//

pretend you have a body

pretend the world is alive

pretend the sidewalk is talking to you as your feet flop over the cement on your afternoon walk

pretend the trees in your neighborhood know you better than your mind does

pretend pine sap is talking to muscle sinew

pretend the Earth shudders in some kind of erotic fit with every footfall, every shuffle across the hardwood floor

pretend the ethers are witnessing you, the choreography of your life

pretend your body is future dust and current miracles

pretend your body is borrowed and belongs not to you, but to the Earth, to the dirt

and that your living days are one long, luxurious arc from upright to supine, back to the dirt

pretend you have a body

pretend your mind is a bar where you go to get drunk on delusions, lost in the sauce of other people’s opinions, other people’s versions of reality

pretend your body is a discotheque in the basement of Hogwarts, and on off-nights there are 12 step meetings hosted there—pretend your body is where you retreat to get sober from other people’s versions of what is and what is not

pretend sensation is a holy bible

pretend tissue, bone, and bile are a scripture to be read on your knees

pretend the shape of every cell is devotion

pretend that when you die every strand of hair on your body is held taut and played like a violin string by a band of rowdy angels, producing a sound so unspeakably sublime that a human eardrum would split in two if you could register the tone

pretend you are not just a floating head pitched forward, funneling attention into a phone screen

pretend there is treasure buried in the basement called your body

pretend there’s a three-headed dog guarding the cellar door who frightens you and dissuades you from entering

pretend the howling dog is a lover not a fighter, a crooner not a killer, and just wants your recognition, your contact

just wants you to remember the fucking miracle

of having

a

body

at

all.

This syllabus is organized like a breath—inspiration and exhalation. Input and output. 

Media to take in, and experiments to put out. To play, to see.

This syllabus is offered as a brief hallway of doors—each one meant to lead you down into the strange vastness of the body and its particular Knowing. 

/// media to take in ///

listen // Podcast Episode : Poet Andrea Gibson in conversation with Glennon Doyle

Beloved truth wizard and grief sage of our times Andrea Gibson tells of their cancer diagnosis-treatment-remission-return journey and offers a devastatingly beautiful reflection on their ongoing grappling with mortality. Their way with words is a filet knife.

read // My Body, the Buddhist : Deborah Hay

A strange and unruly text not easily categorized. Part retrospective of the rich and radical career of choreographer and dance artist Deborah Hay, part manual for coming to know the indwelling Spirit Teacher that is our body. A freaky read, complete with lots of fun dance ephemera from New York DIY warehouse shows in the 80s. 

listen // Grief and Praise : Martín Prechtel lecture on YouTube

There’s so much to say about the medicine that lives in the voice and storytelling ways of Martín Prechtel. His writings are canon for those among us who are repairing and recovering from the severed indigeneity in our bodies,  imaginations, and story-lineage. This lecture series is great because his voice is such a sonic massage, content aside. Wow, just pure wow. 

read // Life on Land : Emilie Conrad

Emilie Conrad was a pioneer in the field of eco-somatics and founder of the movement modality Continuum. Her work is really about getting up underneath the cultural identities that have mapped onto our physiology, and re-enlivening the cosmic body and primordial body. This book is about her life, and how she was guided by her history and her body to bring forth this particular framework for embodied self-inquiry. 

free excerpt here

watch // Experiments in Cymatics : Hans Jenny on YouTube

There are many videos circulating the internet that explore visual representations of *water consciousness*. This is one of the less dorky ones—I don’t know why such a profound concept seems to proliferate corny vids, but here we are. The general takeaway for me, and the reason it’s included here, is to underscore the idea that our bodies possess a consciousness that is real, and alive, and flagrant and elegant and raucous and and and…Our bodies are molecularly like 95 percent water and so the idea of water having a consciousness that is visible to us sort of obliterates any of this dense Newtonian-meat-suit shenanigans we’ve been served.

read // The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor

Oh this text is so beautiful and sensuous. There is grief in this text, reclamation, rage, and new paradigms being unfurled. It is a rebellious and full-throated, full-throttle call to let the cells of our bodies, in their exquisite realness and nowness, loosen their grip and squish out in every direction. To saturate the world with our fleshy aliveness, and return our inheritance of shame and fear like compost to the Earth. 

