Earlier Gaby offered the image of lying in an ocean of breath - SOUND! & for some reason today particularly aware of how breathy my own body is, my movements are, how much the body extends into space through breath and how aware we need to be of this. The breathing body. Then she offered the image of the bones being soft, wet, moist, sea sponges which left me feeling uncomfortable - if bones are soft, how are they supporting me?! (Written during a workshop with Gaby Agis)
The spine just as imaginary as a river or...something else imagined
Things in blue boxes
Some just point to things I wrote (in white boxes) in my embodied practice journal during or after a session. And here they sit among the contents of a fridge they may or may not reference, and above some videos and thoughts about breastfeeding (not my mother's).
Left feeling vulnerable, particularly around the ribs and the skull - I perform a skull dance where I'm thinking of the image that Gaby offered - sea sponges - but somehow I'm reinforcing the hardness of my skull by pushing it into the ground.
Intentionality & specificity and the room. Yesterday - so present in the room, the kitchen, the oats on the shelf also in my stomach. Today, breath so internal, so vital not sourced from objects in the room as such but from everything around them - air that has touched the corners and crevasses of the room, the objects in it, me, my insides. So that when I am moving with the breath spiraling around my bones I am so present with just that - my breath, my bones, spiraling & to a point that I keep touching myself -
Touch & bringing awareness to. Breath as touch as molecules of air and dust, pollution, scent, sound waves, all traveling inside of me - the potential for all the air that is outside of me to be inside. Physical body with a layer of skin, but then also separating unfolding outwards, self touching self, self, breathing self. What does any of this have to do with movement and intentionality? And awareness and midwifery practice as a movement practice - where is there space for any of this if you don't have a floor to lie on, to glide on? (Written during a workshop with Gaby Agis)
Note. From pg 52 in Wisdom of the Body Moving: An Introduction to Body-Mind Centering by Linda Hartley (1995) North Atlantic Books. Berkeley, California.
'When the baby does not yet take the breast or refuses it completely, this technique can help to put the baby in a state where he can accept the breast. The baby is skin to skin with the mother and indicates when he is ready to search for the breast. When he starts searching, the mother helps him, guiding him toward the breast, supporting his back and neck. The mother is careful not to hold his head. Babies need to have their necks supported but not their heads.'
International Breastfeeding Centre. (n.d). Baby-led Mother-guided started upright left breast, latches. Retrieved February 11th 2021, from https://ibconline.ca/breastfeeding-videos-english/
Gaby asks us to go from a deep squat, to standing upright & leaning backwards - looking up to the ceiling, supporting our heads so that we could say our names. I think of this skull support, head support, & holding babies - how soft and malleable their skulls are, but how they are already able to hold them to feed - and how they need space to tilt their heads back, to extend their necks & open their mouths as widely as possible. (Written during a workshop with Gaby Agis)
Taking ideas outside of ourselves to come back into ourselves
Global Health Media Project (2015, August 1st) Attaching Your Baby at the Breast - Breastfeeding Series [Video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjt-Ashodw8&feature=youtu.be
Popova, M (23 July 2020) The Universe in Verse: Ross Gay Reads His "Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt" [video] https://vimeo.com/441064966 Accessed 31st January 2021
Things in blue boxes
Some bring up thoughts and experiences I had a while ago, and which may explain other texts I've included that were written outside of the module
Before I trained as a midwife, I worked as a healthcare assistant (HCA). As an HCA I sat on one of the lowest pay tiers of the NHS hierarchy – band 2. The job description outlined my responsibilities – assisting patients with activities of daily living, undertaking basic observations such as temperature and pulse, providing the highest standard of patient care. In reality I was washing people in bed limb by limb, part by part with soapy water, changing bed sheets - often from underneath people who were unable to get out of bed - emptying catheter bags, helping people on and off of bed pans and commodes (basically a chair on wheels with a hole in it filled by a cardboard bowl to catch urine and faeces), washing people with MRSA with a special soap....
In ' Behind the Screens: Nursing, Somology and the Problem of the Body' Lawler observers that within many 'traditional' nursing models, the lower your social status as a nurse, the closer you get to the physical body and 'dirty work' (p.50). Though written in 1991, her observations reflected many of my experiences as one of the lowest banded healthcare workers. It was not lost on me that of the many healthcare workers engaging with the patients I had both the most day-to-day physical contact with the patients and also the least amount of training and lowest pay.
