Episode 140 – Embodied Attention: Contact Improvisation and Bodywork (with Nita Little)

Summary

Episode Transcript

 

Til Luchau  00:01

Welcome to the Thinking Practitioner podcast, a podcast where we dig into the fascinating issues, conditions and quandaries in the massage and manual therapy world today. I’m Whitney Lowe and I’m Til  Lucau. Welcome to the Thinking Practitioner.  The Thinking Practitioner podcast is supported by ABMP Associated Bodywork and Massage Professionals. ABMP membership gives professional practitioners like you a package including individual liability insurance, free continuing education and quick reference apps, online scheduling and payments with Pocket Suite and much more. ABMP ce courses, podcast, and Massage and Bodywork Magazine always feature expert voices and new perspectives in the profession, including Whitney Lowe and myself Til Lucau, Thinking Practitioner listeners can save on joining ABMP at abmp.com/thinking today.

I am honored to welcome a true pioneer in the world of movement and somatic exploration, Nita Little as a foundational figure in Contact Improvisation. Nita, you have spent decades researching the intelligence of the body in motion, things like the relational nature of touch and the deep listening that emerges through this particular dance form your word bridges dance, embodied cognition and somatics, offering insights into presence, perception and the ways we connect through touch. 

For body workers, our audience here your perspective, and for me as a bodyworker, your perspective has opened new ways of understanding hands-on practice and see it, not just as a technique, but as you know, but as the techniques we do, but as dynamic, responsive dialog with the other person involved. And I’m really thrilled to have this conversation with you. Welcome. Nita.

 

Nita Little  01:51

You’re mentioning all the key areas that excite me so

 

Til Luchau  01:58

well, I’ve gotten to be in your event and your trainings a couple times now, and we’ve had a bit of conversations, and I’ve been excited to have you this extended conversation with you today. Can you say a little more for our listeners about the work you teach, and maybe what drew you to it?

 

Nita Little  02:21

Well, initially I was a dancer. I’d been a dancer since I was a tiny person, and known I was a dancer since I was maybe 11 years old. Just knew that that was my drive, that was who I would be in life. So that’s easy, the moving, the being a mover was easy. Initially, I wanted to be a contemporary dancer, and became a contemporary dancer, but through the course of my education.  I met Steve Paxton at a moment when he was interested in reflexive action. Had just been working with men at Oberlin College, and he was he’s a post modern Judson pioneer, Judson era pioneer. If you know dance history,

 

Til Luchau  03:28

I don’t, but that’s good. That’s a good that’s

 

Nita Little  03:30

a really big turning point in compositional thinking for dance influenced by musician John Cage and dance choreographer Merce Cunningham, his partner and anyway, Steve was interested in improvisational action that was produced, that produced reflexive events. And I, at that time, was interested in, I was a advanced dancer, interested in improvisation, developing as a choreographer, um, and he was my teacher in composition and at Bennington College, and I was interested in what could happen in movement, that when, when two people didn’t determine what was going to happen, but they were in touch, and one was sharing, getting sharing, like one person going up on another shoulder and then coming back down, but nobody determining how that would happen. So it had to be a negotiation,

 

Til Luchau  04:58

and that’s so you. We have a couple of important elements there. One is touch, which is relevant to our field. The other is improvisational meaning. They’re following each other,

 

Nita Little  05:11

right, right, right. And Steve was a master at improvisation, and I was a developing improviser. And Steve was also had a history of studying he was studying Aikido and Tai Chi in New York City, and he was quite expert in both of those. And so that information was infiltrating what happened when we went into a studio to get to kind of explore what what this could be. Now it was an unequal relationship, because I was a student of course, and Steve had ways of understanding movement that I didn’t have yet. He knew how to ask questions of movement, to seek the principles, not the action itself. That was so exhilarating to me, so such a huge shift in how I could understand the making of movement, and it it basically produced what became contact improvisation.

 

Til Luchau  06:37

And you’re describing an ability to somehow open up an inquiry, as opposed to imparting a a form or a method or something like that. And

 

Nita Little  06:47

and he, and he kind of profoundly believed that everybody knows how to do this. That’s part of his interest in reflexive action. What we came to really understand and reflexive action. Everybody knows how to do.

 

Til Luchau  07:07

Hi, tell us what you mean. What’s reflexive action? 

