Let’s talk about what it means to be loving and loved:
- There are levels to love and it is expressed in the body. When what we call love is present, there is openness to truth. There is openness to receive. There is fluidity. There is a reason why folks we call loving are called warm and open and people who we call unloving are cold and closed off. These are characteristics of the body, energetic characteristics beyond a “loving” action. Even with words, even with practice, is a deadened body being loving? Only an alive body can transmit and receive what we call love.
- So is love a practice? An action? A word? A saying? It doesn’t seem to be a full truth. Or is love a radiant state of being? Is it simply the flow of energy from part to part? The unstopped flow of life from person to person? No deadening, no stopping. Maybe we’ve made love too personal. Maybe we’re just seeking life.
- We want to be around people who have aliveness in their bodies because we intuitively know that they are ready for love. We tend to avoid being around people who are very “clogged up”. They might be closed off, overwhelmed, exploding, or withdrawn. So when a person who one might call serious or stoic or depressed or anxious or shy or standoffish enters a space of aliveness, they are intuitively noticed by the others. Not 100% because of social conditioning but from an intuitive sense of the group that this person, this body, is cutting off the life of the group. They might be called a party pooper or reserved or demanding or many other names (I’m sure all of which I have been called).
- So this person— this person doesn’t know it, but they are powerful. Any body that can cut off life can learn to amplify it. This body is not unloving. This body can receive love. It is not the body’s personality or deficiency that produces a cold or tense body. A body becomes cold and tense in response to the toxicities that the body has encountered across their lifespan which clogs the body up. In particular, a body becomes cold and tense in response to taking on the “default toxicities” of every space that body has been in across its lifespan and the lifespans of the bodies that made that body. The body being clogged up and overwhelmed is a culmination of thousands and thousands and thousands of bodies in thousands and thousands and thousands of spaces before it. This body is not unloving. It is temporarily cut off from life. This body has energy that needs to be moved. And all that others want for this body is to share in life with them.
- What we experience as a lack of love is simply a break in an energetic chain. This simply means that the body’s energy has shifted and is shutdown, overwhelmed, or otherwise imbalanced – otherwise “clogged up”. When we experience ourselves not being loving, we are feeling the break in our energetic chain. We are feeling ourselves be “clogged up”. So how are we noticing the toxicities that have built up, that have “clogged up” in our bodies? What does it look like to see this? How are we creating spaces and lives where we can move the energy that has been clogging us up? How exactly do we move that energy?
Many of us are understanding that we have gone so much of our lives believing that there was something wrong with us – when in reality, it was our spaces that were not meeting our needs. When we enter spaces that are not a fit for our needs, spaces where our body is overwhelmed, we can call that space toxic to our body. Because systems of disconnection and conditioning pervade our society, many spaces have “by default” not met our needs and, therefore, have been toxic to us. Taking on the toxicities of all spaces we have inhabited through our lives, these toxicities “clog up” our bodies, often leading us to be “chronically overwhelmed”. This process of recounting the toxicities of our spaces is critical. Collectively and rigorously seeing the “default toxicity” within our past spaces (what I call “microsystems of disconnection”) provides us with intimate understandings of space elements that we can use to design or redesign our spaces of deep connection.
And there is so much more that we are learning we must unravel. What we often overlook in our spaces when we talk about designing spaces of deep connection where our needs are met is that which is much less obvious, the energetic space. To see all toxicities contributing to our spaces, we must be able to “see” and measure all of the energy of spaces (e.g., mental toxins created by racism, patriarchy; toxicities in our light, sound, air; patterns of disconnection that individuals bring with them). Fully seeing all toxicities, we can begin to understand where exactly our spaces (and our bodies) have been “clogged up”. Then, we can begin to experiment with moving that energy and unclogging our spaces (and our bodies).
Collective (movement) practice, which focuses on how we collectively move energy, then, is a powerful approach to designing spaces of deep connection. It is an often-hidden, ancient approach that many of us are seeking, studying, or drawn to, though we call it different things. I define collective (movement) practice as the collective practice of moving physical energy in a space to create the energetic conditions necessary for deep connection to be possible. I believe there is gold in the rigorous study of collective (movement) practice and these ancient wisdoms are here to teach us how to do our Work of designing spaces of deep connection. As we step into our full power to build spaces of deep connection that meet our needs, as we slowly uncover ancient wisdoms of collective (movement) practice, we all deserve the opportunity to learn the truth and the power of collective (movement) practice. Zooming out, we can see that, within this study of collective (movement) practice, there are thousands and thousands of years of ancient science, art, design, culture, and medicine guiding us as we build our spaces of deep connection. May we find each other, study together, learn together. May we fully step into our power as builders of spaces of deep connection. Join us at our Open House to collectively practice seeing the “default toxicity” of the microsystems of (dis)connection we’ve left behind and to co-learn, reflect, and share about how we use collective (movement) practice to design/redesign spaces of deep connection.
These ideas and questions are central to Raw Movement, an approach to inquiring about and experimenting with co-creating spaces of deep connection through collective (movement) practice. If you’re in the practice of creating grounding, deep connection, home, family, and desire to experiment with co-creating spaces of deep connection, find out more about Raw Movement at: www.rawmovement.org.
This writing is a part of my Conversations on Deep Connection series. If you’re also in the practice of creating grounding, deep connection, home, family and would like to get notified of new conversations, click here to get notified of new conversations.