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PART 1

EXPLORATION PERIOD: 14 April - 6 May 2022

FOCUS/PRACTICE: The focus during this period was on the experience of back-ness, through 'walking backwards'. 

We each undertook this exploration separately over the period. Below are some of the individual exercises / scores / questions / prompts that we used for activating the exploration or that emerged through the enquiry.

PART 2 (A)

EXPLORATION DATE: 06.05.2022

FOCUS/PRACTICE: Conversation-as-Material (I) as a shared practice. The focus of this conversation practice was the preceding period of exploration (between 14.04.2022 - 06.05.2022).

STRUCTURE OF PRACTICE

Speaker is not visible (masks camera with tape), listener has back turned, active listening.

1. Speaking/listening: taking turns facing [5 mins each]

2. Speaking/listening: taking turns facing [10 mins each]

3. Speaking/listening: taking turns facing [5 mins each]

'SCORE' FOR CONVERSATION PRACTICE

- Take a moment to tune into the chosen object/focus of exploration – this could involve a period of recollection, or looking back at notes, sketches, wordings that relate to the object/focus of exploration, or by noting/drawing/diagramming.

- Connect and try to stay connected with your direct experience.

- Feel free to speak before knowing what it is that you want to say – thinking through speaking.

- Feel free to speak in single words, partial phrases, half sentences, and thought fragments.

- Allow for vulnerability and embarrassment – for wrestling with, stumbling and falling over one’s words.

- Consider different speeds and rhythms. Allow for silence.

- Approach listening to the other as an aesthetic practice.

PART 3

INTERIM PERIOD

FOCUS/PRACTICE: Transcription and distillation of resulting text through marking/highlighting, undertaken separately.

EXERCISES/SCORES

There was this thing I think we arrived at this idea of walking backwards and actually one of the things I found almost like having the one prompt has been interesting because on the one hand it’s been possible to integrate it more fully, to remember it really, to recall it to kind of bring it to mind, and into body in a more integrated sense, but then also to allow it open up through variation and experimentation, so rather than having many prompts which I was finding maybe a bit overwhelming this beginning with one and this variation and how noticing how it unfolds into other ways of doing things I found really enriching. So I’ve been doing it a lot outside as I’m walking round the park, like this loop that I have. I guess some things I notice really physiologically in a way, or, yes physiologically, in terms of anatomy and I think one of the main things was to do with just the change of tread. So I tend to walk quite heavy on my heels ordinarily and walking backwards was really on the tiptoes so there was this kind of lightness and springiness in it.  So I was just thinking this sense of treading lightly as a practice. And just having much more shock absorbency somehow, it felt much kinder on the joints. And that sense of the pressure on the joints really easing. Because I have some kind of joint issues around the hips and knees and various bits and bobs. This walking backwards was bringing quite a lot of relief actually and being quite pleasurable. And just noticing the length of the tread walking backwards was much bigger, it was almost like these huge stretchy strides in a way. So in a sense as a practice it felt quite tiring – there was something the practice felt quite tiring because it was 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 And I was really noticing that it felt like it was a practice that I couldn’t hurry in, so if I tried to speed it up it wasn’t really happening, it wasn’t possible to hurry it, it kind of felt like it had to have its own time. I guess one of the things I was interested in was whether that unhurriedness was through its unfamiliarity that I was having to really think about what I was doing, or not even thinking, I wasn’t thinking 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 and whether if I got really practiced in walking backwards, the hurriedness that I sometimes experience in walking forwards would also be there. But it didn’t feel like that, it felt like it had this inherent unhurriedness somehow with it, so there was something about this very different footfall, this lightness and just kind of afterwards this sense, I was going to say, 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 and again I just got interested in the sense of 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 and I was just reflecting on why that might be – is it because it’s not how we are used to walking so it’s less worn or less familiar. 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, so yes I was quite curious about that.

