It seems to me that movement is the great law of life, that every single thin moves. All forms move in the sense that everything appears, takes on form, functions and disappears. In the same sense, everything is horn, crows and then lies; or comes into being, chances, and then goes out of being.

The pattern that we perceive in talking this way is a movement pattern, and its other name is Change. Cur universe, from the largest to the smallest, is a moving universe. Whether we think of solar systems and galaxies, of time and tides, or of infancy, growing up, and old ape, we perceive a principle of becoming which moves, and the name of this moving principle is Energy.
This energy flows constantly. Its flow is the pattern of chance, and the laws of its change are the laws, its movement.

Part of this great web of becoming of everything being what 27it is and connected with everything else; of all the patterns of change being related in themselves and to other patterns of change with no separation (although we perceive them separately when we look and focus our attention) part of this great web of becoming is Man. He belongs to the universe, both inside himself and outside himself. Each of us, in our being and becoming, participates in the moving pattern of aliveness which is human.

Here you get to the physical fact that we move. “We are alive because we move, we move because we are alive.” If any of you has personally experienced death, you know that one of the striking and overwhelming things about it is the fact that there is that person lying there is the body but what hits you so hard is that there is no livingness which, at the same moment you perceive as no movement. What it is that moves, and what has become of that principle, that moving aliveness that is that person? We say that the person isn’t there any more when we look at somebody who has died. One of the startling things for me has been the difference in the kind of stillness, the non-moving, in death, and the stillness of a person that we would ordinarily say is not moving. He really is moving. His life goes on moving in him no matter how physically still he is.

Movement, then, is the basic medium in which we live. Everything we think and feel and say and do is a movement pattern. I think one of the things that releases you from the static picture of conceptualization and intellectuality is the sudden perception of yourself as thinking. You realize that thinking is an act, and that the act of thinking moved Thinking is not except in language static hunks of anything. The process by which you think moves just like anything else. (The result may not.)

All the physiological functions, everything that roes on in our bodies of which we’re not aware, are also patterns of movement: respiration and circulation, digestion and elimination, copulation and reproduction. All of these things, whether we have to do anything about them or not, are again movement patterns. And of course, our actions are easy to see: our walking and running and laughing and weeping and talking, our gestures, even the way our voices come out, their speed and their sound all of these are movement patterns. And when we sleep or when we meditate, we may not be moving physically, in the sense of an action, but something in us still moves. What we have been trying to do here is to see how the inner movement of our aliveness, and the visible physical movement are one.

The movement that we use all day every day, twenty four hours a day, is our behavior. Its quality and its energy, its timing and its size and its shape constitute who we are and how we are. There’s an over-all pattern of how each of us moves a style but there is also how we are in a given instant or moment. A lot more research has been done on the over all pattern of kinds of movement in kinds of people than has been done on the instant in which the self, the person, shows what he is feeling and how he is in his body movement, and what that means. And yet we know we feel the how of each other; we respond to what is being expressed, to the way the self is being alive to the movement communication. In a given moment we are (and it’s so hard to keen it in flux and at the same time try to describe it) behaving or moving in a particular pattern that will never come again exactly.

Variations in a given action are individual and unique, but the structure or the pattern lies within the scone of all human becoming and behavior. We all participate in all varieties of human movement, differently balanced and organized, differently put together and focused, but similar in the fact that the human body has a basic pattern that belongs to everybody. We all sleep, eat, breathe, lie down, get up. We all live in our world through moving, no matter what our religion or our philosophy or our culture or our politics. One of the tremendous contributions of cultural anthropology (has been to show) the idiosyncratic use of the body of a particular culture together with the commonality of the use of the body with other culture.

So what does all this mean? It seems to me to offer the possibility of experiencing physical movement not only as doing … but also as being. Doing has to do with producing, it is utilitarian, it is Goal oriented, it uses the movement to get something done. Most of our twenty four hours are lived like that. This is partly a matter of the fact that a great deal of our movement has become automatic within the frame of our being born and growing up. We don’t have to think about those actions which are available to us to get something done. Nevertheless, there is an area where, as you become more sensitive to the expressive side of movement, you can also begin to be aware of yourself in “productive” or “doing” movement in order to learn how you approach tasks or goal: what your own speed is, what your own rhythm. is, where your tension level is, how you use the energy in other words what you are like, living.Apropos of Movement