LOOKING AT THE MOON – A JOURNEY OF TRANSFORMATION
1. The Seed
During my Yoga of Heart teacher training, taking place in Zagreb, Croatia, back in 2015, my dear friend Irma gave a lecture titled The Biomechanics of Movement. At the end of her talk she mentioned the term somatics, as a rapidly emerging field of various approaches of understanding body and movement. Even though I had heard the word before I didn’t really know anything about it. I was a dedicated yoga practitioner, but at the same time I was looking for different ways of exploring moving and being, ways that are more free and playful than the conventional yogic framework. After the class I asked her to tell me some names of somatic approaches to research. So it happens that I came home that day with a piece of paper with several names on it: Feldenkrais, Laban Movement, Contact Improvisation and BMC – Body-Mind Centering. I sat down in front of my computer, read all the names, trying to feel which one of them I would research first. And I said to myself: “This BMC (Body-Mind Centering) sounds like a strong name, let me start with that one.” Little did I know that choice would take me on a journey of my own personal transformation. I found Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s videos on YouTube and my reaction was one of amazement. Something inside of me started pulsating with excitement, telling me that I had found the right thing and to look further into it.
Where does this intense drive to pursue learning come from? Why are we in resonance with certain things and ideas, moved by their very existence, while some others don’t move us at all? What does it mean to pursue a certain path? The initial stage of any kind of meaningful learning process starts with the planting of a seed, the meetingpoint with something new, yet unexplainably familiar. We are called to explore, discover and study, not just on a surface level, but to dive in deeply, as if our life depends on it. This initial impulse is less analytical and more intuitive. Our whole body reacts when encountering new wisdom or a teacher with whom we resonate. The most beautiful thing for me in this process is the beginner’s enthusiasm, an art that is to be cultivated as a life-long practice and an approach to life.
Since there was no BMC community in my homeland, I studied on my own, experimenting. I bought DVDs and books from Bonnie’s website, trying to figure it all out. For me it was a valuable experience, as I spent many hours embodying the materials in the privacy of my own personal space. I was learning a new somatic language, and also, a new verbal language that accompanied the content of study. I now know that this phase of working on my own would turn out to be very helpful at later stages of my BMC journey, because it gave me the roots of my work with BMC. It gave me the vocabulary, which I was yet to learn to put into meaningful speech. Of course, the whole process was interspersed with much confusion. Many things I didn’t understand, but welcoming questions was an important part of the process (and still is). I started to perceive myself differently and open up to new ways of learning and to new possibilities of moving and being. I couldn’t yet explain what was happening, but I could tell I was on to something huge. Once we set on a journey of exploration of consciousness, we don’t really know what’s ahead of us and we meet many surprises and unexpected turns. All we can do is keep taking one step after the other. What matters is following our internal guidance navigation. I could feel a new life path was starting to emerge, still being quite vague, but somehow it felt important, because it was related to conscious, embodied life and conscious embodied movement through that life.
2. The Growth
In the process of receiving the transmission of knowledge (and the spirit behind the knowledge) the student is eventually drawn to the community of fellow seekers. The next natural step in my discovery of BMC was to step out of my space and travel in order to find this community. Travel in itself and meeting new people is always a rich and transformative experience, even more so when there is a definitive purpose behind it. I attended several of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s workshops in Europe and the States, and eventually in 2019 started the Somatic Movement Education program with the Moveus team in Germany, graduating in 2022. The SME courses were all very intense, just like life was in the past three years, going through the pandemic and many other personal trials and tribulations. Each module helped me find different levels of internal organization and support, reminding me over and over again of how strong, resilient and beautiful we truly are.
The most valuable part of experiencing BMC in a group setting, that the solo study could never provide, was being present in the “mind of the room”. I understand the “mind of the room” as an overall vibration that can be felt in the space (according to the sensitivity of our own “sensors”) while a group of people is immersed in a joint exploration. Just by being present in a certain vibrational field, we are changing, transforming and awakening our dormant possibilities. This whole idea dismantles the traditional mechanical modes of learning by uploading information into our frontal lobes. It is vibrational learning, in which a new and a fresh experience can emerge from the cells themselves. In a way we allow ourselves to remember, by coming into resonance and taking a step back from trying to control the situation.
