I so loved the moment when you, Caro, and Iain pushed hands in the way you did. My familiarity with this comes out of Contact Improv dance. I hope you know of this tradition, and suspect you do.
Iain is brilliant in understanding that what tends often to be and produce conflict is actually a situation of complementarity. And so it is in Contact Improv exercises (I never became more than a beginner at it, but know it to be profound). In Contact Improv, it's called "sharing weight" -- a very extreme inverse of "war", in which the partners collaborate in "sharing" the burden of keeping one another from crashing to the floor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPNWivEzSlw&t=137s
In "sharing weight" the partners in the dance keep one another from falling to the floor, thus collaborating rather than being at war. But they achieve this by pressing up against one another!
Contact Improv has always, at least, been at least as much a somatic contemplative pracrtice as a sort of "vocabulary" in dance and dance improvisation / choreography. When we strongly emphasize the contemplative, experiential learning of it (which honestly requires a teacher who fully "gets it"), it joins with traditions like Tai Chi, Chi Gung, etc., as an equally rich opening into the profundity of awakening soma. (Which, by the way, is nothing like "awake" as a noun -- my preferring the verb form as more honest and real).
For years I "taught" a form of contemplative mindfulness, embodiment, somatics.... etc., -- embodied mindfulness -- which I sometimes say I "cobbled together" from various previously existing forms. If you ask, I'll tell you of the root traditions, of which there were several. But the truth of the matter, as I know you will understand, is that this emergent form taught me, and I sat in the corner as a student and listened.
I was exceptially blessed and lucky. It chose me. It wasn't like I had to go to the Ch'an Master and offer up my arm (in the Zen story). I offered my arm quite happily, knowing that it only wanted my heart.
Please remind me of the Chinese word for heart-mind. I do not know how to spell it or to look it up, but it's like a bottle rocket screaming across my sky at the moment, and I must know about it. I've heard that the traditional / classic Chinese did frame heart and mind in this way.
A delightful fact is that Portuguese has a recently added neologism which unites two much older Portuguese words into a portmanteau neologism. That word was coined by Paulo Freire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire). And the word is sentipensar, which refers to an integrated form of thinking, sensing and feeling!
If you're like me, such a word feels like a gold mine! A mine of diamonds! Emeralds! Sapphires! Sophia!
I'm in search of its analogues (and near-analogues), similes, synonyms, resonants, echoes ... in every language! I'm re-learning what it really means to know anything, and what it means to think.
Xin (Pinyin) Hsin (Wade-Giles) = 'heart-mind', (as separate from Yi or I 'mind-intent' or will.)
Apparently the character for 'Heart' in Chinese always used to be the word for 'mind' until fairly recently.
Sentipensar is very nice indeed. There are so many kinds of knowing that I experience, including - knowing in words, gut sense, heart-knowing, intuition, deduction, inference, sudden-knowing, transmission, learned knowing, experience, being told by a trusted person, tacit knowing, osmosis, innate, fleeting...
An older man at a Dark Mountain festival in 2016 got very upset with me when I said there was much thinking to be done without words. He insisted it is not possible. I said me and my T'ai Cho partners have whole movement jokes without words, without reference to words, and still fall about laughing. I asked him if he'd ever met a dancer, choreographer, T'ai Chi person, or had a lover, a massage or a fight. He seemed to think that movement came after the words formed in his brain. Ha! You do that in a dance and you drop your partner. You do it in a fight, and you're dead!
Movement is primary. The first and only word before birth is touch - 'being held'.
Mar 6, 2023·edited Mar 6, 2023Liked by Caroline Ross
"An older man at a Dark Mountain festival in 2016 got very upset with me when I said there was much thinking to be done without words."
Yes, yes, yes! Ever so much thinking to be done without words! I've been in the place where you were when some of my "philosopher" friends made the same remark to me. I basically said that all of my best thinking was without words. And careful, sensitive, delicate, intricate thinking at that. And yet I'm still in recovery from the Dream of the Modern West, in which words carry all thinking, are all thinking.... Sigh.
There is "making sense" and there is "making sense." You and your friends Dougald and Iain make perfect sense to me. I love you all, and all of the friends of each of you. I know I am not alone. I may be a madman, but I'm making sense.
"The first and only word before birth is touch - 'being held'."
