‘BEING’ IN TOUCH
© Nita Little Nelson

We assume we know what the body is. What if we don’t?  What if we are only on the edge of understanding this gift? What if the body is a beginning, not an ending?  What if the infusion of mind within the body isn’t like the electricity that brings a vacuum cleaner to life, so much as like two lovers whose intimacy enables them to lose track of who is whom in the act of making love. This is a love that brings the soul to life. Body and mind embrace their interaction as lovers do. Together at last, they transcend the limits of separate singularities and become a unified “we”, profoundly increasing their capacities. Further evolving this relationship produces the emergence of a greater “We”, and ultimately reveals the Ultimate “Yes”. What if this love imbues mind with physical qualities while retaining its essential freedom? What happens if body is released from its tightly framed definition? Then we have mind that has aspects of body and body that has aspects of mind and a human form that is nothing like what we have been living with.  This form is a meeting ground that is spatially expansive, elastic, has mental fingers that touch within and beyond its fleshy boundary.  It has roots with which to enter and grow. What if? What if we are just beginning to recognize the possibilities of being human, the gifts that are within our grasp, if only we could recognize them?

I am speaking to all of us who live in bodies.  I am speaking as a dancer, as one who explores the subtle and profound levels of experience in order to participate in the action of the soul at play.  I am speaking about the sense of touch, the many levels on which it can be known, its attributes and its gifts.  I am pointing to new levels of possibility that touch holds for you and for me and for our mutual awakening into greater freedom and deeper, more generous states of conscious interpersonal interaction. I am speaking about embodying the boundless nature of mind in this physical frame lending more expansive range to what we experience as form.  And, I am just scratching a surface.

Consider the evolutionary potential of human experience.  Evolution requires that history be exceeded.  Here, our physical history, the history of our perceptions both personal and cultural is defining our experiential limitations.  It’s time to look beyond our assumptions and conditioning. Perhaps there are further steps to be taken here to someplace we have not been before.

It begins by promoting the sense of touch from the questionable status it possesses in our culture to one worth developing, more in balance with our senses of sight and sound.  In fact, it begins with all the senses weaving and sharing their characteristics with every other sense, so that eyes hear, ears feel, and bodies see. All the senses share submodalities that include all the other senses.  Look at a lemon and you taste it, right?  Just try not to.  Go to the zoo. See a bear standing on a rocky ledge and “feel” the contrast, the hard of the rock, and the depth of the fur.  You could call this imagination.  I call it touch.  It is my touch receptors that are set off, and they are not set off on the surfaces of my skin, because I am not physically touching the bear, thank God. They are set off elsewhere, beyond my body.
I am sure that someone could give me the neurology behind the spatial phenomenon of touch, which might lead to my discounting it, but I am not so much a researcher into the hard world of matter as the soft one of experience.  Here’s why: I am immersed in the process of training a new kind of dancer. My interest is in evolved dancers whose minds are as awake and skillful as their bodies.  This is a mover whose dance is formed deep within the paradox of our human nature, the boundless mind within the bound body.   Human experience is manifest in this most potent union. A dancer’s range, physical ability, language and creative expression are in direct relationship to the very character of this union.  This character is not fixed; it is always changing. Getting to this meeting ground is the trick... it’s like sitting in meditation and swimming upstream against the flow of thoughts and distractions so you can arrive at the present moment, now.  It helps to have some way to get there.  In the active meditation of dance, the sense of touch is one of the most potent tools to arrive in the present.
It is no mistake that I find myself describing the meeting of mind and body both as a place, and as an action.  When I name it as a place, I am speaking from my body. When I call it a state of interaction, I am speaking from my mind. Both are right.  No matter whether it is my body’s inner or outer space, I touch this place/state with my knowing of it, and I feel Presence

Seeing something makes us aware of its presence. You might attribute this function to your eyes, but eyes have touch as well.  Think of the feel of someone’s eyes upon you. My awareness of the presence of things is tactile. That is the first job touch does.  It brings things into your presence, even things at a distance.  To understand the relationship between awareness and touch I look again at the meeting ground of mind and body.  The mind acts on the body and the body acts on the mind.  Change the body and the mind changes, change the mind and there is corresponding change in body.  The mind has attributes very much like the body, it ‘feels” and receives tactile reference from things in space. The body has attributes very much like the mind; it extends into space in an expansive, elastic way. To be in the presence of something, I touch it with my eyes, with my body and with my knowing. 