 

Nita Little  07:13

So the  reflexive action is you touch a hot stove. Your hand is already moving before you know it okay away from the stove, you fall to the floor, you hit somebody and you head into falling. Your body takes shapes to preserve and protect parts of you that need so you don’t fall face first unless you’re stone drunk or something. You know something’s intervening those capacities. Otherwise, you will protect yourself right instantly that this interiority of of of knowing oneself without having to think about it’s not brain based. It’s not neuro you know, it’s not, it doesn’t have to go up here before it happens. Okay, that that that instant action, it’s not considered. In other words, now reflexes can be trained. And so a lot of what we were doing was training reflexes.

 

Til Luchau  08:33

Okay, so how? How about touch in Contact Improvisation? How has it? How has your understanding of it changed or evolved over the decades you’ve been doing this about touch.

 

Nita Little  08:52

I think initially it was well, with respect to touch. I was raised with brothers, and we were always grappling one way or another. So we were like in there, moving against bodies with bodies, generally, not in sweet ways, generally somebody’s playing with the other but so being highly physical with another body was was an easy place for me. And then as a dancer, it was always an easy place. I think it was a gift to me, being raised with brothers as I as I went in as contact developed, figuring out the varieties of ways that we could touch opened up this understanding that touch was critical, not only to what I was doing, but to how I was communicating with another body, and I didn’t, in the early days, have language to describe that, so a lot of the past 53 years have been figuring out the language to describe phenomenon that can be felt and acted on but not spoken about.

 

Til Luchau  10:36

And touch is like that. Bodies are like that. Yeah, and that’s touch being the most obvious place that Contact Improv overlaps with bodywork and massage, and yet it’s a really different I’ve learned a lot about touch just through these last couple of years of diving into contact improv myself.

 

Nita Little  11:00

At one, I did a piece called These Gifts were Handed Through a Hole. It was, you know, in the air. This is, we’re talking in the 80s, 70s, okay, 70s. I think this. I did this. I did a dance piece at the art museum and Museum of Art in Berkeley, at UC Berkeley, and it was early, early Contact. And the image, you know, this was the day when, when I was doing the Tai Chi did the I Ching put my hand there, and this is what the title came up to be. So chance procedures with Merce Cunningham

 

Nita Little  11:52

and

 

Nita Little  11:54

the but the image for me was always that the point of contact was a whole,

 

12:01

all right, a

 

Nita Little  12:03

whole was a, was a, was a thorough fair through which information was passing, gifts were Passing. Yes, we understand one another through that whole. Yes. So when you ask how things evolve for me, I kind of in the early seven or late 70s, was there, and from there it developed,

 

Til Luchau  12:37

yeah, and you mentioned how it’s not the same as talking or that putting it into words is sometimes challenging, but so it’s I had a great conversation with Alicia Grayson here on the podcast, and we talked a lot about body work and contact, but there’s something I’m trying to articulate for myself about the learning I’ve done about touch as a toucher, for a professional toucher, for 40 years, moving into a new form format. Here the contact form, it’s opened up. It’s refined what I do, and has opened up different possibilities. I’d say, in my hands on work, I mean in bodywork, I’m touching mostly my hands, and yet in contact, we are using more than just the hands,

 

Nita Little  13:29

right, right, right. Well, since you know, in my growth and development, when I was thinking it was a whole, I I was thinking of mind and body as two different functions, and mind passing through that hole, and eventually, by the 90s, maybe The early 2000s I was then saying, you know, that’s not really what it’s more it’s different than that. Okay, so here’s the evolution price. Think of mind and mind and body as a single action of being as critical to what we understand as being, and if my image is the image of a Mobius, a Mobius being a three dimensional object with a single surface,

 

Nita Little  14:39

so

 

Nita Little  14:42

it’s it’s remarkable form. If you take a strip of paper and you put one twist in, and you bring it together. Now of a Mobius. The thing about a Mobius is that it. Time is implicated in its single surface, because you have to run your finger along the the form to realize that the inside becomes the outside, becomes the inside becomes the outside. I’m

 

Til Luchau  15:16

still, I’m still struck by the whole image. And you said that was the 70s or 80s, and then it became, oh, the whole

 

