Partly because I am a daughter and a mother, and partly because of consequential encounters with extraordinary teachers, I’m interested in transmission as a key to human development. In other words, the long arc of what gets passed on is time expressing itself through lineage.
The seeds of one teacher’s inquiry, stirred and nourished in relation to their teachers, becomes the fruit of a unique offering to students of the next generation, who in turn will grow and be guided by their own questions.
The events that led me to write The Watch, brought me to a very particular crossroad—where practice meets life. In this place of intersection, I wondered about lineage—what it looks like through my practices and what it looks like through my family.
The process of writing often felt like weaving. How my embodied and contemplative practices helped me navigate the time of my father’s illness, his dying, and then life after his death was one of the threads.
My father had a high degree of tolerance for the unknown, an engaged curiosity, and his own unique and authentic way of being present with himself and with others. These are cultivated qualities that I associate with the Discipline of Authentic Movement. Out of my own longing and inner necessities, I have spent decades studying and eventually teaching something that seemed to come so naturally to my father. I wondered how this came to be.
My teacher, Janet Adler, described the Discipline of Authentic Movement as a practice of embodied witness consciousness rooted in the traditions of dancers, healers, and mystics. Her more immediate lineage came through two formative teachers: Mary Whitehouse, a Jungian inspired teacher of a new approach to movement as a depth process; and John Weir, a Freudian inspired psychologist and leader in the Human Potential Movement.
As Janet began teaching her own students, her integration of what she received from Mary and John happened quite organically, contributing to the ways that the discipline evolved, distinct from other approaches to Authentic Movement.
Regarding her deepening questions and study of the emergent phenomena arising within each person in a mover and witness relationship, Janet summarized the gifts she received from Mary and John in the following way: “Mary’s most precious gift to me concerned the opportunity to safely enter the mystery of moving and being moved. And John’s great gift was a contextual framework for my experience as witness.” (1)
Because of Janet’s offering, the great longing to be seen and the longing to see oneself and others clearly, can be grounded and known from within the body—thus embodied witness consciousness.
* * * * * *
I recently had the opportunity to experience another perspective on lineage when my son Sam’s latest Substack post landed in my in-box. The title was “On Becoming Our Parents.” With curiosity and a degree of trepidation, I began to read—where would this go?
Reading my son’s experience of reading about my experience with my father felt a little like being turned inside out. I was seeing myself through Sam’s eyes.
He describes a childhood memory of watching me sitting on the floor of my makeshift home office, surrounded by piles of “A Moving Journal,” the print publication focused on Authentic Movement that Annie Geissinger, Joan Webb, and I published and edited from 1994 – 2006. Sam writes:
It was a ‘niche newsletter, created 23 years before Substack existed. Instead of email, it was physically mailed around the world to a few hundred paying subscribers. At the time, I thought it was bizarre. Now I see how badass it was.
Like alchemical gold, an early memory takes on a new shine.
Annie, Joan, and I were just a few years into being part of a weekly Authentic Movement group, still novices. All the more reason we longed to know more: where did this practice come from? Who else is doing it? What are they experiencing and discovering? What are their questions? What is the lineage and who are the practitioners? We needed to hear more voices.
I remember sitting on the floor surrounded by piles of newly printed AMJs waiting to be stuffed into envelopes. I have little awareness that any of my children were watching, let alone having their own experience of what I was doing. As Sam writes in relation to his and my differing experiences of my father’s illness and passing:
We can live in proximity through the same moment yet experience it fully in our own way. The vantage point is different. The relationships are different. We are different. So, the feelings and sensations we encounter and the meaning we take from them are often surprisingly different.
His youthful perspective, however, was understandably one of antipathy:
Because it came from my mom, it was so obviously silly and unhelpful. I dismissed the power of embodied movement like a teenager judges and rejects their parent’s musical tastes. I ran from the parental association as hard as I could, only to discover decades later the wisdom I’d pushed aside.
Now, I can only laugh that reconnecting to the body and embracing more intuitive exercise have become central to my life.
