Our gestures shape our worlds.

”Pol Rab“ (Hand study)

Germaine Krull. 1929

I am fascinated by the connection between intentionality, intention and matter-ing. In my view, relating is an art-form, and art-making is a relational process. In working with the here-and-now, immediate embodied moment, patterns emerge in a dynamic form between varying zones - thoughts, perceptions, emotions, imagery and bodily/felt sense experience. These patterns inform particular sets of movements, which manifest in particular relational impacts and outcomes. The process of awareness and appreciation of our patterns - these living, embodied art-forms, as I like to see them - gives us breathing space to witness what is actually going on, rather than what we might wish to see instead. From a place of awareness and acceptance can we begin to disintegrate that which has become fixed in our way of being, facilitate integral change and increase our capacity to do life with more response-ability.

Ruella Frank, a Gestalt and somatic psychotherapist based in New York, has committed much of her work to 6 fundamental movement patterns found in humans. These are primary response patterns which reverberate between infants and parents; they define the roots of an infant’s embodied experience and development of contact with the world outside of the womb. These movements are yielding, pushing, reaching, grasping, pulling and releasing. The satisfaction experienced in fulfilling these essential movements allows the support for more complex expressions of these movements to emerge, and for the next movement in the sequence to follow gracefully. For example, from satisfying the developmental movement of rolling, an infant accesses adequate support to crawl…from satisfying the developmental movement of crawling, they access adequate support to begin walking, and so on.

As adults, our primary response patterns, and the degree to which they have been supported to satisfaction, are expressed in a variety of corresponding micro- and macro-movements and aesthetics of contact. By that I mean, just as each child, each adult, and each relationship is unique, the particular colour, shape, texture and essence of these fundamental movements in relationship will vary. As Frank says, every one of us has a "personal movement vocabulary”.

Here are some elaborations on the 6 fundamental movements:

Yielding is the movement of fully allowing oneself to surrender to gravity, to the environment, to being held, to the support of others. When enough safety and trust has been established in one’s embodied experience, they know that someone or something will be there to hold/catch them if they fall.

Pushing is the movement which supports us to get up once we have fallen or surrendered. We trust the ground, the surface, the person etc. enough to leverage it to serve our needs. The capacity to push awakens the ability to know when it is time to push and activate our strength, when it is time to move further from the proximity of our caregiver and explore novel sense data and experience. We know that if we fall or fail, yielding is an option we can trust.

Reaching is the movement of curiosity and meeting our emergent needs. Reaching emerges from recognising and responding to our longings. In reaching we feel capable of asking for and attaining what we need in order to feel safe and satisfied. We trust that what we need is accessible to us and, if it is not, we trust our abilities to reach for the support necessary. Our reaching is a path-carving of intention.

Grasping is the movement of grabbing hold of that which we need or desire, claiming its be-longing to us. Grasping is a kind of touching in which we attempt to take something other into/with ourselves. Through grasping, we re-establish stability after reaching towards the unknown.

Pulling is the movement of reducing the empty space between ourselves and the need/desire/object we have grasped. When this movement is developed in a healthy way, whatever we pull close to our hearts, minds, mouths, bodies, etc. we are able to fully receive, appreciate and assimilate.

Releasing is the movement of effortless surrender, letting go after we have a felt sense of total completion from the sequence of contact. Similar to the ‘rest and digest’ function, we know our ‘enough’ and allow our bodies to assimilate what it has just encountered, eaten, experienced, etc. We relax, say goodbye, return to ourselves, trusting that what we need outside of ourselves will be there when we need it next and trusting our abilities to access it.

The ways that we embody these movements as adults can tell us a lot about the quality and degree to which they were nurtured and developed as infants. We may not be reaching for the breast or skirt of our mothers anymore, but we do reach for our phones, food and friends. (What is the quality of our reaching, how does it vibrate within and around us?) Our grasping (of opportunities, people, things) may be charged with desperation or panic if this movement was not nurtured and/or we weren’t provided with what we needed on a loving and consistent basis as infants. (What is the quality of our grasping, how does it vibrate within and around us?) If we learnt that our parents, communities and/or environments weren’t safe spaces to yield to, we might move through the world in ways that are perpetually tense, armoured or have a quality of feeling suspended.

Perhaps somewhere between yielding and pushing we were interrupted or underdeveloped, and so now we may have a hard time motivating ourselves to get out of bed, or supporting ourselves to extend beyond our comfort zone and seek new experiences. Perhaps our releasing depends more so on the cues of others than the cues of our internal system to leave an experience when we’ve had enough. Once again, I cannot give all of the specifics as everyone’s experience of these movements is uniquely storied, but I hope it spurs some inquiry as to how you encounter them for yourself.

These fundamental movement patterns, originally occurring in the context of primary relationship, echo into our adult lives. Restoring grace in the present to any disrupted primary movement patterns can also potentially evoke memories of deprivation, lack, shock, and pain in the healing process. Our ‘mother’ is now the ‘matrix’; the world that we live in, the relationship that we have with it, the way we organise our perceptions and respond within it. Without adequate awareness of how we move in it, we risk overlaying subtle perceptions which match what we expect to be fed-back gesturally in invisible and visible ways, based on our primary conditioning. This continues to shape our world with the same relational patterns and qualities that we assume to be normal for us. With an infusion of awareness - of breath, witness, appreciation - towards these fundamental movements, our gestures carry the potential of becoming agential, creative and transformative [micro-]acts of embodied poiesis.

Sarah Francis. 2024.