“There is something in personal love, caresses, and the magnetic flood of sympathy and friendship, that does, in its way, more good than all the medicine in the world.” Walt Whitman
Anatomy of listening Series
Dancing ventriloquism
I often wonder how each dance is called up in the hospital work. How it’s summoned somehow by the patients desires, symptoms, pains or pleasures/relief seeking.
The dance happens as a consequence of being affected by another. It’s a human Butterly effect.
One flap of a wing makes an ocean wave appear.
One look from across the ward by a patient, raises my arm like a flag, proud to say hello from where I find myself standing.
‘Hello’
On the way to the ward I was puzzled by the question of preparation, how do i prepare to be unprepared. I try doing some yoga, then I improvise in my living room, but then I make tea and pick up a book about animals, and I read about seals and how there were tales and myths about people transforming into animals so that they could cross over into other worlds.
I have to empty myself, let myself be an empty cup, light, yet strong, willing to be filled,
But empty like the wind.
My daily preoccupations of my self, dissolving somewhere. To be filled by the messages that are coming through from the bodies around me…
The presence of that particular collection of people, or that person in their bed, on this very day.
How to prepare to enter the ward of a busy London hospital, with nothing but my dear dancing friend louise , a speaker, and our bodies.
These presences of the patients begin to shape the story that gets told in our movement.
The resonant bodies that lay in front of me, each person with their own unique story of having arrived on the ward, each body emits communications.
Messages are flying in all directions at once.
Breathe.
The way the eyes are still, the way the eyes longingly reach out of the window, how that left hand clings so tightly to the corner of the bed sheet, and how that thumb traces the edges of the yogurt pot as if it’s a rare treasure.
Each detail enters my body, and it does what it does, but it’s precious information that contributes to the shaping of a response.
All the bodies are speaking, all in their own unique way ,all at the same time.
An orchestra of illness and of healing, of recovery and of movements towards end of life
All tuning up..
The work it seems is learning to see and to feel how each body tells its own tale,
its own hospital odyssey.
The way the hands rest on the chest. The way some patients eyes roam the room, seeking attention of something, or someone, by lifting their faces like a sunflower toward the air, waiting to be held with any attention thats available, seeking with their face a nurse thats going by with great speed. How a face, and often a whole body burrows itself into a pillow, or a bed sheet, deep into the creases, leaving only a limb, hanging out of the bed like an unanswered question.
The best way to describe this dancing on the ward is like a dancing ventriloquism.
The dancers body becomes a vessel, we use the language of our bodies to speak through what we intuit. We use our bodies, to speak out some transmission we receive from other bodies, perhaps we translate, or metabolise, exaggerate the body’s story, we converse..
Not speaking the illness as such, but perhaps speaking and seeking the health within.
The patients sometimes name it as a relaxation, or healing in some way, a rest from the preoccupied self that’s ‘ill’ and a foregrounding, even just for a moment of a part of them thats well.
‘You don’t need words one patient said, its not about words, its about feeling’
Emotion arises and tears move.. we hold a hand, we move the next thing that moves..
We move together… we are dancing..
Where are you from? What kind of dancing is this ?
Swaddled feet under bed sheets move to the music, like someones released a couple of wild rabbits in the bed.
I find myself running across through the corridor and I high five the the nurse in the station, i don’t know why and how it happened. But something moved me, its was a risk I think. But it paid off, she smiles and we connect through our eyes.
Part of this work is in disturbing something, in a way thats hopefully positive.
Like opening a window on a spring day to give the house an airing. Allowing another atmosphere to exist alongside the one that is known. Small doses of strange wonder..
Louise my dancing partner stands at the foot of the bed, a woman lays there, eyes almost closed, her hands crossed over her chest, looks like she is on her way…
slipping out of this world,
or preparing, rehearsing her own death with her daughter by her side.
The moment is familiar… the image, on the cusp of grief.
She twitches, and her eyes sparkle, her hands reach, Louise catches her twitch and sends it back in a different form.
her daughter begins crying, the nurse arrives.
Louise keeps dancing
holding the attention
We keep dancing, the woman in the bed opposite begins crying,
i hold her hand and squeeze it softly, she’s moved by the music, by something changing in the air.
I look up at the her name above her bed. I scan it quickly, and i say her name at the same time as I squeeze her hand.
‘Mary and hand squeeze simultaneously
‘Mary’
I keep dancing, we keep dancing
As she is crying she says ‘ are you from Brazil?
no
I say…
Wales.
She laughs and then more tears come.
I move to sit on the bed with an elderly woman, she touches my arm, up and down. Lightly stroking the skin, I lean into her so she can feel my weight, like we have been friends for years. The kind of sitting you might do with a friend on a bus, off for a trip for the day.
This sudden intimacy. Is this ok? she’s smiling, touching my arm, she’s had a stroke,
‘I can’t move this one’ she said
I realise I have lent her my arm, a surrogate arm, she touches it like its hers. And I watch her touch my arm and feel the gentle tips of her fingers.
She smiles at me and smiles as she dances her third arm
or borrowed arm…
I don’t realise this at the time, only later on the train on the way home. I remember the touch of her fingers, and then the image of her other arm limp and unmoving, like an old cat in her lap.
These encounters and their meaning are often hidden inside the gesture and the moment.
Hidden in the unconscious body.
On the train on the way home while my body is held in the rhythm of the moving carriage the moments bubble up to consciousness, their meaning arrive of their own accord.
A full gestalt.
What seems like chaos, isn’t chaos at all.
The nurse in her pale green outfit stands like a human size caterpillar amongst the wires and machines. She comforts the daughter as she witnesses the paradox of her mothers aliveness … now dancing with such joy, 5 minutes ago she was a vapour of her own self now she has substance, like clay, moving shaping herself alive. Imprinting her presence in the air.
It seems like prior to our arrival there was some other news about her, the nurses carry the back story and context, they do this every day. They are amazing.
The daughter thanks us while blowing her nose.
Can we dance for you because you work so hard I say to the nurse.
We gesture around her body with our hands..
‘Oh its beautiful and relaxing’
‘It benefits us too you know’ one nurse said that day.
