Cleaning Up

'London Clean Practice Group tonight will be presented by Penny Tompkins and James Lawley and the topic is ‘Differentiating difference’.

In 1988 David Grove wrote: "experience presents as undifferentiated data. In order to use the information it contains, the therapist must separate and individuate components of the experience." (Healing The Wounded Child Within, 1988, p. 5)

Tonight we will practise the art of facilitating each other to self-model our natural ways of differentiating, separating and punctuating the “undifferentiated information mass” we call experience.'

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After a night of dreams and waking with awareness of metaphors continuing to develop, change rippling through me, yesterday was a good day: heavy with rain, interspersed with meeting well-loved and newly-loved friends in town, and very special with the practice group in the evening and my first experience of being a client for a full session of Clean earlier in the afternoon. Something I feel will continue to reverberate for good time to come. And of course informs me as I move from this phase of immersive travel, practice, movement, into the next phase of drawing everything together as of writing up.

Interesting how things circle around: the last time I saw Wendy I was planning my trip to Canada, and talking about three ways of working (within the context holistic medicine/therapy) that I was wanting to explore as a methodology that could inform my research within pervasive media. We decided that was probably the subject of a future trip, not this one: good advice! However, just a couple of days ago doing some 'work' up in the woods, the ideas popped up again, this time overlaid with ideas about Clean space and embodied metaphor landscape, as well as pervasive media and working with the body. 

There's certainly something about physical meeting that creates a 'marker' in relation to which certain spaces for thoughts, ideas, processes, occur. 

Skype, video, email, phone all give a sense of direct communication and presence felt - but it's interesting to see what's not there, in the gaps, that we only find when physical paths intertwine.