I spent the first two months of my life in an "incubator" -- a machine which kept me alive, but which could not and did not "hold" me. Birth trauma -- you betcha. And yet here I am, swinging ... swinging not in a fight, but in aliveness!
Thank you so much for this! I'm especially moved by the possibilities for transforming relationships that you discussed. I have long know of The Master and His Emissary but was reluctant to read it. To hear from you and Dr. McGilchrist about its practical applications and the way it's changed lives is inspiring.
It is one of the books that most enriched my life. If the subject matter is less familiar, I recommend watching one of his many talks on the subject first, to help ease into the tome!
Tears of relief and recognition come streaming down my face while reading this. I came from a very different angle at McGilchrists work, but had the same response: finally, someone starts putting words to it. Offering a toolbox for communication to the left brain realm. Reading the book to check if he really got it. Seeing the danger of assimilation by the academic structure. The same thought of the importance for Iain to embody the found knowledge personally, to complete the cycle.
Most interviews with dr. McGilchrist are either introductory or done from a sort of moved observant place. Or even pure analytical. I wish for many more encounters like you had. A true widening, a from the ground up change, the intuitive unease with the machine given hands and feet to turn these ruins into a place for the living again. Thank you.
I have started online conversation meetings to discuss the impact of this newfound vocabulary. And am discovering several other similar initiatives. I must say I felt jealous of your chance to speak to Iain directly. I would love to pick his brain on my take of this phenomenon.
Maybe you should upload on vimeo or delikes and embed the video, your server does not seem fast enough for streaming.
Bertus, thank you for your response to the film. I have not watched any other films of Iain, only seeing him in 'real life', books and emails, so it is interesting to hear what you say about other interviews. I know that Iain plans to put our conversation on Channel McGilchrist but I will email him now and check if it's ok for me to put it elsewhere online myself. I almost never watch video online (of any kind) so advice as to best platforms will be warmly received. Warm regards to you and good luck with all your work, please do post a link here to any public aspects of it.
Thanks for sharing this Caroline. I'm about half-way through The Matter With Things and, alongside John Vervaeke's work, have found it utterly transformative. I teach and perform improvised theatre, so it was wonderful to imaginally participate in your conversation - noting the parallels between Tai Chi, the right hemisphere way of seeing, and my own little backwater artform.
I am glad it also resonated for you in your own embodied art form. A dear friend in Contact Improvisation feels similarly about the wisdom gained from movement and touch. I am not well read around this area, yet, except in T'ai Chi books... so thanks for the suggestions.
This was a wonderful conversation, thank you for sharing. I have yet to read Iain’s book, no idea why I’ve had a reluctance to do so, but now I feel that I must.
Most likely my phone. Nothing lost. Furthe composting of the conversation led me to get out Alan Watt's book - Tao the Watercourse Way, which i first read some 40 years ago! I thought too, the conversation resonated in places with Jenny Odells recent book Do Nothing - Resisting the Attention Economy. I wondered too if you had heard of David Hintons new book Wild Mind Wild Earth? A translator of the Chinese classics, he was interviewed recently in Emergence magazine about his new week. Lots of connections bubbling away from your conversation so thanks.
Thanks for this. I first encountered that wonderful book by Watts 37 years ago, a a potter friend's bedsit, along with books by Bernard Leach, Christmas Humphries, Idries Shah and Suzuki Roshi, just a year or two before I discovered T'ai Chi. Watt's voice is still resonating in my head, even though I personally do not go along with what the wider culture of 1960s America made of Taoism. I have not read the two other books you mention. Currently I am on a big 'binge read' of the Taoist Classics again, in Thomas Cleary's translations, so that I may finally write the essays linking Dr McGilchrist's work and Taoist internal alchemy. Then Iain's 2 volume new book will be the next read. Will I ever surface again? Will short books return to my reading desk? I cannot say. But I appreciate the recommendations anyway. I will look at Emergence again soon, I haven't been there since reading Nick Hunt's great piece a few months ago.
I so loved the moment when you, Caro, and Iain pushed hands in the way you did. My familiarity with this comes out of Contact Improv dance. I hope you know of this tradition, and suspect you do.
Iain is brilliant in understanding that what tends often to be and produce conflict is actually a situation of complementarity. And so it is in Contact Improv exercises (I never became more than a beginner at it, but know it to be profound). In Contact Improv, it's called "sharing weight" -- a very extreme inverse of "war", in which the partners collaborate in "sharing" the burden of keeping one another from crashing to the floor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPNWivEzSlw&t=137s
In "sharing weight" the partners in the dance keep one another from falling to the floor, thus collaborating rather than being at war. But they achieve this by pressing up against one another!
