I am me.  You are you. Considered together, we are we.  These are concurrent realities:  I am still me, and you are still you, as we are we.  The basis for co-creative being and action is that our individual and collective wholeness are true at the same time.  We create life together, and our lives carry meaning with each other.

Who am I?  The co-creative perspective has implications for identity and power dynamics. I am both a fully formed individual and a part of the collective.  The word ‘sovereign’ speaks to my wholeness; I have supreme and ultimate power over myself by choosing to remain present in consciousness.  Sovereignty is a declaration of freedom in which I claim my ability to make choices.  Neither dominant nor submissive, I perceive my self as whole.  I am not alone.  I require the life that surrounds me in order to live.  I would starve without the other living beings that I consume to survive. I will also eventually be consumed. I cannot control how or when I will live or die:  My sovereignty arises when I participate in conscious awareness of my self, taking on the response-ability that is available to me in any moment.

I am a community of the parts of myself.  This community includes not only my organs, muscles, and bones, but also the components of my consciousness.  Thoughts, emotions, and sensations flood my experience of my self. Meanwhile, there are bacteria in my gut that don’t share ‘my’ DNA.  These bacteria do release neurotransmitters capable of making ‘me’ want to eat more of the foods that feed ‘them’.  In this sense I am defined as much by the consciousness arising with these beings as much as I am the consciousness arising from cells that do carry my DNA. We are me, as I am me; concurrently.

In The Sacred Matrix Dieter Duhm points out that my heart and my liver collaborate as distinct entities within me.  They are not in competition.  They do not have the same role in my being.  They also could not survive without each other.  He suggests that the same is true for you and I in community.  We are each whole, and we also require each other in our uniqueness.  He calls this the “communitarian I.”  This relationship of individuals to community is the essence of co-creation.  We are sovereign and we are interdependent.

Dominance and privilege hierarchies such as patriarchy generate tensions, wounding, and trauma between individuals and communities. These patterns can easily stand in the way of co-creative action, and often operate well below the level of consciousness.  Rather than detail the nature of these problems, the purpose of this text is to consider embodied practices that might help us to resolve, or at least redistribute these tensions.  I’d like to approach embodied sovereignty and co-creativity as a developmental process; one that I believe can contribute strongly to healing the relationships between self and other.  I see three primary phases of this process:  Consensual boundaries of no and yes, positioning, and invitation.

Our boundaries are our edges.  They make our safety and overall freedom possible.  We have many different kinds of boundaries, from social dynamics, to physical structures, to energetic fields.  On a physical level our skin is perhaps the most obvious boundary. As a semi-permeable membrane, some things can get through and some cannot.  If my skin is punctured too severely by a knife then my death could actually result.  A critical situation is one where my existential safety is at risk:  The stakes are life or death if a knife is coming towards my body. In this sense the protection of boundaries is the basis for criticality.  We must be able to evaluate when our boundaries are at stake.  I hold my edge when I say ‘no’ to a force that is coming at me.  My ‘no’ is a choice that I can attempt to engage; a claim that I do not give consent. In the knife example this might be by verbally interacting with the person holding it, or by attempting to deflect it with my movement.  I can also reposition my body as a way of claiming my ‘no’.  Whether I am successful in holding this boundary against an outside force or not definitely matters, but it is not entirely the point.  Once I engage my ability to respond I have made my claim.  Somatic trauma recovery methods such as Somatic Experiencing often actualize an ability to create a ‘no’ in the body even when that response might have been compromised in the past.  Doing so can resolve a freeze response by which someone may have stopped attempting to hold their edge after a traumatic event.

There are many times I might allow people or things into my physical, social, or energetic structure.  Even a knife may be welcomed into my body if I feel that surgery could be beneficial to my being.  If someone offers me food or drink that I desire I will likely allow it in, perhaps even developing a desire within myself that had not yet existed.  These are examples of a consensual ‘yes’:  Something from outside myself comes toward me and I allow it into my structure.  Notice that this is different than asking for something or reaching for it.  Consent is permission.  My consent relates to something being done to me—a force coming at me.  To change positioning in relationship to my environment and the beings within it reveals another layer of development.

We are always in relationship to others and to our environment.  Life moves, and as living beings we are always repositioning ourselves.  This positioning is a movement of our edges through the greater landscape of physical, social, and energetic possibilities. Why do we reposition ourselves? We may move toward or away from something to take care of ourselves.  Moving away from a knife is one such example.  We might move toward food.  We might also be drawn to another person to explore companionship, sexuality, and other social possibilities.  We might simply reposition ourselves out of boredom or curiosity—we may not know exactly what we are seeking.  I personally enjoy hiking through nature, repositioning myself in the simple pleasure of moving.  I do not get this pleasure from walking on a treadmill, so clearly my relationship to the environment has an important role in my motivation.  For me natural environments are live beings, and their animacy is what draws me in to the pleasure of relationship.  Overall, I am quite curious about the role of pleasure in how we position ourselves.  Functional repositioning, such as avoiding danger or procuring food seems obvious enough to explain through logic, but how do we explain aesthetic experiences such as walking through nature, dancing, or speaking with a friend about something I care about?  I believe pleasure is a key element of these experiences, even if they are not always entirely pleasurable in the moment.  We navigate pleasure in relationship with others, matching our desires with theirs. Repositioning around pleasure is a particularly nuanced texture of relationship, and I think it offers rich ground for co-creative exploration.