Nita Little  15:23

image, but image of the whole so let me take you to the Mobius. And why I bring the Mobius? As the Mobius, the Mobius is one surface, if one were to make a circle of a strip of paper, you’ve gotten inside and then outside. But with the Mobius, when you put that twist in it, the inside is the outside. Is the inside is the outside. As long as you’re moving along that Mobius, if you stop anywhere on the Mobius, you’ve got an inside and an outside. So if you die, if you kill the object, if you kill if time no longer is implied in it. Now you’ve gotten inside and an outside if you’re on the surface of the Mobius. So mind, body, to me, is a Mobius. You stop anywhere. You register any moment. You take a picture. You study this moment alone, not in time. You’ve got both a mind and a body. If the object is moving, if there’s time, it’s a mind body. So what time does in my world is it brings mind body into this instant of

 

Nita Little  16:47

presence of being.

 

Til Luchau  16:51

There’s a way I don’t I’m really interested in hearing you talk more than I’m interested in hearing myself talk, but you’re spurring all kinds of ideas for me, like one is that sometimes when I’m doing body work, I imagine stopping time through the interaction.

 

Nita Little  17:11

Okay, so

 

Til Luchau  17:14

I imagine that the medium I’m actually working with in my hand is time, and maybe I could even slow it down, manipulate it, change our perception of time, bring out some timeless

 

Nita Little  17:23

so in my belief, every instant is eternity. You know, we can enter into it in some extraordinary eternity, in, you know, in this dive into an instant that is not stopping time exactly. It’s doing a different thing than stopping time. It’s not killing the Mobius. It’s a different it’s a different action. So when you when you stretch something that is in motion, so that the instant now is this like this profoundly deep cavern of of being of this moment. I don’t think of that stoppie. I think of that as this, this simultaneous. Action to the play of time. And I think of stopping as that thing that we do in science when we don’t, when we stay on the same scale as the human and we stop the thing.

 

Til Luchau  18:49

It’s a very different action to push the button on a stopwatch and stop time than it is to be touching someone else and enter into that

 

Nita Little  18:57

exactly. Those are not the same, yeah, yeah. So maybe the variations of of what it means to stop, you know, stretch, enter, I think of what you’re talking about when you’re going inside and finding that eternal moment is you’re in and entering in contact terms, which are touch terms. We can experience time in thin slices or in chunks, durations, a chunk is a duration. As limited beings, we might hold the same amount of information in any moment like we have. We have a limited amount of information. We can hold as conscious information as something we can

 

Nita Little  20:06

describe however.

 

Nita Little  20:11

It really matters, if you’re holding it in a thin slice, that much information in thin slice, as opposed to over duration. So in right? Yes, in slice orients all that information in a depth, and the next thin slice can be a different depth, I mean, or be a different alignment of information,

 

Til Luchau  20:37

each thin size being independent from the next. Yeah,

 

Nita Little  20:42

yeah, this and this and this and this. So so as action happens really, really fast. If you thin slice, you can detail what’s going on. It can ex you can experience this as slow with lots of lots of knowing what’s happening. If you’re experiencing something that happens very fast, as a duration, it’ll be happening and you won’t even know what to do about it, because there’s not enough information to act. You can’t possibly act.

 

Til Luchau  21:14

Okay? What? What about uncertainty, like, what about when we don’t know what to do in the next slice, I’m thinking about just the juxtaposition of having a plan in a body of work session and following the moment. What about this uncertain so

 

Nita Little  21:34

let’s say with within the touch, the realm of touch. Great. Touch always touches, and is touch in return. It’s never just doing one thing. Then that’s my whole image, right? That’s why it works as a whole,

 

Til Luchau  21:56

even. And I’m using my hand even when I’m using my hands with a client, and I am, in quotes, touching them. You’re saying, I’m being touched. I’m both touching,

 

Nita Little  22:09

okay, yeah, and, and you’re, if you’re good at that, if you’re good at that, good at being touched, good at being touched, right? Good at being touched then, then when someone’s working on you, you’re right there being you’re touching back, saying, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, in all of those places, and that’s why body work is fun. It’s a challenge, because sometimes the body worker is going into places that you have that have not said hello in so long, and inviting those parts of myself to say hello back that’s and to say welcome, hello and welcome, hello. And where do you want to go? I’ll, I’ll go there with you. You know that opening, that saying, here’s the opening. Can I open? Can I open? Can I can? How deep can the Hello go? That’s my challenges as being worked on. I I don’t think I’ve ever said that before, but that’s what I’m doing.