read // A Widening Field: Journeys in Body and Imagination by Miranda Tufnell and Chris Crickmay

Another trippy, wild text that is partially an archive of two artists’ work and career, but mostly a delicious handbook of creative experiments. The reader is invited to blow apart any conceptions about genre or discipline and play in the fertile landscape of the sensing/feeling body as the site of creative research. And from there, anything could emerge—drawings, writings, sculpture…

An excellent text for anyone felling a lil stagnant, bored, or unjuiced in their current lane of creative practice. Or anyone longing to feel even a mere morsel of inspiration in any direction at all…

/// experiments to try ///

a few tasks I like to play with to revive and rehydrate my creative practice.

drawing task // chasing shadows, tracing the sun

When the sun is out, make a solo date to visit a few places outside that are important and significant to you. If you don’t have such places, make an excursion to somewhere you find beautiful and inspiring.

Take your tools along—paper and a pen/marker/crayon/pencil.

Lay your paper down so that the edge of a shadow falls on the page, and trace it.

Collect these sun impressions from your special sites, like an essence gathering.

Leave them as momentos in your sketchbook, or copy these line-drawings to different surfaces:

A sticky note on the wall, lipstick line on the mirror, ballpoint pen on your forearm like you’re in highschool again, piping on a cake for a friend’s birthday, drawn with a finger in the pollen dust caked on a neighbor’s car

Consider the constellation points between you, your drawing hand, and your special sites.

Let yourself be held in the web.

We are getting literate on the constantly changing nature of reality. The light is shifting every second. The wind blows that which we are attempting to capture.

The illusion of a solid reality pours through our fingertips like water.

Be with what is, as it is.

movement task 01:

Initiate a dance party for one

You are here to make your own heat

Make a playlist of the most ass-shakingest songs you’ve got

Set a timer to create the container for an amount of time that both pleases you and honors your capacity for the day: ex. 11:11, 24:42, 5:55, 33:08

Create a fun contract with yourself that you will stay moving for the entirety of the time you’ve set

Bounce, shake, flail, two-step, just keep moving, invent new ways to fling your bones

The steps don’t matter, prioritizing pleasure, curiosity, and heat-accumulation is the name of the game

Your sweat and exertion are the currency we’re looking for

THEN

WHEN

THE

TIMER

GOES

OFF

the real work begins.

REST.

Lay down, get comfortable.

Track the flow of energy coursing through you.

Recognize the heat you’ve made and in your mind’s eye, HARNESS IT.

Let your body become an antenna, broadcasting a signal.

Stitch an intention into your heat-energy and send it somewhere.

Send it to a loved one.

Send it to the land, to a former version of yourself, a future version, a version of yourself who never came into being.

Send it to your own tender, wounded heart.

This is potent medicine. Once again, you don’t need to know ‘how’ or ‘if’ it’s happening.

You just need to give your HEAT an address.

An alternative, seated invitation to heat-building is a stimulating breath practice like Wim Hof’s breathing technique ~ if this practice is new or unfamiliar to you I recommend just watching the video first so you know what to expect before trying, as there is no intro!

movement task 02:

the next time you’re in front of your computer, open a tab and pull up the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Jellyfish Live Cam

consider the architecture of your own breathing structures as you watch:

the lungs and the diaphragm

without trying to do much, see if you can feel what you see on the screen happening inside your torso

diaphragm dome bobbing down to make room for air to come in, diaphragm dome returning to its supple dome-i-ness as air gets pushed out of the lungs

jelly jelly jelly

silken tendril twirl

wave wave wave

consider the mirror neurons at work here as you take in this visual data

think of this as a rinsing out and resetting of auto-pilot shallow breathing

let it remind you of your tether to all Earth Relations

these structures and architectures are universal, they braid us to each other and to the world

Thank

You

For 

Remembering 

Image Credits:

1. Erik Thurmond

2. Jamie Hopper

All other images are the artist’s work and documentation