Re-learning ourselves

Author: Péter Fejér, 9 October 2013.

“Movement is my medium and my metaphor. I know that if a wave of energy is allowed to complete itself, it yields a whole new wave, and in fact that is all I really know. Riding these waves means joining the cosmic dance that, as Dante says, ‘moves the sun and the other stars.'” (Gabrielle Roth, Maps to Ecstasy)

Gabrielle Roth once wrote that “we all share the wound of fragmentation”. We are fragmented, because our culture, our education taught us how to ignore, reinterpret or change what we feel. We learn very early that certain feelings – physical sensations and emotions as well – are not appropriate, not acceptable. So we learn how to repress them and the process of our fragmentation begins. We start to feel something, but think something else, and our emotions get lost in the labyrinth of actual impressions and the long ago suppressed but still deeply present impressions. There comes a state when we become so uncertain about our feelings and emotions that we tend to believe others rather than ourselves and we need leaders or teachers even for the most simple decisions.

We can get over this state if we learn what we haven’t learned as a child: how can we listen to ourselves, how can we take into account everything what we really feel, how can we notice those signs which we learnt to ignore. The simplest and most effective way to do this is to start on the most fundamental level – with the attention towards our own bodies. We allow our body to get into motion, to sense, and we start to listen to whatever is happening. We don’t rate our sensations and we don’t interpret them, because these actions – rating and interpreting – were the ways which originally led us astray and caused our fragmentation. So as a first step we just re-learn ourselves. Relearn the way how we feel ourselves, how we sense ourselves. In the movement map of Gabrielle Roth the name of is process is flowing. In the rhythm of flowing our body rediscovers its own movement and its sensations and our attention simply follows this process, notices what’s happening, and allows that – instead of interpretations –  the sensations could evoke new movements which lead to new sensations again.

Only you can do this relearning process with your own body. There is no teacher, seer or guru who would know better what is going on inside you, than you yourself if you listen. Bruce Lee said that “a good teacher protects his pupils from his own influence. A teacher is never a giver of truth; he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself.” As a5Rhythms teacher I provide the framework for this learning, for this exploration. I help you to put aside your fixed judgements about yourself and to open up with curiosity and honesty to whatever is there in you, for you. I provide space and opportunity for you to move with whatever you carry in you and to bring your flow into movement.