 

Til Luchau  23:27

That’s great. You said the challenge is the Hello that happens within yourself, with your own situation,

 

Nita Little  23:33

that meets, the meets, okay, yeah, that enters. In fact, if they can, if I can, not just touches the surface of you, but enters into you.

 

Til Luchau  23:52

Okay, we got Hello, and I’m silent because I’m remembering your workshop here in Boulder, and we spent a bunch of time on Hello. We actually encountered our, you know, we you brought that theme up in a very rich way. And we spent time in movement, in our attention, in our touch, perhaps really exploring this idea of encountering, of greeting. And how do we how do I bring myself to it? What happened to those moments? I like it. I like it a lot.

 

Nita Little  24:27

Yeah, yeah. I like the Hello dance too, yeah. And it one you can do over and over again. I can do over and over again and keep going further. Well,

 

Til Luchau  24:42

is okay, so is that all this thing, slice thing is, is it just hello after Hello? Yeah.

 

Nita Little  24:51

And so many ways, yeah, and when you talk about that eternal moment, yeah, that’s the Hello that Joe. This won’t stop when we talk about or when we think about

 

Nita Little  25:08

time as having this capacity

 

Nita Little  25:15

to open and be entered

 

Nita Little  25:22

and touch gives allows that availability, because touch is deep, touch is dimensional. Eyes see surfaces. They see light reflecting.

 

Til Luchau  25:40

Eyes see surfaces, yes,

 

Nita Little  25:43

and, and we, we work conceptually to make the world a 3d world, right? I mean, we’re structured so that we can see from these this distance, which is not very great, the dist, the difference. So something kind of registers as lying this sees a different surface than this sees. So we kind of conceptually put it together into something, but the and but the reason our eyes, we look at something and they are not still, they’re constantly in motion, is so that we register as much as we can about the 3d as we you know, we’re in minding the world. We’re bringing the world into being, yeah, and move around it by our motion, the motion of the eyes. Touch is, touch is does a similar kind of thing, but touch it already is acting in 3d because everything touches everything. I’m quoting Alvin Noe when I say that. Alvin NOE is a cognitive scientist, philosopher who works with dance, works with William Forsyth and how I did and he registers. He’s looking at how, how the world is, how a human is, is in minding that presence for him. And he has a text. He was on my PhD committee, I must say, so. I’m kind of an alvanoi fan, but he has a book called the varieties of presence in which he’s really or he’s really interested in how we bring the world into being. So that action, for instance, of the eyes that I was talking about, yes, is critical how and understanding, how we presence, how we bring the world into being fascinating to me.

 

Til Luchau  28:16

Okay, I’m trying to catch up. There’s this idea that of with the eyes, we’re seeing a surface our brain puts it together in our experience as a three dimensional object. By you said, moving around, this is like the predictive function, yeah, yeah. Predictive coding. Same thing. My petal motion, micro motion, yes. Tiny little this idea that we actually perceive only a little bit of our visual field clearly, and then the brain puts it into a hole for us. But you’re saying, yes, not

 

Nita Little  28:53

only that, but we’re kind of humans. Have a blind spot in the middle of our vision that we’re constantly filling in. It’s filled

 

Til Luchau  29:01

in all right, okay. So then in touch, you say touch is different, and the touch touches everything.

 

Nita Little  29:10

Touch,

 

Nita Little  29:13

touch isn’t everything. Touch has,

 

Nita Little  29:18

um, oh, attention has the capacity to to

 

Nita Little  29:25

organize the field of touch. I’m sure you’re aware of that as you’re working, yeah, in

 

Til Luchau  29:33

terms of three dimensions, absolutely, yeah, I touch n d, if that’s what we’re talking about, yeah, you touch a, d, but you

 

Nita Little  29:41

also can telescope in, telescope out, your touch, can’t you? I

 

29:50

think so. Yes, right

 

Nita Little  29:54

me, you meet you meet me somewhere, and you’ll be out, in a broad sense, and then, as. You continue to work. You telescope in, maybe penetrating further, maybe entering into the particular

 

Nita Little  30:09

yes and but

 

Nita Little  30:18

you have that capacity, that 3d capacity, because everything touches everything,

 

Nita Little  30:28

meaning, meaning that everywhere there is touch, everywhere there is something, it means that,

