20 Minutes Dance (Sensing, Mindfulness of the Body)

ToolboxProblem mapping
Written By collaboratio helvetica

If your mind is very preoccupied with thinking and you feel disembodied (e.g. like a head walking around), this is an effective way of arriving at the moment by feeling your body. This is a practice for embodiment and groundedness, also called mindfulness. It is one way to get out of the habitual thinking and step into the language of the body, which is feeling. It allows you to fully arrive and be present in a more whole way. It can be used by itself or as a preparation for Stuck Exercise or 4D Mapping.

Process

Needed time & Tools

  • 20min

  • Music

Personal experience

For me this practice is to actually allow myself to become more embodied and grounded, to be “that simple”, because it actually it that simple if we surrender to the innate intelligence of the body. The thinking mind keeps taking over, but is a limited, although very helpful, form of intelligence. The practice feels more of an unlearning instead of a learning process, I let the tracking of my mind go and drop it into my feeling body. Something I imagine is that the head is only one of the six limbs (arms, legs, tail, head) instead of the leader. Inspired by Embodied Flow I sometimes add tapping my body silently saying to myself “I am here”, starting to embody every cell of my body. In that way I allow myself to arrive deeper and deeper, seeing it as a process to invite all the particle parts of myself to be witnessing and present to the very moment of time-space I am in without being scattered by different thoughts in the past and future. The somatic experiencing of my body and paying attention to the source of feelings calms my nervous system and allows me to be present while loosening the chit chat of my mind including worries of appearance, etc. Also, it slows me down to catch habits of interactions with others in order for me to deconstruct them and practice to change them towards what I want them to be. When facilitating I sometimes tell people to move faster than they can think, which allows for the tracking of the mind to calm down. 

Sources and Further literature

  • https://www.presencing.org/resource/tools/20-minutes-dance-desc

  • https://www.presencing.org/files/tools/PI_Tool_SPT_20MinDance.pdf

Written by Michela Güttinger

collaboratio helvetica
Previous

Unser Catalyst Nils Landolt in der Glarner Woche über die Schule der Zukunft
Next

Stuck exercise for individuals and groups (Sensing)