Estrés

In ‘Talking minds’ (2005), Maria Carozzi addresses the issue of how attention is trained. She argues that the way scholars are formed leads them to make uncritical assumptions about their own work, including that discourse has an extra-corporeal character. Carozzi examines the many ways in which evidence of corporeality is excluded in scholastic formation, beginning with school. She notes:

In the first place, school education contributes to the separation of discourse from the rest of the body by training attention. In school rituals, the teacher’s instructions and questions call the attention

towards what he/she is saying or is writing on the board. Students show the ‘correct’ direction of their attention by answering the teacher’s questions using a discourse that should be different in form – but identical in meaning – to that which he/she used before … Additionally, the school trains the body both not to pay attention to the quality of the sound of the voice produced or listened to during an oral lecture, as well as not to pay attention to the body movement involved in writing and speaking, but to address the attention to understanding and allowing understanding, that is, to producing and allowing production of equivalent discourses (2005, 31).

Jonathan Crary addresses the historical, social, and political

dimensions of attention in Suspensions of perception (1999), arguing

that capitalism requires high levels of attentiveness from its workers, so this becomes a norm, and ‘inattentiveness’ becomes a ‘problem’:

Western modernity since the nineteenth century has demanded that individuals define and shape themselves in terms of a capacity for ‘paying attention’, that is, for a disengagement from a broader field of attraction, whether visual or auditory, for the sake of isolating or focusing on a reduced number of stimuli. That our lives are so

thoroughly a patchwork of such disconnected states is not a ‘natural’ condition but rather the product of a dense and powerful remaking of human subjectivity in the West over the last 150 years (1999, 1).

This training of attention in the interests of the dominant powers in capitalism is, I think, what AG means in her report on the previous sequence when she refers to ‘some kind of body “politics”’. Most of us are brought up to ‘pay attention’ to something someone else wants us to attend to, and, by implication, perforce not attend to other things (such as what we feel, what we want or what we might like). It is clear already that Middendorf breathwork encourages bodily experiences that are in stark contrast to those alluded to by Carozzi and by Crary. Bodily sensation becomes the focus of attention rather than something to be ignored. A sense of wholeness is cultivated rather than a ‘patchwork’ of ‘disconnected states’.

One of the most striking things about first taking classes in Middendorf breathwork in Berkeley was the difference in language from what I was accustomed to with Dieter Gebel. Gebel had not taught in English before coming to Australia, and while his English is good, the specialised ‘breath language’ he used was drawn from the English translation of Ilse Middendorf’s book (1990). In that book, aside from the principle of letting breath come and go on its own, the grounds of the work are described as ‘focusing, perceiving, and breathing’, translating the German sammeln, empfinden, and atmen. In America

the teachers use the words ‘presence, sensation, and breath’. These are nouns rather than present participles, but they refer to the same German words. Breathing and breath refer to atmen. Perceiving and

sensation are related – I perceive my bodily sensations – and refer to

the change seems to have come about because of a concern that the meaning of ‘focus’ does not convey the intention of sammeln. ‘Focus’

can carry an implication of concentration on a point to the exclusion of all else, and the word ‘attention’ can have this meaning too. So the word ‘presence’ was chosen.

‘Presence’, closely related to ‘present’, has a number of meanings in English related to both time and space. ‘The fact or condition of being present; the state of being before, in front of, or in the same place with a person or thing; being there’ is the first of nine meanings in the OED online.

‘Presence’ is widely used in the fields of nursing and psychotherapy, usually with the sense of ‘being there’. ‘Presence’ is much contested in philosophy in relation to both time and space. In the realm of spirituality ‘presence’ can mean ‘a divine, spiritual, or incorporeal being or

influence felt or conceived as present’ (OED online). Jon Sharp from the University of East Anglia writes:

the key defining feature of moments of spiritual experience is the sense of ‘presence’ and of totality (2006, paragraph 16 of 37).