 

Nita Little  30:41

not that. Here I am. I Yeah, here I am. I am actually touching everything, because everything’s touching everything, but, but as but, but as a human being, I can’t travel that distance to you in Colorado just by doing this. Right? Well, maybe I could in other capacities, other other realms, okay, but in this, this realm of touch, it’s not really functioning, I would like to put my hands on your face. Not happening,

 

Til Luchau  31:18

not gonna Yes. But in that way,

 

Nita Little  31:20

you’re in Australia, by the way, I’m in Australia. So,

 

Nita Little  31:28

right. And yet,

 

Nita Little  31:37

that that because everything’s touching everything, my hand can touch my own face right now. I feel I can penetrate

 

Nita Little  31:50

I’m not stopped at the flesh.

 

Nita Little  31:55

Right? Yeah, that tickle in my throat was right there.

 

Nita Little  32:01

I wear a doctor right there.

 

Nita Little  32:06

You know, you could go here as well, and I could touch my throat right here.

 

Nita Little  32:15

So

 

Nita Little  32:17

it’s kind of a touch is kind of remarkable, deeply unexplored by contemporary humans. God only knows what previous humans have done. But touch is profound, and just how is it that we live in a world that is excluding touch from education? Oh, god, it’s such a painful thing to me. I can’t tell you, Yes, going to cry. It’s so painful to me that the human that humans are choosing technology, Cold Steel, over human touch, a touch that has this extraordinary variable flexible mind that it also is, it is mind. Why would you choose data over this extraordinary being we are? Oh my god. Anyway, enough said. I don’t

 

Til Luchau  33:25

know if there’s ever enough said about that, and I think that is the subtext. That means, for sure, we’re singing to the choir here, because that’s, that’s the reason people come to us, that’s the reason we’re involved in this work, that’s maybe the most powerful single aspect, where the touch is so marginalized and so uncommon, and especially the kind of touch we’re talking about in these two different domains.

 

Nita Little  33:56

What? Yeah, and, and it’s not you said the kind of touch we’re talking about, but can I trouble that til I got to trouble language trouble up please. Because the kind of touch we’re talking about presents it as a single kind, and I think, in a world in which we don’t know what a body mind can do and we don’t know what a body mind can do,

 

Nita Little  34:30

the kinds of touch that are possible

 

Nita Little  34:36

are innumerable, many more than we have yet conceived, yet experienced. And it is not simply a duality, this touch over that, touch, sexual, touch over healing, touch, parental, touch over the. Uh, over,

 

Til Luchau  35:05

help me. Um, friends, your friendly touch,

 

Nita Little  35:09

yes, that paranormal touch, that

 

Til Luchau  35:13

people, paranormal touch,

 

Nita Little  35:14

awesome, right? What is that touch? What is but they call it paranormal simply because it’s not, not been normalized. But there are, there are kinds of touch that are totally unexplored, totally un not even considered. And I don’t know about you, but I have them. I have touch that happens to me all the time in different ways, not all the time. That’s being excessive. The world shows up in surprising ways. And if you are willing to hold things, to not try and define things really fast, to not try and grab a hold of what’s happening, but you’re allowing the world to show up and teach you then, then your availability for understanding the varieties of things we don’t yet understand about being Mind bodies is important. Is there. And I think this, I think it’s, it’s not super it’s not, you know, I say paranormal, and I’m sorry I even use those words because that makes it weird.

 

Til Luchau  36:33

Alliteration with parental, I really liked that, by the way, parental paranormal. So you’re, you’re juxtaposing things that and thank you for troubling a language too, because box exited in my in my thinking about touch. Thank you for that out of the box.

 

Nita Little  36:53

Great, great, great. And that’s why I think, I think contact improvisation has an ability to explore the varieties of touch in new ways, that kind of clarity, what’s the principle? What allows this to happen when this what then that that something like touch and play doesn’t even come close to because the second you have an agenda, watch the wing of the finger. I’ve learned this since being in India. I know the

 

Nita Little  37:34

got a new finger wag the the moment that you have i Yes,

 

Nita Little  37:43

an agenda, you now have limited the possibilities of touch to that agenda. And so I really speak to contactors and say, Do not confuse touch and play with contact improvisation, they’re not the same thing. And when contact only has a social agenda, it loses its possibility as an inquiry to the social. Social does a very different thing. Social requires that we meet on a ground that we both understand already, you on a ground that we both don’t understand already, and now we both have to be asking about it, maybe together, but we’re now no longer doing something social. So pushing contact where it doesn’t it’s not limited by the social, unless you’ve got a social that will stretch

 

Til Luchau  39:00

by social do you mean like a particular set of boundaries and norms that exactly? Yeah. Okay, so again, help me hold this juxtaposition of the boundlessness of touch and the benefit of boundaries.