I run and high five the nurse in her station for the second time, breaking the line of the corridor, any fourth wall has fallen down, not that there was one
Although this is theatre in some small way..
I realise these spontaneous moments of choreography are part of weaving the field of attention.. again I am drawn into this gesture…it happens by itself.
I imagine presence like a web and with our dancing we weave these structures of attention, a little here, a little there, holding the moment just long enough for aliveness to visit through the door of necessary chaos, then we let go
and the web vanishes.
This time as I go to high five, she was waiting for my hand, she smiles and i continue
A young man with a broken leg lays in the bed.. he is smiling..
I chant ‘may your leg get better really quickly’
and I joke gesturing like a magician, and hold up my hands, he laughs,
and move my hands across his leg like magic , although i’m not joking. I really mean it through my hands with a smile on my face.
I hope it does, I hope his leg really does get better quickly.
It’s relaxing he says.
We stop near a man sitting upright.. in his bed…
‘How are you both’ do you remember the other day, oh the day was a good one.
We have not met before but we fold ourselves into the moment
Yes wasn’t it just wonderful I say.
In my mind I entertain the thought of an imaginary picnic or a ride on a gondola that we may have had.
( he indicates to the music)
Oh this is a good one, its from… something…
Yes it from something…. yes something.. indeed… I don’t name anything to solid, because his reality seems like a river liquid and moving, we simply join its rhythm.
And as quickly as we folded in to that moment, we fold out again
Well lovely to see you both, they are waiting for you..
The writing here is in some way an attempt to reflect, retrace the steps into what was.
It’s an attempt to dance it onwards I think through writing.
To tease out, understand something and perhaps let out what’s held within.
Theres a moment in a film called Indiana Jones and the last crusade, where he is on a quest. He faces a vast cliff and a chasm in which he has to cross. He knows that crossing this requires a certain amount of faith, so he kind of repeats a text, ‘have faith’ like a prayer and as he does steps into the unknown and a bridge appears underneath his feet, from nowhere, In which he can cross.
(Indiana Jones and the last crusade)
I feel the writings like that, the works like that, a kind of falling into space, a stepping into the unknown. Then here I throw words over the day for just a moment to find form here, so I can cross back Into into the very heart of these dancing encounters.
Cai Tomos
2022
‘I Love you’ the patient silently releases this word from her lips with no sound.
We have only just met her. She mouths it again, her whole face lit up as part of the choreography of shaping those three sounds, and then she releases them like birds and watches us, as we watch the words fly towards us.
Her hands hold the side of the bed, as if the bed were about to go somewhere, like a horse. So to be sure, she holds the plastic covered rains of her hospital bed.
She dances her spine.
Undulations everywhere.
We say we are dancers, her eyes widen. We begin moving as if we’re leaning into a gust of wind that she herself is summoning. She is bathing in some way, in the moving.
The space between our hands and her body are close enough to feel the two directions of presence meeting. ‘I love you’ she mouths again, ‘wonderful’.
She is eros, the god eros, who knew?
In this hospital of all places, why is she here?
She is beaming light at us.
There is something about these encounters that are so deeply alive that when you leave the room having danced, everything is changed. The philosopher Edmund Husserl coined the term
‘epoche’ whereby we enter ‘a temporary suspension of belief in everything we think we know about the world, and the relation of consciousness to the world changes’ (p70, Lachman.G (2017)
Somehow this is one of the foundations of this work perhaps is in letting go into the emerging encounter with another, so much so that when greeted with the phrase ‘I love you’ so beautifully expressed, so real, one has to melt into receiving that particular atmosphere the patient calls up in us. Each encounter, is like a door opening and welcoming the stranger, and the strangest of moments, with wide open arms.
Over the years my body has become an archive of presences and encounters. All the people i have danced with. After each one something is learned, and is left to join the company of all the other encounters.There is an imprint, like a hand in the cave of the body with a mark of being touched by someones presence and story.
The gentleman in the corner of the room after a few minutes begins dancing with us.
Just like that.
We are now a quartet moving. She in her bed ‘ We love you too’ i mouth under the mask.
We are squeezed somewhere at the bottom of the bed, ducking under the winch that lifts the patients. But right now she she seems to be flying of her own accord.
To even begin to attempt to describe these moments, i have to lean into the poetic.
A good poem transports you, so too can movement and engagement with the imagination. Just a small moment of the breath filling you deeper, or that arm gesturing into the air in response and dialogue with another arm from another side of the room can be enough to help you salvage some part of yourself that may have gone into hiding by being in pain, or being in hospital.
The smallest of incremental shifts can bring relief.
After a month or so in a hospital myself in my 20s i began a nightly ritual.
I had found this one piece of music by Strauss.
I would fold the bed sheets over my head to make myself what seemed like a little secret cave, a room of my own.
I would take the portable CD player from under the pillow and place the headphones in.
I scrolled through to number 7 on the CD and close my eyes.
In that piece of music, hidden in the voices that were singing, in the swelling of strings, in each intake of the singers breath, and each note sung out, was a remembering of beauty, and in that remembrance was hope.
Dancing sometimes with others in this setting can be like a casting out a message of hope in a bottle, out to the wide sea within each person.
We cast the message out through offering a hand, we cast it out by offering a kind the gaze, by cracking a joke, or by just nodding, and saying hello with our eyes.
A man sits up in his bed. He looks over the bay, I nod gently twice, to communicate that I see him. He nods back in the same rhythm. The space between us now is alive with something weaved by simply acknowledging each other. He lays in bed, almost swaddled, with the bed sheets up to his neck and a towel draped around his head, shaping and framing his face, halo like. He looks like a holy man.
His eyes glow with a light Grey, deep presence. He watches us intently, eyes following the movement, moving toward and away from him. His eyes seem to just drink in the dance.He, in his presence is shaping the dance, we move towards him and see that his curiosity sustains and grows, we move closer, and the smile grows slightly. We are playing, and in some sense, he is too.
He is a witness here. The role he seems to know somehow, in a way, in this witnessing, he is making the dance happen. His presence calls the dance up in us, his particular presence affects the way in which our bodies move. We are responding to his response, in this mutual looping of resonance of being together.