Note. From Naoli Vinaver (2020a) Naoli Vinaver’s personal website. Retrieved February 11th 2021, from https://www.naolivinaver.com/index.html
Things in blue boxes
Some are just here to signpost other things - like this poem by Ross Gay -which I came across while undertaking the embodied practice module. This poem resonated with me, and thoughts about the body being framed by and 'escap[ing] the terms of the question by which it is approached' (Butler, 1997 p. 16) . If you read the poem, rather than listen to it, it forms a long and thin line stretching from top to bottom, head to tail, (yes, like the spine) of the page. It's here to sit alongside other observations, texts, images, and to imply connections where I couldn't articulate them as well.
Combination of roundness of the object, the images of the skull, the images of the landscape (suture lines) & touch - exploring the landscape of our skulls, our faces (mountains, valleys)
image as touch
Sweeping my hand across my ribs, or an elbow pressing gently on knee or inner thigh as a way to remain with the breath & the bones, as if my own touch were the breath inside of me.
What is self touch?
(research questions roughly in orange, to be explored through movement)
- can I touch the touching thing
- can I sense my organs touching one another
- or where muscle or organ touches bone
- or can I sense the 'outside' touching me
- or is my knee touching my leg
- walking - is the floor touching my foot
- rolling - is that a kind of self touch
- image as touch
- breath as touch
The spine reimagined in a workshop with Eva Karczag
Dance and say words out loud:
Chair, upside, flipside, cobwebs
Dance and tell a story:
I have no story to tell
My mother's story -- the story of her breastfeeding
The story of these books I have not read
The story of these pots & pans & the contents of the fridge
(Written during workshop with Eva Karczag)
Weird, imaginary hands
Note. From pg. 5 in Skills for Midwifery Practice 2nd Edition [Photograph] by Ruth Johnson & Wendy Taylor (2007) Elsevier Press, China.
breath as touch
image as touch
breath as touch
where muscle or organ touches bone
rolling - is that a kind of self touch
Dance of closed fist and open fist - transferring something (a treasure, real or imagined) from one hand to the other.
Becomes a giving and receiving all the while traversing the space (imaginary space?)
(Reinterpretation of a score during a workshop with Sherwood Chen)
image as touch
Things in blue boxes
Some show that I enjoyed sharing texts with midwife friends where I saw parallels with our work - like how could learning about Mouthing patterns inform the way we talk to people about breastfeeding? What do we know from midwifery practice that contradicts or confirms any of this? And I wanted to know what resonated with them, and how they were using touch, breath, image, sensation, and voice in their practices.
Touching the touching thing
Remember when hand tapping hand (back, front, sides) "tapping the tapping thing". Same/similar to foot exploration - when hand tapping foot what if foot taps hand? (Written during a workshop with Eva Karczag)
touching the touching thing
Things in blue boxes
Can also point to midwifery texts - here's a page demonstrating abdominal palpation, usually performed to determine how the fetus is lying in the uterus. This is often reported in terms of:
- polarity/lie (is the spine running vertically in line with the carrier's or horizontal to it?)
- presentation (what body part is currently presenting at the cervix - head, bum, feet?)
- position (if the lie is longitudinal position of the spine and head in relation to the carrier's pelvis)
- engagement (how much of the presenting part is still above the pelvic brim)
I remember when I started my training as a midwife feeling so strange that people were willing to let me touch their bellies and the fetuses within.
Abdominal palpation can help to locate the fetal heart which can be listened to with a fetal stethoscope, a Pinnard stethoscope or a handheld ultrasound device (see image below). It is common, and often reassuring, while palpating or listening to the fetal heart rate to feel fetal movements.
'If my heart was giving up & going to drop me, to what degree was it an organ of "mine" my "own"? Was it even an organ?...Not "my heart" endlessly beating, as absent to me till now as the soles of my feet walking'
Remember the neck lengthening (rolling activity) -
rolling head down
weight of head doing the work
then lengthening to the side
don't stretch or pull
eyes still looking down
(both sides)
then hold back of head
round occiput
and roll head back, but
just as a way to lengthen the
neck (feel front of neck!)
then roll (back) through to
other side
(both sides lengthening) then
roll forwards.
Do this again in the opposite
direction, and then at the
end think about the neck
lengthening all the way down
to the sacrum
(when I did this I felt a long
lengthening, moving up my
whole spine.)
(Written as remembered immediately
after doing the exercise in a
workshop with Eva Karczag)
This is one way I'm thinking of 'touching the touching thing' - when the thing being touched, touches back.
It leads to a kind of thinking of the body in fragments
What about my hand - are the fingers of my hand touching one another?
Are my organs touching one another and, are there ways I can move, things I can put inside my body, or things I can do that mean they will touch in different and new ways? Beneficial ways? Harmful ways? Benign ways?