It’s interesting listening to you talking about your experience in the park, also because, it’s really nice to listen because you didn’t mention anything about how you organised the understanding where you are going or talking about visual sights. Because in a way depending on if we are in the studio or outside, it’s the first thing that somehow has to get reorganised, if there are other people there or other obstacles. But I also enjoy this moment of turning, turning from moving and navigating frontally and that turn to the back that puzzling, how the body has to reconfigure the weight and how it works with pelvis and the joints as you say,it takes a little while. I enjoy that, the puzzling of the body to realise its going backwards and things have to come into this other understanding of how the joints and gravity – I suppose in a way that word cooperation comes up again, not only of the senses, but anatomically in fact, together with the sense of gravity and the sense of understanding direction. I actually had the moment, just by chance, that I was on a beach, and got pulled into this class and part of that was to do some running and he shifted it into running backwards. And it was great, I remember thinking, also because I was able to do some homework, but because it was on the beach and it was gently running and knowing there were no obstacles, I could run backwards and look out to sea. Reminded me too of working with the students in the studio, 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. It’s an interesting thing how the eyes and a sense of vision and what you see also has to reconfigure. Hmm, that’s right, you don’t have to push the body forward, I always feel – you mentioned a light tread – I always feel you are stopping yourself from falling, you’re allowed to fall, rest backwards and you are catching yourself from not falling – so it’s more like, 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. And for me that always feels very relaxing. I have always thought you have to slow because you cannot see where you are going, it’s a kind of re re recalibrating our understanding. And I was reading about – umm – contra naturam? - against our nature, against the way we are built, sometimes I wonder if it’s totally the way we are built? Or whether it’s the way we have organised our working and living that it has become ….

The thing about sight is interesting actually and one of the things I’ve been exploring was whether the sense of seeing was to do with seeing where you are going or seeing on what you might trip on or whether was something more fundamental to do with balance with eyesight and visuality and I noticed that sometimes when I am walking forwards especially when I am feeling quite distracted, quite frontal in my mode, I can often look down at the floor so it contracts into a quite narrow space. This week we’ve been reading Marion Millner on attention, psychoanalyst working in the 1930s, she talks about narrow and wide attention and sometimes in the frontal mode my attention does feel quite narrow quite instrumental, kind of it’s serving a certain purpose in a way. And there was this quality of walking backwards where I was experimenting with looking down at the floor and it made me feel really dizzy like I really was going to fall. It felt very disorienting because I think watching the closeness of the movement of the floor moving away from me - maybe I need to go back to this – this sense, it felt like the world was rushing away from me and that maybe sense of falling backwards is more strong. But I noticed my eyeline was higher more out into the world. And as you say there was this quality expansion but also interestingly 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. So there was this parallel with this sense of the world expanding as you’re walking backwards, and staying with it too, it remaining in view and the lung capacity feeling much more spacious. There was something about 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. So like one of the words I was thinking a lot about was this idea of regarding, just having a regarding quality to what was being observed. Sometimes 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. But the thing around balance and sight also became interesting, I was moving on different terrains and in the park, there’s a bit where it moves through a wooded area, so there’s a lot of roots on the floor, and I was 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. And I was thinking a lot about ageing in a way and loss of eyesight through ageing, and loss of balance through ageing and just thinking wow 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 landing just felt a real …. maybe again to do with this capacity to be in the space of uncertainty and to feel safe within that. It’s been interesting these last weeks because I’m doing a 6 month workshop with a yoga teacher Peter Blackaby at the moment who works a lot with this notion of intelligent yoga and functional movement. And is very interested in neural patterning and the ways that we forget particular movement patterns through various reasons. A lot of his work is to do with I suppose re-establishing neurological pathways that might have got lost or forgotten through inaction or through not being used. A lot of this emphasis is to do with functional movement, how do we function with efficiency. And this interesting in relation to moving backwards, because in some sense it is not a functional movement. There are very few times when it might be necessary to move backwards like that. So in those terms it’s not strictly a functional movement but what 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 just felt there’s a real, functional is not quite right, but that sense of affirmative dimension in these kinds of practice, I guess to be resilient towards changes that happen, transformations that happen over time. To be prepared actually, for dealing with these uncertainties of ageing maybe. That’s so interesting 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. So I became quite interested in the sense of what are the conditions of movement. Actually I am saying I was not concerned for where I was going but what I really was doing was only taking a few steps backwards and then turning and walking a few step forwards and turning again and walking a few steps backwards. So this kind of shift between forward orientation and back orientation – and this became also very interesting because of the variations that open within that. 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 there’s a straight path in the park and this became very interesting as a path to walk along because I was walking backwards along it and it felt quite safe because its wide and I can get a sense of orientation in it. I was walking backwards. 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 and this became really interesting because 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. Really exciting really and I started to think about groups of people doing this.

