I am taking a class with a woman who knows about the body and its original wisdom in a way I have never experienced before. And while the focus of the class is on movement that is organic, integrated, and effortless, I often find myself carried away with the metaphors around how she languages the body.
Recently, as we were working with a particular range of movement, she said; “In any movement, you can only come from where you come from.” Obvious on one level in terms of what the body is capable of doing. And at the same time, it reads like a set of instructions for how to live in both mind and body. For instance, to her words, “you can only come from where you come from, I added and where you come from in any given movement is created and guided by your habits, your skill set, your intentions, your quality of mind, your past…” And on and on it goes. Where we move from today is based on everything that has come before.
We are an accumulation of all the movements of the past. Equally, there is so much more to come, which in turn will be based on what has come before. It’s a loop that keeps circling and circling. And so, if we want our current movement to come from a place of greater integrity and ease, it requires awareness, adjustments, and the permission to move in new and different ways. This could mean a change in how or what you eat. It could mean interacting with yourself or others differently. It could mean shifting how you think about yourself or what you believe is possible. Movement in this way can come from anyplace, and be in the service of anything.
Where you move from in any given moment is always a choice, and the choice is always yours, and yours alone to make. And so, even though where you are coming from is based on where you are which is based on where you came from, there is always a point in the circle to make the choice to begin anew. It’s like the old saying; “If you keep doing what you have always done, you are going to get what you always got.” But when we learn to do other than what we have always done, we are guaranteed to get something new.
Right now, where in the endless loop of your movement through life is there a place to disrupt the conditioning of what came before in the service of creating a brand new way of moving, and therefore where it is that you ultimately come from?