Pursuit of Freedom | Witnessing the Limitations
Apr 09, 2021
Witnessing…
It’s like my body doesn’t know what freedom feels like. It’s been so conditioned to form shapes, stack up straight, align in this way, conform to this particular and precise structure… It’s forgotten how to move in a way that is liberated from ideology and theory. It’s like it's begging to be released back into the feminine state of being: uninhibited, chaotic, unpredictable, and wild… Soft, sensitive, intuitive, and divine. But, it doesn’t know how. Or it doesn’t remember how.
I watch my mind get in the way… Repeating patterns, habitual movements, and landing back in familiar somatic spaces. Holding onto preconditioned paradigms and creating shapes that my body ritually recognizes.
It’s like-- it's hard to create new pathways when the conditioning and container has been formed so strongly. I am accountable to this conditioning. Yoga is under disguise as feminine in nature, but really it’s the opposite, composed of structure, strategy, and framework. It’s hard to allow surrender to free flow when the body only knows how to stay within the lines and create the shapes that have been set and defined.
Witnessing the discomfort of my mind as it continually tries to direct and execute it’s intelligence in a body that is craving nothing more than freedom.
Freedom that has been forgotten… That’s been brainwashed into rules, regulations, and algorithms. Theoretical, ideological, postural, methodologies… So ingrained in the mind and body that the body doesn’t even know what to do without them.
Brainwashed to believe it has to be this way… When really it’s just a way for us to control from the outside in, rather than start to navigate our somatic territory from the inside out.
Maybe we forgot who our true teachers are: gravity, space, the breath…
Maybe we forgot that our true intelligence lives in dynamic, ever changing, pulsing rhythms of movement that are rarely confined or contained into specific shapes and forms.
Maybe we forgot that our most supreme teacher is living within… And the shapes are unique to each body, experience, environment, and emotion.
Today in my first Continuum class with Bobbie Ellis, I realized that my mind continues to keep me safe within the conditioned confines of body “shoulds.”
Bobbie set the space with a “container and tools.” I figured, this will be no problem… I know how to move.
Yet, the whole time I was feeling stuck in my routines, posture, and go-to templates. There was little instruction and little guidance and so much space.
I had all the freedom in the world and no place to go except for everywhere that I have already been.
It was like a blank canvas and I only knew how to draw circles and boxes… And it felt like I was just wasting my creative capability. It felt like I didn’t know how to listen to what my body wanted in a container that was so loose and limitless. How could I be so disconnected from freedom in my body when all I do is move?
I realize… this is new territory that I need to explore… To find freedom from the inside out, to be able to feel into organic, dynamic, limitless movement with no mental noise: rules, posture, bullshit.
I wonder what it would feel like to really know how to listen to my body… To know what it wants and how it wants to move without needing a postural template or sequence of poses. I wonder what forms of expression are waiting to unfold within me… If I could just release everything I already know? I wonder what internal feedback is waiting to reveal itself to me… perhaps as soon as I release the need for external feedback, information, and instruction.
Maybe it comes down to trusting ourselves and relying on our individual and unique truths that are always sourced from within, but rarely listened to or heard.
I wonder if unlearning is just as important as learning… And of course… I think it is.
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