"But, What Does It Mean?": Mystery as a Key to Exploring Movement

In my experience, one of the hardest parts of working with movement is to remain open, and to create an atmosphere where movement can flourish and be respected for itself. After this base-line attitude has been at least considered and in part mastered, then the techniques and skills of movement work can be loving and powerful tools. This article is geared toward developing this attitude when working with movement, although what is said here can be used with almost any application of Process Work.

A Look into My Mind

"But what does it mean?" I hear myself say over and over. It's like a mantra in me. "What does it mean? What does it mean? What does it mean?" I am pestering something inside of me or someone outside, some authority, who can tell me the meaning of anything about myself, or of the world and my relationship to it. I have a dream, I wake up, remember it and the first thing that I think is "What does it mean?"...no answer. I have a cup of tea in the morning and spill it all over myself. "It can't be just a senseless mess, a waste of tea and effort to clean it up." I ask, "What does it mean?" I make something up. "I need to be more messy." Not satisfying. Not enough of an answer for that part of me that is looking for something that transcends life and is part of an eternal

order. "Need to be more messy?! This is the answer to eternity? But, what does it really mean?" I hear myself say.

This is a look into my head, into the daily experience I try to make sense out of. Jt is not a bad beginning for awareness. It has a persistence and vitality to it; at the same time it kills the very thing that I am looking for. Because I am asking for the meaning of an event and expecting it to come as a verbal or understandable answer from some known or unknown authority, it is like a living purgatory. It is a means of keeping the status quo. It is an attempt to fit new experience into an old context, and in so doing, it has the tendency to make new experience into something old.

As a dancer and choreographer I always had a dream that movement was going to get me closer to who I am. It would be an avenue into the spiritual realms of myself and the world. Performance would be a way to make a difference in and a way to be affected by the world. There were/are times when movement is a transformative experience. These are the times when I am able to believe in the experience of the movement and to not look for the meaning of it, to trust that meaning is inherent in what I am doing because I am doing it. It is a belief that even though what I am experiencing cannot be explained with

words, it is still a valuable experience. Kurt Sachs says: "...man creates in his own body in the dance before he uses substance and stone and word to give expression to his inner experience."l

Judging from my years of working with people and watching students work, my experience seems to be a common one. When the attitude of finding the authority comes into the therapeutic hour and functions as a goal-maker it can prevent the work from progressing to a greater depth. The question "What does it mean?" is one that sometimes stands between someone doing good movement work or Process Work and superficial work, because it implies an objective verbal truth. It treats the world and the person as if there were a single answer or "process" that you have to "follow" and as if there were one right outcome.

Knowing this is one thing, but changing one's awareness is a more difficult endeavor. My next question is, "Makes sense, but how do I get out of the cycle of trying to find the meaning of events? What do I do to switch my attention from wanting to know what something means to deepening the experience that is happening? How do I get access to the magic that can connect me to that deeper meaningfulness, the essence of life, the thing that I felt and knew as a very young child but lost contact with?"

Again, I am heading for trouble with myself. I am still focusing on something verbal and objective. I am in the realm of culture, of figuring out problems and of trying to get an understanding. Although this is important and valuable, I am far from the experience that I am having. I am still trying to figure things out and not yet in touch with the experience.

To get a little further, let's go back to the example where I am asking myself about the spilled tea. Why am I not satisfied with the answer that I need to be more messy? There are a number of ways to answer this question. First, the injunction that I need to be messy is like a command from a negative figure who

thinks there is something wrong with me. This makes me rebellious and prevents me from actually taking the message in.

Second, being more messy may in fact be right, that I need in some way to release my sense of order, but the delivery, "you need to be more messy" does not yet get me in contact with the experience that I have just had. I have just spilled the tea, but I disavow the experience and try to get it to fit into some neat corner of understanding. I haven't yet experienced what we are calling "messy." In order to find out what happened and make it useful for myself, I have to go back to the experience and believe in its meaningfulness.

Meaning vs. Meaningfulness

What is the difference between meaning and meaningfulness and why make this distinction?

