pushing pulling and making change

Sometimes I am going to share practices or activities for helping you and your kin, the folks you work with, bring different kinds of embodiment or movement play into your work. This is an open sourced workshop. Go ahead and use it. Ask me about it. Bring me to do it with you. If you use this, please just credit where you learned it from. I learned what is on this page from Suzanne River, now passed, who learned these elements from Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen through the School for Body Mind Centering. Gratitude to Alejandra Tobar Alatriz for playing with me and helping to create and earlier and first version of this workshop. 

Pushing, pulling and making change: a 90 minute workshop

This workshop is used to explore the developmental patterns of the body that are integrated through life, supporting our bodies abilities to move, make change, integrate information and make connections with other people. Here, the workshop is used as a kind of lab or practice space to look at the collective body eg: our organizations, our collaboratives, our collectives. Through movement and information, individuals are invited to look at their social justice work critically, identifying “stuck” places or opportunities for different kinds of action. Every directive in here can be modified to meet your body's abilities and needs.

Framing time:  5 minutes

• Frame: this is a form of practice and learning, this is a kind of lab. This isn’t about getting anything write but it’s about surfacing information, noticing what comes up but not attaching to it. Just noticing.
• All life moves as a pattern of contraction and expansion. Every cell. Every organ. Every living organism. Every family. Every community. The planet. Expansion and contraction is what makes movement possible. If you break expansion and contraction down, you get a series of steps: yield, push, reach, grasp, pull, with a pause or moment of intention between each one. These are also the basic developmental movement patterns of infants: the steps we repeat as we learn how to move from a life lived only in fluid to the ability to jump in the air and catch a ball. These are also the steps we go through in order to build trust with our environment.
• Today’s practice is to play with these movements: with the movement of yield, of push, of reach, of grasp and of pull. To sense where there is ease and where we are awkward. To notice where we can play or fluidly move and where we can't. This practice lifts up information. All through our work for liberation, we are going through the same steps: needing to sometimes yield, to sometimes push, to sometimes reach or grasp or pull. Everyone of us has habits; some things we do more often and other things we avoid. Don’t assume you know which is which for you or for someone else. Play with these movements and see what happens.
• Take care of yourself with the movement, go where you feel comfortable, make any necessary accommodations. Remember, stillness is also a form of movement. So is breathing.

Movement:  30 minutes

• Move into the developmental stages - movement practice without theory - yield - push-reach-yield-grasp-pull
• Start with tonic lab. This is also shivasana in yoga. It’s the first reflex the body has; lying on the floor and feeling gravity. Start here. Let yourself fall into gravity.
• Move to standing as you are able. Notice how this movement happens. Be curious.
• In your own space, invite your body to feel what it is to yield. To push. To reach. To grasp. To pull. Feel them clearly. Merge them. Play with them. Listen to yourself.
• Partner with another person. Do the same using each other’s hands, bodies as the other against which you pull or push. Notice what feels easy. Notice what feels awkward. Listen to what comes up in you as you practice your own development against and with the body of another.

Framing/information language: 5 minutes

• Some language about the developmental patterns and the body
• There is a pattern for how our individual bodies engage with other individual bodies as part of a broader collective body through relationship (baby against mother, developmental stages that move us towards separation, patterns that are then repeated in all of our friend/lover/colleague relationships). These have been created through an evolutionary process. They are always playing out when we are together. They are impacted by power, by intimacy, by our individual and shared physical sense.

Group exploration exercise:  15 minutes  

• Put sheets of paper up on the wall
• Frame: now this is the lab moment. What we believe is that any kind of change we make, any kind of activism, comes from the collective body seeking fuller embodiment/presence. What we are inviting this group to do is now be in learning lab together and to see what happens when we apply all of this to how we make change. Remember, for the purpose of this workshop, we are thinking of activism as collective strategies for making collective change. Think of different kinds of change work you are involved in - either now or in the past. Another point, everything can be a tool or a weapon.
• Break into small groups of three and reflect on the following questions
• What is great or useful about each of these patterns? How does it have the potential to move your work forward?
• What can potentially hinder collective process?
• All groups share out on the pages on the wall

Movement practice: 10 minutes

• Movement break: We are going to use movement to experience the patterns again but now we will do them as  a group. Because we still don’t know each other, there are a few boundaries. For one, we don’t assume that we’re about to get in a great big puppy pile of bodies. You can choose if you want to touch or be touched by others. But move into your group. Start exploring and playing with the patterns but the point of this is to notice how the other people in your group affect you. As you move, notice if their reach shifts your push. If you feel compelled to move away from someone when they are reaching, if you feel the desire to lean into their push. Notice how your individual self is impacted by the others around you.

Transition: 5 minutes paired check in.

• Transition - five minute check in with your group. What did you notice?

Group conversation: 15 minutes

• For each of you, notice: what patterns feel more habitual, accessible or cultural? What patterns do you privilege in your movements? Your work? Your relationships? Which feel the least embodied or available as a tool to support your life? Your work?
• Full embodiment of our change work means having available to us all of these movement patterns at all times. It means being able to shift between them within five minutes or within five hours or within the space of a week. Any pattern held or maintained over a long time is not sustainable. Pushing and pushing and pushing is both exhausting and limiting.
• If there is time, more conversation about this.

Ending circle: 5 minutes

• In expanding, I
• In contracting, I