the poetics of orthobionomy

–– a 'book' of beginnings ––

orthobiomy -- how to be useful without doing harm

A little note. I use Grammarly (basic only). I think this is the closest I have come to using AI. I assume Grammarly uses some form of AI. I recently got a message of congratulations: I have used 65% more "unique" words than anybody (that they track). For this, (comma insertion recommended by Grammarly) I apologize. I don't know if this is more a sign of failure than accomplishment. I know how off-putting it is to encounter unfamiliar sesquipedalian words. As a child, this lure of the big word was thrust upon me. I got great reward for learning to say "A kiss is an equilateral juxtaposition of two orbicular muscles in a simultaneous state of contraction," and to know what all those big (sesquipedalian) words meant. My word-hord grew from there. I try to be scrupulous in finding the simplest words to convey what I'm thinking, to scrunch up as close I can to "reality."  Obviously I have more work to do. 

 September 20-21, 2025

Westport CT

An Ortho-Bionomy® Phase Five Class

The Haunted Body--The Spectrlity of the Body Schema

For Information and Registration contact

Giedre Kere

 (203) 554-7249birthfeedlove@gmail.com

Cost:

$350 by July 1, 2025 , $380 after 

This class will be co-taught with Cathy Krenicky. Notes for the class can be found forming here.

I have been asked to teach an Ortho-Bionomy class with particular attention paid to the role of the body scheme (BS). Since being asked, I have found that my play with the BS has run me into hauntology. Some titles I play with:

The Haunted Body

A Body Without Organs

The Ghost in the Machine

Spectral Presence

The Subjunctive Body

Nothing to Be Seen Here

I have placed a hauntology bibliography just for writings exploring hauntology. Some of the texts are not easy to read but altogether they indicate the seriousness of the study. I am building notes for the class on a page titled "Hauntology."

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

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>>>

    The Blind Man And The Elephant

A Brief Pictorial Review of Where I've Been

(and why I've not been here)

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 . . .

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: Care of the Self through Care of the Other.

Contact Richard here