We gesture hands closer to him and I whisper to Louise ‘bring the outside in’ this is one of our ‘scores’ ( and instruction that we follow) that encourage a widening field of perception of that which is is outside, the wind and the trees we see through the window.
We invite in a change of something within us, and in that moment, something shifts. Small perceptual shifts and changes of attention open up a different quality to what we do, and how we inhabit our bodies in space.I trust these changes in some way are felt by another who may be close to us.
Towards the end of the dance we wait.
We shape shift presence. If we go with the idea that presence is like texture. As if I could reach into the space and feel the quality of it. I liken this to the moment the conductor of an orchestra lifts up the baton and gently breathes, and the whole audience of thousands of people in the theatre quiet everything and the field of attention shifts like a murmuration of starlings.
Everything comes into coherence, on the tip of that baton, in just that moment, a synchronisation, a precious moment which can be felt felt deeply by all. A suspended present.
Whatever has happened has happened today in the dancing. There has been an exchange, in some way, in each of these small improvisations there is a willingness to be changed by each other. Deeply. This tenderness of shared being together if only for a moment is what makes the dancing happen I think.
To let each other in so much so, that what is created is unique to this meeting at this very day and time and season.The sounds across the ward, the nurse half dancing as she passes. The other nurse patiently waiting to take blood pressure, just there, watching. The woman half asleep conjuring a tissue from her sleeve. The woman shouting across the room to another patient ’your back ? And she replies ‘god didn’t want me yet, I am still here..
There is something so alive about this, and so hard at times knowing the fleeting nature of all of this.
I feel that the thing I am left with is these inner traces of people. After all these years of dancing. Thousands and thousands of glances and gestures traced inside me. Thousands of hands reaching into the air, of yearning eyes seeking horizons, and the soft and tender ‘thank you’ that is exchanged at the end of dancing.
Last night I couldn’t sleep looking at the moon, it was so fucking huge. So bright, that I just couldn’t fathom the whole thing, how small we are, how wonderful we are, how little time we actually have here.
I phoned my partner to say that looking out the window last night and being lost in wonder for that time was so precious. I said, “I hope I remember that moment, id like to remember that” I knew in some way that a memory had been made, and that it was shared.
This man today in the hospital made the moon make sense. The same eyes last night lost in wonder looking up at the moon, today were meeting this mans deep light grey eyes in a busy ward of a London hospital. Im full of the same awe, still the same wonder, knowing that a memory had been made.
A whole other beautiful universe right there, looking out, sitting up in bed.
His eyes said something about being here. One day I might know what that is.
Cai Tomos and Louise Klarnett are dance artists who work on the wards of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital London.
The nurse called to the patient ‘they are dancers’ they have come to dance for you.
The nurse explains to us that she had been down, depressed. She was, as we arrived wrestling with the feeding tube, its presence no doubt disturbing. Other to her.
We said hello, through our masks the best we could and started the music.
We began with gestures of hands and arms, and it was clear that something awakened within her instantly. Her hands echoed and amplified ours.We were weaving something in being together. In the absence of words another language is formed by the necessity of needing communicate.
Soon her face followed.
Wide eyes, wild with something that was deep within that was finding its way out.
The force of pleasure and the pleasure of wildness through her. Her eyes were on fire. I told her that i could see how much she loved dancing by the way her eyes were sparkling.
By this point all her limbs were speaking in their own way and tongue.
‘Her legs are moving, look at her legs’ the nurses seeing her way of being different, now a dancer, as she always was.
As she is. As we all are under the skins we wear out in the world.
Staff caught a glimpse of this encounter within the corridor and stoped or slowed down, some confused, most curious.
There is something that seems out of the ‘ordinary’ when bodies that move in public spaces, move out of the pedestrian language that is so often determined by the context. When arms wave, and faces curl, and hands shoot out like branches. Something is disrupted in our ordinary perception and something wakes up in the air.
On the way to the hospital that morning i stood for a while while passers by were trying to help a goose that had found its way to the high street amongst the cars and buses, dogs and people walking with their cappuccinos. It was stuck in a doorway, disoriented, as joggers and a school girl tried to get help.
They were giving it some posh bread in the hope it would settle. As i watched from the side of the road, it was so sad in so many ways, but in some other way so full of hope.
The passers by knew that the goose did not belong so well there in the street, and so they huddled around to try and help it get home, wherever that was. It was wild, its head moving about, its body displaced and out context. Shouting in its own language that the passers by were in some way listening to it’s story.
As i walked on eventually i wondered about how out of context we all are in some ways..
Today as we danced with this woman, bound to the things that kept her alive. I guess we were trying to help her get home in some small way. As a dancer i think that’s what I’ve been dancing for, and kind of life long migration over the continents of the fractured self, a navigation towards presence through the body.
The journey of always trying to remember, or trying not to forget what it is that makes us feel alive.
Joseph Campell once said
“I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive”
Today.
Her face folded and unfolded all the stories that a face can live. Rage, wonder, loss, delight, and peace. They passed through her, as her hand and gestures delivered each one for us to hold, see, amplify and recognise. A few seconds or minutes today, just for that time together we can feel like our selves. I hope she did. Suspended inside the domestic, there is still enough room to fly.
The body and our imagination can help us find our way home. Not in home being a far away destination, or a place were always longing for, but a right here kind of place that is breath and flesh, expression, gesture, and connection.
This patients face today was beautiful. Its rippling through me still as i write.
Her beauty in the wildness she could release from her face, a flock of geese flying from the centre of each eye. Dazzling us with wonder.
I don’t know what happened to the goose on the way to the hospital.
I can imagine.
I like to imagine.
I will imagine it being welcomed back by its friends.
open winged welcome.
Wild and precious.
Cai Tomos & Louise Klarnett
Chelsea and Westminster Hospital
These encounters i am lucky enough to participate in, somehow are suspended somewhere until i find myself one afternoon peopled again. It’s like a kind and benevolent haunting of memory.Often these stories are written at the moment just after an encounter. Then i wait. This was two years ago, and one afternoon a few weeks ago i was visited by this memory more than once, and when the ghosts of memory appear more than once, i take notice. So i am thankful for each encounter through my work, because each person leaves trace that one day comes back to keep me company.The details of this meeting have been changed slightly with respect to those i meet.
