Losing Oneself

Tag: improvisation

  • non dual awareness can co-occur with any content

    Zoran Josipovic is a cognitive and affective neuroscientist who founded the Nonduality Institute with Judith Blackstone. Here’s Josipovic with Vladimir Miskovic:

    NDA [non dual awareness] can co-occur with any content, whether perceptual, affective, or cognitive, which appears in it, so to speak, like an image in a mirror.

    – Josipovic, Z. and Miskovic, V. (2020) ‘Nondual Awareness and Minimal Phenomenal Experience’. Frontiers in Psychology 11, 2087, p.6

    This was an important idea in my initial curiosity about the potential to work through and with nonduality as a lens to understand experiences in dance improvisation. Nonduality does not presuppose particular types of content and therefore it seemed to make sense (as a matter of direct experience) that a busy, emotionally rich (even difficult) experience during a movement improvisation could be non dual in much the same way that more contemplative, slow and still meditation or sitting practices could be.

    I’ll return to nonduality as a framework for thinking through improvisation in future posts including whether the phenomenological method is capable of ‘getting at’ nonduality, and how nonduality is distinct from typical flow experiences.

  • me doing into it doing itself

    One of the things that Katye Coe and I have been focused on in the studio is the remarkably subtle shift that happens between a very expansive and open awareness that is the consequence of attention, and the feeling that a similarly open awareness is happening of its own accord. Katye beautifully captures this distinction as “me doing into it doing itself”.

    I’ll get more into this another time as it seems to be at the phenomenological heart of these movement improvisations Katye and I are practicing. My initial hunch is that these oscillatory experiences (between me doing and it doing itself) are different by degree, and not by kind.