Rooted in the principles and tenets of Emilie Conrad’s Continuum Movement, Living Body Inquiry explores our individual and collective human experience through the living body. We use breath, sound, and movement as well as imagery, stories, and dreams to dive deeply into the primordial essence of being human.
The following description of what Continuum Movement means to me is my way to honor, respect, and acknowledge the profound influence that my 35 years of involvement in Continuum has had on my own work.
Continuum Movement is a visionary inquiry into our capacity to innovate and co-create with the biological movement of life. Founded and created by Emilie Conrad, it is revolutionary approach to the questions “what does it mean to be human?” and “what is a body?”
In Continuum we consider the possibility that, as “organisms”, our lives may have a meaning function and purpose separate from the personality, assumptions, and stories that arise out of our identities as “individuals”.
We live from a capacity to think, feel, imagine, make meaning and create. We live also, as biological organisms belonging both to the aquatic and the terrestrial aspects of the natural world. Like all biological organisms, we are comprised mostly of water. The waters of life flowing through us, connects us to all life on this planet. Continuum invites each of us to enter into the mystery of Fluid Intelligence as it spiral through our bodies, our planet and our galaxy.
From this perspective, the “human being” expresses the life force of the Universe as it interacts with itself in a creative flux. The human organism manifests as self-organizing, self-generating system of information made material. We embody the movement of 4 billions years of life on this planet.
Movement is not only an activity we ”do”; it is a fundamental quality of who we “are”. Therefore the movement of thought, feeling, image, sensation, dream, action are all included in the movement of our “bodies”. The human being is, in effect a non-linear unfolding event existing in the context of a bio-morphic universe.
Awareness of ourselves as movement begins with developing our sensitivity to our inner landscape. We meet this world and come to know it by exploring the mobile diversity of breath. We discover how the play of our own sound permeates the living tissues of the body. We experience fluidity as our biological birthright. We learn to listen to the wisdom that swims in our cells and encourages life to unfold. As we participate with these fundamental movements we join with the underlying creative matrix which, in its vastness, spawns protoplasm, humans, and galaxies.
Continuum educates our capacity to participate in the health and well-being of ourselves, our communities and our environment at all levels of our existence.
Continuum-Movement Inquiry uses principles and applications of Conrad’s Continuum Movement in service to Inquiring into our individual and collective human experience living through a body. We use breath, sound and movement as well as images, stories and dreams to dive deeply into the primordial essence of being human.
Continuum provides:
- a non-linear rather than mechanistic model of movement and body-education
- ways to use the tools of primary perception, awareness, sensation, breath, sound and movement
- elaboration of fluid movement which stimulates organs, skeletal structure, circulation.
- A means of experiencing the cellularly oriented movements that curve, arc, spiral and undulate, recapitulating the biological forms of Nature.
- A means of developing an ability to use sensation as a resource for accessing the Intelligence which creates and unfolds all lifeforms.
- Methods to increase the mobility of breath which liberates movement.
- Use of sound to stimulate sensations and shape new movement
- A platform for experiencing and re-visioning ourselves as individuals and as a species guided by the intelligence of 4 billion years
- Experimentation with non-patterned, asymmetrical movement to stimulate neurological growth
- Exposure to the effects of human wave motion, gravitational diversity and movement in multiple planes
- A ground for discovering ourselves as creative organisms, informed by and participating in our planetary unfolding
- The basis for experiencing our individual identity belonging to a coherent field of Love.