Before i enter the room i wash my hands, dry them and look into the room. I see two people, one in the bed and one beside. In that moment something begins to listen in me. Through the bleeping of machines and disinfectant, someone coughing loudly two doors down and a person shuffling alongside briefly. I stand at the threshold of the door.
It feels still and cavernous somehow, and the patient and her partner seem so far away as i walk towards them. I walk into a particular feeling thats been there a while.It feels with each step towards them, i acclimatise to a sadness and begin to wonder what may come. I walk forward, slowly.
Both of their eyes look with a softness and tenderness that i can only recognise that comes with grief. Any shells of pretence has fallen away by the weight of worry. Grief is gravity’s weight, and grief is suspension, both up and everywhere, and down and nowhere. Another paradox, always paradoxes.
The life that was there before has left only a small trace of who you might have been. You look into the mirror to see if by some miracle you will find your own self, looking straight at you, perhaps thats the relief you might wish for in the drugs they give you to keep you alive. Something familiar amongst the swirling uncertainty has made its home around you. But there is tenderness here. Sometimes I see people touch their face to feel if they are still here.
I sit with you and your partner in the expansive quiet together and introduce myself. I can see on your face that whatever words i have, they must be carefully chosen, felt deeply before being spoken, as everything seems to hurt you right now. The skin of this self now is painfully porous. My words, I fold around my mouth for a while till the shape of a small bird appears rattling against the roof of my mouth, an origami carefully folded ‘hello’ fly’s out.
I introduce myself, and i try and trust this bird to fly and land where it needs to, and let it carry within it no demand, no edge, but softness and space. I feel that any positivity i conjure for the sake of masking the depth of despair that’s here, knowing that place where we humans unravel when life falls apart, the only place left is rigours honesty, you can sniff it a mile off if that’s absent and a curtain of pretence has risen up in the shape of a taught smiley face.
Gilles Deleuze speaks of when we are “riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images”, the challenge is to search for “little gaps of solitude and silence in which [to] find … the rare, and even rarer thing that might be worth saying”.
I trust this silence, the sharing of it, i am cautious of trying to help for my need not yours, i watch each rising wave of wanting to do something. I watch it like a hawk. I let it fly through me and try to trust this being together. I am trembling a little as we all are really deep down under our personal competencies, when the rubble of our life is around our ankles and we are just about standing, covered in dust.
A bright yet charged energy moves through me, and, as best i can i slow it all down.
After some time we speak about music. You choose some. Slow guitar, mind of medieval sound. Theres the pluck of strings then the gaps where you hear a melody rise and form.
You start to cry, your partner places a hand on your upper back, i ask you how that is, and if you can feel that support, that warmth. We wait here, your partner closes his eyes and rests alongside you.
We wait here. letting in what can be let in. A resting together.
I start rocking, slowly tipping side by side to the music, its like my body decided it needed to move.
I move my fingers just gently, and that movement disrupts you’re gazing down, and for a moment you look up. There is s sky above, but the weight of grief has a different gravity, so much so that there is only the presence of weight, of heavy limbs, of the pull of earth. Your dressing gown looks too big around the arms, maybe thats best, a shelter of sorts.
The trees outside are blowing and i bring that in, ‘its wild out there.’ i say..
I reference that energy, so to let any remembrance of that may touch her somehow. The elements speak to aliveness sometimes, sometimes the wind can blow you back into yourself, into your body.
If i could peel down the hospital wall, and let the sky and wind and rain and glimmers of broken light hold the un-holdable with you, the company of the elements can do that sometimes. Rain can be the best company somedays.The way it falls on your head and your face, has a way of saying ‘yes you are here’ you are alive, because you can feel me ‘says the rain’
She looks down.
Both her hands are on her belly, and i invite her to notice them, warmth, comfort.. she nods and smiles a fraction after the word comfort.
Theres enough perhaps to feel a trace of it, or something that comes in the shape of comfort, so can be felt in the middle of the sorrow, like the cool blue part of a flame.
We sit in silence, her partner by now looks in deep relaxation, resting alongside her. Is he sleeping. He is exhausted i imagine?
We sit in silence and i have my hands on my belly and i gently move
so i move somehow to keep one element in the field of awareness moving. It feels necessary and i check if she minds-
It feels at times i am moving something that’s unable to. Or that keeping something moving keeps the aliveness just here.
Its small but necessary.
After some time i invite her should she wish to be curious about a colour, entering where her hands are..
What would it be like..
I mention a few colours, yellow, white, and gold- she nods to gold.
We sit in silence, and i imagine that gold around the 3 of us.
This story didn’t really finish, they never really do. I left the room after some time that day.
Golden, Gold.
Two years later or thereabouts, i am taking a moment in my day, i catch the sight of this bowl i have in the window, its gold. The light falling in, and with that, this encounter weaves it way back through the labyrinth of my body and the ghost of memory comes knocking once… twice…
I think this may not be about being able to conjure hope, or help ‘change’ something.it is tempting to help, but often that can be like willing a caterpillar to be a butterfly quicker, mostly because we cant bear looking at the way its legs move, or we cant bear this slow process of it breaking open into its other form, but theres a reason the butterfly moves like that, pushes against its temporary home , slimes about in its emergence, because that takes time, and every gesture from inside that dark place is needed to cross the threshold into the next bit of being, whether it grows any wings or not.
For health to emerge in any small way I guess all the other parts need to be welcomed, sitting alongside despair, hopelessness, respectfully giving despair enough room so It can stretch its legs out, it can lean on the table and knock over the vase with the flowers you didn’t want and weep in broken company.There can be relief in that.
perhaps it’s as simple and complex as that.
One afternoon in the hospital I was working with and elder, I will call him Jim. He was having difficulty breathing and panicking that he could not get his breath. We sat together and very gently, by invitation I just massaged his hands as we were chatting. I often think the hands are portals to our interiority. When another person holds our hands it’s almost as if with that action, the door to each others world is opened briefly. Jim spoke about his illness and his story so far. Then a sentence landed from Jim right between us, as a bright visitor to our conversation, he said through a half whisper “I cant seem to keep up with it all”
I asked him what was he trying to keep up with, and he said ‘“the world”
I was sat in the airport in Madrid, an older woman was on crutches, each step in itself seemed a whole universe. She occupied such a different time to all those around her. I sat and watched her for and hour or so, and that hour melted to deep time, but she was clearly invisible to those around her. People would enter her orbit and have to change gear, they had to re navigate and break their own rhythm. I could see peoples frustration as their progress was re directed briefly, for me there was something joyous in witnessing the change, the block to progress, the re direction, and the gravitas with which she moved.
