I became a Continuum teacher in 2006. Continuum is al ife and movement practice created over many years by somatic pioneer Emilie Conrad. When I first experienced Emilie’s teaching, I instantly recognized myself in the breath-sound-movement soundscape. It was a homecoming.
Continuum pays homage to the 70% water our human bodies are. In this practice, movement is instigated through the use of breath and sound – breath made audible. Similar to ultrasound, the frequency of sound that permeates our tissue – our inner landscape of canyons, rivers, organ earthy islands – enlivens the fluidity inherent in all our tissue, dense as it can seem. We humans tend to be conditioned to “do” movement when in fact we are movement. Undoing this “conditioned doing” is a premise of this work. Emilie used the term coaguladio to describe our denser tissue and our tendency to emphasize functional movement and form. Soludio was a term she used to describe all the ways density, tension, and form can dissolve to formlessness; all the metaphorical and sometimes literal mini deaths any living being can experience in a lifetime.
Illustrating the potential for transformation and healing in this willingness to dissolve form, density, unhelpful beliefs, and swim in our natural flow underlying all the currents of social conditioning, Emilie often spoke about caterpillars. She mused about the caterpillar’s courageous dissolve into a gooey mass of formlessness inside the cocoon, before it emerges as butterfly, a profound soludio. A willingness, whether conscious or unconscious, to let go into a dark unknown and to trust this letting go is the only way to achieve the bold flying beauty of the butterfly.
Our teaching community was set to gather in Encino, CA in February, but the meeting was moved online due to the fires in the Los Angeles area. In our online meeting, one of the curators of our gathering, Susan Harper, who had partnered with Emilie for many years to co-create this body of work, invited us into an elegant movement sequence that paid homage to this bold transformation. Susan shared some fascinating and currently very relevant details about this “caterpillian” journey that are timely for today.
The caterpillar eats voraciously, consuming everything it can right up until it forms a chrysalis. Inside the chrysalis, it dissolves into goop. The caterpillar’s structure has no similarity to the butterfly structure it will become. This transformation is catalyzed by imaginal cells, which lay dormant in the caterpillar’s body. In the dissolve, these cells begin to form individual cells and clusters, and the caterpillar’s immune system attacks the cells and clusters, defending its structure. The imaginal cells persist, eventually forming a unified multi cell organism. It is this organism that sparks goop to become the winged creature it never imagined it was, and was always destined to become.
As I muse on these times, and last month’s piece on resistance, I consider another form of resistance – the fear of letting go. The caterpillar’s immune system initially resists the imaginal in an act of self-preservation and resistance. It destroys the cells until they, persistent, become the unified organism that become butterfly, a creature that pollinates in service of continued growth. Susan offered us the uplifting metaphor of our capacity to spread love and nourishment in service of community, rising from a history of voracious, unrelenting consumption.
Last month, writing about resistance, I described how the word can conjure tension in my body. Resistance can have force, it can feel like a push against; a fight. And there is also creative resistance. Transforming science into metaphor and poetry, if we surrender into the possibility the imaginal realm offers, trust into the dissolve, what emerges? I am not privileging one form of resistance over the other. Both are essential in times of oppression and dangerous change. Perhaps the caterpillar’s journey can remind us of both the daring, bold fierceness and yielding willingness and ability to let go with discernment that feeds and transforms our power to both dismantle oppressive change and nurture meaningful change in greater service to many.