I became aware of the importance of community and the sharing of individual experience in the formation and growth of BMC, realizing that one is not studying a fixed system, but rather exploring a living, growing organism of knowledge that is changing and evolving as we as a community are evolving. It is empowering to realize one is a co-creator of the whole process through their own experience, rather than being a passive recipient of a fixed body of knowledge. Also, when in a group, one is not focusing solely on self-exploration, but also on the rich and complex idea of holding space for others – co-creating a safe container that allows the richness of exploration to flow freely. The opportunity to witness other people’s movement and expressions and to give and receive touch and support, helped me to dive much deeper than in a solo study, and I found new possibilities of movement, shedding light on dark spaces, blind spots which had previously been unreachable to me. Moreover, all these practices we do are always based on relationship – with self and other. They never happen in isolation, having a purpose just in themselves, but are always related to the larger frame of Life. Yes, we explore movement and we give ourselves time and space to explore various body systems – each playing its own part in the symphony of the body. But in the midst of all these explorations more important questions arise – the ones related to the very nature of our consciousness, our complexity and multidimensionality as human beings, our role as an individual in a group or a society, our life on this living, breathing planet as living, breathing organisms made of cells. In this process, friendships and connections are formed. Experience is born. We practice kindness and self-love. We practice patience. Our body, being the microcosm always teaches us about the macrocosm – the Universe, and vice-versa.
3. The Fruits
After every intense cycle of BMC I would feel full to the brim and the next step would always be a time for rest, integration and processing. There is only so much sensing that a person can do at a certain time. What I’ve noticed is that the process of embodiment is an organic process and that it cannot really be rushed. Certain things open up and become clear, certain tissues soften and release, and certain movements and insights appear only when we are ready. There is no need to push ourselves. Sometimes this happens fast and sometimes it takes years. We have to remove ourselves from the aggressive and mechanical goal oriented approach to self-discovery, and tune into much softer, organic impulses. It is nevertheless an intense process that is not always pleasant, because as we dive in all these different tissues of our body-mind a lot of challenges can arise. In order to know ourselves, we need to face ourselves and the totality of our internal contents. But it’s best if we approach this process with utmost gentleness. We can feel our strength awakening, but like a flower that’s blooming, we are also quite gentle and delicate.
BMC made me appreciate all these beautiful dichotomies that we have inside of us: strength/gentleness, stability/fluidity, going within into self/stepping out and opening to the world, yielding/rising, expanding/condensing. These opposites complement and need each other. There is no one without the other. In the end we are looking for balance. We are discovering our own rhythms, and as every individual is different, so we all have to discover individually what these rhythms are for every one of us. Also, how do we study and take in knowledge? How do we embody? How do we teach? There is no one formula, this is a process of individual discovering, venturing into the unknown and coming back with insights, small parts of the map, which we can then meticulously, over a period of a lifetime, start putting together. Nobody can do that for us. We are in the process of creating our own personal style and creating our life. There is great strength in the realization that we are the creators of our own life path, and that we are free to choose the roads upon which we tread on. Our life reveals itself to us step by step, and in each moment we can take a pause, go back to our own vibration, ground fluid, our own signature drone, and make a decision, a new step from a place of consciousness, fully owning all our previous steps and all our past and future choices. In a way it is taking full responsibility for our life.
When we are moved on a deep level, sooner or later we have an impulse to share with other people. Being in contact with different BMC teachers, witnessing their different teaching styles, allowed me to appreciate the variety of creativity in transmitting the material. Many of us are often confused how to use this material with other people, how to implement it into our teaching modalities, but I’ve noticed how much space and creativity this knowledge offers. And being that it is always an invitation for exploration, both the teacher and the students are in this wonderful space of not knowing, which allows playfulness and curiosity to surprise us. But even if we never share the material with others, it is still worth the effort, just for the sake of personal experience. One of my questions that keep arising is how to integrate all these beautiful moments, feelings, principles, and insights into everyday life. I guess that would be full embodiment. I’ve noticed that even the most beautiful intense experience fades away after some time if I don’t invest the effort to nurture and grow what I have received.
One of the most interesting aspects of Body-Mind Centering for me is the study of embryology. Awakening the memory of our creation from sperm and egg, in the moment when life said, “Yes,” reveals that we are made from a pure intelligence of Life within an unmistakable fluid process. We still remain that same marvelous process, always creating, evolving, changing, transforming, flowing, expressing, molding and being molded. Somehow, along the way, we have developed a false sense that we are some kind of a rigid structure, but that is not really true. Rather, we have an ability to remember our beginnings, the voyage of formation of our physical vessel that is imbued with consciousness. We have the ability to “find the joy that began the journey”, our true nature. And we still haven’t reached our final form. The more I dive in into the consciousness of the body, a sense of utmost respect for life emerges. Respect for the wonder and mystery of life that we are. Our bodies hold so many secrets. Buried treasures – so much delight, depth, and information; so much pain and suffering from personal, ancestral, and collective memories. The extent of it is beyond our full grasp. The material, which is us, is always new, thus allowing never-ending exploration. Bonnie once gave a nice analogy of this process of self-discovery, and two different ways we can approach it. Two people are walking in the evening, and the sky is filled with stars and a full moon shines. One person says to the other: “Look, the Moon! It’s amazing!” And the other replies: “What is there to see? I’ve seen the Moon many times”, even though the truth is he never saw that particular moon. We are that Moon. When we allow ourselves to be amazed by the ordinary, with elements we take for granted, that is when our senses start opening up and life shines through in all its beauty.
Ivan Vuković