 

Nita Little  39:22

So I don’t think touch is boundless, otherwise it wouldn’t serve us.

 

Til Luchau  39:28

You know what I’m trying to ask,

 

Nita Little  39:30

yeah, yeah, yeah. But I’m wanting to make sure that listeners understand, because they mean in this conversation here, in the same way, because

 

Til Luchau  39:42

let’s go, let’s go through it slowly. Then, yes, please. Okay,

 

Nita Little  39:48

so everything touches everything. I don’t want to personally, don’t want to have that confusion. Used with boundlessness or boundarylessness, okay, boundary lessness, Yeah,

 

Nita Little  40:09

true. Um, I think being able that that life shows up means

 

Nita Little  40:20

it shows up in ways that can be perceived and understood and felt and recognized. We’re missing a ton. There’s so much we that is here present now that we’re not getting it’s not all available to us. The notion of boundary, lessness may be a notion that, hey, you’ve got further to go. There’s more there. And I think that’s what the word means when you speak it, when it shows up, it’s going to be organized in a way that you can see, which means there are boundaries to it. And you’re going to constantly be invited to go further into that thing that you’re speaking of is boundary, boundarylessness. So there’s this constant play between how it is we we enter into the unknown and we discover something that becomes available to us, that that difference is, is the is that that play, that that oscillation

 

Nita Little  41:54

is,

 

Nita Little  42:00

It’s a kind of it’s a profound dance to enter, if you can enter there, if you can live there, it’s joyful, it’s profound. It’s like, oh, the world’s going to surprise me here.

 

Til Luchau  42:14

I’m free associating a little bit, but I’m thinking about the fact that you are a rigorous teacher instructor. And yet, what you’re inspiring in us that are learning from you is this, this almost an expansive but this sense of possibility or boundlessness, or the something beyond the form, something else besides the form. And it’s only gets complicated when I try to put those two together, because in practice, it’s really clear we’re working within a certain context in there, given a net or certain limitations, conventions. And yet, there’s the magic that comes in, is something else,

 

Nita Little  43:01

right, right? And, and when the mind is a body, is a mind the body, the limits of the body are, the limits could be, could be the limits of the mind that is a body. The limits of the body could be limits of the mind that is a body. The limits of the mind could be the limits of the body that is a mind,

 

Nita Little  43:40

which means that to to break through our cultural domestication

 

Nita Little  43:53

and re wild our ability To attend

 

Nita Little  43:57

to touch, let’s keep it about touch. Do much we

 

Nita Little  44:09

know that the mind is, is, is is going to has the capacity to take the body places it’s never been you have to be able to distinguish between fantasy and imagination. Fantasy is what can never be. It’s it’s a play of images smashing against images.

 

Nita Little  44:38

Imagination

 

Nita Little  44:42

is the is a possible that you have not yet arrived at, and you may be, don’t yet quite know how, but you have that inner sense, hmm, could be, how could that be? What if? What if? And. Right now, I’m thinking of that crazy bar scene in Star Wars where they take you to a bar and they’re all these creatures that are humanoid, but they’ve got trunks and weird things and, yeah, and it’s kind of creepy. And you go, okay, that’s somebody’s is that fantasy or imagination? Well, in a world where I read, in that same era a Harper’s Magazine talking about a plastic surgeon who’s trying to figure out how to put in a cochlear implants in humans to to enhance hearing,

 

Nita Little  45:46

hearing that touches, hearing that touches, then you go, Hmm,

 

