Your body carries- within it’s cells’ DNA- the remembered bits of experience of organisms that have existed on earth. This cumulative experience is a collective memory. This combined remembered experience is a kind of sensory intelligence. This intelligence is not available to your conscious mind. It can only be accessed through your preconscious mind. Your body’s intelligence comes to life and is revealed only in this preconscious state. Your body carries within it all the joys, sorrows, anger, pleasure, losses, etc. that have been a part of your whole life as it, moment by moment, interacts with all other organisms in its environment. This intelligence also includes your body’s ability to express what it remembers and knows. It does not use language as we know it to express itself. It uses the universal language of movement. Not only does your body create its own vocabulary but it also gives you the technique to perfect that vocabulary with precision and efficiency so that you will speak with clarity and power. When your body is speaking, other bodies will sense and recognize what it is saying at a preconscious level. Your body’s story will be heard and internalized by the bodies of those who experience it.

Your preconscious mind is a state of mind. It is also a place in your brain. It is a place where your body can live and breath and reveal its unique kind of sensory intelligence and knowledge. It is a place where your body feels at home and safe from the accusations and restrictions of your conscious mind. It is a place where your body can tell its story- a story that only it knows how to tell. It is a place where energy which flows both within your body and around your body can comingle and create a new flow of energy that is shaped into movement that tells your body’s story. This movement story can be sensed and comprehended by other people’s bodies at the same preconscious level. Your conscious mind does not function at the same level of awareness as your preconscious mind.

Your preconscious mind functions as the intermediary between your body and your conscious mind. It is also the place where your body interacts with the environment around you. It is the flow of energy from within your body and through it from your environment that creates and sustains these connections.

Your body has a story to tell. It is a story that only it can tell. That story is based on the remembered bits of experience of organisms that have evolved on earth. This cumulative experience or collective memory of billions of organisms has been transmitted through the DNA strings that now reside in your body’s cells. Your body adds to this ancient memory everything that it has collected from your whole life through its sensory mechanisms. It records all of your joys, sorrows, anger, pleasure, losses, physical pain, etc.. It is a kind of sensory intelligence.

Your body tells its story in your preconscious mind. This is a place in your brain and a state of mind. It is a level of consciousness unlike your conscious mind. This place is where your body lives and breathes; it is where your body remembers and expresses what it knows about you. Your conscious mind cannot handle this because it is not designed to do so; it has other purposes.

Your body tells its story through the universal language of movement. Your body has its own movement vocabulary and organizes that vocabulary into phrases, and sentences, and paragraphs which tells the whole story of what it knows about you and the world around you. It tells its story effortlessly in the form of spontaneous movement meditations. This is not choreographed movement.

When your body speaks, it speaks to other bodies through that same pc state of mind. This connection is beyond observing a performance; it is a communication of common experience at a level beyond words and ideas. It is a recognition of shared experience woven into each of our bodies cellular fiber.

Artists often talk about their artistic expression as a kind of personal therapy. As we live and take in the world around us, we have responses to it. Sometimes words are enough to express what we want to say and sometimes we need other non-verbal avenues to express our responses to life’s events. When your body tells its story, you are both creating an environment (art) and allowing your body to show you who you are with all of your joy, pleasure, sadness, anger, pain, love, etc.(therapy).

Your body’s movement is both an artistic creation and a healing release of remembrances beyond words. Your body has its own movement language that it speaks more powerfully than any string of words. As energy moves through your movement, it allows your body to speak sentences, phrases, and stories. Expression is a form of release.

Your preconscious mind is the place where your body is free to remember and express what it knows about you. It is the place where you can hear and see the truth about yourself and be healed at the same time. It is the place where other bodies see and hear your body’s story which sets their body’s stories free and they are healed as well. We amplify each others stories and heal ourselves in the process.

Dance as we know it today is basically choreographed dance. Someone has an idea, experience, or event that they want to express through a string of movements. This thing that they want to express may be abstract or very personal. The choreographer then begins to lay out bodily movements to express or depict their subject. These movements may be patterned after some other dancer or choreographed movements or may in fact be their own version of movement based on a technique in which they have been trained. The artist may use their own body or other bodies to create this movement.

As the artist strings these movements together, they make choices about what movements or phrases to keep or throw out. The tool that the choreographer uses to make these choices is their conscious mind.

When this editing process is complete, dancers will memorize the strings of movement and perform them as if they were their own. Once these movements have been recorded, the artist can copyright them and sell them as a product to be consumed.

This whole process is centered on the choreographer’s conscious mind. Ss does not use the conscious mind to create its movement. Your body’s story is created in a preconscious state of mind.

Spontaneous movement

The formal definition of spontaneous is: “acting in accordance with or resulting from a natural feeling, impulse, or tendency without any constraint, effort, or premeditation”.

