My "mid-section blues" are growing into new form, perhaps best described as “bodywork literacy 101." Few but highly-verbal academics care about such semantic differences, but the more I examined the “blues” in voices I’ve valued, and the more I’ve received gifts from “living life from perspective of a liberated core,” the less appropriate the term “blues” has become. I’ll weave a bit of textual-resourcing here alongside some new narrative, all toward a more refined, ‘spoken’ intention within which to engage the practice(s) and listening-learning to come.
“The blues” as defined by James H. Cone, systematic theology professor at Union Seminary in NYC, is as good a place to start as any. (The Spirituals and the Blues, Orbis Books, 1972, 1991, 2004; what follows is paraphrased and cited from Chapter Six, 97-128). Written in 1972, this now-classic work of Cone argues against any white co-optation of the term “blues” for any of their/our experience. Cone, in other words, would bristle at even a metaphorical use of the term to wrestle with my embodied experience, because I am white. Fair enough. My socio-cultural location and history do mean I have absolutely no entrance into the experience of black people, except that which they welcome me into, translating every step of the way in what might be called ‘compassionate companionship.’ But metaphorical use relies precisely on that dichotomy, that “not-ness” brought up against “is-ness.” Metaphor allows indirect teaching, learning, sharing, which is open to all who will open to it.
Within the “not-ness” so assumed, then, “the blues” name an existential focus/intent for this foray into embodied learning, awareness that I have described as “Mid-Section Blues.” Cone defines the “blues” as “secular spirituals” arising from a “state of mind in relation to the Truth of the black experience.” They are true because they “combine art and life, poetry and experience, the symbolic and the real. They are an artistic response to the chaos of life.” Their origin and definition “cannot be understood independent of the suffering that black people endured in the context of white racism and hate.” The blues offer black people a way to transcend trouble without ignoring it, nor being destroyed by it. They also give voice to “existence” as a “form of celebration. It is joy, love, and sex. It is hugging, kissing, and feeling. People cannot love physically and spiritually (the two cannot be separated!) until they have been up against the edge of life, experiencing the hurt and pain of existence.” The “blues” signal an unwillingness and inability “to follow white Christianity’s rejection of the body.” Ultimately, the “blues” express a belief that “one day things will not be like what they are today.”
“Mid-Section Blues” musings have arisen out of my state of mind in relation to the truth of my own embodied experience. Whatever truths may arrive come from art and life, poetry and experience, the symbolic and the real. Surprisingly, to me at least, this beginning writing-exploration speaks most powerfully with recognition of its deeply rooted self-loathing and decades of learned-imposed-imputed (self-)hatred in women’s embodiment, my own body. Nothing like systemic racism or white hatred of blackness, as per Cone, but vivid, costly, debilitating for me and those like me, who wrestle with physical form mired in shame, guilt, fear and more. I’m finding that these bodywork practices, these intermittent reflections along the way, seem to be paving a way to transcend trouble without ignoring it, without remaining captive to it. I’m finding unexpected moments of existence, from the core, as celebration, as an overflow of devotion/awareness from the wedded physical-spiritual life up against the self-loathing, the edge of existence known in hurts, pains, here in this place. The gift here for me is new ways to signal an unwillingness, an inability, to accept or follow any longer “white Christianity’s rejection of the body.” This line of learning, then, expresses my growing belief that one day, things will not be like what they are today.
I am already finding this to be true, in unexpected ways. For instance, I discovered while singing for a faith community recently that although I’ve not sung or practiced regularly for months, my vocal tone and range have cleared, extended. Huh? Specific attention to bodywork via brief yoga routine and continued training appears the only candidate for cause there. Singing flows out of the breath, aligned in body and posture. Yoga and training channel breath alongside energy currents within physical forms, posture. Or another truth-awareness: simply taking an evening walk which can become boon for new awareness, gifted sentience of interdependence (see Eve’s Sermon).
But the significance is not the physical-biological cause-effect learning, that bodywork can renew or strengthen a singing voice, can open one’s heart to new sentience. I find those pleasurable, but not the rub of what impressed me, my body. The significant awareness for me today is that this fruit of sustained practice—expanded capacity in song, extended sentience—is/was completely unrelated to my state of mind and reasons for engaging the sustained practice. It’s like the mind functions for direct-sight dependent upon intention. Bodywork, “body-language,” in contrast, invites a peripheral life fundamentally necessary for, sustaining all seeing, only a portion of which we move to focus.
The bodywork path seems to be not solely to redress body-issues or self-loathing that remains rooted in my core, albeit in weakened form. Clearly that is one of the intentions, hopes, for this path of practice. But a more urgent of the emerging invitations appears to be an indirect pedagogy and surrender to a life-practice without clear awareness for the gains to be had, the ‘products’ to be ‘purchased’ in such activity. How often do we engage in a practice or activity or service for which we cannot precisely define its aim, its arguable end-point? How regularly do we submit to a commandment from ‘outside ourselves,’ minus some rationale for its completion? So it seems my path is to commit openness and resources, time and energies, to lively bodywork practices without knowing the end or outcome aimed. If the fruits so far are any clue, my intended aim/end will be ‘wrong' anyway, or at least inaccurate.
What will my life become, living into this primary commitment to embodied practices sustained with concrete resources, time-spent, openness to bodywork companions? What is it like to choose to unknown, from moment to moment, in order to learn the language of the body which is not literate or even a language. Perhaps its song instead?
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