The Heart of Movement 2 - The beat within your body
Our heart reverberates through all the tissues of our body as we are resonant creatures.
The same structures that shape the sound of our voices also vibrate with the sounds of our environment. We are filled with sounds that influence the way we feel from the sound of our inner dialogue to the hum of a town or the sea.
This week we’re going to consider the sound of our heart and its rhythm ..
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The sound of a beat has a duration. It has a middle that is the apex of its force but the true nature of its sound is a wave.
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The sound is being generated by the closing of the valves in our heart as they control the flow of blood through the four chambers. The sound of the heart beat rings out through the resonant framework of the blood as it moves through the body.
Do we live in time with the rhythm of our heart ? Can we adapt our heart beat to blend with the rhythms around us? Musicians do it when they play in synch and we certainly feel that when we fall in love.
It certainly is useful if you’re dancing or playing music. It’s also useful to be consistent.
Our heart rate is governed by our autonomic nervous system and varies quite a lot. You could experience this by holding your pulse to feel your own heart beat and compare it to any of these GIFs. The first two move at about 70 beats a minute and the third one at about 60 beats per minute.
Can you adjust your heart rate to follow these rhythms? and can you feel the subtle changes in your own heart rate as you do it?
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It’s really useful to shift your weight on the beat when you’re dancing. If you can do that you can also move on smaller divisions of each beat - but where is ‘on the beat’ ?
We can feel and hear our pulse if we become quiet. Sensing the shape of the space in between each beat and matching that with a sense of the blood’s flow is, I feel, at the heart of moving with the pulse.
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Much of the narrative about ‘the heart’ is couched in terms of good versus bad. Following you heart to do what you love as opposed to following your head. I think that avoiding negative experience is often at the heart (sic) of our disconnection from life.
Life is complicated. There are so many rhythms and forces to negotiate. Sometimes it can feel rather lonely when we lose our flow.
I think it’s rather useful to pause and consider those contradictory rhythms in life. Perhaps they are giving us something of great beauty that can only seen at a greater scale.
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So you’ll be moving with the beat of our heart and listening for the shape and character of its sound and rhythm. Let’s go with the flow of where we are.