the poetics of orthobionomy

–– a 'book' of beginnings ––

some of the wall of the Medina of Marrakech. Photo by R. Valasek

orthobiomy -- how to be useful without doing harm

The next two seminars I currently have scheduled have much to do with playing with the body schema. To forward this project I am writing thoughts about the BS, publishing as I write though all my guides tell me no to do it this way. I will try to make it easy to look for.

 

Save the Dates: 22-23 February 2025:

Bend, Oregon

 

 

An Ortho-Bionomy® Phase Five Class

(The Phase of Subversion)

Care of Self Meets Care of Other

For Information and Registration contact

Elizabeth Mixon

+1 (352) 359-2910

elizabeth.mixon@gmail.com

 

Cost $375

SAVE $50, register by Jan 20, 2025

 

 

No Prerequisites for any of my classes. The richest learning is when there is a wide range of experience and peer learning.

 

Not your typical Phase Five class, but most of the classics will be presented (often with a twist). Phases are about shifting perspective and seeing how the world changes when you do. Phase 5 was a major turnabout, a deconstruction and reversal of the therapeutic relationship. We will closely examine the principle of reciprocity, the involvement of the Body Schema, and follow threads into various phases and domains of Ortho-Bionomy, centered on Phase Five.

 September 20-21, 2025

Westport CT

 

An Ortho-Bionomy® Phase Five Class

(The Phase of Subversion)

The Body Shema

Care of Self Meets Care of Other

For Information and Registration contact

Giedre Kere

 (203) 554-7249birthfeedlove@gmail.com

Cost:

$350 by July 1, 2025 , $380 after 

 

Phase Five     

 

Phase 5 becomes difficult, because we have been taught to do - do - do!!! To be a pure observer is the hardest thing for a human to do. Tor this is where it all evolves from, doing No-thing!

     We touch the body, still hands on we watch and by doing nothing, everything can happen. Again, doing nothing cannot be an intention - we are a pure observer. 'Ortho-Bionomists do nothing better', as someone once quoted.

     In Phase 5, we observe, calmly and with no fear! Then and only then can we feel the REAL movement, not only within ourselves, but with the other self we are with.

     Doing! Doing! Doing! - leaves no space for listening. When all you are doing fails... allow Phase 5 to do you instead!

                         Arthur Lincoln Pauls D.O.

           The Philosophy and History of Ortho-Bionomy

                                 (1st edition pp 48-49)

 

I have moved the notes that pertain to these classes. They continue at another location in the process of being always in process of becoming written.  Life itself is happening in the inchoative. Click on the internal hyperlink to go to the notes.

The Body Schema in Brief

Have you ever watched how infants play together? Two or more big babies sitting on a toy-strewn floor. The experts call it "parallel play."

This is what it's like to play with the body schema.

 

Have you ever experienced a "forced correction"? An expert, who knows how you should be arranged, like Procrustes (see glossary), puts you how you should be. Puts you perhaps in a contraption, a brace, so you will grow the way he wants you to. Or he performs a slam-bam manipulation. They might be right but they have made a cybernetic mistake. They think the flesh comes first; flesh rules. 

 

The situation is analogous to the hardware/software relationship. We have stepped into the realm of cybernetics. Norbert Wiener characterized cybernetics as concerned with "control and communication in the animal and the machine." The body schema is all about "control and communication." One can, directly and forcefully change the arrangement of the flesh but doing so can be either feckless (leading to an almost addictive relationship with a practitioner) or a chronic incoherence between flesh and "spirit." [Traditional healers from many different cultures speak of the "body spirit" in a way that calls to mind the functioning of the body schema.]

 

I first realized that the flesh follows when a client came to me with an injured ankle. I held her foot in a neutral position, that is I held it in the position it presented. Then I silently wondered if the ankle would rotate most readily this way or that way. As if it "wanted" to go that way (an external rotation). I held it with a feeling as if it were rotating (but the flesh itself held still). When the "movement" came to a stop Barbara (I will call the client Barbara because that's the name I remember) exclaimed, "That's the position my feet were in when they put me in braces." She was a duck-footed child. I invited Barbara to look at how her feet actually lay and she was surprised. I asked her how she happened to get injured. "I tripped on my own feet; I'm always tripping on my own feet.

 

I had not yet learned the idea of the body schema, it had not shown up in the many A&P classes I had had noR the A&P texts I had studied but I saw that her proprioception told her that her feet were not where she felt them to be. They had remained stubbornly where they were even though the flesh had been stripped off and moved elsewhere. No body likes to be pushed around.

