Feeling

The inner sense of movement is connected to movement form and it is important to understand that the Function2Flow approach encourages interdisciplinary integration. As such, the Feeling register of movement consciousness is intricately linked to movement Form.  What is kinesthetically sensed and felt in poses, postures, positions, gestures, and expressions properly establishes a requisite self-awareness towards the onset of Flow. For if the Feeling or ‘kinesthetic’ register is the “inner touch” of the external senses that gives to us a “sense of sensing” (Heller-Roazen, 2007), then the Form or ‘aesthetic’ register properly brings this inner sensing to fuller expression. To ‘look fit,’ even to be a ‘picture of fitness,’ is to harness, momentarily, the flow of vitality within vibrant stances and alignments, dynamic changes of position, gestured motions of contracting and extending, and even expressive details of the face that are reflected in the carriage and bearing of the fittingly physiognomic form.

In specific activity contexts, we communicate very physically through the effort qualities of the movements enacted, the spatial arrangements and relationships created in the passages of play, and in the body shapes taken to convey specific intention. Curricula of health and physical education tend to interpret such self expression in conceptual and cognitive terms, suggesting that it is based on an explicit awareness of what the body does, where it moves, how it moves, and with whom (e.g. Ontario Ministry of Education, 2010, p. 24).  One might consider, however, that this communicative competence involves a more primary, visceral sense of the body and its ‘expressive possibilities’ based on the movement exploration of breathing, balancing, timing and touch. One learns to physically ‘read’ the overt intentions of others and to communicate one’s own.