I wrote the following after completing the muscle tissue module with SOMA France in Valcivières in July, 2022.
I am writing this to examine my relationship to the metaphor of wrapping relative to the way I seem to be experiencing muscles at large.
Many if not most people react affirmatively–I see nods and hear sighs of appreciation–when the experience of muscle is associated with the metaphor of wrapping. Evocative performing of an embrace–of embracing another as well as oneself–is frequently engaged following the mention of the metaphor. Sometimes objects are used, blankets and mats, to further extrapolate on the notion and suggest (add) sensorial and visual content to its bodily analysis.
I see myself nod in agreement and in time with all the other nods, but do not register my nod as empty of feeling instead of full of feeling until my arm is extended and my muscles contracted eccentrically so as to maintain instead of reduce distance. Maintaining distance between myself and the other person, I am suddenly full of feeling. This was the first clue.
Contracting my muscles concentrically, then, I am pulling the person towards myself, successfully maintaining my relationship with full feeling, which I now associate with the mind of the muscle, until one of my arms swings around to wrap. This was the second clue.
The first clue: recognising the fullness of feeling, associating it with the mind of the muscle.
The second clue: loosing touch with the fullness of feeling, associated with the mind of the muscle.
I found the third clue after I wrapped my upper limbs around the body of another, contracted my muscles concentrically to create pressure and received–in response–a welcoming, softening, and expansive resistance–as if an answer being offered to a call–from the body I was embracing, which was contracting eccentrically into my own concentric contraction. It was then that I realised I would describe my experience of muscle as follows:
I experience muscle as that which something–that something being connective tissue–wraps around. I experience muscle as the content, perhaps, of a wrap. Wrap or wrapping itself I associate with connective tissue, with fascia, tendon, and ligament. Muscle then is buoyant, bloody, ready to react, but it is also in need of containment, it is in need of support.