Nita Little  45:56

is this fantasy or imagination? We talking? You know, what’s the what are the bounds of genetics, and what are those scientists up to? But, but then I start to say, Hmm, but why do we have to go all the way to change the genetics? That might be cool too, especially when the brain rewires itself, which it can do very easily, like if I imagine I’m I have a cane. Let’s talk about proprioception. I’m walking with cane, right? And there’s somebody and the end of the cane is telling me what’s happening. I’m not looking with my eyes. I’m there, letting the end of the cane tell me, nothing’s there. Better take better look, there’s a stack. Do I need the cane? Can I proprioceptively? You know, the cane, by the way, gets wired into your brain, becomes part of us. Yes, yeah, the so that the brain has actually changed to include the the, the the cane. Yes,

 

Nita Little  47:07

we’re so facile. So then, if I just have

 

Nita Little  47:16

my imagination and a cane there, what? Then happens? Do I wire in? And how do I wire in a cane so that I’m understanding the touch that is at the end of the cane, and would I feel that empty step? And what kind of wiring, what kind of having of a cane do I need to do that job? What kind of ears do I need to have sound touch? And we know there are blind people who use they they make clicks and they hear great D

 

Til Luchau  48:03

we have games all the time in hands on work. We’re always feeling through something to feel something else. Yeah, the through through a bar, to the through a limb, to feel the trunk, through the skin, to feel the layers underneath,

 

Nita Little  48:22

etc. We’re always feeling right, right, right. So, and, and, and the moment you felt through that is you now it’s in you. You now are that which you are touching.

 

Til Luchau  48:37

And he has expanded into the cane. You have become.

 

Nita Little  48:41

You have become that limb, that being, and that’s the realm of touch that so deeply needs to be explored. Further further further. What happens when identity refuses to be limited to a skin single skin set.

 

Til Luchau  49:03

So what about CO regulation? What about the nervous system? You know? So that’s so much of what happens in contact is that this me that I’m used to expands, and together with this bigger sense of me, there’s a different sort of regulation possible.

 

Nita Little  49:22

I wonder what the word regulation means, because every I hear that word regulation, I fight inside. Ida, have a fight. You want to regulate? Me. That’s just

 

Til Luchau  49:35

your unregulated spirit. I think.

 

Nita Little  49:39

Yeah, so co regulate. I would use the word register. I wouldn’t use the word regulate under those circumstances. Interesting,

 

Til Luchau  49:47

so that if I was a listening or a witnessing or a recognition, I’m thinking

 

Nita Little  49:52

register when things register together. They’re, they’re, they’re doing this

 

Til Luchau  49:57

right. Your hands are like. Back and forth with each other, yes, yeah,

 

Nita Little  50:01

they’re touching and they’re moving as one movement is registered together. Regulate means I’m saying now you do what I do when I do it. Got you. And I don’t want that. I don’t like the word regulate. I don’t like that. It’s become the like key term these days.

 

Til Luchau  50:29

Well, I have an imaginary listener in my mind who’s saying, Great. This is all interesting, but what do I do? How do I help a client have a better experience. How to help myself have a better experience? How do I help them feel safe? What do

 

Nita Little  50:48

I do? You and you know we haven’t mentioned it yet. We haven’t mentioned it yet, but you have worked on me. You’ve done body work on me, so I know something about your touch. Yeah. Mind you, I will return for a yet again, because it’s so extraordinary and wonderful and and works

 

Til Luchau  51:21

very kind. So what thank you for the compliment that was, yeah, it was great to work with you as a toucher backer in your own way. Yeah, and so what about this? Listeners, going, Okay, interesting. But what do I do? What

 

Nita Little  51:33

do you do so you touch back so that you can register together. You know, in contact improvisation, we don’t close our hands around each other unless we’re unless we’re counter balancing, and we need to create this, this link between our bodies. But if we’re moving, just moving together, we don’t wrap ourselves to constrain one another.

 

Til Luchau  52:06

There’s not a grasp, there’s not a holding grasp. There

 

Nita Little  52:10

are the offering of ledges and forms that give the other person the possibility of having choice like a foot can hook. I might do this with my arms so that I’ve got a hook that their foot can act on, and now they can fall away, but if they want, they can just slip out. Not I’m not holding the foot because now they’re the one in danger. They’re the one in counter balance, and I’m the one that with the choice doesn’t work for me.