 

We did some things, I don't recall what specifically, but likely we did some isometrics of a Phase Five sort, BS reunited with flesh. Barbara called me shortly after to report a follow-on. Driving home she had to pull over and do some uncontrollable sobbing (not a sad sobbing). Barbara was not a person to whom tears came readily. 

 

In the next month, Barbara's life changed radically. Where she had led a bit of a hermit's isolated life she became a socially engaged person. She changed her job and her living situation. I cannot say that just because went through a major transformation right after this session it was because of it (post hoc ergo proper hoc) but I have experienced enough such events that I am well convinced. 

 

Neurologists say that one property of the BS is that it is interpersonal. Some say that one body can know the intentions of another body. 

BOUNDARIES

Fractal Basin Boundary

SOME TEXT ABOUT BOUDARIES AND WHAT THEY ARE TO FOLLLOW SOON, I HOPE.

TRANSITION ZONES AND MUCUS AND CELL MEMBRANES AND ESCAPE DISTANCE ALL TOSSED INTO THE SALAD. I have started it HERE>>>

Itcho Hanabusa, Blind monks examining an elephant, 1888

    The Blind Man And The Elephant

It was six men of Indostan, to learning much inclined,
who went to see the elephant (Though all of them were blind),
that each by observation, might satisfy his mind.

The first approached the elephant, and, happening to fall,
against his broad and sturdy side, at once began to bawl:
"God bless me! but the elephant, is nothing but a wall!"

The second feeling of the tusk, cried: "Ho! what have we here,
so very round and smooth and sharp? To me tis mighty clear,
this wonder of an elephant, is very like a spear!"

The third approached the animal, and, happening to take,
the squirming trunk within his hands, "I see," quoth he,
the elephant is very like a snake!"

The fourth reached out his eager hand, and felt about the knee:
"What most this wondrous beast is like, is mighty plain," quoth he;
"Tis clear enough the elephant is very like a tree."

The fifth, who chanced to touch the ear, Said; "E'en the blindest man
can tell what this resembles most; Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an elephant, is very like a fan!"

The sixth no sooner had begun, about the beast to grope,
than, seizing on the swinging tail, that fell within his scope,
"I see," quothe he, "the elephant is very like a rope!"

And so these men of Indostan, disputed loud and long,
each in his own opinion, exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right, and all were in the wrong!

So, oft in theologic wars, the disputants, I ween,
tread on in utter ignorance, of what each other mean,
and prate about the elephant, not one of them has seen!
 
                                          John Godfrey Saxe (1816 –– 1867)

 

A Brief Pictorial Review of Where I've Been

(and why I've not been here)

Karen outside The Sphere

 

 

I have neglected this webbiness for several months. After Atlanta much was going on to keep me from it. Most of the distraction was travel. First stop Las Vegas to see The Sphere, the Postcard from Earth show. The Sphere is a paean to Technology. The script for the Aronofsky film must have been produced during the writers' strike: embarrassingly bad. It's all for the spectacle. 

 

 

 

 

The main purpose of the Vegas stop was to take the trip in stages, and build up our travel muscles. Use the spectacle of Las Vegas as motivation for walking.

 

 

On to Virginia to spend Christmas with our son, Cooper. The National Portrait Gallery was at the top of our DC agenda. Most happy to see the portrait of Queen Liliuokalani, which we normally see in her Iolani Palace home.

 

 

 

 

The courtyard itself was worth the trip to this Smithsonian museum. It is an architectural marvel.

 

 

 

Christmas on 'the farm' (near Culpepper VA) was white, but not with snow. On January 3 we all boarded a Royal Air Maroc flight from DC to Casablanca. From there took the train to Marrakech.

The bride is carried in on a palanquin

 

 

 

 

For a wedding feast on New Year's Eve.

 

 

 

 

Back to VA for a couple days then the final leg of the trip, Tacoma WA to spend Karen's birthday with her old friend. Unfortunately Karen came down with a nasty URI our last day in Morocco. No Hockey games, no going out. We bundled up, watched old movies, played games, sipped whiskey, and talked.

 

Home now for a few weeks, well recovered, even rejuvenated, and inspired. Inspired in part by a David Hockney exhibit at the Honolulu Museum of Art.

