Why Move Through Things? Or Why Talking About It Often Makes No Difference

     We have long advocated a body-centered approach to relationship transformation rather than any kind of talking cure. I recently read an article in a professional journal that gave me a condensed (and heavily Latinate) map for the primacy of movement. Here, you’ll see what I mean:

“Relationships between individuals of the same species and between different species of animals are based precisely on synergies of meaningful movement [I love that phrase.] Synergies of meaningful movement are significant at a further basic level. Indeed, they evolve from human infancy onward. They are the basis of a sense of agency (my bold), what Husserl (1989) terms ‘I can,’. ‘I cans’ are not simple and only physical capabilities on the order of ‘I can hop, skip and jump.’ They undergird subject-world capacities, such as my ability to calculate distances—for example, the extent to which I must extend my arm in order to reach the glass at the far side of the table—my ability to estimate the efficacy of a certain procedure…for example, the decision to consult a map before setting out in my car to a place I’ve never been.” Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

     I went to my online dictionary to discern in what new way she was using the term “agency.” I found that, aside from the more familiar designation of a department, agency connotes “means of control; state of being active.”  Try this on: every single “I can” that you roll through in a day, such as greeting a friend, negotiating through the line a lunch or challenging a colleague with an opposing view, has evolved from thousands of choices. You learned over years to combine your sense of weight, pace, tension flow and shape to operate your body in a way that allows you to make sense of the world and to act in it in meaningful ways.

     Here’s why that’s important in your close relationships. You learned thousands of movement patterns that you may not even be aware of as you grew up in the family, community, school, church, mosque, etc., of your unique evolution. So did you partner or friend. For example, you might have learned that certain escalating sounds were a signal to make your body smaller and become more invisible. Your partner might have learned that escalating her loudness and moving more forcefully was THE thing that worked to get attention. That’s just one example among literally thousands. So these complex meaningful movements that you experience as your “I can,” I matter, I interact with others to impact, weave, dance, thump against and communicate in powerful ways. Talking at best skims the surface of these foundational ways you experience your world. Moving, and moving together, allows you to enter into another’s world, to explore the places and ways in which your true meaning constructs, your moving world, blends and clashes with another.

     That’s one reason our seminars, books and other learning materials include movement—you develop more “I can’s” in your relationship world and co-create mutual “we can’s” together.