At this time in particular we are forced into another rhythm, and as humans, rhythms are so primary to how we navigate ourselves in the world. Whether its the seasons or how we eat and sleep. Our rhythms and our relationship to our own and others is so key to feeling well.
So thinking about rhythm in relation to listening.
It seems that In order to listen we must first surrender something something within ourselves and touch in with an inner availability or emptying of sorts. So often in listening, the part of us which formulates a response is habitually awakened. Albert Camus coins this perfect sentence which encapsulates the rhythms of togetherness.
Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend
The work i do, if you can call it work, is about being beside. There are perhaps many ways to being beside another as there are people. But the particularities of listening, of side stepping our own rhythm for a little time and allowing our selves to feel out another, is part of it.
Sometimes i imagine placing my ears on my heart, how wonderful that would be.
One on the front, and one on the back. One to listen to whats coming towards my heart and one to hear whats about to come out, if anything.But all this listening located gently in the heart.
As one listens, the stories impress themselves, like a heel in clay upon us. Deep or light. The communication leaves a mark, then we feel that imprint and let it be there.
In St Benedict rule for monastic life speaks of ‘Listening by inclining the ear of your heart‘
So one of the questions i have is how we arrive at the conditions necessary that enable listening. How do we incline, or shape our inner ear like sail, so that we catch the right wind to take us out to the vast sea where we may meet the other.
Listening perhaps in some cultures and conditions is a luxury. The very fact that ones time is not occupied by wondering about safety, food, shelter. When ones interiority is available without fear, when theres time to even day dream, how a precious thing that is and how we can take it for granted to have day dreaming time.
When i was about 7. I used to be lucky enough to spend days up in my father’s house in North wales. Early morning i would set off for the day, a bright skip into the day as if it was pulling me towards its unfolding. I would head down to the river and slowly begin the work of listening. Now as i recall and look back i see that play was a kind of prayer. In the organisation of rocks and mud to places in the river, a small dam to hold the water, and a little red boat that when the time was right i would set it free down stream.
Each time a stone would be moved, i would hold the stone, and in me i would listen to its shape, ever so briefly through my hands, and as a 7 year old that i was, it was done without to much seriousness about much of anything. I would know where it needed to go through the feel of it. Each stone carefully placed in the work of play, formed this inner care for my hunches. Over time and over years of years of work as an improviser the home of my intuition was built. Stone by stone.
Intuition is one of ingredients of listening, but it can be slippery and you cant always catch its tail. But the practice of trusting that arising yes or arising no that knocks of the inside door of the body, is what cultivates it, and makes it more possible to lean on in daily life. One listens in, and from the cacophony of voices that call up within us each day, there is always one voice that steps forward with a clarity. That voice is often earned by waiting about, patiently. There nothing more tiresome than pulling out the words from myself when they haven’t been warmed up by the fire of the heart.
The care we take with our own story and the stories of others seems so vital. I have spent time with some in the hospital watching how as the story rolls out of their mouth along with the corresponding gesture , a brightness falls upon them, even in recounting of the darkest of stories. The words and gestures often weave a mirror that hangs majestically right in front of them for only a few moments before it vanishes. And when that mirror appears you see it in the eyes, two canyons of light.
The remembering of something about themselves, was there long enough to bring back a knowing that was forgotten.
A strange visitor, entering, nodding its head with a familiar smile saying yes ‘ yes it’s you your feeling, and leaving again.
I guess i come this this work because i know the power of being listened to, simply put. listening can bring you closer to feeling more like yourself.
I once heard Nóirín Ní Riain tell a story on an online talk about an old traditional irish singing called Sean nos. When this was sung the men particularly, would pull the cap down over their eyes to allow them to go into the song and become the song. I find that in a way listening is the same, we pull down the cap, over the habits of thought so we can listen deeper to the song of the others, in their words, and gestures.
As i walk the corridors of the care home with the team i work with. We make ourselves a flock. A small one, but a flock nonetheless. With the ears of the heart as open as they can be, we are shepherded around by voices, calls from the rooms, smells, sighs, shouts and cries, and as a faithful flock we follow where the wind takes us.
We enter a room, and are greeted and we greet. An eye to an eye, and hand to a hand or something else less known, and we wait, and we listen, The musician plays something that seems to arrive on the wind too, it grows out of what’s happening now, right now. We rock, back and fourth, and a song emerges. A small movement emerges from the distance of this person in a bed that always seems to consume the sleeper like a tired mouth. A hand unfurls, and we carry that gesture a little longer by picking it up ourselves. The unfurled hand becomes a note, and that note becomes song, a song thats known and ‘amazing grace’ appears with great vigour. We are in a church of our own making.
It all settles, a head turns, we creep back out into the corridor and plunged back in to the listening of the whole again. Thats the rhythm.
Listening can hold together what might seem separate. I often think of the act of listening more of a receiving, as if the words, gesture, a silence, or the way the person wears their face that particular day is like a perfume.
It fills the corners of the air with a scent that the listener takes time to receive .At first, one scent, then another, then the whole, then gradually one can begin to differentiate and appreciate the complexities of each part.
If you could open up listening like a body, and take a good look around, the pumping life giving ground of it, you would find at it centre, in the middle of the blood wet heat of the heart is care.
The morning state changes when i arrive at the care home.
We are like the weather system, moving through the home, bring rain, bring sun, bring cloud to shelter.
We are clowns, priests, handy men, entertainers,singers,chaos bringers, peace makers, protestors, interior designers, listeners, trouble makers.
Mothers, fathers, brothers, nurses. That cousin you never liked, the school teacher, the robber.
We are lost, most of the time, i think thats the point. We only know where we are, when something comes alive by whats called out from within us by the elders we work with.