Meaning is an important and complicated issue. There are many excellent philosophical discussions about meaning, and specifically about movement and meaning.2 The following definition is not the final authority on the subject, indeed it is one sided. I present it here as one possible window onto my experience. Meaning implies a definition. Meaningfulness implies an attitude of respect and reverence toward an experience. Meaning implies an objective reality or truth in the way that a stop sign at an intersection means that you are required to stop. Meaningfulness implies "not knowing," and allows space and encourages experience to live and unfold into its full essence. Meaningfulness is a feeling - a sense of importance - what people call a numinous experience. We don't know what the meaning of a given experience is but we sense that there is something important in it.

In movement, attempts at assigning meaning have been made with varying success; however, we read meaning into movement all the time. For example, a wave of a hand generally means some sort of greet-

Kurt Sachs, World History of the Dance, trans. Bessie Schonberg (Bonanza: New York, 1937), 3. See Ray Birdwhistell, Kinesics and Context (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1970), Mabel Elsworth Todd, The Thinking Body (New York: Dance Horizons, Inc, 1937) and Irmgard Bartenieff and Dori Lewis, Body Movement: Coping with the environment (New York: Gordon Breach Science Publishers, 1980).

The most successful, like Laban Movement Analysis, have paid attention to the experience of the mover. Movement specialists have divergent views. Some maintain that meaning is a subjective experience while others say that one can assign meaning to movements in a limited way. Still others say that there are predictable and absolute interpretations of movement, such as arms crossed across one's chest means that one is closed. Such tides as Signals: how to use body language for power, success and love, are in many libraries.

ing, good-bye or hello, although it could also be shooing a fly off one's head.

This brings us to the problem of trying to assign meaning to movement. From the outside, one can only guess at the experience that a person is having. Let's say I see a woman with her arms wrapped around her chest, pulling her shoulders up toward her ears and shrinking into herself. As an outside observer I might think that she is cold. But what about the possibility that she is having a totally different experience? Maybe she is angry and holding herself back from expressing it, or she is feeling some sense of power in the muscles of her arms and shoulders and chest and enjoying it.

You get the point. With this line of thinking, I am trying to make sense of a world that doesn't quite make sense to me by asking the question, "What does it mean?" This has the possibility of only leading me back into my known experience, because known experience is the only resource that I have. Searching known experience for answers is not a bad approach, but it is not going to give me the satisfaction of finding the deeper unknown process that I have been looking for. By asking "What does it mean?" I can only access meanings I have previously encountered. The way around this double bind is to get into the experience.

Another problem of assigning meaning to movement is that movement in cultures which are dominated by verbal and visual modes of perception is usually unconscious. That is, we are more aware of what we see and say than of our movement. I once had the embarrassing experience of being a client and having a therapist ask me what my balled up fist beating on the arm of my chair meant. I looked at the offending hand blankly, and said "What fist? I'm not making a fist." It simply wasn't in my awareness and when it was pointed out to me I excluded it from my awareness.

This is like a language problem where two people trying to communicate don't have a common language, or what in Process Work is called a channel problem. My fist was doing a dance on the chair in the movement channel. The therapist was interested in finding out something about my hand. The part of me that is acculturated and not interested in the

strange and unknown, the part that would die if I recognized and encouraged a beating fist at that moment, was not interested in that at all. So to ask in words, or the auditory channel, what it meant, contacted only the verbal part of me and not the part that was a fist beating on the chair.

How Do We Contact Experience?

I don't know of a foolproof technique that works for everyone all of the time. Having an awareness of one's momentary world view is useful. Is it a view where there are objective truths or subjective experiences or both? Let's look at a way in which we could interact with movement experiences.

In the example of the fist on the chair a way to contact the moving part would have been to think that what was happening was an experience that neither person knew much about, but to experiment with believing that it was meaningful. You might like to try it yourself. See if there is a movement that you are doing or have been doing without noticing it. See if you can put aside an impulse to understand the movement and believe that it not only has meaning, but that it is meaningful. If you can, then interact with it in its own language: movement. Amplify the movement

This can change from moment to moment.

