At first a movement has no meaning because we are unaware. We reach an arm out. Pull it back. Like a robot. Having never put attention on the sensation of reaching out and pulling back, we have no sense of its place in the firmament of self. The feeling of skin against our shirts, or the bones sliding inside our tissues, or the mood underlying the reaching out and pulling back – all these, though they are happening in us, are invisible, as unknown as if happening to someone else. The movement has no meaning because we have no consciousness of it.

Then, as we become conscious, the movement begins to acquire meaning. This meaning accumulates focus and substance as we associate our internal and external environment – the room, the sounds, the surroundings, emotional ups & downs - with the movement. Practicing repeatedly in the same environment over the course of weeks or months, imprints the movement with the environment. It creates a current history within us.

As we deepen and extend our concentration, the movement evolves into a palimpsest where forgotten or repressed associations seep through the more recently formed associations. These older experiences have attached themselves to the movement in the past, then been sealed away in vaults of the unconscious. Like the process of talk therapy, moving with spacious, non-coercive attention allows somatically stored memory to bubble to the surface. The memory may be non-visual or pre-cognitive. It may not contain rational narrative, but it will have the flavor of memory – a sense that we are re-visiting a territory inside the body.

Finally if we continue far enough along the process, the movement will cease to have meaning, but this is unlike the outset of our exploration. By dissolving the habit of imprisoning the movement in historical content we discover how far beyond the limitation of idea or thought its dimensions reach. We encounter the movement’s underlying energy where meaning – now seen as interpretative translation - annihilates in a tide of surge and force. We now move inside a fundamental level of motion. Rather than instigating or defining the movement, we are carried by it, floating in a sea of electrical charge. Though initially unsettling, we grow accustomed to this unfettered dynamism, expanding to include its continual newness.

Knowing more about the movement brings us to the paradox of knowing nothing at all. We now perceive the movement’s ever–changing nature and its humbling infinity forces us to embrace an understanding that is beyond our understanding. The movement becomes the miracle of itself. Each little motion, each little fragment of motion, is a wonder. Such intimacy with the movement reveals its Mystery - not a wilderness of unknown, but instead a cultivated garden of non-definition, engulfing us in magnitude.