She looks out of the window
We enter the dream she is in
The grief of her father comes through in waves
her body curls in
and uncurls out
He holds her feet
We sing a song
The sun is so so bright somehow
He sits in the chair
I smell the flowers
He hums a lullaby made for now
As we leave she gestures a kiss that
Meets the air
Her hand extends, reaches her lips
She sends a kiss our way.
She is fully there in this action
She turns to look out of the window
The man in the wheelchair is on the other side of the corridor.
Far away he gestures
He comes closer
“I was once lost, now i’m found, he sings with us.
I feel the grief like wind hit my face.
He has tears in his eyes
The woman with him couldn’t
Sense that, she smiles, he is crying
Half way through the song we all forget the words and laugh.
I taste that feeling of forgetting briefly.
Is that whats it like to be suspended in
Forgetting?
We ask the question what do you
Wish for…
Its surprising how difficult it is
Where have the wishes gone
Can we find out
The desire, the fire.
have they been stored somewhere in a room
In the Basement
maybe hope is there too.
Shall we break in at night and set it all free.
How can people not see how all that is older matters as much as whats young
I think of the staff. I imagine them, one day soon with their feet in hot water and salts like my grandmother used to do.
Feet up, eyes closed, resting, maybe someday.
Perhaps we can all go, all of us, when this pandemic eases,
offer a bucket of warm water and our hands.
Our listening hands.
Oh the touch we can give again and the touch we can receive. We could wash their feet, hold their feet, that have been up all hours, perhaps.
Not in a holy way, although it is
But with ordinary thanks for all their care.
because we are all fragile.
Those in charge, those who care, those who are cared for.
We have all been shaking a little at home in our pyjamas these days.
This morning i saw this white streak in my hair, it caught the light right, for me stop for moment and wonder about getting older, and that its happening now. This very moment, things die and things grow. The need to see and feel ageing within our very tissues to know its inevitability, to care for those changes as precious within us, perhaps might make us care more for those who are a little further down that road than us. But know that we are all walking the same road, we might want to begin that work now, of how the elderly are cared for, repair the road as it were. How we see and value elders. Their contribution to the fabric of all the communities we exist in, and the people who care for them. During this time of the pandemic the ethics of care has shown its face so clearly in the holes that we see in the system and how the elders have often fallen through. We can see now i hope, i really do, that every life, no matter where its sits within the strange numbers we give it. Is precious
The State of Dance
Dancing exists in my body and imagination even when I’m going about my day-to-day activities not dancing. Its a comfort to know that a small shift in perception towards interception awakens the felt sense, the feeling of being here in body/mind, noticing my relationship to gravity and space; alongside this allowing imagination into the mix, something changes and I begin to feel my place in the world. What that is, I understand to be the state of dance. It is an immediate wellspring of creative potential where the expansion of the self, a broadening of consciousness, can be made accessible by noticing the feeling of dancing within us, outside us and between us.
I understand dancing to be movement in all its forms. Movement without the spark of the imagination can lack aliveness in some ways. Dancing for me is bound in the imagination and in feeling. By feelings I mean the traces of feelings that have meaning for us in some way, be that a sense of passing joy or sadness or an unknown trace that moves through us briefly, these traces can bring a certain kind of attention to the self.
Mary Oliver speaks so wonderfully about this,
‘Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness – an empathy – was necessary if the attention was to matter’
A question to us is: How can our attention matter when thinking about working in healthcare?
What kind of attention are we taking about? What ingredients make up this attention? What are the necessary conditions for this attention to be available or to blossom even, given that attention is like water, shape shifting to different forms, constantly changing, evaporating, stilling; it can be wild or flowing, and as water is essential for life, so this attention too can matter and can bring about change. The arts allow us a particular attention and way of being with each other and ourselves.
Cynthia Bourgeault speaks of attention by saying that,
‘Attention, as we normally understand it in the West, is implicitly an energy connecting subject to object: “I pay attention to my driving.” “I pay attention to the lecture.” “I pay attention to my breathing.” But there is also a different configuration for the attention, in which it does not flow in a straight line linking subject to object, but can rather hold a certain tensile strength as a three- dimensional field of awareness. The best way I can describe it is through a beautiful metaphor from Rumi: “quivering like a drop of mercury.”
When removed from its container and allowed to organize itself on a flat surface, mercury can either act like a liquid and spread out in a puddle, or it can hold its own shape as a drop, rolling about like a Weeble (the children’s weighted toy that will wobble but won’t fall down). Your attention is much like that. In its “liquid” form, it connects subject to object. In its solid, “Weeble” form, it is a tensile field of vibratory awareness, within which you can be conscious of the whole without having to split the field into the usual subject/object polarity.’
The dance, or the movement of health and vitality, exists continually within us like a long sung endless note that’s there sounding under the surface of things. All of us have periods of life where we can barely hear it, or it’s a distant murmur. At other times we know it’s presence is there and nourishes us in each step. All that is asked of us is to slowly turn our ear towards our own experience and attend to the act of listening to ourselves as we would a great storyteller. This is no mean feat. Learning to trust our body is something many of us were not taught to do. Perhaps through illness or loss we learned that we had at some point to listen to our bodies. To others it’s a new adventure to uncover new terrains of sensations that can become resources for us as we go through life. For some the task of befriending new sensations and allowing the inner world to become known can be threatening, but slowly slowly it can be a way of re-kindling our belonging.
David Whyte speaks in his poem The Winter of Listening
‘All those years
Forgetting
How easily you can belong To everything
Simply by listening’
Movement and improvisation can be invitations to unfold our physical body, to unfold our feelings, and most importantly to unfold our imagination and psyche from the places where thought and the thinking life, particularly in illness, may have dominated our capacity to welcome any ‘new’ sensations images or feelings.
When we engage with any art form or creative process we get to be in kairos time.
The word kairos was an ancient Greek word meaning ‘opportunity,’ ‘season,’ or ‘fitting time,’ ‘A passing instant when an opening appears’.
These openings can appear when we engage with a creative practice. These openings and fleeting glimpses of our resources, or the feeling of health are a vital small step in a longer journey toward regaining health and recovery.
Entering the state of dance can therefore be a wonderful resource from which one can navigate the thresholds of change we experience in life.