This is a metaskill or an attitude that children seem to have

but that we as adults tend to lose and have to releam. I was

in order to experience it more. Try touching it with a similar energy and really appreciate it (you can't fake it) by saying something like "I like this movement. It is important and the right thing to be doing." Watch and feel very closely in order to join and encourage the experience. The actual technique for doing this is not as important as the attitude that the movement is meaningful and that you are willing to put off your own need to know what it means, at least for a time. See if you can shift into a different level of your own momentary experience. If you are working with someone else in this way, both the person and the movement will know if you are looking to pin it down to a specific meaning or if you have an interest in the experience without assigning an objective "truth" to it.

Approaching movement or any experience in this way is a little like entering the world of science fiction or fantasy, a world that can be totally different from our own. The rules of this new world don't fit in the same way, perhaps gravity doesn't pull things down or people get younger instead of older, or every bush, tree, rock and thing is a living being. It is such a thrill to visit these different worlds. By supporting experience we are able to be explorers and adventurers in these worlds.

The attitude that something is meaningful leads one into the experience of the event rather than into an idea about it. The deeper, more satisfying moment happens when you experience that which is disavowed.

Let's go back to the tea accident in the morning. Let's say that instead of asking myself what it meant, I said, "That was something interesting, a peek into a world where one spills things on oneself. What is that world like? Let me really experience this world of spilling tea. What is it like being in this kind of world? How do I experience it and what am I experiencing? Let me pay attention to this experience." When I say that, I experience a wonderful freedom, a freedom from having to understand what is going on. It is coupled with an anxiety that I will not be able to support the meaningfulness of what is happening and I will come away feeling stupid, stuck and unsatis-

fied. I know that it is not enough for me to only experience things; I need understanding and thinking too. I tell myself, "One thing at a time, let's focus on this experience first and see what happens." This provides relief, as some little thing is given the space and time to exist.

Channels as Support for Meaningfulness

Let's talk about channels for a moment. For years I have thought about channels as communication conduits. Let's say I see a signal; someone's hand shakes as he brings his cigarette to his lips. I think there is something unintentional in the movement channel. That means that there is a process happening there that is disavowed. (Here I am again, thinking in terms of meaning instead of experience...such a difficult habit to break, but let me continue in this vein to make a point.) I think as a movement worker, all I have to do is to get that process to come out, to encourage it and get it to live out here in the world and find out its meaning. The channel model in this form is a little like expecting an encoded message to come over a phone line, like the squeaks and squawks of a fax being sent. These squeaks and squawks somehow get transformed into an exact copy of the original, something sensible and readable that fits into my known verbal-visual means of understanding. This use of channels is encouraged with the

recently in a cafe where a child was standing in the middle of the floor swinging her leg. I got jealous of her because as an adult it would not have been acceptable for me to do that and I had an impulse to move. She seemed to have the freedom, belief in herself and at least minimal collective support to go ahead and do what she felt like doing. See Amy Mindell's Moon in the Water: The Metaskills of Process Oriented Psychology as seen through the Psychotherapeutic Work of Arnold Mindell (diss., Union Institute, 1991), for a complete discussion of metaskills.

questions "What does it mean?" and "How do I fit it into my life?" questions which have a tendency to lead us back into our known world.

The more experience I have, the more I see that this model stands in the way of encouraging experience and meaningfulness. I have learned this from working with comatose people. At first I found myself asking people about their experience. The first time was comical. There I was, sitting with a comatose man, asking him how he was, and whether he wanted to talk to me. Of course he didn't He was doing something else. I found that noticing his movement, matching it and encouraging it took me into his experience and communication style. I could communicate clearly, quickly and well. It is a little like having a good day at the beach -I didn't always know what it meant but I knew that we had an important experience together.

Another useful model for understanding channels and signals is that they are ways of getting into experience. If we followed our science fiction metaphor, channels and signals would be the space ships that take us to new planets. They help us join in the experience, to nurture it and to give it the life and respect that helps it live in ways that the search for meaning cannot.

