It Begins with Our Bodies

It begins with our bodies. Feel the eyes you are seeing with. Close your eyes. See what you see now when it’s dark. Is it black, orange, blue?  Feel their weight in their sockets. Move your eyes from left to right. Touch the moistness of your eyeballs with your eyelids. Feel how touching the insides of your eyelids with the balls of your eyes is a simultaneously being touched of your eyelids by the skin of your eyeballs. Is it skin? Do you call it skin? Do your eyes feel cold? Do you think of your eyelids as walls that close you off from the outside world? Think about other parts of your body that you experience as a boundary, as something that divides you from something else – that sometimes might make you feel alone, but also allows you to exist as you. Maybe you think about your skin. Or you feet. Or your hair. Maybe your body feels like origami or a set of Russian dolls, with every layer of skin closing off an entity in which another entity lives with and within a skin, in which another entity lives with and within a skin. Does your skin feel like a surface? Does it feel like a kind of envelope? Do you feel enveloped by it? Or does it feel like an embrace? What does it embrace? Do you embrace it? Does it embrace you? What about when you embrace someone or something else? What about when you feel embraced by something or someone else? Do you feel the space in which your body is now? Do you feel its walls? The air and the wind and the temperature?

Remember to keep your eyes closed. Where does your attention travel to? What do you your inner eyes tend to? Do they wander, or are they focused? Turn your gaze back inwardly. What’s the temperature on the inside of this embrace? What is its color? Is it bright? Does it feel smooth like marble, or sticky or furry or rough? Is it a surface too?

Swallow, once, two times, three. Feel your gullet move, imagine your heart, bwheating in your chest, what is its rhythm? Travel down, to your stomach. Does it feel sticky, full, expansive, hollow, dark, pulsing, imagine the folds it makes in its membranes, and also the space it holds. Go further down with your inner eyes. Imagine the many many folds and curves and layers of your gut, the embrace it is folded into, what lives on the insides of that embrace. Do they move or do they lie still in you pelvis? Can you feel your liver, your spleen, your pancreas. Do you have a womb and fallopian tubes? Can you feel these hover, float or weigh you down? Do your organs feel like a burden to you, or do they push you op? Do you feel the inner activity going on inside of your gut? What about time, how does it move inside your gut? Is it slower or faster than time on the outside of your skin? Can you make it in synch with time around you? Do you want to? What do you need to do for that? OR IS SOMETHING THAT YOU NEED TO NOT DO? Shift your inner eyes to the space around you. FEEL ITS EDGES WITH YOUR CLOSED EYES. MOVE YOUR PUPILS TO THE OUTER EDGES OF YOUR EYESBALLS. FLUTTER YOUR EYE LIDS OPEN VERY SLIGHLTY BUT VERY QUICKLY. COUNT TILL TEN WHILE DOING SO. OPEN YOUR EYES. TAKE IN YOUR SURROUNDINGS, THE PEOPLE AROUND YOU, THE SPACE, THE SHAPES, THE TEMPERATURE. HOW DOES TIME MOVE HERE? FEEL THE BOUNDARY OF YOUR SKIN. THINK ABOUT YOUR GUT. FEEL TIME.

Leuven, June 2021