On some tactile levels only my body is touching, like with a handshake. On others, it is my mind behaving like body, as when my mind’s arms continue to embrace a departing loved one as he boards an airplane. The questions arise, “Am I my fleshy boundary only? Its size, its shape?”  I move within the boundary of my flesh and my body changes shape.  Yet, when I dance with a partner, things start to change.  My body is changing its shape as I move, but so is the size and shape of my mind’s awareness.  Dancing with a partner, body to body, I get information about his/her movement from the point where my body is in contact with the surface of his skin. I may even feel the bone beneath, but my sense of touch does not stop there.  My mind’s body moves deeper within my partner to where I am touching the very ground beneath his feet. (This is an important thing to do if you are up on his shoulders, flying around head first to the earth.) To touch into and through all the joint connections of his body and feel the stillness and firmness of the floor is amazing and inexplicable, especially since my body is a separate structure. What makes sense to me experientially is that my mind is taking space, traveling beyond my body into his. As we dance, my physical well being depends on the accuracy of my touch knowing him - where he is strong or weak, where his energy is moving, where it is blocked. I feel no risk.

We all live in a sea of touch. We are so used to tactile experiences that we no longer notice them. There is no end to our mind’s touch within and without the body. And, every living part of our body seems capable of extending out into space. In fact my whole envelope of flesh seems to have qualities of listening and seeing. It is rare for me to keep my mind within the confines of its physical shape and size. You are probably no different. When I walk into a room with a low ceiling the top of my head gets tactile reference, or a sense of the ceiling.  Should the ceiling suddenly open up, or more likely, I go outside, the top of my head feels very different.  I get tactile reference anywhere in space that I extend my body.  Sometimes it is conscious, mostly just below consciousness.  What interests me is that I am getting this spatial information not on the surface of my skin, as one might expect.  It’s not in or on my body, but outside of my body that I feel it.  It’s as if my mind draws my body out, or my body draws out my mind.

What I notice is the body’s elasticity works well combined with sight or sound, either real or imagined. I notice that the state of my body and the state of my mind both influence it. I notice that tactile awareness extends and receives, touches and is touched, is active and passive, and can function spatially as a field of awareness. Thus, awareness, like presence is a shape, a volume. Touch can locate a point in space or a whole field, a three dimensional shape. In order to consciously perceive touch as a field the mind has to be out of linear thinking and into “open mind” or “whole mind”. It has to be able to hold the experience of many points in space and many levels of experience at the same time.  I notice that in order for my body to experience the field of touch it needs to fall open from the inside out. It helps if I can experience myself as a multiplicity of beings, many lives. It is best if I allow myself to disassemble into parts so freely that when my body assembles again it organizes internally with a light touch that is also strong - light, like a ballroom dancer directing me internally with just his fingertips. Then I also touch the world lightly, in order to know it. A light touch can penetrate deeper and further.

Touch plays in all of the dimensions of space and on levels of material and immaterial existence.  I can build a wall around my person and live within it. No one else need see the wall. I’ll feel its enclosure, though. I can have wings on my back and no one will see that either; although I may have trouble passing through doorways.  The wings are an illusion. What is of interest is that those imagined forms give tactile reference as if they were matter. How can something that is not real give me feedback?  It’s a wonderful conundrum. And why am I feeling it, not in my body, but out in space where a wing would be?

The elasticity of the body’s reach is fantastic for making great performances.  Watching a performer’s attention shift and change is to observe their inner experience.  When a dancer moves only their shape, the performance is flat.  Thin.  When a performer is dancing her experience in multidimensional space - inner space and outer space are included in the three dimensions - the performance begins to have fullness. When the performer is consciously touched by the space and the presence of that which is in space, then the performance is another step richer. Then she becomes vulnerable in the finest sense of the possible, the mercurial. She is able to be changed, flexible in her mind and her body, and she carries the future moment as a field of possible moments, not as a certainty. Possibility depends upon being open to it. It is the state of mind that is touchable. Now, add to this state the ability to be intentional in her touch and her being touched, and the dancer becomes magnetic.  The dancer becomes a shape shifter, dancing mind and body. She can touch to any height and penetration and be touched to any depth within. This is not a dance in which the dancer is a bubble of attention, one size, like the light from a light bulb. This is a dance in which the dancer plays with the meeting ground of awareness in time and space, like all the evolutionary stages of a celestial star, ever changing and being changed through the field of her tactile involvement with Presence. This is dancing with the depth of a black hole and the acceleration of a shooting star.  And, anyone can do it. Although it’s wonderful to have a great physical facility, it’s not necessary.  Living rooms are great places to have phenomenal dances.