And what about words & images - how do they move me & is this a kind of touch?
Things in blue boxes
Some draw attention to differing paradigms and practices within midwifery.
In the UK, the use of ultrasound technology to listen to the fetal heart rate in labour and for scanning to assess fetal development at distinct stages are widely accepted and expected practices.
Modeled after bat echo-location ultrasound technology uses the 'application of directional sound reflections...to detect objects and measure distances' (Kane et al 2004, p.931). The devices themselves transmit and receive resonant frequencies that move at different speeds through different densities of bodily matter. The echo information can be used to form audio or visual representations, in the case of obstetrics, of fetal heart rates and images of fetuses and their bodily structures (Woo).
It is recommended that the fetal heart is monitored in some way or another in labour depending on the pregnant person's 'risk' level (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence [NICE], 2014). If this is performed with ultrasound technology, a hand-held device (as shown in the 'I put a spell on you' collage above) or a cardiotocograph transducer is placed on the pregnant belly at the place where it is thought the fetus's shoulder is. The echo sounding device can sort between the different densities of bodily matter to sense the pulsing of blood in the fetal heart and a digital audio representation of this is played by the machine. Great care has to be taken to differentiate the fetal heart from the pregnant person's heart - this can be done by feeling for the radial artery on the pregnant person's wrist, and noting the different heart rates pulsing at the same time.
National guidance recommends offering ultrasound scans at two different stages in pregnancy (NICE, 2008). Though the explicit purpose of the scans is to assess fetal growth and development and to screen for certain conditions, the scans have multiple meanings for pregnant people with many seeing it as a milestone in their parenting journey, and an opportunity to see into the underwater world of the fetus (Molander et al, 2010).
Consider, in contrast, or, alongside this, Naoli Vinaver, a Mexican midwife who has developed what she calls 'Natural Ultrasound' (Vinaver, 2020a) . Initially developed to provide people in low-resource settings the opportunity to visualise the fetus even without an ultrasound scan, the practice, in Naoli's words, allows 'the mother to connect with this life that is pulsing within her, and for the baby who can also feel this connection from before the birth' (Vinaver, 2020b). The image above, a line of pregnant bellies at different gestations, demonstrates the practice of painting with eyeliner, lipstick, and eye shadow, lines and images and swirls that show the positions and sizes of the fetuses. This is not widely practiced in the UK and I pay a membership fee to Naoli's website where she uploads videos that teach her practices and techniques. I present both of these paradigms here - which may coexist in certain contexts, both images, held in each fist - as different ways of knowing, of sorting through bodily matter, of thinking about self and other through touch.
I also note that the language used on Vinaver's website and in the image above may tend towards a biologically essential understanding of gender, pregnancy, and birth. I would like to acknowledge, without undermining the subjective experiences of pregnancy of cis gendered women, that we must work towards dignity and respect in pregnancy and birth as a fundamental right for all people accessing midwifery services, women, non-binary people and transfolk (Brighton & Sussex Univerity Hospitals NHS Trust, 2021).
References
Brighton & Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust. (2021). Gender Inclusive Language in Perinatal Services: Mission Statement and Rationale. Retrieved February 11th 2021, from https://www.bsuh.nhs.uk/maternity/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2021/01/Gender-Inclusive-Language-in-Perinatal-Services-BSUH.pdf
Butler, J. (1997). "HOW CAN I DENY THAT THESE HANDS AND THIS BODY ARE MINE?" Qui Parle, 11(1), 1-20. Retrieved January 13th 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20686081
Global Health Media Project (2015, August 1st) Attaching Your Baby at the Breast - Breastfeeding Series [Video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjt-Ashodw8&feature=youtu.be
Hamza, S. (Host). (2018, September 12th) The Pulse (No.2) [Audio podcast episode]. Harvard Divinity School. https://ventricles.simplecast.com/episodes/the-pulse
Hartley, L. (1995) Wisdom of the Body Moving: An Introduction to Body-Mind Centering. North Atlantic Books. Berkeley, California.
International Breastfeeding Centre. (n.d). Baby-led Mother-guided started upright left breast, latches. Retrieved February 11th 2021, from https://ibconline.ca/breastfeeding-videos-english/
Johnson, R. & Taylor, W. (2007) Skills for Midwifery Practice 2nd Edition. Elsevier Press, China.
Kane, D., Grassi, W., Sturrock, R., Balint, P.V. (2004) A brief history of musculoskeletal ultrasound: ‘From bats and ships to babies and hips’. Rheumatology 43. 931-933.