Lots. I’m wondering because of the simplicity of, or as you said, a simple task that can then open up into all these variations, but there’s also this sense of listening to some else talking about their experience, that also triggers, so when you were talking about looking down on the ground walking backwards that just triggers a nausea in myself so there’s a kind of triggering memory of having a similar experience, a kind of reminding of oh, yes that happened to me as well. Also, 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 feels as though, in relation to sight, even though it might not be our habitual or everyday way of moving that There is something, how weight is negotiated feels much more natural than the walking forwards, there is a kind of a natural way to be working with the weight, and letting the things settle into the body. I like this, 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, it reminded me also when we were talking about 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. There was also, I was thinking of whether it is inside or outside, or whether it is a wall or tree or people, there are also these moments of surprise, because literally things appear from behind, they are suddenly there on the right side or the left side. When normally we might get a sense coming nearer to us from a distance, but when things can suddenly just emerge from behind. 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. I was trying to, I liked what you were saying, it was 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, but how, last time we also talked about a sense of direction. How we orientate in relationship to a sense of direction, as well as knowing where that door is, where that tree is, a combination of seeing, listening and also knowing where things are from last time you looked. I also reminded of shiatsu where we would do these ki exercise, enerhetic exercises, where we would do things like walk forwards but with an intention of walking backwards, so there’s a kind of double focus, I haven’t practised that for a while. I feel what I might naturally do now is in a way 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, and that operates very differently than the other way round. It also feels harder to do maybe because there’s more a habit to work against. But it’s strange because its like you are not actually going anywhere. My colleague said to me when I was explaining a little bit about the dorsal project that there are actually these ideas that walking backwards literally does help with ageing, and this idea that it 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. But also, what you said on this idea of 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. And perhaps 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.

Interesting listening to you talking and bringing that idea again of the murkiness of the dark and the shadows and that idea of walking in the dark having a similar quality but some shared quality of feeling in a way. It’s making me think, I could almost like feel my body trying to get a taste of what you were saying at times.

So when you were describing this experience of walking forwards but with the intention of backwards, of holding back I could sort of really feel that as a kind of intensity in the body. So there’s something about backwardness and this amplification of feeling, sensation in a way particular in terms of movement. I suppose when I think about kind of the tactility, I think I have talked before about using touch or the sense of tactility as a way of orientation when the visual field is diminished. But what I do straight away is I almost Iike kind of outstretch my arms and my fingers feel like they’re feeling a way almost as a way of balancing but my experience from the practice it was very much in the feet that were feeling away. Maybe there is something there I am interested in terms of this orientation, not necessarily away from the hands to the feet but to expand, 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. Maybe that was a zone that I was interested in was whether some of the experiences that I was arriving at through the practice was because this walking backwards was an unfamiliar practice and whether with practice and more fluidity these experiences would disappear. Or whether it was somehow inherent within this walking backwards so I was very interested in when you were talking about the way the organs and the joints can settle, 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. But this notion of automaticity and things becoming automatic became very interesting and I was thinking a lot about inhabiting this threshold around automaticity, so before things become fully automatic there’s this kind of interesting wrestling area, it’s not quite familiar. And I was thinking actually maybe about dancers and about the way in which their capacity of movement is so expanded, so much possibility and reflecting on how my own experience maybe quite different, but there could be something in this, 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 rather than dropping into something that just feels, it doesn’t need to be thought about. And then there was something about, you mentioned about Katherine Hayles last time and this notion of unthoughtand I was thinking about these 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.

While you were talking I was also reminded of how the body, I think this is more if I would be walking backwards in the studio or around my little home, how the body in walking backwards there was something about the turn, there’s the turn of the head that sometimes has to happen just to kind of check, which I noticed first of all it feels awkward but it can quite easily become integrated in a light easy way. So there something then that although there is this backness 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. In walking backwards, it always brings me back to this dorsal turn and the David Wills, which I continually don’t understand what he means but in these moments, that’s right, the turn, it’s very easy to work with the pelvis and to simply turn to navigate these corners you have to go around, in moving forwards and you have to turn, you can push the body around but it’s like a decision you have to do whereas in walk backwards the turn is happening very very naturally, so the turn does move into the back. This was suddenly making sense to me in a very physical way. Whenever the body turns, he says whenever the body turns it turns towards the back, I am kind of, that is what I experience when I am walking backwards or forwards, the turn moves into the back or comes from the back, no towards the back – hmmm. There’s something also about the different areas of the back, like especially there’s something around, we were talking about the softening of the chest around the front, I also get very 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. A very sort of light delicate brushing sense of the neck area, which I suppose is different when you’re inside, its often then not covered up with scarves and such. But even then I think there is 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. I love that sensation – because 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. Yes and in that there is so many, it’s coming back to these tiny tiny micro movements in different parts of the spine in relationship to the sense of spaciousness.It comes back to what you were first saying, that this very simple task opens up a complexity, not only a complexity but a huge playground of possibilities.

