On TRANSPARENCY
Entry 97 in the Triarchy Press Idioticon
97. Transparency - a way to make myself known to the other AND to myself WITHOUT EXPLAINING
It’s 20 years since Linda Hartley wrote her very widely loved and admired introduction to Body-Mind Centering (BMC): Wisdom of the Body Moving
Since then, her work and practice have taken her deeper into BMC, mindfulness training, Release Work and the Discipline of Authentic Movement. Her long-awaited new book draws together all these strands, and many others, into a remarkable guide to somatic movement and embodied awareness, specifically written for a time of climate and ecological crisis and with one eye clearly on the beginnings and the endings of life. Published this month and available now, Embodied Spirit, Conscious Earth is a masterpiece.
It's impossible to isolate one idea from the rhizomed complexity of the book, but let’s try!
Transparency is an inviting way in to think about how we may receive and understand another’s condition and intention. It touches on how we might know when someone is being ‘sincere’ and what we might mean when we say someone is being ‘authentic’. (The old shorthand for how we may know another – intuition – doesn’t help us much unless we define what intuition actually is.) Linda’s explanation of ‘transparency’ is more helpful. She suggests that:
the intention within a movement can be transmitted or made known without explanation or interpretation.
being seen by another makes it possible for each of us to see and witness ourself more clearly.
“the invisible part” – not only the unconscious but all that is not yet known in our experience – can be made visible through movement.
just as you can follow the invisible wind through the patterns it makes on water or on sand, so you can follow the invisible mind through the patterns it makes in and on the moving human body.
Read more about – or order - Embodied Spirit, Conscious Earth
You can stop there or read on for more detail on how Linda comes to make those startling assertions. She starts by quoting Mary O’Donnell Fulkerson, her teacher at Dartington:
Transparency is a quality which is present when people are moving with full mind and body concentration upon the physicality of any moment … It is not the personality alone which becomes visible. It is the total mind and body self. When mind and body are united the result is a very simple, direct expression of intention. One can see through the whole person to find this intention. The person becomes transparent. (Fulkerson 1977: 93)
Linda continues, with reference to the work of Janet Adler, Mary Starks Whitehouse and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen:
“In dance performance, the intention within the movement can become known by the audience without the intermediary processes of symbol and interpretation. The audience are invited into a state of presence, of mind and body integration, as they witness the nakedness of the movement …
Transparency is a quality which arises with deep attention to the moment in Authentic Movement practice. At times the witness sees the mover clearly and through this, the mover is enabled to see himself more clearly. Both are fully engaged in the moment − present, aware and attentive to the fullness of their own experience. Intuitive knowing becomes possible. The invisible is made visible. Janet [Adler] describes how it is through seeing the other clearly that the witness also comes to see herself:
[S]elf-witnessing is transformed after truly seeing another as she is. It is as though there is now a reversal. In the same way that being seen by another originally enabled me to see myself as I am, in a further sweep of the spiral, seeing another as she is – loving her – enables me to see myself as I am. (Adler 1999: 154)
The idea of making the invisible visible through the practice of moving authentically was present in Mary Starks Whitehouse’s original work:
[M]ovement is a way to get in touch with yourself – the invisible part. (Starks Whitehouse 1963: 31)
In developing the practice of what came to be called Authentic Movement, Starks Whitehouse was deeply influenced by Jungian psychology; what she named “the invisible part” consisted largely of all the unconscious and unexpressed content of the psyche, which could be made visible through embodiment in expressive movement. She was also informed by Taoist philosophy and we might assume that embodiment of the Mystical was part of what she intended here, though maybe it was not so explicitly central to her approach as the psychological. Janet developed this aspect more fully in her evolution of the Discipline of Authentic Movement, the ‘invisible’ coming to signify all that is not yet known in our experience, both within and around us; this can include the Numinous, the Sacred, the Mystical. As Bonnie Morrissey and Paula Sager write,
Mystical experience is a realm of subjective communion with that which is invisible, the infinite unknown. (Adler, Morrissey and Sager 2022: 36)
The many layers of complexity that are a human being, the total expression of the psyche − including body, feeling, thought and imagination − and Spirit may become visible in moments of deep, full and clear attention to the moment.
Bonnie describes the process of transparency in this way:
I see the body as being like sand. It’s difficult to study the wind, but if you watch the way sand patterns form and disappear and re-emerge, then you can follow the pattern of the wind or, in this case, the mind. I knew long ago that what I was seeing on the physical level was only ten percent of the whole picture of what I was seeing. Mostly what I observe is the process of mind. (Bainbridge Cohen 2008: 11)
Soma is the embodied expression of psyche. Psyche is the invisible flow of energy and information that underlies soma. Through attending, with love, to the intimate intricacies of embodiment, the whole person can become known and Spirit may be revealed.”
Read more about – or order - Embodied Spirit, Conscious Earth
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