Where does the movement come from? This decades-old question first began squirreling around in my dancer mind as a yearning for a deeper source of movement.
In her new book, Embodied Spirit, Conscious Earth, Linda Hartley takes her readers to the brink of movement’s mysterious and unseen source. She tracks the embryonic growth process as a way of revealing the inherent order of life force coming into bodily form through a continual unfolding of gesture and movement patterns. Linda writes:
Nothing that we will become, create or experience has not already been experienced and expressed, in some embryonic form, during the process of embryological development.
In other words, the dynamic details of unfolding growth echo throughout our lives, reappearing within the complexity of our relationships and creative processes. Even the emptiness present in the silent still pause—after conception but prior to a next impulse—is necessary for creation.
A few months after Linda’s book came out and shortly before The Watch was released, the two of us had an opportunity to speak together about underground conversations within the writing process, and how the period we are living through may be seen as a birth process.
Something that gives Linda hope at this perilous time is “all the circles of people working and practicing in relation to a more creative rather than destructive quality of consciousness.” Our conversation began with the mystery of what becomes embodied as “plan and potential,” and led us to a vision of the flourishing of life‘s promise in relation to the longing and efforts to bring creative consciousness to the world and our communities.
May it be so.
Paula Sager and Linda Hartley come together as teachers of the Discipline of Authentic Movement and as authors of newly published books. Attending to the body as a primary source, they speak to the importance of embracing the mysteries within the unfolding of life.
Embodied Spirit, Conscious Earth
In Embodied Spirit, Conscious Earth, Linda Hartley brings together the wisdom and learning from nearly five decades of study, practice and teaching at the forefront of somatic movement, embodied awareness, somatic and transpersonal psychotherapy, and spiritual disciplines.
The interrelationship of Body, Mind and Spirit weaves its way through the book – taking us beyond a dialogue between them to the transcendence of unitive consciousness, where an immanent or embodied spirituality is glimpsed.
The Watch: Time to Witness the Beauty of It All
Sometimes the most ordinary object can open a door to life’s greatest mysteries. For Paula Sager, it’s a wristwatch—one that takes on a life of its own after her father’s death, prompting questions concerning synchronicity and the nature of relationship.
Paula walks alongside her father to the threshold of life, bearing witness to every step. Time is the landscape. Contemplative practice spreads out the crumpled map. The Watch delves into the mystery of time as lived experience, and to the possibility that every moment can be a portal to the invisible realm beyond time.