I Move; Therefore, I AmBy Carol A. Wiley
From Radiance Winter 1999
From a self-conscious teenager who
restricted her body movement and tensed and pulled away from touch, I have
become a woman of forty who joyously participates in a dance form involving extensive
physical contact with my partner. In the process of learning to move myself, I learned the
beauty of my 200-plus-pound body.
The idea of being in close contact with another person
was foreign to me when I began my movement odyssey in 1979. Not that I knew I was
beginning an odyssey: I just wanted to study the martial arts, my mind filled with images
from the Bruce Lee movies I had watched as a junior high schooler. But my mind was also
filled with the fear of looking ridiculous.
Why ridiculous? I grew up fat. The teasing from other
kids and the disapproval from adults created a self-conscious Carol with a tense,
constricted body. If I didn’t move, maybe people wouldn’t notice me too much.
Still, I could not completely suppress the urge to move. I danced around the house as a
child. As a teenager, I bicycled and walked extensively, which unfortunately went along
with dieting and desperately wanting to lose weight. People approved of my
"exercise" but did not appreciate the movement in and of itself. Neither did I,
consciously.
As a senior in college, I finally took karate. After
graduation, I began studying tae kwon do. For many years, I worked to learn the techniques
of the art and finally earned a second-degree black belt.
Tae kwon do is primarily a linear striking art. This
means that many of the techniques—kicks, hand strikes, and blocks—work in a
straight line with little circular or curved motion. Much of tae kwon do is practiced
solo—with many repetitions of techniques and technique combinations called forms. The
time spent working with a partner is far less than time spent practicing alone. This
practice helped me develop focus and strength, but did little to develop spontaneous
movement or release the constriction in my body.
 When I began studying aikido in 1989, I realized that I was on
an odyssey: a journey of movement. In contrast with tae kwon do, almost all aikido
techniques are practiced with a partner. Aikido emphasizes controlling your
"attacker" by taking that person off balance, immobilizing his joints, or
pinning him on the ground. Aikido also incorporates large, circular movement and a concept
we call blending, learning to respond to and move with your partner. This circular,
blending technique began to free and develop fluidity in my movement, helping to release
some of my body’s constriction. (It’s difficult to be fluid and constricted at
the same time.)
More self-limiting beliefs about my body’s
capabilities disappeared when I managed my first aikido breakfall; something I had not
thought possible just a year earlier. A breakfall is an escape technique employed when
your partner (attacker) attempts to take you off balance or lock your position. It is
similar to a half-flip. By moving your entire body and using the momentum created by your
partner to propel yourself up and over, you move from a standing position, heels over
head, and land on one side. For a second, you are completely airborne.
Next stop in my movement journey: an aikido friend
introduced me to contact, improvisation dance. The two arts are similar in that they both
involve blending and moving with a partner. In contact improvisation, one minute I might
be moving fluidly across the floor with my partner. The next minute one of us might be
supporting the other’s weight. Then perhaps we might find ourselves on the floor,
rolling around and over each other. Unlike dance forms such as ballet and ballroom dance,
contact improvisation has no set technique or steps. As its name suggests, contact
improvisation dance is a dance form that is improvised while keeping physical contact with
another person. It is the freedom of two (or more) people responding to each other’s
movement.
I started contact improvisation by taking an
introductory workshop and then several series of classes from a wonderful teacher. Contact
improvisation is also done at "jams" (open times when people get together to
dance). We have weekly jams in Seattle. Contact improvisers get together at annual jams
(open dancing) and festivals (where classes are available) around the country for a few
days to a week just to dance. I am a founding organizer of the annual Seattle Festival of
Alternative Dance and Improvisation, which we started in 1994 to bolster the local dance
improvisation community.
Contact improvisation provides an environment where you
meet people through movement. You usually begin with solo movements to warm up. Partner
dances often begin when two people spontaneously come together on the dance floor. Dance
is an exciting way to meet people: you often learn more about someone through movement
than you could through an introductory conversation. Dancing with friends is also
exciting; the more you have danced with a person, the greater your level of trust when
dancing with her.
By the time I started contact improvisation, I had
worked through many issues about my body size and thought I had learned to accept my body.