This was very beautiful. I only know a little of contact improvisation, mainly through Elise Nuding.
Contact Improv has always, at least, been at least as much a somatic contemplative pracrtice as a sort of "vocabulary" in dance and dance improvisation / choreography. When we strongly emphasize the contemplative, experiential learning of it (which honestly requires a teacher who fully "gets it"), it joins with traditions like Tai Chi, Chi Gung, etc., as an equally rich opening into the profundity of awakening soma. (Which, by the way, is nothing like "awake" as a noun -- my preferring the verb form as more honest and real).
For years I "taught" a form of contemplative mindfulness, embodiment, somatics.... etc., -- embodied mindfulness -- which I sometimes say I "cobbled together" from various previously existing forms. If you ask, I'll tell you of the root traditions, of which there were several. But the truth of the matter, as I know you will understand, is that this emergent form taught me, and I sat in the corner as a student and listened.
I was exceptially blessed and lucky. It chose me. It wasn't like I had to go to the Ch'an Master and offer up my arm (in the Zen story). I offered my arm quite happily, knowing that it only wanted my heart.
Caro -
Please remind me of the Chinese word for heart-mind. I do not know how to spell it or to look it up, but it's like a bottle rocket screaming across my sky at the moment, and I must know about it. I've heard that the traditional / classic Chinese did frame heart and mind in this way.
A delightful fact is that Portuguese has a recently added neologism which unites two much older Portuguese words into a portmanteau neologism. That word was coined by Paulo Freire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire). And the word is sentipensar, which refers to an integrated form of thinking, sensing and feeling!
If you're like me, such a word feels like a gold mine! A mine of diamonds! Emeralds! Sapphires! Sophia!
I'm in search of its analogues (and near-analogues), similes, synonyms, resonants, echoes ... in every language! I'm re-learning what it really means to know anything, and what it means to think.
Xin (Pinyin) Hsin (Wade-Giles) = 'heart-mind', (as separate from Yi or I 'mind-intent' or will.)
Apparently the character for 'Heart' in Chinese always used to be the word for 'mind' until fairly recently.
Sentipensar is very nice indeed. There are so many kinds of knowing that I experience, including - knowing in words, gut sense, heart-knowing, intuition, deduction, inference, sudden-knowing, transmission, learned knowing, experience, being told by a trusted person, tacit knowing, osmosis, innate, fleeting...
An older man at a Dark Mountain festival in 2016 got very upset with me when I said there was much thinking to be done without words. He insisted it is not possible. I said me and my T'ai Cho partners have whole movement jokes without words, without reference to words, and still fall about laughing. I asked him if he'd ever met a dancer, choreographer, T'ai Chi person, or had a lover, a massage or a fight. He seemed to think that movement came after the words formed in his brain. Ha! You do that in a dance and you drop your partner. You do it in a fight, and you're dead!
Movement is primary. The first and only word before birth is touch - 'being held'.
"An older man at a Dark Mountain festival in 2016 got very upset with me when I said there was much thinking to be done without words."
Yes, yes, yes! Ever so much thinking to be done without words! I've been in the place where you were when some of my "philosopher" friends made the same remark to me. I basically said that all of my best thinking was without words. And careful, sensitive, delicate, intricate thinking at that. And yet I'm still in recovery from the Dream of the Modern West, in which words carry all thinking, are all thinking.... Sigh.
There is "making sense" and there is "making sense." You and your friends Dougald and Iain make perfect sense to me. I love you all, and all of the friends of each of you. I know I am not alone. I may be a madman, but I'm making sense.
Come, let us make sense together.
https://deeptransformation.network/share/yE93kT5zhGQVbC6p?utm_source=manual
And should you join us there ...
https://deeptransformation.network/posts/reweaving-knowing-informal-design-process-dialogue
"The first and only word before birth is touch - 'being held'."
I spent the first two months of my life in an "incubator" -- a machine which kept me alive, but which could not and did not "hold" me. Birth trauma -- you betcha. And yet here I am, swinging ... swinging not in a fight, but in aliveness!