ShapeShifting is all about spontaneous movement. It is about movement that comes out of your body naturally without any constraint or effort. This is much like jazz musicians who improvise-that is, simultaneously compose and perform on the spur of the moment without any preparation-music. It is also like freestyle rappers who improvise their words on the spot. They often describe this experience as being ”in the zone” or being in the “flow”. And this zone is often triggered by responding to other musicians melodies, sounds, or words.

What has just been described above also matches Abraham Maslow’s peak/flow experience. This experience includes such elements as: control in flow, effortlessness, altered perception of time, melting together of action and consciousness, and the autotelic quality of flow-experience.

This same kind of flow can spring freely from your body in response to a multitude of stimuli, such as music, sounds, words, other bodies, or silence. There is an exchange of energy taking place between your body and those external energy sources. This combined energy flow unlocks your body’s story through movement and it shapes its own energy flow into a movement sentence.

There is a place in your brain that is really good at doing this. This part of your brain is called the medial prefrontal cortex and it is the center for self expression which sets you free to risk mistakes and not worry about what comes next. This place or state of mind is your preconscious mind. Your preconscious mind is where your body lives and breaths. It is not your conscious mind. Your conscious mind wants to constrain your body to fit its wishes. Your preconscious mind allows your body to tell its story free of those constraints. Furthermore, your body has its own kind of intelligence that remembers what your conscious mind cannot handle.

Meditation

Movement meditation has the same goal as traditional meditation which is to get beyond the clutter of your conscious mind and allow your true self to come through. When your body expresses itself through movement, it is performing the meditative process of awareness, of being completely present in the moment, but it differs from traditional meditation in a number of ways.

Unlike traditional meditation movement meditation involves movement. This movement can be done in any place and responds to everything in that environment without judgment. Your body tells its story in response to what your body is taking in.

Traditional meditation seeks detachment from trauma. Spontaneous movement meditations allow you to embrace your autobiographical memory. As you relive what your body knows through expressive movement, you can embrace and become present with who you are. The state of mind that you enter is your preconsciousness where you are totally present with your body in every moment.

Your conscious mind is that default level of consciousness that you spend most of your time in. It is the waking state that observes, responds, and thinks about what happens to you in the coarse of a day. This part of your brain is considered the seat of consciousness. It is located in the frontal lobe of your brain. It is also subdivided into sections- two of which are the lateral prefrontal cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex . The lateral prefrontal cortex is the area that especially focuses on the self-reflection, introspection, and self-monitoring aspects of consciousness. These functions do not encourage creativity and freedom of movement. They would inhibit taking risks and moving in unfamiliar, unaccepted ways.

Your conscious mind is not the place or state of consciousness that knows the power and intelligence of your body.

However, your body lives and breathes in your preconscious mind which is associated with the medial prefrontal cortex of your brain. This part of your brain also engages the senses and motor (movement) regions of the brain.

When your body tells its story it uses the language of movement to communicate. This language speaks more powerfully than any string of words. It is a universal language that everyone can understand. Your body has its own movement vocabulary and organizes that vocabulary into phrases, and sentences, and paragraphs which tells the whole story of what it knows about you and the world around you.

When your body speaks, it speaks to other bodies at a level beyond your conscious mind. ShapeShiting engages bodies at the preconscious level. This connection is beyond observing a performance; it is a communication of common experience at a level beyond words and ideas. It is a recognition of shared experience woven into each of our bodies cellular fiber. It is a part of that collective preconscious of all living organisms. It is your body’s version of that ancient remembered experience.

Movement meditation has basically the same goal as traditional meditation. Both of them seek to set you free so that you can see yourself and the world around you clearly without clutter or delusion.

When your body expresses itself through spontaneous movement meditations, it is performing the meditative process of awareness, of being completely present in the moment, but it differs from traditional meditation in a number of ways.

Unlike traditional meditation ShapeShifting practices movement in any environment.

Most meditative forms involve stillness in a quiet place. This kind of meditation can happen any place on earth and movement is central to this practice. Your body can use the flow of energy from any environment to help create its movement story. If you live in New York City, for example, try doing your spontaneous movement meditations on the subway grates embedded in the sidewalks. Open yourself up to all the sounds, smells, and energy flowing around you.

Unlike traditional meditation ShapeShifting embraces your autobiographical memory.

ShapeShifting does not seek detachment from your thoughts, feelings, and memories that have clouded your judgement. The purpose of movement meditation is rather to relive it all through your bodily reactions that were originally present. When you allow your body to relive these things, you go through them, you embrace them, you become present with them, you become aware, and you are healed.

Unlike traditional meditation ShapeShifting seeks to immerse you more deeply into your physical self.