As a dance facilitator and somatic movement therapist I am particularly biased toward physicality as a way of exploring, describing, and practicing shifts in position.  I believe physical practice can support our development in interpersonal and energetic realms.  Improvisational dancing, and particularly Contact Improvisation, in which dancers establish physical connection with each other, are great scenarios for co-creative investigation.  I approach these dances as experiments, and I attempt to remove goals beyond the simple pleasure of interaction.  One of the basic principles guiding contact improvisation is to not grasp.  Dancers may share weight by leaning in, pushing, reaching, and even pulling on each other, but grasping is strongly discouraged. Beginners will often try to pick someone up like a sack of potatoes; this is not the dance.  Potatoes do not have the ability to respond and co-create: Potatoes are passive dance partners, and they may be owned.  I grasp my potato because it is mine.  I have control over the potato.  In the co-creative dancing of contact improvisation I do not have control over anyone or anything except myself.  I do not claim ownership.  To grasp another person is to exert will in a controlling way.  The dancer who is grasped has lost their ability to reposition themselves freely.  From ballet and ballroom dance to acro-yoga, there are forms of partner movement that utilize and even depend on some grasping, but these forms have some level of choreography structuring the interactions.  The dancers have shared physical vocabulary they can use to actively position themselves in relationship with each other and remain at-choice in each moment.

Co-creativity requires that I remain fully myself and you remain fully yourself so that we can create a larger living field together. If we have exerted control over each other that limits our freedom to reposition; we are no longer fully sovereign individuals.  The power structure is no longer balanced.  Co-creation asks that we each fully inhabit our power, our pleasure, and our choice.  When these requirements are met we will probably be intrinsically drawn to dance with each other.  The potential for dynamism when these requirements are met can be surprising to those that haven’t experienced it before—our bodies are capable of great feats of balance, shaping, and learning.  Experienced contact dancers can flow together as one being, launching to great heights, each always capable of taking care of themselves should the other make an unpredicted turn.  For me, unpredictability is a great part of the pleasure of dancing with others:  I am given the gift of new possibilities, and my senses are heightened.  I get to practice my ability to respond because I am never fully in control.

Perhaps co-creation is defined by response-able collaboration.  I am a community of the forces that compose me.  In an atom the space between the nucleus and the electrons is many, many times the size of the particles themselves.  My apparent solidity is a product of these forces, if not a complete illusion: I am composed of the spaces between particles more than by the particles themselves.  When I consider myself this way I begin to perceive my consciousness as the primary force through which my matter takes form.  The edges of my identity have a relationship to my physical form, but they are not the same thing.  I can identify my edges in many ways, including as part of the collective whole of life in the universe.  And, my physical form is the most direct evidence I have of my identity.  Through my form I can experience my self.  I am sovereign because I choose to participate in my existence.  I am able to respond to the forces within and around me.

We are a community of the forces between us and within us.  When I identify myself as part of our selves then I recognize a larger whole.  I am part of Gaia–the collective living whole of the Earth.  I am Gaia, and Gaia is far more than just me.  When I perceive myself this way I am better able to witness my sensations, emotions, and actions in the context of a larger whole.  I am not in control of my circumstances.  When things go differently from how I intend them that does not mean I am at fault.  I may be cursed or blessed by circumstances.  I may be supported or abused by others.  I may be provided or deprived of the privilege of attaining my desired outcome.  I may or may not feel free.  Yet, I am able to respond.  I can share the truth that comes through me.  Response-ability is a choice capable of redirecting victimhood into sovereignty.  This is the benefit of a co-creative attitude.

When we practice co-creation we can offer invitations to others without attempting to control them.  An invitation is directed outward, asking another being for consent and/or co-creative participation.  This text is an invitation to you.  You accepted my invitation and made a choice to read it.  You may choose to agree or disagree with the ideas I’ve presented, an expression of your ‘no’ and your ‘yes’.  You might also take the opportunity to reposition yourself in relationship with these ideas, dancing with them in your own life, and with others. You might even be in dialogue with me. I invite your response, finding pleasure in the dialogue.

Co-creation need not be the only method for creativity. I imagine there are times for grasping, and times when equal power structures might not be possible or optimal. Perhaps it is sometimes important to command, request, or acquiesce.  Yet, I am personally fascinated by co-creation.  I believe that practicing co-creation in our bodies—engaging both personal sovereignty and communitarian unity—is at the edge of human consciousness and creativity.  In a world in which we are quickly exceeding limits of all kinds, the opportunity to practice working together non-hierarchically, staying ourselves while being aware of the larger whole might be exactly what we need in order to survive.  We cannot dominate a finite planet in infinite growth, and our collective boundaries are reaching a critical capacity.  It is my hope that practicing co-creation will support us individually to take pleasure in taking care of the larger whole of our civilization.