Time passes. And yet it seems like just yesterday I was standing in a moving and witnessing circle for the first time. We were five movers and one witness. As our witness-teacher rang the singing bowl, I stared into the empty space of the circle until my eyes began to close. Everything felt very still as I stood in place, waiting for an impulse. Not knowing what would happen I stepped in, into the movement circle. . .the beginning of my life unfolding in a new way.
Actually, in that circle we were six movers. I was pregnant with the second of my three children. Yes, you guessed it, the sixth mover was Sam. I can only laugh.
In her remarkable new book, Embodied Spirit, Conscious Earth, my friend and colleague Linda Hartley points to conscious embodiment and embodied relational spiritual practice as “forms of sacred activism” so needed in our time. She guides the reader toward an embodied remembering of “the movement journey of the developing embryo” as a way of discovering “many truths about ourselves as human beings and the roots of our being-in-relationship with others and the world we live in.” (2)
Linda writes:
A human being comes into existence through specific movement sequences. . . A perpetual flow of motions and gestures which shape the new being into form. . . How this unfolding is initiated is still one of life’s great mysteries. (3)
Out of nothing, move by move, we begin to become something, someone.
* * * * * *
Often, these days, I feel myself within the stream of time, although sometimes I wonder if what I experience as time is more accurately the continual unfolding of life. My practice lineage and my family lineage are of this stream, often flowing parallel, sometimes intersecting. Where I am in the stream is sometimes dappled with shadow. Sometimes the flow seems stuck, caught in a whirling eddy.
In practicing embodied witness consciousness, the intention for both mover and witness is to notice when projections, judgments, and interpretations arise, whether in relation to oneself or to others. One of the most challenging places to bring this aspect of practice is to the matrix of family dynamics.
Our interactions can be trapped within decades-old roles and perceptions. It’s long and hard work to become more conscious of the voices, stories, interpretations, and assumptions bred within our societal and familial roles. The ones that contribute to our behavior, relational patterns, and sense of self.
If I’m not in my body as a freely multi-dimensional felt sense of myself, then I must be in a narrative, a belief of some sort filtered through an interpretation of the role I’m identified with. I’m no longer in the flow of time, I’m caught in reaction, an eddy. If I can “wake up” in the moment and feel or see what’s happening, I can invite further awareness of my inner experience and body sensations. My inner witness may be more available to emerge as a steadying presence. This is one benefit of practice.
In response to my wish to be present and see clearly, I recognize an element of transmission: Janet’s words—May I be present enough—are sealed with love within me. And I’m forever grateful for that one word enough which, every time, makes room for the inevitable imperfections of being human.
And then there are the other times when the stream of time stops, not because I’m caught but rather, because something opens and I’m dropped into a vast, vibrant, timeless and empty stillness.
* * * * * *
Toward the end of his Substack post about reading The Watch, Sam writes:
It reminds me how often we don’t open the door to these deeper parts of ourselves and our experiences with even our closest family members. But when we do, the vulnerability is an invitation to greater understanding and connection.
Just as there’s wisdom in resisting parental influence early in life, there’s also value in allowing it to reemerge. So now, instead of running from or toward the vortex of my parents’ experiences and preferences, I just sit back and marvel at all the fascinating ways certain themes, ideas, and activities weave across generations and bubble up in my own life.
I used to feel myself stretching between my children and my parents, navigating the changing span of interests and needs, the evolving twists and turns of relationship with each family member. Now I feel myself being stretched nine decades wide. With one hand I reach to each of my four young grandchildren as my other hand extends to my mother, their great-grandmother.
And near me are my three children—Molly, Sam, and Julia. Here we are, the same number of years apart in age as ever, though now somehow closer as we begin to see and let ourselves be seen by each other in new ways. A new era.
Thank you for making this visible, Sam.
NOTES
- Adler, Janet. “Toward the Unknown: A Conversation Between Janet Adler and Annie Geissinger” in Intimacy in Emptiness: An Evolution of Embodied Consciousness, edited by Bonnie Morrissey and Paula Sager, p. 169. Rochester, VT, Inner Traditions, 2022.
- Hartley, Linda. Embodied Spirit, Conscious Earth, pp. 67 – 70. Axminster, England, Triarchy Press, 2024.
- Hartley, Linda. Embodied Spirit, Conscious Earth, pp. 67.