Pilates and Interoception

The inner body as a psychic form

I have for the past few months been undertaking pilates exercises. These have helped me to get more in touch with my body and to teach myself about myself. Each week as I go through a set of controlled exercise routines, I am gradually, very slowly, increasing my ability to control my body. In Pilates, students, like myself, are taught to employ the repetition of specific movement skills, and gradually through repetition, hopefully the brain will also rewire itself, as a more body aware organ. This hopefully will develop my neuromuscular synapses, and lead to a heightened body awareness and therefore more precise body/joint/muscle control, something that I am testing out by playing more and more table tennis.

One example is the fact I often experience lower back pain. I have realised that I have trouble sensing the position of my pelvis in its body space and find it hard to differentiate the movement of my pelvis from my spine or distinguish the movement of my hip joint from my spine. I am slowly becoming aware that I can more precisely activate my core and I am sensing the fact that gradually I can take control of an inner set of relationships, that previously I wasn't even aware of.

My trainer/teacher gets me to make certain movements over and over again, their repetition has helped me to internalise certain movement skills, an ability that I am beginning to see as being essential for my lower back health. I see this development as fostering improved communication between my brain and my body, which should also eventually result in more resilient muscles and an increased capacity to sustain effort over an extended period; again I am trying to test these things out by playing table tennis. For instance how quickly I react to changes in incoming stimulus or how long I can sustain a certain level of bodily concentration.

All of which I am of course then trying to bring into my visualisation of interoception research. I am trying to approach the issue from several angles at once, putting myself and my feeling tone, at the centre of the process. I cant really ask others to believe in what I'm doing, if I am not prepared to undertake an investment in the full possibilities that begin to open up, as I continue to explore the relationship between my inner body and my outer psyche in relation to the way that my outer body hosts my inner psyche. The folding that I feel takes place, seems rather like a Klein Bottle, my insides becoming my outsides, my facial signalling reflecting my stomach feelings and my mind reflecting my body. 

Studies for body mind awareness

The animation I'm working on tries to deal with these issues and at times it represents feelings trapped inside the body, at other times the body becomes a landscape and then we slip between the body and its interior organs and the feeling tones or sensations that make up the emotive landscape that emerges from the physical release of hormones into the bloodstream. 

The images above eventually become embedded into ideas for a body moving within a body. The 'trunk' being a totally separate organ, seen as an idea rather than as some sort of anatomically accurate image. 

Four versions of a trunk, ready to be animated

Body parts to be attached to a trunk

As I begin to put the animation together, the process will like all my other drawing activities, eventually begin to tell me what it is becoming about. This finding clarity in the muddle of doing, is I'm afraid my most valued methodology, but it is not one that sits very well within the established research list of approaches to attaining new knowledge.

However here is a first indication of what the interior somatic feelings are looking like.

The growing awareness of a pain emerging

In the image above, I'm trying to fuse a shape of a pain with an emotive reading of a response to it. The landscape itself is a fusion of two sets of drawings, one of local woods and another of mountains of slag drawn from memory. It is movement that tells us something is alive and active, a throbbing pain, being as alive as a flying bird, all inhabiting the biological ecosphere. 

The animated gif image below is an indication of how the trunk and body parts will come together. I was initially going to hand make all the parts of the animation and had already made a few cutout puppets, jointed with paper fasteners, but Doctor Simpo, an old friend and animator as well as comic maker and many other things, suggested that he could digitally animate the figure for me. This is his test, to see how the figure sits against the background. 

As the figure moves through the body/landscape it talks to itself, using a language that has been constructed from sounds made as people respond to different feelings, see Sound sample

The object in the frame that looks a bit like a helmet with two horns, is what I termed a psychic infuser, it is where life energies can be piped into the ground from living creatures, in this case birds attempt to breath life into the landscape. You can get a better idea of how that works from the image below, which is a colour test, to see how orange would sit against the blues. I'm yet to animate the birds properly, as they need to be redrawn. 

As I return to pilates, I will continue to use the experience to visualise a somatic awareness of the body in motion, alongside trying to represent the feeling tone that I have as I emotionally think about my ageing abilities to move. Therefore the visualisation of emotional feelings has to be coupled with 'invented' body forms, something that is also being developed by another related project that has emerged from the meetings I occasionally have with artists that worked with myself on 'The Body I am in' online project. I am in the middle of a new project directed by myself, but with growing interventions and ideas from the other participants, whereby three of us are working to develop body costumes to help externalise internal feelings but there is so much going on there that it will need a post to itself to communicate what is happening. Hopefully, this work will begin to fuse with all my other projects, such as the work at Pinderfields Hospital, and I will begin to see what it is I'm actually doing. 

References:

K. Caldwell, M. Adams, R. Quin, M. Harrison, J. Greeson. 2013. Pilates, mindfulness and somatic education, J. Dance Somat. Pract. 5 (2):141.

See also:

Fine art animation

Drawing and mindfulness

Drawing and healing

Visualising energy flow

The embodied diagrams of Nicholas Gansterer

Drawing correspondence: The Body I am in