The arts can give us another way of feeling, seeing and imagining our life in the present. This present is the way we live, we spend our time living from here, the past deeply informs the present, and the present can deeply inform the future. When working with dancing we are working with what arises from countless complex streams of conscious and unconscious information – more than we will ever understand, more than we can ever attend to.
We know that movement and touch was our first language, but many people have forgotten that.
‘Observations on the few still surviving hunter gatherers in Africa, Oceana and the Amazonian basin reveal a great deal of close physical contact between people of all ages. Individuals are embedded in a ‘socio-sensual human organisation’, which began in infancy during a period of almost continuous unusually rich tactile interaction. This sensual network begins in infancy and continues throughout life. When not in the sling, infants are passed from hand to hand around the fire or similar interactions with one adult or child after another beer kissed on their faces bellies, and sung to, Bounced, entertained, encouraged, and addressed at length and conversational tones long before they can understand the words.’ (Konner, 1982, p. 302)
Whatever age we are we still need places of socio-sensual human interaction, even more in those fragile times in older age when the body might not often be touched, in a way that has nothing to do with functionality but more to do with care or meeting each other. Illness intrudes into life, disrupting our biographical experience of time. The ground that we were standing on shifts. The sense of (I) ,our identity, is often in a process of re-negotiation and within that, we can feel a deep sense of loss of control that brings with it questions of mortality, fragility and uncertainty. People can feel as though the story of themselves has fragmented, and been replaced by an unknown story that is imposed due to illness, loss or injury. Perhaps the arts and movement can be a way to slowly re-trace steps to something that can be known again. A sense of physical security can support the deepening of a psychological security.
Deep listening and creative strategies allow us to meet the parables, metaphors, and narratives that shape people’s relationship to illness, but also health to health. These stories, how we carry them, and express them through creative acts allow us a way to make meaning.
The artist brings forth that skill of knowing without knowing. We follow a scent of a creative path that unfolds moment by moment. We befriend uncertainty when meeting others with a sense of curiosity. We have many ways into dancing together and being together but these ways perhaps reveal themselves uniquely to each relationship and in the moment. A ‘one size fits all’ model of activity will engender perhaps a ‘being done to’ feeling as opposed to ‘being with’ – dance for or dance with older people feel like quite different things.
As an artist I am lucky to be able to occupy a different sense of time when working in the hospital or care home. The ‘doing’ culture of the hospital means that we artists can offer something else. Perhaps the role of the artist is in being able hold the space of ambivalence at times, in opposition to or underneath the linearity and functionality which a context such as a hospital needs to adhere to. The possibility of undoing the doing for even a short time and carving out a space of ‘being’ can be vital.
We can attend to the ‘being’ aspect that takes up another space different to medicine. The goal is seen, but in the distance, and perhaps the way towards it is reached with a different ‘feeling of time’ and it is this different ‘feeling of time’ that people feel – ‘Feeling felt’ (Siegel)
‘Where are you from? What’ it like there…
What music do you like? How do you notice that, what’s that feeling there.
Is that comfortable, warm, or other.. Can we move together?’
Every time we ask a question, be it through movement or words, there are small places where one’s agency can be expressed. We can be drawing out the subjectivity again of the body, where perhaps the body in illness and through treatment has become an object. Slowly the body might find its voice and as it finds it voice a slow trust can begin to build. We can support a development of connection, to draw back a sense of conversation between parts of the body so that a map of the wholeness can begin to be woven.
Dynamic 4-D ultrasound research films reveal that by the 7th month of gestation the foetal mouth will open in anticipation if a hand comes near – a striking demonstration that one part recognizes its relation to another part, (Myowa-yamakoshi & Takeshita, 2006)
CASE STUDY
Patient L – palliative care patient:
I stand on the side of the ward and I see Patient L looking over. I look back and smile. She signals by gesturing a hand towards her. I notice this in my body as a space opening up as by these small relational moves, like the animals that we are, we give and receive gestures, sounds, words, postures, and in within fractions of seconds we deduce from these communications the availability of relationship, of safety or threat.
I walk over to Patient L- “I can’t breathe I can’t breathe.” She is obviously distressed. She thinks I am a nurse. Possibly … she’s very distressed. It’s not necessary to explain anything right now. I ask if I can sit with her. She keeps saying “I can’t breath I can’t breathe.” I notice that I shift my tone of voice and make more space between my words as if it were possible to slow down time.
“I can see that it’s difficult, but I can also see that you’re breathing.” I reiterate something factual, something solid. She is still very distressed and I ask if I can hold her hand. I apologise about my cold hands and say that it’s biting cold out there today, “looks like snow I think.” I ask her if she can feel my cold hand – an invitation to shift her awareness to the periphery away from the centre. I look out of the window and describe the day, “The sky is blue and the air is crisp.” She begins to respond a little as we move into the social. She drops down a little into a more regulated state for a moment, then goes back to “I can’t breathe”,”I’m frightened, please don’t leave.”
In somatic experience theory she is moving and pendulating back and forth from sympathetic hyperarousal to something more akin to a parasympathetic state. In polyvagal theory it would be worded as the shift between dorsal and ventral vagal states.
After some time I explain who I am and speak of my work and ask her about music – she loves opera, specifically La Bohème. I find it on my playlist and place the speaker on the bed. Slowly slowly she smiles and the sound of the tenor’s liquid voice fills the space and something shifts in her face; something shifts in my body too as she seems more settled. She briefly lets some notes, some voice, come through as I sing a few notes alongside what I hear.
Again she settles deeper and takes the oxygen mask off. She begins to talk about going to the opera, and the dress she wore, and I ask about it. In my response I emphasise the good, the resourcing aspects of what I hear. “I imagine that felt wonderful.” There was a process of mirroring and echoing back the resources. Slowly her hand began to move ever so gently to the music and I was aware of only the intricate dance.
“I like this Prayer, too – the sung version.” She says the words…
“And though we are few, we’re surrounded by many, who have crossed that river before
and this is the song we’ll be singing forever….