‘Presence’ has become an important concept in the world of virtual reality and computer simulations:

presence: the perceptual illusion of nonmediation. The term ‘perceptual’ indicates that this phenomenon involves continuous (real time)

responses of the human sensory, cognitive, and affective processing systems to objects and entities in a person's environment. An ‘illusion of nonmediation’ occurs when a person fails to perceive or acknowledge the existence of a medium in his/her communication environment and

responds as he/she would if the medium were not there (Lombard & Ditton 1997, 'Presence explicated').

In Lombard and Ditton’s case, presence ‘cannot occur unless a person is using a medium’, so this meaning is far removed from that intended in Middendorf breathwork. It is also in marked contrast to the way ‘presence’ is used in performance training. Philip Auslander writes:

In theatrical parlance, presence usually refers either to the relationship

between actor and audience – the actor as manifestation before an audience – or, more specifically, to the actor’s psychophysical attractiveness to the audience, a concept related to that of charisma

(1992, 37).

Jerzy Grotowski writes: ‘Awareness means the consciousness which is not linked to language (the machine for thinking), but to Presence’ (1995, 125).

Phillip Zarrilli refers to the actor’s ‘metaphysical studio’, as a place to explore fundamental paradoxes such as:

the relationship between space and time; between absence and presence; here/there; now/then; if/when … the embodied relationship between in-spiration and ex-piration (2002, 161).

Zarrilli points out some of the problems of identifying the notion of an actor’s ‘presence’ with a transcendental or essential self:

A reified subjectivist notion of ‘presence’ is as complicit in a dualist metaphysics as is the Cartesian ‘mind’. Neither provides an adequate account of the ‘body’ in the mind, the ‘mind’ in the body, or if the

process by which the signs read as ‘presence’ are a discursive construct (1995, 15).

In looking for ways to avoid these problems Shannon Riley draws on the work of neurologist Antonio Damasio and linguist Mikhail Bakhtin to frame a ‘provisional sense of presence that has more to do with

perception and attention than with any essential trait or quality’ (2004, 448). Riley’s work incorporates two contemporary movement forms she describes as ‘embodied perceptual practices’ – Authentic Movement and Butoh:

Embodied perceptual practices include a focus on breath and

perceptual imagery as the primary means of bringing attention to the dialogue between perceptual and recalled images, which are fully sensual in form. It is particularly through the breath that embodied perceptual techniques attempt to merge image, movement, and text in ways that are palpable. Embodied perception, put simply, is working with fully sensual imagery using one’s breath and all of one’s senses (2004, 454).

Riley says that the use of these practices can create a state of ‘perceptual polyphony’, an ‘ability to work simultaneously with text, perceptual and recalled imagery, and associated feelings’ (2004, 467). This strikes me as having parallels with what I describe as ‘kinæsthetic thinking’ (p.18).

In 2005 a group of researchers from Exeter and Stanford universities began a major research project, ‘Performing Presence: From the Live to the Simulated’, investigating the connections of presence in

Presence is a fundamental yet highly contested aspect of performance, and performance has come to be a key concept in many different fields. Notions of presence hinge on the relationship between the live and mediated, on notions of immediacy, authenticity and originality.

Presence prompts questions of the character of self-awareness, of the presentation of self. Interaction is implicated – presence often implies being in someone's presence. Location too – to be present is to be somewhere. Hence presence also directs us outside the self into the social and spatial. And also, of course, into temporality – a fulcrum of presence is tense and the relationship between past and present (Kaye, Giannachi et al. 2006).

The studio in Berkeley where Middendorf breathwork training sessions take place is a quiet unadorned room. In the early sessions of the training we trainees were often encouraged to close our eyes, reducing the external stimuli to make it easier to focus on the internal sensations of breath movement. But from the beginning the question was, when I direct my attention to some particular part of me, can I sense all of me at the same time? Can I have my presence/attention throughout? And then later as this became more possible (as we became more adept) the question became, can I have this ‘attention and devotion’ and contact the outer world? Can I extend my presence outside my body? Can I include other people, objects, into my awareness and still stay with the sensations of the movement of breath, sensing how these movements change in response to the stimuli from the outer world? Those familiar with Stanislavski will recognise a parallel here with his ‘circles of attention’.

