With our imagination, we can access sensation. With sensation, we can access movement. With movement, we can access an experience. Experience repeated creates and changes us. Through my research, I started calling this self-ing. Self-ing is a way of being more active in how we view the idea of self and being a self in time and a body in space. It speaks to the fact that it is a process rather than a state. It means we can't just say, "That's just who I am," because we are always changing and have the option to change.
Also, self-ing as an action that includes movement means that we need to question how we are moving and our assumptions about movement. If there is obvious pain, restriction, or lack of energy, this is your body pushing itself into the foreground. But the opposite can also be true. If our mind and thoughts are so loud that nothing else comes through, like in my rut landscape, it's only a matter of time before pain will come, or our kinesthetic options—that is, the life experiences we have available to us—will decrease.
When I move in ways that reflect the learning process of who I am becoming, I am not just moving better, but I am self-ing better. I can feel the coherence of my body taking over and shifting from being an object of preoccupation, distortion, and fixation to moving to the background as an experience of being alive. Then, my central healing impulse is more available because my body is not living in its compensatory nervous system patterns. The living experience becomes the moment. This, I believe, is the body’s silent thesis.
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