What about drawing and craft making while eating breakfast, using the food processor as an oven, singing about random stuff at the top of your voice, wiping your sticky hands on your brother’s t-shirt, rolling around in delight on the kitchen floor while sticking your feet in the pantry, clearing a surface with one sweep of an arm, wailing because the dress you want is in the washing machine and five minutes later laughing about burnt toast…? Seriously what about it?
This is a regular morning in the MalingSmith household and it’s mostly the behaviour of the little people – mostly. And we spend much of our time hustling our little people to follow our much-needed order of the morning to get out the door on time! At what point I ask, does regimentation and routinisation kick in? At what point do we say this thing and that behaviour belongs here and not there? Yes I know there is the matter of our safety, productivity, cleanliness and general social functioning not to mention order to consider, but I wonder if in becoming so fixated on fitting everything nicely into where it ‘should’ belong and how it ‘should’ be, we’ve greatly reduced our capacity to feel and compartmentalised ourselves out of our embodiment. We’ve shut off our ‘all over everywhereness’.
With little people when something goes awry it’s a full-bodied, full throated and an all-on emotional episode. While joy, can induce random flying limbs, squeals registering way off the richter, human catapults and your presumed super human strength propping spontaneous acrobatic contortions. These responses are ‘all over everywhereness’. They’re not only happening in body, while spirit is off flying with the birds and mind is thinking about what’s for dinner!
Morning madness is also ‘all over everywhereness’. Life with little kids is magic, it’s chaotic, it’s uncontrolled and it’s ‘all over everywhereness’. Your house is all over the place and things are everywhere, emotions move so fast you sure as heck can’t hold onto them, you’re so physically entwined with each other it’s delicious and utterly annoying – the loving and living is right now in each action packed moment. So I want to figure out how to live like this more in my ‘out of the family’ life…and the place I find gives me the keenest access is my movement practice.
It’s my kids who have reminded me of my ‘all over everywhereness’ – both a feeling and behavioural state. It’s about how I can fully participate. Right now I can choose to feel the carpet under my folded legs, hear the whir of the air con, that passing car, notice my hair tickling my cheek, curl my spine, circle my head, watch my fingers move as I type, see the contrast of black ‘n’ white on the screen, think back to my morning, feel warmed by the thought of my children, chuckle at our madness and well register here and now all over and everywhere because that’s what we are and how life is.
Life is messy and all over the place and can be everything all at once and in a moment flip and we’re somewhere else. It’s visceral, fluid and like our systems, simultaneous. We can try and rein it in, order it and indeed this can be helpful, but not at the expense of ourselves.
If we continuously tell ourselves to be a certain way in a given context then we shut out possibilities and engrain behaviour right. Well, our need to control has spilled over into how we construct ourselves. It is now a deeply engrained cultural habit to compartmentalise the very material of you, to break you into parts and guess what… disembody yourself. We do this by constantly referring to ourselves as body, mind and spirit – it’s almost as if they’re different countries! I often hear ‘my body has let me down’, ‘I’m so in my head at the moment’, ‘the body is…’ well the simple fact is you can’t separate body, mind and spirit or head and torso, if you did you’d be dead. Or at least you wouldn’t be the living breathing human being reading this. You’d be some other version capable of astro travelling and surviving disembodied or perhaps, and this is the sci-fi lover in me, some digital organism superimposed onto the fabric of reality…Simply, you wouldn’t be you now.
For the past three and a half years I’ve been working feverishly to create a platform and a community – an epicentre for a conversation about us as magnificent human beings! We have multiple intelligences or perceptual capacities – ways of sensing, creating and knowing our world. We are physical, we are matter, we are imaginative, we are emotional, we are intellectual, we are energetic, we are breathy and spacious, we are contextual…a multi-dimensional being who thinks, feels, listens, creates, sheds, regenerates, digests, registers, archives, learns…and believe me I could go on. Here’s the big one…all of this at the same time! Yeah when it’s put like that it’s a no brainer. But really, stop and read that again, and then again. You are this, of this, arising from this.
I want to influence a cultural shift highlighting the crucial and I’d go so far as to say ESSENTIAL role a conscious and conscientious moving practice plays in our wellbeing. At The Yoga Lab, the main piece of equipment is you. We’re not heads and bodies, or minds and other, or mind, body and heart, spirit. We are highly integrated sophisticated organisms woven into the greater organism of our environment. We are in fact ‘all over everywhereness’.
And like our little people we too are delicious swirling balls of life force oosing industrious creativity and flush with emotions. We are human beings for whom thinking physicality and spirit are not separate countries but an elegantly integrated and sophisticated expression of life.
So what about your ‘all over everywhereness’ hey, paid any attention to that recently?
– Camilla Maling, April 2016
