When The Head Rolls Away The Body Rises

// January 3rd, 2010 // creativity

As you read this, does your head feel heavy on your shoulders? The head makes up about 5-15% of our body weight, but can feel as if it weighs more.

When creating I often feel the pull to rush upstairs and try to think my way through a project. Sometimes it works too, even if the end result feels a little shoe-horned into being. My head is loud and busy with ideas and opinions on what should be done. Maybe not the greatest ideas or the most shining opinions, but very insistent.

This insistence adds to the physical weight of the head, I’m sure.

When I tune into my body I can sometimes feel the tension rising from the neck as it tries to hold the head up, the compression in my throat as the weight bears down, the forward slump of my frame.

Joanna Macy, in ‘World as Lover, World As Self’, says that we often walk through life as we were a “head on a stick”. To live out our lives within the confines of our skull is  a way of being that is pretty well accepted. The question: “Are you out of your mind?” is pretty telling as a measure of someone’s sanity.

I used to be a member of a Playback Theatre group and every Tuesday night we would meet for rehearsals. Playback theatre is a form of improvised theatre in which audience members stories are played back by the actors. The bulk of the rehearsals were devoted to going into our bodies and working from there.

Training ourselves to move from the feeling body rather than the thinking head was the only way to tap into the intuitive nature of working as an ensemble.

Six different heads all trying to impose their ideas at once would never work. Once you were on-stage and an audience member was telling their story to the conductor, the worst possible thing you could do as an actor was to try and ‘think’ your way through to how you would tell the story.

Instead, we got to be continually amazed at what came up through the wisdom of our  ’collective body’.

Often a performance would begin with a snatch of improvised music from the musician who was a part of the group, and we would respond with a movement. Whatever movement seemed appropriate. From there the performance would almost create itself. More importantly, the performance would often be a revelation to the performers, the audience, and the story-teller whose story was being played back.

One of the most transforming things I got from my Playback Theatre experience was a deep respect for the creative abilities of my own body, and the relief that came from knowing that.

Douglas Harding wrote a book called ‘On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious”

The whole book is great, but the insight in the opening few pages is all he really needed to write. He talks about the day he ‘realized’ that he didn’t actually have a head.

What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or numbness, came over me. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in—absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head.

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.

I think that’s the best description ever of the relief that can be had from dropping the weight of the head. Do I have a head? Actually, I think I do. But I agree with Harding that when your head sometimes seems to have the weight of an iron ball it can be sweet to just let it go and allow the world to come forward.

There are many ways to create from the body, even in seemingly sedate forms of art. William Wordsworth wrote and revised many of his poems while on long walks, Wallace Stevens composed his poetry while walking the two miles to and from his work  each day. In the world of art the physicality of Jackson Pollock’s painting stands out as an example of letting the head make way for the body’s intelligence to come through.

Here are some things I’ve tried that help me get more into my body:

Mindful bath: I was taught to do this at a stressful time in my life when I suffered from a particularly busy mind. Basically it involved getting into a bath, grabbing some soap and washing myself from the feet up, naming each part of the body as I washed it: “These are  my toes, here is my ankle, … and so on. The combination of being immersed in a warm bath while trying to be mindfully aware of my body is a really powerful exercise.

Writing/drawing with the non-dominant hand: the sheer unfamiliarity this act is enough to bring my awareness down into my hand as I draw or write. Trying out a different way of moving, a new kind of dance for example, also helps to bring me out of an unconscious way of moving to a more aware state.

Juggling: is a great way to get out of the head, I like to do this at the point when I’ve been thinking something over for a long time and just need to wipe the mental slate clean. If you don’t juggle, a mini trampoline also works really well.

Play with sidewalk chalk: I learned the value of this by drawing on our driveway with my son. I like to make huge sweeping lines as I draw, there’s just something really freeing and physically dynamic that really drops me into my body. It’s like a ‘dry’ version of Jackson Pollock style art.

You might like to try some of these (let me know how you go). I bet you have some great ways to bring your awareness into the body and create from there too, I’d love to hear them.

I’ve signed up for  the ‘Creative Every Day’ challenge for 2010. The topic for the month is ‘Body’ So I thought it would be fun to write a blog post each week on the monthly theme. Here’s where you can learn more, and sign up to join the challenge if you like:

http://creativeeveryday.com/creative-every-day-challenge