But being in such close contact with people and letting them support my weight opened up
subtle issues on the road to self-acceptance. How would my dance partners react to my
size, especially the fat I carried on my belly? How would people feel about supporting my
weight? I was pleasantly surprised to find many people able and eager to support me. I
have even had "flying" experiences, when I, with the support of my partner,
completely leave the ground.
Sometimes I surprise myself. My reaction when  I did a back
walkover in a contact improvisation class was, "Oh, my God, I did it." (This
involves first standing back-to-back with another person, and then letting that person
completely support me on his back, as I reach my arms over his shoulders and toward the
floor. My partner then gives me upward support as I bring my legs up and over and land on
my feet.)
Through contact improvisation, I became
curious about somatic practices. The soma, in this case, refers to the body as perceived
from the inside; this focus is quite distinct from our culture’s emphasis on the body
as perceived from the outside. Somatic practices are not about the development of muscle
or some specified body shape. They are about internal awareness, the flow of breath in the
body, the release of muscular tension, and developing your own natural movement.
Two somatic practices I have experience with are
Feldenkrais Awareness through Movement and Hanna Somatic Education. These systems of
structured movement aim to create more bodily awareness. They affect the nervous system,
reeducating the body about its abilities, and often releasing pain in the process. Hanna
Somatic Education has been especially effective for me in relieving the lower back pain
I’ve experienced since my teenage years.
The somatic practice I find most fascinating is
Body–Mind Centering, which uses developmental movement and awareness of the
body’s anatomical systems to expand movement possibilities.
As infants, we go through a series of developmental movements as we grow,
where each movement is a brick in the foundation on which other movements are built. Any
missing bricks weaken that foundation, causing excess tension in the body and creating
less effective or efficient movement. A child’s developmental movement
sequence can be interrupted by injury or illness or by being pushed into activities before
she is developmentally ready. As adults, we cannot use skipped developmental movements for
everyday movement unless we go back and develop them, which is one goal of Body–Mind
Centering practice.
The other part of the practice is the in-depth,
experiential study of all the body’s anatomical systems (cells, skin,
skeleton, muscles, ligaments, fascia, organs, endocrine, nerves, fluids, and
fat). Usually we think of movement in terms of bones and muscles, but
Body–Mind Centering looks at how all our anatomical systems can
support movement. Body –Mind Centering teaches that fat is potential power that
can either be denied—or accepted and embodied. Repressing fat leads to the tissue
becoming hard and immobile, receiving less oxygen and less physical and psychic
nourishment, and becoming less responsive and less healthy. But, then, fat acceptance is
nothing new to Radiance readers.
 Through another somatic practice, Continuum, I learned to explore breathing and
unstructured movement. This work can be quite subtle. For example, in a Continuum
workshop, I spent most of a weekend lying on the floor exploring
"micromovements" (tiny pulsations that are felt but seldom seen) in various
parts of my body and learned that moving my belly was more difficult than moving other
parts of my body. Still more subtle self-acceptance to work on!
The beauty of Continuum practice is that it does not
have a rigid program or set outcome. It’s not about moving or isolating a specific
muscle. Rather, it is the process of letting movement happen. It’s an exploration
that looks at movement at the most fundamental level, letting go of cultural conceptions
of movement and nurturing an internal awareness of movement possibilities. Continuum
starts with the movement of breath, movement available to any person of any size, shape,
or fitness level. Emilie Conrad Da’oud, the founder of Continuum, says that movement
is not something we do but something we are.
I cannot say that I am never self-conscious now. Moments
of self-consciousness arise—especially when I want to impress someone or "look
good." Nothing kills natural movement faster than focusing on outside judgment rather
than on your own internal experience! But through movement, I have found awareness and
comfort in my body and an appreciation of its abilities that I did not dream possible in
1979, when I self-consciously made my way through my first martial arts class.
Looking back, I see a progression. Bicycling and walking
were safe, solo activities. Tae kwon do involved some interaction with people, but aikido
brought me into really close contact with others through the technique of blending with
another person’s movement. Contact improvisation and somatic practices continue to
take that experience further and, most important, have brought me inside myself to find my
own (internal) movement. My acceptance of my body has progressed with each new practice
I’ve undertaken. I’ve finally come to realize that many of the limitations I
thought existed because of my body size were limitations only in my mind. ©
CAROL A. WILEY is
a licensed massage therapist living near Seattle. She is the editor of two books of essays
about the martial arts and of Journeys to Self-Acceptance: Fat Women Speak.
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