Experimental self-inquiry #3
Experimental self-inquiry #3
Dance to the choreography of a tree
This series consists of provocations to stimulate your body’s deep instinct to learn.
Written instructions are provided to invite you to be the author of your own process.
The practices can be explored briefly as a way to simply create a new pattern in the flow of your day or at greater length to allow for deeper investigations of your patterns and potentials.
Initial postings will be available to all subscribers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber. By doing so, you can help me to publish this series one day as a book.
Paid subscribers will also be able to access to audio instructions. Mixing guided audio with self-paced practice via text will yield you the most creative potential to find your own way.
3. Dance to the choreography of a tree
Go outside and stand below a large tree. Place your hand on the trunk.
The tree is alive. Don’t mistake it as passive. Close your eyes and feel how the tree touches your hand just as much as you touch the tree, how the texture of the bark speaks to your skin. Breathe gently. Allow the tree’s touch to soften your body.
If you like, be a tree hugger. Experience the solidity and strength of the tree through the contact of different parts of your body. As you do, imagine the tree's roots below the ground and its branches in the sky high up above your head.
After a time, step back so you can look up to see those branches.
Slow down. As you follow the shape of the tree with your eyes, tune into your relationships with breath, ground, space, sound and light - but especially ground.
Look up and let your eyes settle on a branch. If the tree has leaves, settle on a single leaf. Or choose some other landmark to anchor your vision.
Notice how you have positioned the entirety of your body to support your gaze.
If your neck feels strained, lower your head. When you lift it again, lift your chest too. Let your belly drop and open, your pubic bone reaching away from your chin.
As you remain looking at that spot, imagine your two legs as tree trunks. Sink roots in the soil under your feet. Imagine the underground network that strengthens the stability of your upright posture, allowing you to safely sway.
Extend the image of the trunk up through the length of your spine. Feel your head supported by twenty-four vertebrae, not just seven bones in your neck.
Now allow your eyes to slowly travel along the branch you are looking at. Let your head follow your eyes. Let your spine follow your head. Allow your shoulders, ribs, hip joints, knees, and ankles to come alive to the movement.
Let go of “standing still.”
See how the tree carves unique pathways through the sky. Follow different lines with your eyes through the branches. Let every joint in your body be affected by each contour you admire, adjusting for each crooked angle.
Feel your roots below the earth.
Improvise different paths with your eyes from the base of the tree up into particular branches and into the sky. Ascend and descend many times, allowing what you see to inform the movement of every joint in your body.
When you look down into the ground to imagine the roots, feel your feet.
Live in the sensations of your legs and pelvis as your eyes rest at the base of the trunk.
When your eyes begin to climb, also climb up your spine.
You may wish to gesture with your arms like the branches do.
Feel the contents of your skull shifting as your gaze rises up into the sky.
Relish the shifting of your weight while staying deeply rooted in place.
Spend some quiet time allowing this tree to choreograph your dance.
Discussion:
David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal, describes our kinship with nature this way:
“We can feel the trees and the rocks underfoot, because we are not so unlike them, because we have our own forking limbs and our own mineral composition, because - contrary to our inherited conceptions - we are not pure mind-stuff, but are tangible bodies of thickness and weight, and so have a great deal in common with the palpable things that we encounter.”
In this experiment your eyes become a portal for the shapes you perceive in space - carved by the tree - to enter your body and shape you.
If we believe that the world is alive, it’s not true that we “just see” what is passively “there” doing nothing other than waiting to be seen.
Instead, the phenomena we call ‘nature’ appears in our field of vision. It encounters us and ripples through the rich many-layered field of interwoven sensations that we live in at all times, reorienting our bodies again and again.
The bodies of all kinds that we see reveal themselves to us - while simultaneously concealing other parts of their inner essences from our view. When we ‘look’ more closely, we ‘see’ - and feel - that we are in a dynamic relationship.
Vision plays a dominant role in our sensory-motor participation with reality. Our eyes help us find our place in space and stabilize our relationship to gravity.
Our shifting focus of attention anchors our sense of identity in each moment, so it’s not trivial how often we look out at the world or in towards our psyches.
In a healthy body every single joint relates to the movements and sensations of the eyes. Ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, ribs and vertebrae adjust dance differently with eyes that are squinting or softening, eyes that see beauty or ugliness, safety or danger.
A tree is a beautiful partner for this practice, but you could do the same with a streetlamp, garbage dumpster, refrigerator, or rainbow.
The tree reflects back your being for you to savor (and you return the favor).
A related post:
Workshop for paid subscribers this Sunday:
Musicality of Ground
October 20, 1-3pm EST
Your capacity to be upright depends on your relationship to the earth below and the bones of your skeleton. Ground provides leverage for movement, support for rest, dignity for the soul.
The ground of being is your most fundamental resource. You have no idea how deep it goes.
It goes deeper than ideas. Orientation begins with sensation. Knowing grows out of feeling.