I’ve known no greater joy than feeling fully in my body. To have my entire being present and engaged, is to feel the full power of my life force unified, working in concert to achieve an outcome. Every cell feels activated at once.
To fully inhabit the body, is to be truly alive on Earth.
It takes some moxie, but I have experienced this on the dance floor of a nightclub when I let the music take over, in the arms of a lover when no one is leading or following, when drawing the audience’s attention to me while performing on stage, when holding a child in the pure light of love, and while skiing down a hill.
We learn to hold back. We learn to check ourselves. And these habits keep us from going all the way.
This is the thrust of all the work I do. I make sculptures that are meant to be touched. I design them to insinuate specific human movements. The sculpture is an invitation to the public to engage physically with a novel form with which they have no prior reference or skill. The creative problem of a sculpture makes the participant aware of their bodies and their own greater potential for physical expression. Who is hiding inside the movement that is locked inside their bones and muscles? Move differently - feel different - be different. Wonder who you even are anymore.
In our lives, we rely on a very limited repertoire of movements. We don’t exploit the full potential of our intricate machinery. We rarely do anything physically that we haven’t already done millions of times.
The world is a complicated, busy place. Once something becomes habitual, we stop noticing it. How often do we notice our walking, standing, typing, or lying down? We can try to notice such things through meditation, but this takes great effort and focus. Effortlessly, novelty brings the movement of our bodies to the fore - to the center of our concentration.
All we have to do is change the choreography of our daily lives, even briefly, to become more physically present.
Sports that require a certain amount of risk-taking do this too. Skiing fast down a hill, you have to keep your brain on, as I like to say. You need to pay attention to the features of the snow that are continually in flux. You have to be aware of all the other moving bodies on the slope. You have to make micro-adjustments that affect your timing, form, and speed.
In Creative Journey, as a lifelong dancer/choreographer, I offer a more embodied approach to the psychedelic experience. Psilocybin is very physical. It can make you feel very alive and it can be pleasurable in your body. I feel all my capillaries and the blood rushing through them.
This physical dimension of psychedelics can easily be missed if a traveler is not prepped to welcome the physical experience. If they hold back or fear the feelings, they can shut down potential sensations. I begin every psychedelic experience by helping people fully inhabit their bodies so that when the compound shifts their physical experience, they notice and welcome it.
Inhabiting the body allows you to go fully into whatever you are attempting. My working philosophy for living this is “If I am going to go, I’m going all the way.”
If we are going to go, let’s go all the way.