Characters Vs. Relationships

“What if I stopped worrying about my characters and worried instead about my relationships?”

This quote from author Kazuo Ishiguro, in his Nobel Lecture, is a fitting metaphor for the body. People often say things like, “my right shoulder is the problem,” or “I have a bad left knee.” But the problem is not the right shoulder or the left knee, or any other body part, (i.e. the characters). The problem is said part’s relationships to the rest of the body. Understanding these relationships is one of the essential skills you develop in an Awareness Through Movement practice.

Ishiguro said he began to “hold up to the light the various relationships that crisscross any story” and that this discovery, made late in his writing life, led him to “build my stories in a different way.”

You can try the same process: begin to examine your problem character and its joint above, and ask yourself, what is the quality of this relationship? Is it friendly, confused, unbalanced? And then move to the joint below and try to describe the quality of that relationship. You can do this with any two parts of yourself that you’re curious about. Does this approach help you to build your body story in a different way? If so, what does it change for you? If you feel like it, let me know. I always enjoy hearing from you!