 

Collage br David Hockney. From the show Perspectve Should Be Reversed, at HOMA

 

 

 

It seems a long time since Atlanta in September, from which much will be developed,

 

Bust of President Jimmy Carter at the Carter Center

 

 

. . . and a long time too, since Albuquerque and the SOBI Instructor Retreat and Annual Conference, from which much may develop.

 

I find the greatest benefit from attending conferences is not from the formal program offerings but from being with people, old friends, new friends. The highlight for me of this conference was the unexpected presence of Dr. Lynn Drummer, the woman who brought Otho-Bionomy to me and many others. This was the last time I saw Lynn. She died this last December, two days before her 82nd birthday. I hope to add a Lynn Drummer page.

"My wife and my mother-in-law" W.E. Hill. 1915

You can always come up with other ways of looking at things. That's what the Phases gives us, different ways to approach the Body, different portals, differnt perspectives.

GRATITUDES

(AKA Acknowledgments)

I have had to train myself to move gratitude up to the front. Perhaps I will explore in one of my three Introductions why I have struggled with gratitude. For now I will try some simple lists. The start of one list is simple: Karen Valasek, spouse, partner, co-parent, orthobionomer extraordinaire. I would for sure put Lynn Drummer on the list. Probably next after Karen though in Ortho-Bionomy she . . .

<< New text box >>

Body Schema

Looking back at my list I wonder where this might go next. We won't know until we are there together doing it. But right now body schema is salient. I direct your here to see what's in the glassary on body schema. I hope to add more to this entry, or direct also to Motor Cognition (see References, Jennerod, Marc) but that's not yet written. 

 

Whatever names we use, whatever words, the curiosity at the core is this: How does a concept, a thought, move matter, achange the world. We want to hang our in that hinge. Playing in the "as-if." We will certainly play the childhood game of Simon Says but will be aiming for a different impact, a different take-away (not "You must pay close attention" as your teacher taught you).

 

As we play this game we will start to look at movement itself, a phenomenological examination of movement, the experience of movement. Heraclitus wrote that there is nothing but movement. Octavia Butler wrote that God is Movement. We will look at movement apophatically.

 

News flash! There is no Universe! It's been a multiverse all along.

 

The Extended Organism

If we were to define the body as the site of physiology then the appearance of the body radically changes. Many necessary physiological functions take place outside of what we normally define as the body. We can begin by looking at the microbiome. 

 

Orthobionomy clarifies the bond between self, other, and world

The Principle of Reciprocity: Care of the Other through Care of the Self

 

"Yes, there is beauty

There is love

There is joy.

All you who suffer from the world's

misery defend them."

––EEVA KILPI

Richard Valasek will be in the DC area in June.  He will be availabe to teach anywhere along the way with minimal travel expenses. Contact Richard if you are interested in coordinating a class in early June.

 

Flaneur (Out for a Stroll)

       Contact 

  Richard Valasek           1308 Ala Kapuna St. Apt 103

         Honolulu HI 9681 

        +1 (808) 256-1646    

    richard.valasek@gmail.com

 

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I am I and my circumstance;

and, if I do not save it, I do not save myself.                       —JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET

Changing the Conversation

I was born. I am always a vessel for something other than myself. The self is only a

vehicle for Foreign matter which comes from elsewhere and is destined to go on

elsewhere without me, whether it's words, smells, vision    ––EMANUELE COCCIA  Metamorphoses

The Story Teller

Now, more than ever . . . our place in the universe and the place of the universe in us, is proving to be one of active relationship. That is more than a scientist's credo. The separateness of our lives is a sham. Physics, mathematics, music, painting, my love for you, my work, the star-dust of my body, the spirit that impels it, my politics,  clocks diurnal, time perpetual, the roll, rough, tender, swamping, liberating, breathing, moving, thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are patterned together.

      —JEANETTE WINTERSON                            Gut Symmetries

What you do, what you become, is not my concern.                      ROBERT MCCALL

 

 

Yes, there is beauty

There is love

There is joy.

All you who suffer from

the world's miseries

Defend them.

                         ––EEVA KILPI

 

"Don't immanentize the eschaton."  

                     ––ERIC VOEGELIN

For the god of writing is also the god of death. He will punish the imprudent who, in their quest for unlimited knowledge, end up drinking the dissolved book.…To drink the tear and wonder about the strangeness of its taste compared to one's own...

 

 

Jean-Marie Benoist, 
The Geometry of the Metaphysical Poets
 
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