Movement Expresses Values

Abstract

You are reading these words with your body—not just your eyes and your brain, but your whole body. The angle of your head, the depth of your breathing, the tension level of the muscles along your spine and around your mouth are parts of a pattern that is at this moment expressing your attitude and your response as you read. These so-called physical factors are not separate from your alertness, your receptivity, your capacity to focus, your sense of humor—the whole rich undifferentiated realm that you call “reading.”

We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person we are and not of the person we should like to be.

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (1913–1927) 1981, II: 191–192