Class

After my first day in Durham, things really busied up. Classes began at 8:30 am beginning on Monday and lasted for over a week. So let me here make some testimony to the school of Body-mind centering. The first day of class began with a seated circle. We were prompted to simply ‘be’ in the space. After a short time, our attention was swept up by an instructor, who’s next prompt was for each of us to get acclimated to the space. “Move however you like, explore all corners, perhaps you would like to stay in one place.” I quickly got the sense that I was in a room with a significant population of dancers, as the ‘however you like’ was interpreted by many as pirouettes, hip gyrations, and patterned arm flairs. I found myself exploring like a hedgehog the perimeters and small, cave-like spaces created by the furniture of the room. We were in the Center for Jewish Life on the Duke University campus, more acutely, in the chapel. The room was as deep as it was wide, with a ten foot perimeter ceiling with rope-light inlay, and a four-sided pyramid vaulted ceiling. At the back of the room (assuming the two glass door entrance from the lobby as the front) was a right-angle triangular two-stair height stage which dropped by the same depth, but only by the count of one in the back two sides. The triangle shape jutted out from the rest of the structure with two full walls of glass, about thirty feet from ground level, so that the view was like that of a museum for tree understories.  (The view was leaves and branches, I believe of a magnolia tree). The reflective quality of the (suspected) magnolia leaves in conjunction with the intensity of mid/afternoon Carolina sunlight meant that a glance out of the window might give you an unflattering glare. There were times however, in in-direct light, when the view provided respite for the eyes during the long class hours. So, exploring the space I recognized that my patterns rather than pirouettes and the like were standing upside-down on my shoulders and rolling into a fetal position in small spaces. I began to suspect that there may be a  breakthrough in personal discovery somewhere in this class. I’ll hold nothing from you, dear reader, that I am writing on the other side of the experience, far away, in a familiar place (the Jacksonville public library, as it were), and I can testify that I was changed by the experience… probably. I don’t know actually, maybe I’m not. I’ve been reading a lot of philosophy. Anyway, back to storytelling. So we (the class) all grab on to fun noodles, and flexi-bands and wooden rods, one object in either hand, and begin moving about the room, feeling the tensions between our limbs grow and diminish, finding homeostasis between our personal experiences and those of our adjoined (by the props) partners to either side of us. This, it was explained to us, is the sensitivity with which we must observe our ligaments and fascia. We sat again in a circle to discuss our observations. We played name-games to learn how to call each other and to get further integrated. This work, Bob said, is really just an excuse to get together. And how.

Explore, discuss, explore, discuss, bathroom break, slides of ligaments, lessons illustrated with props and skeletal models, explore, discuss, explore, discuss, lunch, more slides, more models, more exploration, more discussion, tea break, open questions, bathroom break, guided explorations of pre-natal development, maybe some other things that rhyme with exploring or discussing, aand class.

So we did five days of this. Sometimes in the mornings, we would open with mindfulness meditation which, have you ever had someone masturbate in the same bed as you?

All in all it was exhausting work. Stand up, sit down, stand up, move around; it was like a school for enlightened hokey pokey, whereby the whole body and mind could be engaged. Students, and there were about twenty of us, would periodically cover their faces, or lie prostrate on the floor once they had become saturated with experience. Each arch of exploration ended, however enthusiastically it began or jubilantly it peaked, (as sometimes someone would ‘catch the spirit’) on floor in exhaustion. Thus, the lessons imparted flowed from one into the next very naturally, and anyone could rest assured that their cat-nap would not read as anything other than needing time to absorb the material. I found this a liberating learning model. Likewise, if one needed to stand or roll around or allow their exhalations to activate the vibrations across their vocal chords, effectively producing rhythmic breath-hums, they could so do without judgment.
I took time to draw many times, as my mind was racing. Catching words from the lectures, I would design tags for them in my notebook, or draw bones or ligaments from the slides.