Traditional meditation seeks to remove you from the encumbrance of the physical world. The goal of ShapeShifting is to be totally present in the story that your body is telling through movement as it responds to the energy flow both within your body and the environment around it. The place where this happens is in your preconscious mind. This altered state of mind is where you connect most completely with your body. Leave your conscious mind behind.

There are levels or states of consciousness or awareness created in our brains- the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious, for example- and all of these levels have energy as their actuating and organizing force. Energy is the entrance key that opens up all of these states of mind. Each of these levels has certain functions that they perform in the life of our whole organism. Our conscious minds are our default state; it is the conscious state in which we spend most of our waking lives. It focuses on reasoning, self-reflection, introspection, and self-monitoring.

There is also a level of consciousness accessed through energy flow that is dedicated to our creative and expressive processes as humans. This level of intelligence is our preconscious mind. It ,in fact, functions best when the conscious mind is shut down. Its sole purpose is to promote and insure spontaneous moments of creativity. It is the place where our bodies live and breathe. It is a place where our bodies are free to remember and express all that they have collected from their sensory mechanisms throughout our lives. And it is the place where other bodies connect with our own body stories both collective and personal.

Our bodies are the most complex organisms on earth. They are the result of billions of years of evolution beginning with inorganic chemical compounds all the way up to the millions of daily organic chemical reactions that take place in our bodies today. Our bodies carry the recorded history of this evolutionary process in the DNA strings that reside in every cell of our bodies.

All movement comes via our DNA from our collective memory. All of our body's movements come from everything that has ever gone before us. We access this collective memory when we allow our bodies to tell each of their stories. These stories live and breath in our preconscious mind where our bodies live and breathe free of the conscious mind’s control and judgement. When other bodies are in the presence of our body stories, the energy flowing between our bodies activates and amplifies all of our collective and individual stories.

There are many common sense kinds of environments. These categories are basically internal and external to your body.

Internal environments fall into these categories:

Subatomic/atomic--

Every cell in your body is made up of atoms which are made up of subatomic particles which are all held together by charges or forces. There is this world of billions of particles relating to each other inside you all the time.

Biological/Physiological--

The next level of environment starts with cells. Cells form the basis for all of the biological and physiological functions that take place in your body.

Consciousness/intelligence--

This level of your internal environment is uniquely a result of the organizing power of energy. There are multiple levels of consciousness that each serve a different function. Your conscious mind is the daily default level that you function in most of the time. There are also levels like your unconscious and subconscious which are less easy to access. And there is the level on which Shapeshifting is most focused: your preconscious mind.

The levels that are external to you include these categories:

Immediate--

The most obvious environment is the one you are in at this moment: the room you are in, the street you are walking on, etc..

Global--

Planet earth has its own unique environment which in time will affect every part of your life.

Cosmic--

Our planet is a speck in this environment but was also formed out of it.

Unseen--

There is a whole unseen environment made up of webs of energy of which we are not consciously aware. These include known ones such as electromagnetic waves (radio waves), sonic waves (sound waves), and atomic particle rays. There are also webs of energy that we may not yet be aware of such as dark energy or parallel universes that tangentially interact with ours.

All of these layers of environments either create and maintain our bodies or are that which our bodies’ sense and take in as we live our daily lives. Our preconscious minds allow us access to what our bodies know. The flow of energy in and through our bodies enables this access. Shapeshifting is the way to connect and express this knowledge.

Energy is basically work. When you move a chair, you are doing work, you are expending energy. You are allowing energy to be transformed into other forms of energy. In that act of moving a chair you are setting in motion a whole host of transformations of energy through out your body and into that chair.

Basically there are two main forms of energy: kinetic and potential. Kinetic energy is possessed by objects due to their motion (your moving hands and arms), while potential energy is possessed by objects due to their relative position or configuration ( a chair pulled to the floor by gravity in the corner of your living room).

In order for you to move that chair, your body goes through myriad forms of energy exchanges that are both kinetic and potential. The photons of light that reach your eyes to locate that chair are kinetic packs of energy. When they reach the electro/chemosensory neurons of your retina they activate, via other interneurons, the neurons in your brain and throughout your nervous system that control a whole series of muscles in your arms which result in your arms moving the chair.

Energy is every where around you and in you. And that energy never goes away; it endlessly transforms into ever changing expressions of energy. The energy present at the big bang of our universe is now flowing through your body. Your body also senses and responds to ambient energy. If you are moving in a room filled with people, your body is heavily influenced by the energy of those people’s bodies. There are webs of energy that you move through your body every second of your life. Your body can gather that energy and direct it into physical movement. And that directed energy can be perceived by other bodies.

Fundamentally, energy flows. Energy seeks energy. Energy may even seek expression. Because your body itself is pure energy, it can give ambient energy a physical expression. And your body receives power from that ambient energy to tell its story in the language of movement. The flow of energy gives clarity and presence to what you express in your body’s movement story.

