Losing Oneself

Author: Simon Ellis

  • shimmer again (video)

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    Simon Ellis
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    My colleague Heinrich Escano has been playing a bit more with using motion extraction from the simple footage taken from a still video camera (although in this clip there are some still images as well). In this sample there are three different things to look at: 1) you can see what happens when there is…

  • the conviction that we are selves

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    Simon Ellis
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    Here’s a bit more from Jay Garfield’s Losing Ourselves: The ninth-century Indian philosopher Śāntideva argues in How to Lead an Awakened Life (Bodhicāryāvatāra) that our conviction that we are selves arises from a primal fear of death, and that we construct the idea of a self as a bulwark against that fear. Śāntideva also argues…

  • the thing itself

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    In work like this that explores complex first-person experiences of and through the body, you inevitably bump into the issue of the thing or experience itself versus our description of it. Years ago I had a go at discussing this long-standing issue in dance and performance in a presentation called Hands that don’t want anything.…

  • part of the experience

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    Here’s Roger Linden from his website The Elusive Obvious on the nature of experience and the self: What is assumed to be at the heart of all experience, namely that I have to be there experiencing it, it’s not what’s happening. It’s not you who is experiencing reading these words, the experience is of you…

  • ask where the horse is going

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    In our work and conversations together Katye would often talk about the moment in improvising where one becomes a passenger. Katye says this is Charlie Morrissey’s term for the feeling that rather than you driving the improvisation, it is driving or leading you. Here’s one moment when Katye is reflecting on this idea: and the…

  • body awareness and embodiment

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    Simon Ellis
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    Wolf Mehling specialises in family and community medicine and has published on interoception and body awareness. In one study, Mehling and colleagues sought to understand the “conceptualisation of body awareness” in mind-body therapies like yoga, TaiChi, Body-Oriented Psychotherapy, Body Awareness Therapy, mindfulness based therapies/meditation, Feldenkrais, Alexander Method and Breath Therapy. They created a series of…

  • the infraordinary

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    Simon Ellis
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    In Jenny Odell’s book Saving time: discovering a life beyond the clock (2023) she discusses George Perec’s concept of the infraordinary: In A 1973 essay called “Approaches to What?” the French writer Georges Perec coined the term infraordinary. Media and the public perception of time, he wrote, focused on the extraordinary – things outside the…

  • response to shimmer

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    Simon Ellis
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    I had some interesting responses to the brief video shimmer from a couple of weeks ago. My colleague Scott deLahunta wrote: [the video] really highlights the variation going on across the whole surface of the body, the small balancing adjustments, the small dancing going on. which you miss normally since your attention is dragged toward…

  • what we are doing in the practice is delicate

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    Simon Ellis
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    I’m wary of this kind of digging as well. Because of it’s … because I think what we’re, what we’re doing in the practice is delicate. And yeah, I’m wary of it, as you’ve already expressed previously about planting seeds or … addressing something that you’ve seen, and the risk being that it becomes a…

  • the sensing of a sensation

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    Simon Ellis
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    In one of our conversations post movement (on 2 February 2024) I ask Katye: Are we expressing sensation? Can you talk more about sensation and movement? You say “sensation then movement”. What is this thing called “sensation”? I then wonder out loud if sensation is different from sensing. Once Katye and I have worked through…