 

Nita Little  52:47

Yes, so, um,

 

Til Luchau  52:52

on the table. We want the same thing. We want options for our client. We don’t want to be controlling things so much that they are being coerced or influenced or put somewhere they’re not going already,

 

Nita Little  53:07

right, right? You have to listen for the yes, the internal Yes, the touch Yes, hearing Yes In Touch is like, that’s a key. There’s a language. And I have to say I and I haven’t said this yet, but my interest in touch is the touch of attention, the embodied action of attention as touch, which I am relatively confident, is a language and is not a function, a thing that we do language. And I’m interested in working with people so that they are have a capacity to explore that language. In the language is greater than yes, no, but yes, no is an essential place. Hello is an essential part of that language?

 

Nita Little  54:18

Wonderful. It’s great.

 

Nita Little  54:21

And for Yeah, and, and, and, you, I wanted to answer the thing about, how does register? Registering together? It’s touch based. It means you’re going to touch, and that touch that becomes is a registration. It’s different than a regulation. It’s a registration. It’s not a regulation.

 

Til Luchau  54:51

The touch that becomes, the touch that is unfolding, that is a potential, more than a thing, deceptive

 

Nita Little  54:58

that. Are you lose the boundary, the the boundary of your identity. That identity is unstable, essentially unstable, letting living in an unstable sense of self, because the self can be so many things, so many beings.

 

Til Luchau  55:21

Let’s see if we can stay in this mood right here. And I want to ask about one more thing. Tell me. This is a question a client asked me yesterday, what, how do you think about aging? He said,

 

Nita Little  55:39

That is the question right now, oh, my God,

 

Nita Little  55:46

how do I think about aging within a realm of, specifically, of touch or within touch

 

Til Luchau  55:55

body movement? Inspiration? Yes, he was on my bodywork table, and he he’s a guy that has written books about aging, so I was like, I had no Yeah, I was flattered that he asked me, but it’s a question I’m pondering as the years go by, and I’m curious how you think about Aging in this realm of movement, bodies, physicality, touch.

 

Nita Little  56:28

Well,

 

Nita Little  56:32

I’m present with the vulnerabilities that are aging. I think it’s extremely important just thinking about this in the shower, because I think because of stuff that comes across my I mean, I don’t know if it’s happening for you, but when I go online so often, I just went into YouTube to to see something, and the ad comes up, and it’s about Alzheimer’s, and I’m thinking, you know, they’re just tracking me as an old person.

 

Speaker 1  57:12

They got my amber. They know me, yes, they know my age,

 

Nita Little  57:17

so that now they’re wanting me to be concerned about my brain health, and they’re wanting to move me towards spending money in those in those realms. But as I was in the shower and this kind of floated through, I thought so important for creativity, for the imagination, to not fix on culturally agreed ideas. I was thinking about words and complex words, because I’d very often use complex words and how words live in so many parts of my brain, in varieties of contexts, and If, if I remain actively recognizing how I’m using this structure, how I’m that I’ve got more than one place to find a word. They live all through me in lots of ways and in this body. Bring it down. Bring it down. Bring it down. That the imagination that can imagine more than culture offers

 

Nita Little  58:47

constantly, stays awake, stays alive,

 

Nita Little  58:52

imagines possibilities. Goes for them. See if sees if they work. Go for a new one, if parts of it works and parts don’t in exploration. Pretty hard for that to go down the old cultural Road, pretty hard for that being to do it the same way. So what is Aging? Aging is makes the demand to be an adventure even even stronger, but the adventure becomes one of new How’s, how? How, how. How can this be? How can I do it? I’m, you know, contact improvisation appears because of the question of how and when and where, and if this what, what those kind of constant inquiries, the question why? Least important question there is. Is

 

1:00:07

okay.

 

Til Luchau  1:00:09

One thought, you want to leave us with? It’s been delightful. What would you like to leave us with?

 

Nita Little  1:00:16

Oh, my God, I think I said one thought, hello.

 

Til Luchau  1:00:28

Nita Little thanks for taking the time to talk to me. Books of discovery has been part of massage therapy education for over 20 years. 1000s of schools around the world teach with their textbooks, e textbooks and digital resources, books of discovery, likes to say Learning Adventures start here. They see that same spirit here on the thinking practitioner podcast, and they’re proud, proud to support our work, knowing we share the mission to bring massage and body work community and live in content that advances our profession. Check out their collection of E textbooks and digital learning resources for pathology, kinesiology, anatomy, [email protected] where thinking practitioner, listeners like you pay 15% by entering thinking at checkout. Thanks. Books of discovery, you.