Practising Middendorf breathwork requires one to be ‘in the present moment’, because attending to sensation requires being ‘in the present moment’. It asks for attention, not only of a pinpointed concentrated

sort but also of a more open receptive sort that includes an awareness of the whole body. But there is more to it than this.

I recorded a short interview in October 2004 to ask Jürg Roffler, about presence and attention (see Appendix C). He responded in part:

I consider attention being a part of presence. I see presence divided up in the most ideal situation in a balanced form of attention and devotion. So the more masculine25 _{part of presence, which would be attention,}

that is more linear, directed to the knee or this or that, has an intention, very clear … there, I want my presence to be there. The other, the devotion part or surrendering part, I don’t want to be just there, I want to include this into the whole. So presence, the way I understand that we are using it, holds both, holds the combination of attention and devotion or surrender (Appendix C, paragraph 2).

Towards the end of the short interview about presence Roffler says,

It is hard to describe. How would you describe an ability to be present? I think it’s a soul function,26 _{I don’t know. That’s the closest I can come to.}

25 _{Roffler’s use of ‘masculine’ in this context reflects the underlying Jungian}

vocabulary Middendorf breathwork. In this vocabulary ‘masculine’ is understood as goal-directed, or more broadly as having direction, and ‘feminine’ as ‘receptive’. This use of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ draws on cultural understandings and ideals of the nature of women and men that are no longer so widely shared and cannot be taken for granted, even if they once could. In Jungian circles it is understood that men and women have both feminine and masculine characteristics, but the fact that the labels ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ are intended to point to something that is contested now rather than taken for granted, remains unacknowledged. Insofar as Middendorf breathwork practitioners use this language I have included it, but otherwise I try to spell out what ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are intended to convey in the context. Presence, then, is understood in Middendorf breathwork as including both the directive and receptive.

26 _{‘Soul’ is another part of the language of Middendorf breathwork that reflects the}

Jungian assumptions within which the work is set. It is a word that sits uneasily in most modern parlance except in phrases like ‘soul music’ or ‘soul food’, both of which are showing their age. Here Roffler contrasts soul with intellect. During my interview with him, Dieter Gebel made the same distinction a number of times. He spoke of people who had problems ‘with their mind, with their mental [sic], with their soul’ (Appendix I, paragraph 33). When I followed this up it appeared that he was referring

It’s definitely not an intellectual function. The intellect is participating there too, but more passively, because presence itself is a kind of a tool that affects something, and I’m not thinking presence, I am presence. Thinking can get involved in the intention of being present. I can think about, I am making a decision to be present. That can be involved, but ultimately presence itself is not a rational function, it’s more like a soul function. That’s the closest that I can get (Appendix C, paragraph 10).

So, according to this understanding, I can make intellectual decisions that affect my presence, but ultimately presence is not an intellectual function; it is a function of my being, one that I can learn to use and direct. Later in the workshop series RB wrote:

Body circling – pelvis – from small to big […] – feeling that smaller is bigger – slow & miniature gives time to be in each detail – present – not overreaching – being with self & movement & breath (RB 30 May 04).

This ‘being with self & movement & breath’ is what I understand to be presence. Presence is about being here, now. If I am here in the space but am thinking about the past or anticipating the future then I am not fully present. If I am daydreaming or caught up in the sorts of thoughts that seem to think themselves then I am not fully present. I can say my presence is elsewhere, but that reifies presence in an awkward way. Presence is not a ‘thing’ in that way.

In Middendorf breathwork presence includes the notion of extending my presence to encompass others in the space. When I am teaching, for instance, I try to extend my presence out to include all those in the space. This has a parallel with the ‘presence of the actor’.

to what I would describe as ‘psychiatric problems’ such as schizophrenia, severe depression, and psychosis.