I have a dancer’s lab in Santa Cruz that meets every Friday morning when I’m in town.  Many of the people  who come have worked with me for years. Often people arrive who are new. My only request is that they have some skill in a related physical pursuit; I want them to know where their body is in space.  This is where I am training the Mind in Motion. This work evolved out of years of exploring the dance form Contact Improvisation. Here, I have spent months, years, and decades investigating the material in this article. Most of class time is spent establishing dancers in a physical/mental state in which their bodies are responsive, saturated with mindful awareness, minds are working in “open” form and their field of awareness (think tactile) is flexible and in motion. At the end of each class we spend perhaps forty minutes dancing as a group, composing together. Every week a new dance, a score or frame is developed within which we all are working. Recently, I have been asking dancers to dance in the presence of another’s awareness of them.

And something new is afoot.

The presence of another person has a particular feel to it. There are two parts to it, the presence of their body and the presence of their awareness. I perceive both as “fields”; they extend outside the physical form, and they work together. Yet, they aren’t quite the same. I’ve worked with the body’s field for years, calling it the “energy body”. It can be felt with your hand and with skill, other body surfaces. It has common characteristics. Dancing within that field we notice there are different levels to it. The outside field has various layers of sensation; each has a definite shift in quality. First there’s the sensation of a boundary, then a feeling of increasing density.  Finally, there is the sense of an energetic “pillow” an inch and more away from the body.  This “pillow” is fun to dance within, close but not physically touching your partner. It has a thickness to it. If you are light enough you can almost bounce off it. It never ceases to amaze me how well my body’s mind knows where someone is before the slow thinking levels of my cognitive mind does. Dancing Contact Improvisation I find that I can release completely to the immediacy of my body’s mindful touch. 

Dancing at a distance of ten, twenty, thirty feet from someone I may have exceeded their energy body, but I can still be referencing their presence.  If I extend touch in their direction, supported by sight, then I can feel the direction of their action, the shifts in their attention, the rhythm and dynamics of their movement. When we both do this, each referencing the other, a reciprocal field of touching forms where we are in the presence of one another’s awareness. Something changes in the quality of the space. There is a shift. This feels different. 

When I ask my class to dance within the presence of someone’s awareness of them, I am asking them to feel the touch of someone’s mind, not just the touch of their physical body’s field, but of their mind’s body. This is different. Not just conceptually different but experientially different. And, something different occurs in terms of the organization of the dancers and the quality of their meeting.  We all notice it.  We say, day after day, “What just happened!?”

Something new is happening here.  Something is emerging in terms of our coordination that wasn’t here before.  Before, there was a subtle mental overlay of people figuring out what was going on, what to do next, looking at the dance from the outside.  Now, there is a web of connection where awareness’ interweave as synchronicity after synchronicity stuns us. It shares similarities with fish schooling or birds flocking in its immediacy of interpersonal response time. The organizations are tremendously complex.  The creativity of this pool of mind is brilliant. The compositional material arises freely and without a configured overlay, yet it is clean and intricate and interesting. The generosity of the field of touch is profoundly moving. There is room and support for everyone. Everyone is free. No one gets left behind. There is always somewhere to go, or be, and someone moving in another’s felt presence.

I think of this score as creating an interlocking web through the means of touch.  First, you extend to touch someone’s presence, but continue into that presence to feel back toward yourself through their mind’s awareness of your presence.  It’s “out”, with your extended body, and back “in” through their experience.  And it’s intentional.  You don’t just stumble upon this pool of mind; you engage it and sustain it. 

There is no trying to think this one through, but rather it calls for entering a state of being that supports this level of knowing.  It takes me to a term Joseph Needleman used, “state specific knowledge”; what gets known in this state is specific to the state itself and can not be accessed from other means. You can see it, you can feel it, but you can’t be it without entering the pool. 

I travel in many worlds, in most my work is celebrated, but in many it is discounted as “touchy feely”.  A lot of us hear this label, shrug and go on. Meanwhile, we live in a world in which we strive for progress through greater and more sophisticated mechanical and bio-mechanical technologies while we reduce  and dismiss our evolutionary potential as beings. I laugh at the idea that machines are going to free us.  Even in this past decade I find that less and less true as I get tied closer to my cell phone, my email and my laptop. The culprit is our reliance on externalized information at the detriment of experiential information. After all, in order to experience, your whole self has to show up… not just your eyes, not just your ears.  And, worst of all, your mind has to live “at home” in the body, in the present. I just watched “The Matrix” again, loved it again, but found it sad that the purpose of being in the present moment was to be able to stop bullets in their tracks. Ultimately in the Matrix, the answer to the metaphysical question, “Are there bullets or aren’t there bullets?” was, “There are no bullets in the mind but there are in reality”. The body is reality but the mind and the body are still split.  This is a world I question.  It has no true evolutionary potential. The tools get trickier but the states of mind stay the same. It is up to us to bring mind and body into union. Then things might really happen. Then, something truly new can emerge.