Experiencing without having to know gives us contact to a deeper part of ourselves, and, paradoxically, gives us a deeper sense of meaning. Why is that? Going into the experience is the only way to contact unknown aspects of ourselves. Otherwise we merely meet parts of ourselves with which we are already well acquainted. Trying to make sense of our experiences will simply lead us into thought and speculation, but not into direct experiece.

I would like to tell you about two sessions, one where I was a therapist working with two women on a relationship problem, and one in which I was a client working with Amy Mindell. The first illustrates an aspect of working with movement where the work was signal-centered and was deepened because we were able to drop an interpretation of the movement. The other is an example of a session where the therapist's approach to the movement was open and reverent of the experience.

Far more information about working with people in coma

Shambala, 1989).

For the purpose of this article, their names have been chan

Mary and Jane

Mary and Jane were working on a relationship problem. It was the middle of the session. They had gotten into movement work together and were standing in the center of the room pushing on each other with their hands clasped. They looked like they were going at each other but not with an abundance of energy. It didn't look like anyone was getting hurt so I invited them to keep doing what they were doing and to find out what they were experiencing. They said that they were fighting. They were mad at each other and they were fighting. I was not convinced it was only a fight. I thought that the movement was meaningful but that that meaning did not fit. There was a lack of energy and conviction in what they were doing. I again invited them to do what they were doing and to notice everything, and I also looked, noticing what was fighting as well as what was not fighting.

This is an important point in movement work. When the client assigns a meaning to the movement it is easy to forget that this meaning might be an understanding of the movement but not a full representation of its meaningfulness. The client may still be thinking about it and not fully experiencing what she is doing. The trick is to honor the person's understanding of what she is doing while leaving the space for something deeper to unfold. Two experiences are happening at the same time; one part is finding and assigning meaning, and the other is doing something mysterious and unknown. One way to support the experience that the person is having is to look at the movement, see what isn't doing the intended movement (in this case fighting) and bring it to her attention.

I did this and saw that Mary and Jane would push on each other with a lack of conviction and then relax and squeeze each other's hands. Their hand squeezing didn't look like fighting to me. Notknowing what it meant, I asked them to continue fighting and pushing and also to notice what their hands were doing. They got interested in their hands and started to use them differently. Soon they were embracing and hugging. They were saying how much they liked each other. It was a very touching experience to see these

« Coma: Key to Awakening by Arnold Mindell (Boston: 3d to protect their identities.

two women go deeper into their love for each other. The experience of loving contact seemed to be more meaningful than the conflict

In this example it was important to notice the meaning, acknowledge it and allow the space for a different experience to emerge.

My Session With Amy

I walked into Amy's office exhausted from four weeks of editing the journal. It was finally at the printer's and I could rest long enough to feel that I was totally exhausted. I thought that we would work on exhaustion and find that there was an endless fountain of energy in me as we had found in the past. This would make me feel better and relieve me of my current state.

I started to tell Amy about my fatigue but he seemed to hardly notice what I was saying. Instead of listening to me and focusing on my problem, he started gently nudging me and moving me around the room. I was in a terrible internal conflict. How was I going to get my psychotherapeutic experience and find out what I was supposed to do with this fatigue if I just moved around and didn't talk about my problem?

I let myself be moved. I had had enough experience working with Amy to trust his impulses. I found myself thinking the old refrain "What does this mean?" It continued on, "What am I going to get out of this and how am I going to integrate it into my life?" As we continued the voice continued, "Am I

doing this right? Am I going to get the point?" Fortunately, Amy was supporting my experience by moving with me. This helped me forget the question about meaning and integration and go into the experience. Having someone with me who believed in the mean-ingfulness of the experience gave me the freedom to drop my questions and go deeply into the experience.

It was a relief to move, gently flowing with his movement and then feeling my own impulses kick in. I enjoyed the feeling of flowing, rolling around on the floor, allowing my body to be in contact with the earth and gravity, to resist it, to go up away from the earth and then surrender to it again, flowing into its folds.