Your body is energy. From the subatomic electrochemical exchanges within cells and neurons to the most complicated physical and metal processes of which your body is capable, the flow of energy is at its core.

Resonance is defined as the effects produced when the natural vibration frequency of a body is greatly amplified by reinforcing vibrations at the same or nearly the same frequency from another body.

Resonance in ShapeShifting is a kind of energy flow that connects one body with another. When you pluck a guitar string, it vibrates. The vibrating frequency of that string causes fibers in the guitar body to vibrate at a similar frequency and the sound is amplified. As energy flows in and through our bodies, it creates a common frequency to which each of our bodies vibrate. A kind of synergy occurs. And together our bodies speak to each other with clarity and power.

The place in each of us where this resonance happens is in our preconscious mind. It is the place where our bodies live and breathe. It is the place where we are set free to tell the stories that each of our bodies have been longing to tell. It is the place where we truly recognize one another’s stories. And it is the energy flowing in and through each of our body’s that binds us together.

The total energy of a system can be subdivided and classified into potential energy, kinetic energy, or combinations of the two in various ways. Kinetic energy is determined by the movement of an object – or the composite motion of the components of an object – and potential energy reflects the potential of an object to have motion, and generally is a function of the position of an object within a field or may be stored in the field itself.

Here is a list of most of the accepted forms of energy.

Unlike traditional dance based on movement that is created through the process called choreography where the conscious mind strings together shapes that are supposed to express some idea or made up story, Shapeshifting is totally based on the flow of energy through your body. It is the energy flowing through your body which joins with energy webs that surround you that give rise to your body’s story. The movement that flows out of your body is the story that your body tells as it remembers all that it has experienced in your life. It knows who you are and it allows its energy and the energy surrounding it to tell your story.

Your preconscious mind is the place where your body lives and breathes. When you are in that preconscious state, your body will tell its story through spontaneous movement meditations. This story includes the story of energy from the beginning of time. Your body is the vehicle that gives expression to this eternal energy. It is both your body’s story and the story of all living organisms that have gone before you. Your body is like a tuning fork that picks up frequencies and amplifies them and then sends them back out into the myriad of types and range of energy frequencies in the form of movement. This movement with its’ invisible power is read by other bodies which also pick up and reshape these energy types and frequencies with their own movement.

Not only are our bodies made up of pure energy but everything around us is also pure energy. We are surrounded by webs of energy in the form of light waves, sound waves, radio waves, gamma rays and forms of energy unknown to us at this time. Other bodies pass their energy into our bodies. Because our bodies are pure energy they connect with these external webs of energy as they pass through us. We are shaped by these external waves of energy surrounding us even as we also give shape to the energy within us.

Being “in the zone” is often how jazz musicians and free style rappers describe what it feels like when they are creating spontaneously. Music and words flow out of them effortlessly without any written notes in front of them. There is no worry about making mistakes or what people will think about what they are creating. There is actually a place in your brain that does this very well. It is called the medial prefrontal cortex. It is a place that allows you to express yourself without self monitoring and inhibition.

In Shapeshifting that same place is called your preconscious mind. It is the place where your body lives and breathes and is free to express itself in the form of movement. This is a level of consciousness or state of mind that is free of the inhibitory restraints of your conscious mind. In a sense it is your body speaking before you conscious mind can capture the moment and stifle it with self-reflection, second guessing, or self-monitoring.

The psychological theory of self actualization also describes the flow experience as one in which control in flow, an altered perception of time, the melting together of action and consciousness, and the autotelic quality of flow-experiences are present.

Abraham Maslow, a very influencial psychologist in the 20th century, developed the idea that there is a hierarchy of needs that all humans have. These range from the very basic, such as, the need for food, shelter, and sleep all the way up to the more complex and often rarely achieved need for self actualization. This final level of need involved a person achieving what they saw as the purpose of their life. These moments of complete actualization did not last for long periods of time. However, it was reaching these points of satisfaction that permeated the rest of their lives. These flow experiences contained these elements: control in flow, an altered perception of time, the melting together of action and consciousness, and the autotelic quality of flow-experiences are present.

The spontaneous movement meditations which are an essential part of Shapeshifting are very similar to this experience.

Your body has all of the tools to hone your technique. As you find your own movement vocabulary, your body will with repetition make those movements occur with more efficiency, power, and clarity. As energy flows through those movements it teaches your body how to allow that same energy to flow with greater ease. By allowing yourself to truly fall and using the energy that that creates, your body learns how to move more efficiently and thus with more power and clarity.

If you should choose to take a dance technique class, always keep in mind your own movement vocabulary and direct whatever you learn into the service of your movement not the choreographed movement of the class.