Right now I have just taken off from London and it is 17:11 on ground… but we go into suspended time right now, flying towards Istanbul. I have always considered flights and boat crossings like a suspended time, one is there for some time and one can forget the time down there. So I guess it is the perfect time to write this blog today, Monday.
Give me a break, yes!
I was just thinking what to write today, because I really haven’t been working on the book this week, nor the last week to be honest. I have taken a break from this process. I find it very healthy during a creative process such as writing for example, to give regular breaks where you turn your focus to other things, and let the ideas infuse, or settle down inside, without writing or scribbling. I always feel that when I take regular breaks, my brain first goes a little blurry, and then I feel this space opening inside of me, and I feel my thoughts breathing. It is a very new kind of experience for me in my daily life: taking a break. I usually am of the sort who is constantly in action, and when not in action I think, write, create, think again, that is after I act. But in the past years while I have been leading the Somatic Dialogue Facilitator Training I have learned to stop, and just stop, to take a break, even if short, and to not think. I have noticed that by giving regular breaks I enhance my listening, and I started to see more, to recognise even discreet gestures or colours in the voices, details that had escaped my perception.
Taking a break vs not moving
In Somatic Dialogue one of the main aims is to enable movement and flow. One of the most difficult things in life is to pass into action, i.e. making a conscious move towards something or someone. However, stopping consciously and not moving is just as important. When we are in the flow we can decide to stop for a while and step out of the movement flow, and just listen to the flow of life, which is continuing. It is a great moment to breathe, to listen more attentively and to become aware of our bodily sensations. To give regular breaks in movement enhances the taste of the movement for the mover, and it opens our senses.
I think just as it happens in the body we can also train the mind to take breaks. Our mind is constantly working, we are constantly thinking of something. But it is a bliss, when we are able to create little moments where we can step out of the flow of thoughts, and concentrate on something, or doze off into a landscape, or let our mind be invaded by music. It is more tricky to achieve this kind of harmony with the mind. But it is also a matter of training.
I found it easier to achieve these little moments of nothingness in my mind once I had mastered really to bring my awareness to stop moving or being in action in my body, through my regular Somatic Dialogue practice. It is a bliss, because this empty space opens the perception to another layer of reality. And it becomes interesting once you feel good in this nothingness.
What happened during the break?
I know that I am in the process of writing, and sometimes one is not always in control of the process. And the process itself leads you to a stop. And I have reached such a stop. But in this stop I have been witnessing an impressive movement toward the past. It all started of course with my memories of my university years in England, as I have been travelling through England for the whole of last week. I started by going to the house of my ballet teacher Judy and her husband Tom in Embelton. I wasn’t sure to find them there and to my big surprise I found them there. Judy nearly got a shock, and we embraced warmly. She was such an important person in my teenage years. She has taught me elegant discipline, enhanced and supported my love for ballet and we have had such a great time together. She was funny, witty and always careful, making sure that everything was well. She hasn’t changed. We dived into memories of those years we spent together, and we were both delighted.
Writing letters is great
Judy found some of my letters which I had written to her just after my first travels to Russia, while I was studying at Bath University. It was so strange to read myself. I could recognise my tone, and also the youth, naivety, and also the insolence and arrogance of being inexperienced and thinking that one knows already a lot.
It was fascinating to compare my memory of those times, the images and sensations which have stayed in my body, and the words of that period which describe what had happened.
Memory is something really peculiar. What happens leaves a trace in us, and shapes or directs our next steps into life. We learn, we transform and move on, and then when we look back or find a proof of something related to our past experiences, we revive that experience or memory. Or we can also look at that person (which is ourselves) with a kind of alienation. I looked at that young woman, desperately trying to achieve something in dance, knocking at doors, taking lessons, getting involved into productions, making choreographies, being completely ignorant, but fervently decided to make it.
It was I, but I of that time, and not the I which I am now. So why do I have the need to look into the past? Into what has happened? To go back there to discuss with someone who was there with me, and to talk about it…
I don’t know the answers but I know for sure that we have lost something by not writing letters any more. I just remember now, that in some of my workshops at Vadimanasir in Orhanli-Seferihisar, Izmir, I had asked the participants to write me a letter just after the workshop, describing their experience. I didn’t read these letters straight away, but took time, and they called me in their own time to open and read them. And so I did! What a journey, to plunge into that person's experience and the memories which they were describing.
I think that writing and keeping letters is a wonderful action. You actually give someone your most intimate thoughts and insights, a part of your story. And I have received such gifts from the participants of my workshops.
Emails are not the same, they do not contain the traces of that very moment. Just think, when was the last time you wrote a real letter to someone?
Does memory help us to re-create our stories?
I am not sure about the answer but the question makes me think about memory. Let’s look at it in Somatic Dialogue terms: when we have memorized certain movements, we know them, and most of the time we stay in them. But with time they …. Well right now, as I am on the plane with my daughter, she has just put her feet on my lap and silently asked for a foot massage, And guess what?
I had to stop my thoughts and I was transported to the sensation in my body of having her little feet on my lap, when we were travelling together back and forth to Turkey. She was tiny, and so were her feet. I would massage them and hold them and she would sleep, play with her rabbit, or watch the little mole (Krteček) on her dvd player, and I would feel happiness flowing in my veins. Her feet are much bigger and right now she is watching Batman on her phone and I am massaging her feet and the same sensation flows in my veins. Yes, memory can be magical too.
I was going to write about memory in Somatic Dialogue… but this will wait for another time. I just got too distracted.
The importance of liberation
But I think that once we are stuck in our memory, and we keep on repeating our memory again and again and becoming attached to them emotionally, we create a certain prison in our inner world. At least this is what I feel. I have considered writing isa wonderful way of unloading experience and the memory of the experience. Because it is also a great feeling to liberate ourselves from our memory, so that we can continue creating ourselves. With each experience lived, and with each choice and the consequences of our choices. We have the potential of re-shaping and re-creating even re-inventing our lives.
And when we write letters on the way, and find these letters long time after, we can have a dive back into the memory, and witness how we have lived those very moments, and which words we had chosen to describe our feelings.
Coming back to what happened more during the break?
I think I should slowly stop writing for today, but I can’t help telling you about a tiny little bookshop in Oxford’s Jericho quarter: The last Bookshop. A charming little bookshop with old and new books and lovely postcards, CDs and some Vinyls too. I had the pleasure of choosing some old books, with notes on them, inscribed by their former owners. This also was another brief journey to the past.
Here they are for you:
Treasury of English Prose New and Old
The Centuries’ Poetry, 4, Hood to Hardy
Love’s Labour’s Lost
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Dramatic Works of Bernard Shaw, No.III, Mrs Warren’s Profession. A Play
The Ballet Lover’s Pocket Book
The Drunken Forest
I am still flying, but I will stop now and enjoy reading one of these books, namely the Treasury of English Prose New and Old. But wouldn’t it be nice if we all started writing letters again? So I invite you dear reader to write a letter to someone who is dear to you and see what happens. Also you will for sure experience something very different while writing, compared to writing a long WhatsApp message, or an SMS or even an email.
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