I recently returned from a vision fast. I spent 4 days fasting alone in the wild, supported on either end by integration with a spectacular group of men. I brought only a journal—no books, ipad, camera, or other things to “do.” I brought a tarp, and I used it to find shelter in a cave twenty feet off the ground when it rained. The purpose of this adventure was to find greater clarity in my life’s purpose: I wanted to initiate my egoic ability to function in the world in to the service of my soul. This all appears rather dramatic, and it is indeed a story with personal potency. Yet, the drama of what took place for me is far less important than the simplicity of listening to our shared live earth. I have been initiated in my service to Gaia.

Gaia is the idea and name of the earth as a whole living organism. We are part of this living system that the word “Gaia” represents. When I make meaning of something I experience, then that meaning exists in Gaia because I exist in Gaia. And, Gaia is so much bigger than I am. Cultures more attuned to the language of nature take this for granted, I think, while for me it’s a gentle revelation. I learned lessons from Rattlesnake, listened to rhythms expressed by Rain, and spoke with numerous characters I saw in the rocks of Idaho’s Little City of Rocks Wilderness Study Area.

Movement is a constant in living systems. It is how we gather resources and express our intentions. On the other side of movement is sensation. We constantly take in information about ourselves in relation to our surroundings. Awareness is a form of consciousness by which we notice our sensations and actions. When we interpret our sensations or actions then we are building upon awareness and generating stories for ourselves. Oftentimes stories are given to us such that we organize our awareness into shared structures. The stock market represents such a story: Wealth is generated and destroyed based on a shared belief that these numbers represent something real. Yoga is another version of such a story: Particular movements are given meaning through their practice. In both cases these belief structures have very real effects in our lives: We can gain or lose wealth that buys us food. We can gain or lose flexibility, strength, and connectedness with our bodies. I find that moving in the natural world connects me to a very deep story wired directly into my physical, emotional, and spiritual being. We are living systems, made up of living systems, and participating in the living system of Gaia. When I connect to Gaia by moving and sensing in wild places I build awareness of a life force larger than myself.

We as humans are not acting mindfully within Gaia. We seem largely unaware of how unsustainable our movements are as we create tremendous toxicity through the abuse of our natural resources. Meanwhile, I’d assert this way of life isn’t making us happy. Because we are part of Gaia, and capable of being sensitive to this shared consciousness, movement and awareness in our own bodies are the beginning of saving ourselves on Earth. I don’t think we’ll hurt Gaia that much overall—we’re just a flash in the timescale of Gaia’s aliveness. The possibility that we’ll exterminate ourselves is very real, though. I see it in each of us when we choose not to notice the signals our own bodies give us for healing, when we allow addictions to determine our actions, or when we fail to communicate honestly. I see it in each of us when we choose fearful stagnancy over movement and love for our bodies and beings. I am devoted to bringing myself and others to movement and awareness because I am devoted to humanity as part of Gaia. I am in your service.

Generous Dance

I have been exploring “Generous Dance” as the new container for my artistic work as a dancer and choreographer. As living beings we are generative: It is essential for our survival on this live earth that we learn re-generative ways of taking care of ourselves, others, and the ecosystems within which we are sustained. I believe dance, movement, and embodied awareness are key ways that we can educate ourselves about how to consume less, produce genuine vitality, and be more resilient. We are nature, and dance can re-wild us.

In May I will be engaging in a vision quest where I will spend some time fasting in the wilderness; searching for my truest self. I created a film—a generous dance—in preparation. Find Vision Quest below. This is the second ‘generous dance’ film. You can find the first, Dance Surplus, at this link.

Scroll down past the video for the Generous Dance Manifesto!

The Generous Dance Manifesto:

Dance is our birthright.
We can all dance.
In dancing we can generate vitality.
To generate vitality we gather energy and organize it.
Organizing energy through dancing is a practice we all have access to.
In generous dancing we connect with ourselves, each other, and our stories.
In generous dancing space becomes place, and form comes to life.
In generous dancing there is abundance:
There is abundant love, health, vitality, connection, and beauty.
We can thrive by sharing what we generate with each other.

Matthew Nelson

I had an ‘aha!’ moment this week while speaking on an alternative medicine panel at the Conference on World Affairs. An audience member asked the panel if we had any thoughts or solutions to the expenses and hazards associated with pharmaceutical use. The question suggested a misalignment between the profit-driven corporate structure of pharmaceutical companies and the health needs of individuals. Pharmaceuticals are completely outside my scope of practice as a movement therapist and bodyworker: My primary objective is to empower people in their bodies and healing process through movement, awareness, and touch. What struck me in addressing pharmaceuticals is that the relationship between the companies that produce them and the individuals who use them is that of producers and consumers. The companies will sell whatever there is demand for. Our medical culture revolves around the idea that our health depends on these substances, and that we therefore depend on these companies. We expect pharmaceutical companies to be benefactors, perhaps like parents, whose responsibility it is to take care of us. We may feel wronged when they don’t.
Only we can produce our own vitality, and doing so is our primary function as living beings. Opposing entropy—the tendency energy has to disperse—living systems gather energy and organize it into vitality. We are self-organizing and generative. Unlike machines, which must be created and energized from the outside, we grow spontaneously when given resources such as food, water, shelter, information, and love. Unlike pharmaceutical companies, many of us are parents, and biologically we all have parents. We generate vitality for ourselves and then generously produce future generations. The question of pharmaceutical use changes when we realize that we are producers of vitality, and not consumers of it. Pharmaceuticals are a resource that we can choose to include in our self-organization, but they are not the source of our health. When we begin by acknowledging this power structure—that we are the agents of our own health, lifestyle choices such as movement patterning, food, personal relationships, and environment become exciting ways to organize our vitality. Pain and injuries are opportunities to notice the less lively parts of ourselves, and to reorient our awareness and actions toward healing. It is our nature to heal. We can reach out to others for help as we do so. Doctors can help us choose pharmaceuticals when we deem them useful. I’m here to help you physically direct how you generate your vitality, because you are producing gobs of it. We can practice being alive through movement—life is always moving. The most amazing part is that when we practice moving with clear intention we get better at it!