Patient T
A patient in the butterfly room, was at the end of his life. He was in the last stages of (COPD) Respiratory failure. I introduced myself, and he began to speak about his physicality – the physicality of his life, his love of sports, his love of fear, and jumping from cliffs, skiing, his lover at one time who was a singer.I sat and felt these stories fill my legs and hands as I began to gesture in response. As he spoke he sat up and I sat up. We worked with some gentle touch, but he wanted a firm touch, to feel his edges, as these stories of descent and flight seemed to fill the room vividly moving back and forth between loss and anger… the remembering and savouring of the life force through the felt images that he was calling up.
For me, words have a place within the dance. Words can be like fire to the imagination, and they can be a handrail in a way to support the dance and vice versa. When the cold and dark times of life settle in about our bodies, we can begin to sense that perhaps imagination is ‘a divine place’, as John O’ Donohue writes in one of his poems. It can perhaps become a resource in the darkest of times, a place to call yourself back to. Perhaps imagination can be like an echo chamber for our life, a place where images and memory call us back to the dance.
The Waiting Room:
I was seated in a small room, on my placement as an art therapist in psychiatric intensive care unit. There were 3 patients and myself in the room. I was there to offer an open art therapy session. I sat in the room attending to my own regulation and noticing in and around me.
I saw a soft ball out of the corner of my eye. I held it in my hand and then looked around the room as one of the patients looked up. He met my eyes, and nodded. I threw the ball softly to him and he threw it back. We repeated this for a few moments until the third patient looked up and joined in. We kept going with this action, in silence mostly, for around 10 minutes.
This particular moment has stayed with me deeply as a point when I understood the necessity for the body’s involvement in co-regulation – the importance of rhythm, gesture and facial expression as cues for possible safety.
There was a palpable shift in the way we were together for that time… Just for a moment there was a sense that the nervous system of each other could sufficiently soften into more regulated states that could allow a different way of being together, coming into social engagement in this way, through the body. There was bottom-up approach to being together.
One of my acronyms for my work: GRACE
GREET: access the social nervous system as a way to build a bridge into connection
RESOURCES: look for resources within the narrative, or bodily communication, drawing out the feeling of health where possible.
AWARENESS: expand and bring about awareness of what is resourcing or what could resource with small movement, touch or breath support, or a story that feels important to be heard.
CREATIVITY: support the emergence of the patient’s creativity through language and imagination (Developing the capacity to think into, feel into well being potentials- other possibilities that exist alongside their current situation/illness.
ENERGY: notice any shift of states of energy/bodily/emotions following the session and integrate and changes through reflection, dialogue and closing.
SELF CARE STRATEGIES
As I enter the ward I stand outside the door, and I bring in this image:
I stand on the edge of a lake in Wales, it’s a place called Cregenan. I know the landscape very well as I grew up there as a child. So I stand on the edge of the lake and look over the lake. From my centre a light begins growing, small at first, then it begins to expand. It grows and meanders towards the heart then out of the top of the head, and it grows down from the heart into the earth. As it exits my feet I see the lake slowly begin to illuminate and I am reflected in the light of the lake. As I begin to open and become more porous, I bring in the mountains that surround me in 360 degrees. I notice the container of them especially around my backspace, the strength and stability. I try to hold that light open quality alongside the solidity.
I imagine 3 candles. I place one in front of the heart, one behind and a light above my head. I notice the light spreading across the surface of my body like a skin of light. Reflecting.
NOTES ON WHAT TO WORK WITH
Deep listening
Imagination
Supporting body schema coherence
The ways in and the ways back out
Up and down regulating- opening energy field for a tired body, or supporting a containing of energy (anxiety)
Working with imagination and images that come from moving.
We can work with Breath to support relaxation and reduce anxiety
Working with Touch – to support connection to parts of the body, for pain relief or to increase movement after injury.
Working with Awareness to bring connection back to the body as a whole.
Working with improvisation to awaken openness/strength and fluidity of movement in the body. Explorations of quality of movement.
Explorations in body posture.
Coming back to body sensations.
Going along with what is happening or/and what were feeling, following the story of the body. Developing a quality of Presence.
Projects at CW+ Chelsea and Westminster Hospital ‘Meeting places’
The title of project was ‘Meeting Places’ and central to the ethos of the work was the emphasis on the ‘meeting’ of people through the arts. The interventions offered were bespoke, and were developed through the relationship that prioritized person centred arts interventions as the means to support patients. Many of the staff and patient have spoken about ‘learned helplessness’ that can occur during the time in hospital. This project aimed to address and develop patient agency through the exploration of creative expression.
Creative reflections
Movement and improvisation can be invitations to unfold, our physical body, to unfold our feelings, and to unfold our imagination and psyche from the places where thought and the thinking life have narrowed our capacity for remembering and experiencing the mystery of the body and all that it brings.
Orienting ourselves to mystery it seems, is the place where we can meet our aliveness if its been compromised by ill-health. There is in movement and embodiment it seems a simultaneous forgetting and remembering of ourselves. The arts offer a bridge in which we cross to meet each other. They offer a way of communicating both verbally and non-verbally, where the ungraceful and the graceful aspects of becoming visible to the each other can be revealed. There is a risk to that, it can be tender and powerful and there’s an awkwardness that come with trying. The arts hold us and propel us into the unknown. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche Speaks of ‘Shaky Tenderness’ this is the best description I have found of what it feels like to enter the ward of the hospital and relational field with the patients.
Welcoming and attending to the state of ‘shaky tenderness’ means that any agenda I might have, personally, unconsciously and that of the institution (known and unknown) can perhaps be emptied a little from me. Attending to shaky tenderness can soften and widen attention so I can become more available to meet the relational ground of the work with as much honesty as possible. Some times in the work in the hospital I can feel like a detective of sorts, gathering clues as to what the ‘mind of ward’ is in that day. Sometimes it is about hanging out, inconspicuously. Sometimes its about being bold, sometimes embracing the clown, often embracing the clown, and often the awkward artist with too many bags and no sense of direction. Many patients have asked me on the ward ‘are you lost’, in some degree I am, and to some degree I need to be. It seems that it calls for the artist to bring forth that skill of knowing without knowing. What it to be listening, how creative can this act be? What’s possible in this listening? How wide are the things we can listen to, pick up, follow? What is it to begin, where and when does that happen, with and without language?
Cai Tomos 