The benefits of mindful movement

Interview with Simon Slieker from Mindful Puzzles Magazine

9th June 2022

https://mindfulpuzzles.com.au/connection/the-benefits-of-mindful-movement/

In the face of life’s relentless busyness, it pays to take a step back and reconnect with the ground beneath our feet. DJ and Feldenkrais Method practitioner Simon Slieker’s upcoming Eco-Somatica movement workshop at the Sydney Opera House’s Centre for Creativity promises to help us do just that. He tells us more…

Eco-Somatica is a process which incorporates sound, rhythm, and movement to raise awareness of the self as part of an ecological ‘whole’. The difference between a somatic exploration of movement and something like a more performative, dance-orientated movement is that rather than copying someone else or moving for the purpose of experiencing how it is to be seen, you move with the intent of feeling how it is to move: it is about your own internal experience. I use sound and audio together and apart in different ways to explore movement and assist people to feel what’s going on in themselves, to explore, and to connect. Eco-Somatica assists people in dealing with the complex feelings that come up in response to the times that we’re living in, specifically climate change and all the layers connected to it.

It sometimes feels as if the stress of everyday life causes us to live in our heads so much that we lost sight of our bodies – we move so relentlessly, always on, shoulders up, heads dropped, but almost without real purpose or awareness. Why?

There are many things that contribute to that, and it’s true that you see people hunching their shoulders and dropping their heads and kind of caving in through the middle and walking in quick, small steps… Picture someone walking through the inner city with their headphones on, shutting out the world to listen to this other world, which is also separating them… There are multiple layers of separation going on.

Here’s the thing, though: the world we live in is actually our physical body – this is the world that we’re going to inhabit for our entire lives. But the apprenticeship that we serve to learn how to use ourselves well, our ‘self-use’, is microscopic. Yes, there’s learning to move while we’re babies, and that apprenticeship essentially finishes by the time we can walk and have learned the main things. From then on maybe we do some physical education, but that’s generally just how to do certain sports. People such as athletes and artisans will spend time honing their craft and their self-use, and they get really good at particular things, but generally speaking that’s still a particular strand of movement. There’s this vast absence of attention to detail when it comes to how we are in ourselves and how we move. That continues through our whole lives, and when we get to the point where things go wrong, we don’t know what to do about it, and we just suffer it. We get injured, we go and seek expert assistance, and our bodies are treated like machines: it’s all very mechanical and that’s the end of it. But there’s another possibility out there and that is that if we attend to our self-use with more awareness, we’re able to feel what we’re doing with greater sensitivity, and we’re able to move through life with enhanced efficiency and grace.

What can participants expect of a typical movement workshop?

We set people up to succeed. The starting position is more often than not lying on the floor and lying on your back. You’re lying in a position where the habituated muscular responses to being upright in the gravitational field are removed. Then I’ll give verbal instructions to do particular things, such as ‘bring your knees up and your feet to standing’, perhaps asking you to repeat it, and guide you to just notice exactly how you did that movement. It becomes a process of slowing a thing, a moment, a movement down and simply feeling it in yourself, instead of immediately responding to an instruction without even thinking about what it is you’re doing, and how you’re doing it. Are you straining your lower back? Where is the movement coming from? Therein lies the lesson. Because each movement is reduced into such small steps, it gives people a really great chance to succeed in perceiving themselves in these small moments. Parts of the workshop includes sound immersion where people can do their own exploration, and parts include verbal prompts and spoken word, where the process is more creatively poetic in the way I combine sound immersion with spoken word.

You emphasise the importance of finding ground, or reconnecting with the ground beneath our feet – can you explain why?

There are parts of the process that are about the sound immersion, the sound bath, and there are parts that are specifically about okay: let’s get grounded, find the ground. It really is about exploring the idea of making contact with the ground, which I think is such a beautifully fascinating idea… How do we contact the ground? And then, if you flip it, if the ground were conscious, how would it be experiencing us? Are we prodding it, are we being reactive, pulling away from it, or are we fully allowing ourselves to just surrender to the ground? There’s a whole lot that can be entered into through that as a physical process but also as a philosophical process, which I love.

At the end of the day Eco-Somatica is really about a person learning to experience themselves with more sensitivity. If I distilled it all down then what I want to encourage is this: people who are more able to be more sensitive more of the time, and I’m talking physically, emotionally, mentally, and psychologically. That’s kind of the ultimate distillation of my work as a whole in response to climate grief and concern: that people will have a greater sense of what it is to be able to trust themselves, and with that sense of being able to trust oneself and one’s responsiveness to the environment that they feel that some of the congestion of feeling and emotion is eased.

How do the Eco-Somatica workshops benefit participants in everyday life?

It is something that you’re able to draw upon all the time, and once you’ve done it, you’ve opened a door of consciousness, and even if it’s closed again, you have the possibility of opening it again. So, for instance, being able to choose to come into more focused attention about what you’re doing in a moment is a really useful thing to do, but that doesn’t mean that you’re aware of yourself in every moment of every day, because that would actually be disruptive: you can’t function if everything is being kind of meta-analysed like that! I’ll give you an example. A pivotal moment during my Feldenkrais training came when I was driving somewhere and running late. I was sitting at traffic lights when everything coalesced, and I just brought myself into a state of awareness of what I was doing: I was GRIPPING the steering wheel like I was about to rip it off the stem and my body was just in this state of utter contortion. The next step was being aware of what I was thinking in the moment: that the car in front of me is too SLOW and in my WAY! It wasn’t just the physicality of what I was doing, but also the state of mental tension and agitation that was making me an awful person on the road, looking at other people as if they were the problem. Once I became aware of this, it also restored my choice in the situation: the choice to soften my grip on the steering wheel, and letting that simple act cascade through my body to soften my shoulders, soften everything… And once this physicality was transformed, so was my thinking. That’s an example of how learning to attend to yourself restores choice, and options: you’re not just locked into a thing because you’re unaware.

It’s very practically applicable!

That’s the thing: people often misunderstand the Feldenkrais Method as something esoteric, but it’s the furthest thing from it, it is absolutely super practical. Founder Moshé Feldenkrais was a physicist, a biomechanist, and a martial artist, so he was absolutely grounded in the physical and the practical, and so was his work. But it ripples out: it begins with the physical and movement, and the effects ripple out into the emotional and psychological.

Kind of like an adapted Maslow hierarchy of needs: if you’re in touch with your body, inhabit it, have intention around it, the rest of the pyramid falls up on top of it.

Hence why I think it’s important we enhance our sensitivities and our capacity to feel, so we have access to that. Because, you know, the more sensitive people are in themselves, surely the more sensitive they can be with one another.

The ‘Soundbath and Movement for Climate Anxiety’ workshop aims to help you discover how our senses, emotions, and bodies can positively connect with our deeply held anxieties around climate change, through a creative exploration of movement, sound, and music. Saturday, 18 June at the Centre for Creativity: www.sydneyoperahouse.com/learn/adults.html

Discover more of Simon’s work: simonslieker.com