LIFESTYLE • HEALTH • BODY EXPRESSION
5 tips to connect with the body from the point of view of Corporal Expression
By Gabriela Moura*
“It is the a priori state of the body that determines the richness of lived experience”
Therese Bertherat
1. Still or listen. Lie on the floor in comfortable clothing. Observe your body for a few minutes, without moving it. What can we perceive of the internal movements and of our bodily state? There are movements generated by breathing, the movement of the organs, the heart, the blood.
2. Wake up. Get in touch with what your body needs and wants. Change your position, and hold it for a few seconds. Then change again. I repeated a few times looking to contract and expand.
3. Self-massage. Give yourself a body massage. The practice of self-massage can always be accompanied by many benefits. In this case, the idea is to prepare the body for physical activity, so it is a massage to stimulate muscle action, recognition of the body and its volume, activate blood circulation, decontract and thus work on mobility.
4. Conscious movement. Observe the energy expenditure that you usually apply for basic and daily tasks, such as getting up, standing, sitting, walking. Investigate how you can optimize those movements and make them more dynamic, clean and fluid. See what it would be like to modify those times, to do everything very fast or very slow. And what are the possible space deployments. You can do everything small, short, close or, on the contrary, expand and from the movement gain space, change directions.
5. Registration. Work on building body image. Try to perceive your postures and inquire about how you are feeling when you are in that posture. For example: how are your shoulders? Contracted? When you stand, is your weight evenly distributed or do you have more weight on one side than the other? How is your spine and neck when you are sitting? Finally, according to the observation, you can build a new notion of your being-body.
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* Gabriela Moura was born in São Paulo, Brazil. She has lived in Argentina since 2014. She teaches dance classes and training, and is studying a degree in Choreographic Composition in Corporal Expression at the National University of the Arts (UNA).
Photos: Rodrigo Vazquez Avila