorsal mode, which I also experience in the simple way of walking, of walking backwards. Reorientating my relationship to what I am afraid of in life, whether that is fear of falling, but also a fear of failing, fear of embarrassment, fear of change. it does reorientate one’s relationship to oneself. Yes, trust, fear, control.

The re- of reflection and the testing, the testing of things re-turn, as in go back to or do it again, and this returning as in to turn it over, to retest it, or do it again, and then to notice anew. And maybe some things re-emerge or feel familiar or not. The turning over and over, the testing as in with more circular or folding quality or perhaps settling back into something that is more familiar in order to test out how things are happening in this new situation. So now I am returning, I am repeating in a different way, what you said. I am turning what you said over and over in my mind and sometimes it comes as an image, sometimes it triggers a memory of what I was doing yesterday.

The more we talk, the more I can’t hold on. So much builds on and accumulates and fills our space in this conversation. abandon any sense of where it is going, or what is being said or what would be useful to say now. How might I move this conversation backwards. Turn it around.

The words that were in my mind were ‘coming’ and ‘going’. There is something temporally unsettling about them, almost it is unclear whether going is towards or away from, or whether coming is going away from or going towards. Even using one to describe the other. So the inflection of those directions and orientations that are present and how they are embedded into language. Even inflexion, that feels interesting. Flexion was something that I was writing down and reflecting on – all these flexes and -flects, flexions and flections, even the relation between flexion and reflect. Coming to the ground as a way of releasing the back from uprightness. So lying down is a release from the pressure of uprightness, coming to the back as a way of releasing the pressure of verticality, but also flexion in the curling down to crouch as a way of releasing uprightness and also coming to the ground. And this flexion of the spine, coming down to crouch was really interesting as it also brought my eyes close to the ground. So there was this closeness to the ground in both of these practices, but really very different. So something about flex and -plex, complex, simplex, coiling and curling and folding through this gesture of flexion.

This question in my mind of the functionality of backwards walking, and the functionality of the articulation of our joints of the body being oriented towards this forwards faciality. The evolution of movement, as having this push towards uprightness, and faciality and frontality, that moving to the back in all kinds of ways, whether physiologically or psychologically, brings such a lot of release and joy, how can that not be programmed into our being in some kind of way. Describing this abandon, this sense of abandon, the joy of abandon, felt really vivid. how can it not part of the fabric of being human and having a human body. It can feel so amazing, and expansive and liberatory. something about this emotional texture or tenor of dorsality. The sense that came to mind, or even the word that came to mind, is sorrow. This sorrow, yes, sorrow feels very close for it, a real, not quite sadness, but the sorrow that this is a fleeting experience.

Brief interludes in a life which otherwise feels very frontally oriented. These pockets of abandon, and the joy and the ease, and the relief feel momentary and there is a sorrow with that. The fatigue of frontality, the tiredness of it and this fluid, pleasurable, joyful, easy experience just experienced in these very slight pockets of exercising and of testing something out. And the sorrow that this is how it seems to be – encountered in a brief exercise. I mean it doesn’t need to be a brief exercise, why could it not be more, why not live life more dorsally?

We keep coming back to the turn, the turn, it is the turn that can move us around. To navigate the frontality and the dorsality. If we became too familiar, if that became as natural as our frontal mode, would we be having the same sense of release. It is the turn that keeps, the possibility of always being able to turn, we also have this flex, to bend or curl or twist, we also talked last time about this capacity to sway.physically, the spine and the joints can move us this way or that way. It keeps a sense of possibility to move in another way, to see things in another way, to perceive things in another way. Yes, it is what keeps some possible, not static, not fixed, not so familiar, there is a childlike joy or curiosity or playfulness in wanting to sometimes move to the ground, to crouch and to crawl. To find different ways of doing things. Seeing what happens if. How does it feel if? Yes, and these words, nostalgia and sorrow.

The turn is always dorsal, as I was walking and some of this was to do with noticing which shoulder I turn back over as I am turning backwards. These experiments on the turn, and also this feeling of whether the shoulder was moving, whether the shoulder was moving dorsally. this turn that lets the body roll back, rather than forcing the shoulder forwards which is how it felt at times. I don’t think of the skeleton like that, having this movement capacity. It can feel rather solid and static at times but that range of movement, is dependent on these micro movements within the skeleton itself, the capacity of the bones to have rotation. All of these turning upon which the turning to the back is contingent, like the reliance of the hips and the legs and the shin bones having this micro capacity for movement, to enable movement. What is at stake in not practising, in the stiffening and solidifying of the body into more of a sense of a single form without these micro capacities for movement. What closes down as movement possibilities through lack of practice or through habits, habits of holding really, yes, habits of holding. And the potency of release as a principle, of letting go of control seemed very present in those experiences. And then something about deprivileging of certain things like the frontality of the eyes, and just thinking more in terms of lessening a dependence on them.