For those of us who are committed to accessing and really feeling and sensing our deep connection to all that is, we’ve learned a lot recently about what it means to really not feel that sense of deep connection – and what it means to really feel that deep connection.
I’ve come to a potentially painfully obvious conclusion about when it is painfully difficult and potentially impossible to truly feel this deep connection.
We cannot truly feel deeply connected when we feel that we do not exist. Another way to say this is that we cannot feel truly deeply connected when we feel invisible. We cannot connect to our people, our ancestors, our physical world, our universe, when we feel invisible.
And visibility is “embodied”. Feeling visible is first about being able to feel one’s body. To feel our bodies, it must be alive. There must be life in our bodies, our extremities, energy flowing through each part of our bodies so that we can literally feel it there. We need to feel our bodies, otherwise we cannot connect to anything – because we do not exist. Perhaps we are everything and nothing, but, when we feel invisible, there is nothing to connect to because there is no distinction between us and what is out there. Ironically, in order to connect, we need to know the boundaries between who we are and who we are not.
Visibility is also communal, experienced in the embodied receiving of expressed love, of eyes meeting, of physical touch. Visibility is communal, shared and co-created.
So as our work often involves the body, we work to enliven our bodies – to create a body that is alive and that we can feel and sense. This is the work of what I call collective (movement) practice, moving the physical energy in a space to create the conditions necessary for deep connection to be possible. We also are working to create that sense of communal visibility, of being seen and heard and loved in community. And at the end of the day what we are all searching for is the embodied experience of love. We can look to experiment with and share current, ancestral, and historical collective (movement) practices of grounding and energizing our bodies, making ourselves visible and communally seeing, witnessing, attending to each other. In essence, we are learning that we long to feel loved. The feeling is in our bodies and in order to feel love we must be able to feel our bodies. In order to feel loved, we must also experience and receive it communally. This is the potency of collective (movement) practice.
I commend us for working through all that keeps us from feeling alive in our bodies. I commend us for creating spaces where we can communally see and witness each other. I commend us for simply the radical act of desiring to be seen. There was a time that many of us were not physically able to be seen. Now we are clamoring for it. We are clamoring to create it. And we are creating it. We are creating exactly what we need to really feel our deeply connection to this entire physical world, wow. Yes.
And so, 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.