I rolled into a backwards somersault, allowing my legs to reach up into the air, felt the stretch of the muscles in my neck and the safe return to earth again. Suddenly I looked up and Amy was going up into a head stand, his legs going up with a strength and surety that was fascinating. By this point all concern with what was right or what it meant had disappeared. I said, "I can't do that" meaning that I can't go up into a head stand with such strength and surety. Then I tried it. I could do it, but I was so shocked that I didn't stay long. I tried again and this time I wasn't successful finding my balance. I fell over backwards almost immediately and came crashing down into the closet door, knocking it off of its hinges on top of myself. Before I knew what was happening I caught the door and Amy exclaimed, "I have never seen that before!" I didn't know what he meant at all. I thought that seeing someone crash into something was quite a common experience and I was feeling clumsy and embarrassed. Dazed and confused, I asked what he meant. As we set about to restore the door on its hinges, he said that he had seen many people crash into something and break it, but he had never seen anyone crash into something, break it and then catch it and put it back together.

At this point I was half in and half out of the experience that I was just having. I was having the normal response of being embarrassed when you break something in someone else's house, but Amy just kept saying "I have never seen that before!" He sounded delighted. I was trying to find out what that means. "But, what does that mean?" was my predictable response. I could see that for him the meaning wasn't the most intriguing thing in the moment. For him the experience was enough. By saying over and over, "I have never seen that before, someone crashing into something, breaking it and then catching and

fixing it," he helped me experience my experience. He was simply reporting what had happened. This was one of the most important therapeutic hours that I have had in my life. It has contributed both to my experience of meaningfulness and my to willingness to take risks and not criticize myself before I get a chance to try something.

In terms of my own world view what stays with me from this hour is the steadfastness with which Amy trusted the experience that was happening. Much, much later I asked him why he chose to move with me and he said he didn't remember, but we can guess that there must have been something in my movement at the beginning of the hour that encouraged him to try moving. This is not a simple example and there are a lot of questions left unanswered. I wanted to tell it to you to illustrate the feeling of openness and respect for the experience that was in that atmosphere.

In conclusion

I have tried here to find the Tao, to discover some deeper existential or spiritual path, to experience the unknown and numinous. It has been the subject of spiritual writings, thinking and being from all disciplines and cultures since the beginning of humankind. Many of us are looking for this and the questions, "What does it mean?" or "How does it work?" are indicative of this deeper search.

I have used movement work as the focus of this discussion, but we could look at any unintentional signal and apply the same metaskill to it in the attempt to focus on our experiences, believe in them and to let them lead us into unknown worlds. Finally, at the risk of negating what I have said, I want to add that accepting the challenge of being explorers and finding the courage to risk not knowing following our unknown, strange and difficult states into the numinous world of meaningfulness will take us deeper into our sometimes magical unknown selves, but there are times when we just have to understand. It is a dynamic relationship between knowing and not knowing that is a rich and exciting event.

Works Cited and Additional Reading

Bartenieff, Irmgard with Dori Lewis. Body Movement: Coping with the environment. New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1980.

Birdwhistell, Ray L. Kinesics and Context. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970.

Bull, Peter. Body Movement and Interpersonal Communication. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1983.

Hanna, Judith L. To Dance is Human. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Laban, Rudolf. The Mastery of Movement. Boston: Plays, Lie, 1950.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Mindell, Amy. "Moon in the Water Metaskills of Process Oriented Psychology as seen through the Psychotherapeutic Work of Arnold Mindell." Diss. Union Institute, 1991.

Mindell, Amy. Coma: Key to Awakening Boston: Sham-bala, 1989.

Lamb, Warren and Elizabeth Watson. Body Code: the meaning in movement. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979.

Pease, Allan. Signals: how to use body language for power, success and love. Toronto, 1984.

Sachs, Kurt. World History of Dance. New York: Bonanza Books, 1937.

Todd, Mabel E. The Thinking Body. New York: Dance Horizons, Inc, 1937.

Weitz, Shirley. Nonverbal Communication: Readings with Commentary. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Kate Jobe MA., a Certified Process Worker and Certified Laban Movement Analyst, is a dancer I choreographer, a therapist in private practice and travels throughout the world teaching Process Work. She is pursuing her interests in jewelry making and painting as well as acting as the editor in chief of the Journal of Process Oriented Psychology.