There was this thing I think we arrived at this idea of walking backwards and actually one of the things I found almost like having the one prompt has been interesting because on the one hand it’s been possible to integrate it more fully, to remember it really, to recall it to kind of bring it to mind, and into body in a more integrated sense, but then also to allow it open up through variation and experimentation, so rather than having many prompts which I was finding maybe a bit overwhelming this beginning with one and this variation and how noticing how it unfolds into other ways of doing things I found really enriching. So I’ve been doing it a lot outside as I’m walking round the park, like this loop that I have. I guess some things I notice really physiologically in a way, or, yes physiologically, in terms of anatomy and I think one of the main things was to do with just the change of tread. So I tend to walk quite heavy on my heels ordinarily and walking backwards was really on the tiptoes so there was this kind of lightness and springiness in it.  So I was just thinking this sense of treading lightly as a practice. And just having much more shock absorbency somehow, it felt much kinder on the joints. And that sense of the pressure on the joints really easing. Because I have some kind of joint issues around the hips and knees and various bits and bobs. This walking backwards was bringing quite a lot of relief actually and being quite pleasurable. And just noticing the length of the tread walking backwards was much bigger, it was almost like these huge stretchy strides in a way. So in a sense as a practice it felt quite tiring – there was something the practice felt quite tiring because it wasworking 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 And I was really noticing that it felt like it was a practice that I couldn’t hurry in, so if I tried to speed it up it wasn’t really happening, it wasn’t possible to hurry it, it kind of felt like it had to have its own time. I guess one of the things I was interested in was whether that unhurriedness was through its unfamiliarity that I was having to really think about what I was doing, or not even thinking, I wasn’t thinking 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 and whether if I got really practiced in walking backwards, the hurriedness that I sometimes experience in walking forwards would also be there. But it didn’t feel like that, it felt like it had this inherent unhurriedness somehow with it, so there was something about this very different footfall, this lightness and just kind of afterwards this sense, I was going to say, 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 and again I just got interested in the sense of 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 and I was just reflecting on why that might be – is it because it’s not how we are used to walking so it’s less worn or less familiar. 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, so yes I was quite curious about that.

It’s interesting listening to you talking about your experience in the park, also because, it’s really nice to listen because you didn’t mention anything about how you organised the understanding where you are going or talking about visual sights. Because in a way depending on if we are in the studio or outside, it’s the first thing that somehow has to get reorganised, if there are other people there or other obstacles. But I also enjoy this moment of turning, turning from moving and navigating frontally and that turn to the back that puzzling, how the body has to reconfigure the weight and how it works with pelvis and the joints as you say, it takes a little while. I enjoy that, the puzzling of the body to realise its going backwards and things have to come into this other understanding of how the joints and gravity – I suppose in a way that word cooperation comes up again, not only of the senses, but anatomically in fact, together with the sense of gravity and the sense of understanding direction. I actually had the moment, just by chance, that I was on a beach, and got pulled into this class and part of that was to do some running and he shifted it into running backwards. And it was great, I remember thinking, also because I was able to do some homework, but because it was on the beach and it was gently running and knowing there were no obstacles, I could run backwards and look out to sea. Reminded me too of working with the students in the studio, 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. It’s an interesting thing how the eyes and a sense of vision and what you see also has to reconfigure. Hmm, that’s right, you don’t have to push the body forward, I always feel – you mentioned a light tread – I always feel you are stopping yourself from falling, you’re allowed to fall, rest backwards and you are catching yourself from not falling – so it’s more like, 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. And for me that always feels very relaxing. I have always thought you have to slow because you cannot see where you are going, it’s a kind of re re recalibrating our understanding. And I was reading about – umm – contra naturam? - against our nature, against the way we are built, sometimes I wonder if it’s totally the way we are built? Or whether it’s the way we have organised our working and living that it has become ….