Thank you so much for this! I'm especially moved by the possibilities for transforming relationships that you discussed. I have long know of The Master and His Emissary but was reluctant to read it. To hear from you and Dr. McGilchrist about its practical applications and the way it's changed lives is inspiring.
It is one of the books that most enriched my life. If the subject matter is less familiar, I recommend watching one of his many talks on the subject first, to help ease into the tome!
Hey Caroline,
Tears of relief and recognition come streaming down my face while reading this. I came from a very different angle at McGilchrists work, but had the same response: finally, someone starts putting words to it. Offering a toolbox for communication to the left brain realm. Reading the book to check if he really got it. Seeing the danger of assimilation by the academic structure. The same thought of the importance for Iain to embody the found knowledge personally, to complete the cycle.
Most interviews with dr. McGilchrist are either introductory or done from a sort of moved observant place. Or even pure analytical. I wish for many more encounters like you had. A true widening, a from the ground up change, the intuitive unease with the machine given hands and feet to turn these ruins into a place for the living again. Thank you.
I have started online conversation meetings to discuss the impact of this newfound vocabulary. And am discovering several other similar initiatives. I must say I felt jealous of your chance to speak to Iain directly. I would love to pick his brain on my take of this phenomenon.
Maybe you should upload on vimeo or delikes and embed the video, your server does not seem fast enough for streaming.
Greetings,
Bertus
Bertus, thank you for your response to the film. I have not watched any other films of Iain, only seeing him in 'real life', books and emails, so it is interesting to hear what you say about other interviews. I know that Iain plans to put our conversation on Channel McGilchrist but I will email him now and check if it's ok for me to put it elsewhere online myself. I almost never watch video online (of any kind) so advice as to best platforms will be warmly received. Warm regards to you and good luck with all your work, please do post a link here to any public aspects of it.
Caroline, I wondered if the video could be uploaded to Vimeo or YTube for wider consumption?
Hi there, Iain suggested that it would go up on Channel McGilchrist shortly. I will post the link as soon as I have it.
Thanks for sharing this Caroline. I'm about half-way through The Matter With Things and, alongside John Vervaeke's work, have found it utterly transformative. I teach and perform improvised theatre, so it was wonderful to imaginally participate in your conversation - noting the parallels between Tai Chi, the right hemisphere way of seeing, and my own little backwater artform.
I am glad it also resonated for you in your own embodied art form. A dear friend in Contact Improvisation feels similarly about the wisdom gained from movement and touch. I am not well read around this area, yet, except in T'ai Chi books... so thanks for the suggestions.
This was a wonderful conversation, thank you for sharing. I have yet to read Iain’s book, no idea why I’ve had a reluctance to do so, but now I feel that I must.
Thank you! A good start is the RSA animation https://youtu.be/dFs9WO2B8uI
That book was a life changing one for me. I am looking forward to reading 'The Matter With Things'.
Really enjoying this conversation although the film seems to freeze randoly. Maybe my device is the problem.
Sorry it's freezing. It was working ok when I posted it. Perhaps there is a connection glitch.
Most likely my phone. Nothing lost. Furthe composting of the conversation led me to get out Alan Watt's book - Tao the Watercourse Way, which i first read some 40 years ago! I thought too, the conversation resonated in places with Jenny Odells recent book Do Nothing - Resisting the Attention Economy. I wondered too if you had heard of David Hintons new book Wild Mind Wild Earth? A translator of the Chinese classics, he was interviewed recently in Emergence magazine about his new week. Lots of connections bubbling away from your conversation so thanks.
Thanks for this. I first encountered that wonderful book by Watts 37 years ago, a a potter friend's bedsit, along with books by Bernard Leach, Christmas Humphries, Idries Shah and Suzuki Roshi, just a year or two before I discovered T'ai Chi. Watt's voice is still resonating in my head, even though I personally do not go along with what the wider culture of 1960s America made of Taoism. I have not read the two other books you mention. Currently I am on a big 'binge read' of the Taoist Classics again, in Thomas Cleary's translations, so that I may finally write the essays linking Dr McGilchrist's work and Taoist internal alchemy. Then Iain's 2 volume new book will be the next read. Will I ever surface again? Will short books return to my reading desk? I cannot say. But I appreciate the recommendations anyway. I will look at Emergence again soon, I haven't been there since reading Nick Hunt's great piece a few months ago.
Thanks Caroline!