notes

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===== Seeing hidden blockages =====


Working with groups of people to reveal the ideas, emotions and memories in situation by moving our bodies, things and images around the space.

Instead of sculpting thoughts as objects using play doh or Blender, it's going to be more about feeling around for changing energies moving within and between us.

**Start with the blockages.**

I can't see my thoughts and feelings as easily as I thought I might be able to. Im beginning to think theyre invisible like dark matter. 

I'm picturing invisible particle systems of flocks, foraging ants, other collectives moving in relation to morphing formations that block and repell them. I cant see these blocking formations either, but I can feel where the tensions are in my body. Between muscle and bone, organs, cells and cells. In the spaces between me and other people, furniture and architecture. These might be the best indicators I can find of the location, form, appearance and movements of thoughts.

Start from

- My body, where I'm tensing, blocking or inhibiting. What is that tensing achieving? What is it dampening down?
- Embodied version of Marvin minskys critics, cognitive agents whose job it is to block the progress of unproductive thoughts. How do I experience this in my body? In between my body and other people things?
- How are they blocking and inhibiting me from feeling love in my heart, desire in my eyes, movement in my hips, feelings in my gut, sensuality and vulnerability in back and arse, impulses to move my limbs. What are they protecting me from?
- Other people - what do I think they are thinking, doing, that I wouldnt? What am I projecting onto them?
- The space -  how are parts of the space singing to me, thinking feeling for me, pressing onto and shaping my behaviour? Where are the tensions? Where are the different intentionalities pushing up against each other, distorting and wrinkling the field?
- Other situations from my life - How is this situation pressing on them? How are different experiences from my life pressing into this situation and shaping how I feel and act now?

Don't use the word thoughts.

Energy, emotion, feelings, blockages 
tensions, memories, spirits, fields, intentions, intentionslity, places, textures, traumas, patterns of behaviour, movements, gestures - all ok. 

I need to pull all this abstraction into the real.

Before I give form to the thinking and feeling that moves invisibly between us, I need to start with the feelings I block moving up my body to my brain, the parts of myself I suppress, the feelings I externalise and transfer onto the things other people say and do, onto things and the fabric of places.

Describe how the spaces and situations that shaped me in the past continue to shape me now, camoflaged with and pressing into the spaces I'm in today.

My feelings are getting to my face.
Im not crying but I can feel tears in these emotions as they move around these eyes to leave my face.

I think this is what I've been working on with Sharon. I didn't realise how much I was blocking these kinds of feelings til I let myself stop. Now it feels so obvious.
I can feel sadness and frustration flowing from inside my chest, up my neck then slowly working through the muscles, they're loosening my cheeks, around my eyes and on my forehead, going out through the wrinkles on my forehead and the pores on my nose, forehead, cheeks and chin, floating away, like steam.

The feeling of being moulded, being pressed, harried and trained. ‘The thing with kids is you have to train them, like dogs’.

Realising the environment that's shaped me. How that sometimes still inhibits me. 

Flocks making forms shaped by predators we can't see, shepherding other forms, emerging from the negative space of the forms that shaped me.  Small things I don't understand wriggling and migrating between the movement of eyebrows, lip curls, laughs, disowned criticisms and framed paintings and wallpaper.

Realising how people around me's traumas have been pressing on and revealing mine.

How our traumas press on each other, distortions into our space, like clews of worms pushing at fabric underwater.  

How my dad tells me stories, the feeling of being sat there not being expected to interrupt, the routine - being taken to acomb homewear shops, syds, football, ‘dont run like that’,