The thing about sight is interesting actually and one of the things I’ve been exploring was whether the sense of seeing was to do with seeing where you are going or seeing on what you might trip on or whether was something more fundamental to do with balance with eyesight and visuality and I noticed that sometimes when I am walking forwards especially when I am feeling quite distracted, quite frontal in my mode, I can often look down at the floor so it contracts into a quite narrow space. This week we’ve been reading Marion Millner on attention, psychoanalyst working in the 1930s, she talks about narrow and wide attention and sometimes in the frontal mode my attention does feel quite narrow quite instrumental, kind of it’s serving a certain purpose in a way. And there was this quality of walking backwards where I was experimenting with looking down at the floor and it made me feel really dizzy like I really was going to fall. It felt very disorienting because I think watching the closeness of the movement of the floor moving away from me - maybe I need to go back to this – this sense, it felt like the world was rushing away from me and that maybe sense of falling backwards is more strong. ButI noticed my eyeline was higher more out into the world. And as you say there was this quality expansion but also interestingly 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. So there was this parallel with this sense of the world expanding as you’re walking backwards, and staying with it too, it remaining in view and the lung capacity feeling much more spacious. There was something about 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. So like one of the words I was thinking a lot about was this idea of regarding, just having a regarding quality to what was being observed. Sometimes 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. But the thing around balance and sight also became interesting, I was moving on different terrains and in the park, there’s a bit where it moves through a wooded area, so there’s a lot of roots on the floor, and I was 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. And I was thinking a lot about ageing in a way and loss of eyesight through ageing, and loss of balance through ageing and just thinking wow 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 landing just felt a real …. maybe again to do with this capacity to be in the space of uncertainty and to feel safe within that. It’s been interesting these last weeks because I’m doing a 6 month workshop with a yoga teacher Peter Blackaby at the moment who works a lot with this notion of intelligent yoga and functional movement. And is very interested in neural patterning and the ways that we forget particular movement patterns through various reasons. A lot of his work is to do with I suppose re-establishing neurological pathways that might have got lost or forgotten through inaction or through not being used.A lot of this emphasis is to do with functional movement, how do we function with efficiency. And this interesting in relation to moving backwards, because in some sense it is not a functional movement. There are very few times when it might be necessary to move backwards like that. So in those terms it’s not strictly a functional movement but what 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 just felt there’s a real, functional is not quite right, but that sense of affirmative dimension in these kinds of practice, I guess to be resilient towards changes that happen, transformations that happen over time. To be prepared actually, for dealing with these uncertainties of ageing maybe. That’s so interesting 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. So I became quite interested in the sense of what are the conditions of movement. Actually I am saying I was not concerned for where I was going but what I really was doing was only taking a few steps backwards and then turning and walking a few step forwards and turning again and walking a few steps backwards. So this kind of shift between forward orientation and back orientation – and this became also very interesting because of the variations that open within that. 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 there’s a straight path in the park and this became very interesting as a path to walk along because I was walking backwards along it and it felt quite safe because its wide and I can get a sense of orientation in it. I was walking backwards. 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 and this became really interesting because 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. Really exciting really and I started to think about groups of people doing this.

Lots. I’m wondering because of the simplicity of, or as you said, a simple task that can then open up into all these variations, but there’s also this sense of listening to some else talking about their experience, that also triggers, so when you were talking about looking down on the ground walking backwards that just triggers a nausea in myself so there’s a kind of triggering memory of having a similar experience, a kind of reminding of oh, yes that happened to me as well. Also, 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 feels as though, in relation to sight, even though it might not be our habitual or everyday way of moving that There is something, how weight is negotiated feels much more natural than the walking forwards, there is a kind of a natural way to be working with the weight, and letting the things settle into the body. I like this, 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, it reminded me also when we were talking about 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. There was also, I was thinking of whether it is inside or outside, or whether it is a wall or tree or people, there are also these moments of surprise, because literally things appear from behind, they are suddenly there on the right side or the left side. When normally we might get a sense coming nearer to us from a distance, but when things can suddenly just emerge from behind. 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. I was trying to, I liked what you were saying, it was 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, but how, last time we also talked about a sense of direction. How we orientate in relationship to a sense of direction, as well as knowing where that door is, where that tree is, a combination of seeing, listening and also knowing where things are from last time you looked. I also reminded of shiatsu where we would do these ki exercise, enerhetic exercises, where we would do things like walk forwards but with an intention of walking backwards, so there’s a kind of double focus, I haven’t practised that for a while. I feel what I might naturally do now is in a way 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, and that operates very differently than the other way round. It also feels harder to do maybe because there’s more a habit to work against. But it’s strange because its like you are not actually going anywhere. My colleague said to me when I was explaining a little bit about the dorsal project that there are actually these ideas that walking backwards literally does help with ageing, and this idea that it 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. But also, what you said on this idea of 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. And perhaps 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.