If you would like to see and hear the panel it is available here:
http://livestream.com/accounts/18548854/events/5105457/videos/118547136

Another panel I loved participating in was on improvisation. I was honored that cellist Joshua Roman even joined me for a little jam! Available at this link:
http://livestream.com/accounts/7791094/events/5105446/videos/118193913

How do we know what’s true in our bodies? How do we know if we’re in the ‘right’ posture, or walking ‘correctly’? What do we do when we go to yoga, pilates, or dance teachers and hear conflicting ideas about how to be in our bodies? We’re like snowflakes in that we are similar in many of our patterns but never quite the same. Yet movement teachers must try to present something universally useful to their students. The most obvious solution is to listen to our own bodies through sensation—and I think this bears incredible truth. Yet, a problem pops up: We will favor the sensory, motor, and thought patterns that we’re accustomed to. Sensation is fickle, and if we believe everything we feel we’ll tend to narrow the field of possibilities down to past experience. The beauty of learning from others is that our interactions can draw us into what we don’t know, haven’t felt before, and don’t identify with. New sensations of alignment and movement are often awkward or uncomfortable! So what’s a conscious human to do?

Science is a method of procuring and processing information that attempts to be objective. Through observation, measurement, and testing, the scientific method tries to determine whether something is ‘true’ from the outside. The experience of embodiment is subjective and unique, and yet our bodies are also quite physical and real. As a practitioner of somatics, a field that studies the experience of the body, I try to find the both/and of subjective and objective research. I notice what I feel and take it as evidence by which to test my theories. Like a scientist, I don’t believe everything I feel, and yet unlike a scientist, I pay attention to the data of my subjective thoughts, sensations, and beliefs.

So how do we know what is true in our bodies? We gather ideas from outside sources, take in information from our own experience, and experiment through the process of moving and noticing to draw the best conclusions we can for the moment. This is why I love movement improvisation so much—it’s research into the nature of being alive!

Having just returned home from 2 weeks researching at Earthdance in Massachusetts, I feel primed for us to explore generativity and generosity. One of the things I was reminded of at Earthdance is the importance of creativity. I entered the residency with the intention of devising some specific physical exercises aimed to increase vitality. The more I tried to do this, the less sense it made to me: We are self-organizing systems, so while prescriptive exercises may sometimes be useful, they aren’t the most effective ways of increasing our systemic aliveness. Improvisation is the key to practicing resilience, diversity, and receptivity, all key skills in generating vitality!

As I work with generosity in my own dancing, and my life in general, I keep coming back to a balance between self-consciousness and opening up the boundaries of expressivity. I am terrified and enlivened by the creative impulse that causes me to connect with parts of myself, with others, and with the world. I walk straight into this fear as often as I can, with an improvisatory spirit. I feel it when I dance, and often when I work with clients as well. So now I’m beginning a new practice, perhaps called Generous Dance Practice, and perhaps simply called Dance Surplus. When I dance I aim to generate surplus vitality that I can share. I think we can all do this. Today I created a short 2 minute film to begin my own Dance Surplus. It explores a story: I found out that I made a new friend uncomfortable without intending to. I’d love if you’d take a look at it below. Your comments are welcome!

As a dancer, electric skateboarder, roller-blader, skier, and runner, (among other activities) I have had my fair share of injuries. I sprained my ankle in graduate school (for dance) on my electric skateboard when my board overloaded and stopped short while braking on a hill. What’s a dance MFA student doing on an electric skateboard anyway? I love to move, I love to be moved, and electric skateboards are like magic carpets. I felt pretty stupid, I was badly hurt, and it did affect my success in school, but I also learned a tremendous amount about balance in recovering from that injury. I learned that I was often gripping my ankles tight when I moved, and thereby compromising my grounding. I learned that neurologically the feedback between the ankles and the neck, and the micro-movements of each, are tremendously important to how we balance. The ankles and the sacro-iliac joints also have an important relationship, and I still use what I learned recovering from my skateboard accident to help me when my low back gets sore. My injury helped me become more sensitive to all of these movements, and to retrain how I utilize them. I didn’t take pain killers–instead I spent many hours investigating how sensations ran through my body as I healed, using the feedback of those sensations to re-pattern my movement pathways. The scientific knowledge and understanding I gained about how balance takes place was one form of expansion, but more important than that is the physical knowledge my body now has about connectivity and grounded-ness. Ultimately, both cognitively and physically, I learned more than I lost in the long term.

When I work with clients to heal injuries or chronic pain I always hold the perspective that we are researching an experience larger and more important than just the inconvenience of pain and discomfort. I’m not trying to return people to who they were or what they experienced before the tremendous inconvenience of pain or disability presented itself. Instead I work with people to make use of their experience so that we can learn from it together and grow on a much larger scale. Blame, frustration, pain, sadness, and anger are often present for people in this process: Through the process of engaging with embodied experience these feelings often resolve into empowerment.

I will be heading to EarthDance in Western Massachusetts this coming weekend for a two week artistic residency as part of their E|Merge program. While I’m there I will be creating and documenting improvisatory and set movement sequences that aim to increase embodied resilience. In short, resilience is the ability to rebound from external influences…such as being thrown off a skateboard and hitting the pavement, or spending the day sitting in front of a computer. Upon my return in March I hope to launch a class series to present the techniques I have been developing. Stay tuned!