Lawler, J (1991) Behind the Screens: Nursing, Somology and the Problem of the Body. Sydney University Press. Sydney, Australia.
Molander, E., Alehagan, S., Berterö, C. M. (2010) Routine ultrasound examination during pregnancy: a world of possibilities, Midwifery 26(1) 18-26. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.midw.2008.04.008
Nancy, J., & Hanson, S. (2002). L'Intrus. CR: The New Centennial Review, 2(3), 1-14. Retrieved January 16th 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41949352
National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. (2008). Antenatal care for uncomplicated pregnancies. Clinical guideline [CG62]. https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg62
National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. (2014). Intrapartum care for healthy women and babies. Clinical guideline [CG190]. https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg190
Popova, M. (2020 July 23rd) The Universe in Verse: Ross Gay Reads His "Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt" [Video] https://vimeo.com/441064966
Vinaver, N. (2020a) Naoli Vinaver’s personal website. Retrieved February 11th 2021, from https://www.naolivinaver.com/index.html
Vinaver, N. (Director). (2020b). Natural Ultrasound. [Film].
Woo, J. (n.d) A short History of the development of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology. Retrieved February 11th 2021, from https://www.ob-ultrasound.net/history.html
Things in blue boxes
Need to acknowledge the development of my practice and thought. Before embodied practice I took a performance making module. When thinking about movement, performativity and my movement practice as midwifery practice I struggled to show what it is that I do, or the connections that I experience between dance and midwifery. For the performance making module I was working with the idea of 'Listening to Your Body'. This is something I have said to people in labour and which has often elicited a confused or frightened response from the labouring person. I've wondered if it is too direct, or not clear enough. If people have spent so many years drowning out the sounds of their physical bodies, that to be suddenly told to listen (and trust) alienates them further from themselves. In a sharing for performance making I performed what I called 'pulse piece' the score for which is roughly -
Feel your pulse and count it aloud. Try to simultaneously dance in time to the rhythm and pace of your own heartbeat.
The reaction from the class focused on what the piece looked like - could it be a film? would close up enhance the work? what if you didn't show your face?
The movements felt jagged, uncoordinated and uncomfortable, the task too difficult, like I was trying to do too many things at once and not doing any of them satisfactorily or joyfully. It is fair to say this is sometimes how I feel while working as a midwife. But was it a performance?
I returned to this question in embodied practice, writing in my journal -
Things in blue boxes
Should also acknowledge the centrality of the text L'intrus by Jean-Luc Nancy to my movement practice and research and particularly this quotation translated here by Susan Hanson (above).
And also this episode on the pulse from the podcast Ventricles hosted by Shireen Hamza (below).
I'm thinking about what Sherwood said about presence & performance 'what is our capacity to transform?' and 'how do multiple images & fragmentation of the body render the dancing performer's body uncanny? How do we as performers being witnessed offer this in our performance?'
At times in embodied practice I was confused by what we were expected to show one another in class and the sharings. Why was it important to have cameras on if this was about our individual embodied experiences? Was there a disconnect between some of the people leading sessions, and us, working often from - in my case cluttered - home in the middle of a global pandemic? What is the importance of physical presence and digital representation in this module, in midwifery? (Making a paper spine, realising that what I think of as my physical spine is also just as as imagined as it is real...the ultrasound images of the fetus, the painted on fetus, both treasures real and imagined). What did it mean when Gaby and Mary-Clare teaching Skinner Release Technique said 'I can see it' - didn't it not matter whether they could see it or not? (these sentences, this journal cluttered too...)
Nancy, J., & Hanson, S. (2002). L'Intrus. CR: The New Centennial Review, 2(3), 1-14. Retrieved January 16th 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41949352
A note on referencing
All references for in-text citations can be found in the reference list. All quotations outside of my own writing have a reference underneath and can be found in the reference list.
All images unless otherwise indicated by references below the individual images (and in the reference list) are my own.
I would like to thank Heni Hale and Gaby Agis who facilitated this module having to hold various spaces in Siobhan Davies' Dance Studio and across Zoom for a group of 13 of us, and Claudia Tonietto for her technical assistance.
I would also like to thank my cohort for their generous moving, sharing, and witnessing, and for our conversations about, among other things, seeing and being seen, sharing and not sharing, and which bodies can release and how.
Finally I want to thank (in chronological order) all the teachers on the course for their wisdom and guidance:
Gaby Agis
Eva Karczag
Sherwood Chen
Thomas Kampe
Caroline Scott
Mary-Clare McKenna