Interesting listening to you talking and bringing that idea again of the murkiness of the dark and the shadows and that idea of walking in the dark having a similar quality but some shared quality of feeling in a way. It’s making me think, I could almost like feel my body trying to get a taste of what you were saying at times.

So when you were describing this experience of walking forwards but with the intention of backwards, of holding back I could sort of really feel that as a kind of intensity in the body. So there’s something about backwardness and this amplification of feeling, sensation in a way particular in terms of movement. I suppose when I think about kind of the tactility, I think I have talked before about using touch or the sense of tactility as a way of orientation when the visual field is diminished. But what I do straight away is I almost Iike kind of outstretch my arms and my fingers feel like they’re feeling a way almost as a way of balancing but my experience from the practice it was very much in the feet that were feeling away. Maybe there is something there I am interested in terms of this orientation, not necessarily away from the hands to the feet but to expand, 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. Maybe that was a zone that I was interested in was whether some of the experiences that I was arriving at through the practice was because this walking backwards was an unfamiliar practice and whether with practice and more fluidity these experiences would disappear. Or whether it was somehow inherent within this walking backwards so I was very interested in when you were talking about the way the organs and the joints can settle, 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. But this notion of automaticity and things becoming automatic became very interesting and I was thinking a lot about inhabiting this threshold around automaticity, so before things become fully automatic there’s this kind of interesting wrestling area, it’s not quite familiar. And I was thinking actually maybe about dancers and about the way in which their capacity of movement is so expanded, so much possibility and reflecting on how my own experience maybe quite different, but there could be something in this, 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 rather than dropping into something that just feels, it doesn’t need to be thought about. And then there was something about, you mentioned about Katherine Hayles last time and this notion of unthoughtand I was thinking about these 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.

While you were talking I was also reminded of how the body, I think this is more if I would be walking backwards in the studio or around my little home, how the body in walking backwards there was something about the turn, there’s the turn of the head that sometimes has to happen just to kind of check, which I noticed first of all it feels awkward but it can quite easily become integrated in a light easy way. So there something then that although there is this backness 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. In walking backwards, it always brings me back to this dorsal turn and the David Wills, which I continually don’t understand what he means but in these moments, that’s right, the turn, it’s very easy to work with the pelvis and to simply turn to navigate these corners you have to go around, in moving forwards and you have to turn, you can push the body around but it’s like a decision you have to do whereas in walk backwards the turn is happening very very naturally, so the turn does move into the back. This was suddenly making sense to me in a very physical way. Whenever the body turns, he says whenever the body turns it turns towards the back, I am kind of, that is what I experience when I am walking backwards or forwards, the turn moves into the back or comes from the back, no towards the back – hmmm. There’s something also about the different areas of the back, like especially there’s something around, we were talking about the softening of the chest around the front, I also get very 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. A very sort of light delicate brushing sense of the neck area, which I suppose is different when you’re inside, its often then not covered up with scarves and such. But even then I think there is 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. I love that sensation – because 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. Yes and in that there is so many, it’s coming back to these tiny tiny micro movements in different parts of the spine in relationship to the sense of spaciousness.It comes back to what you were first saying, that this very simple task opens up a complexity, not only a complexity but a huge playground of possibilities.

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. It co

PART 4

06.06.2022

FOCUS/PRACTICE: Reading as distillation

- Reading practices using the conversational transcript from 06.05.2022 and 13.05.2022 as source text.

- Take time to tune into the transcript, marking phrases and words that strike you or that resonate

Moving between 2 practices:

Reading (Noticing Attraction)  – Have the transcript to hand, allow gaze to be soft and glide/roam the pages. Practising simultaneously. When a word draws your attention speak it outloud. Allow for overlaps and also silences.

Conversation-as-material distillation – Have the transcript to hand.

When the time feels right read aloud some of the words and phrases that have been highlighted - these could be single words, phrases or a cluster of sentences. Or alternatively, identify words and phrases live and read them aloud.

(1) 5 mins

(2) 15 mins

PART 5

17.03.2023

FOCUS/PRACTICE: Fields of Association

Fields of Association 

- Tuning into the transcript, marking phrases and words that strike you or that resonate

- Each selects a cluster of single words to explore through conversation and etymological exploration, live within the conversation), as a field of association.

(1) 3 mins (e.g. ECs choice of words)

(2)  3 mins (e.g. KBs choice of words)

(3)  8 mins (e.g. ECs choice of words)

(4)  8 mins (e.g. KBs choice of words)

(5)  5  mins (e.g. ECs choice of words)

(6)  5  mins (e.g. ECs choice of words)