* THE MEETING

My journey with Continuum Movement started earlier in 2010 in Israel during a “Mystery School” retreat, led by Emilie Conrad, the founder of this practice.
I knew little about Continuum, just that it was a somatic inquiry supposed to help chronic pain or physical injuries. I was interested in somatic since I started my dance education, and I had experienced different approaches, such as Body Mind Centering, the Feldenkrais method, Qi Gong, Yoga, and so on…
I was striving to heal my body, as critical physical issues were limiting my future as a dance artist, and I knew intuitively that this healing was encompassing much more than the physical dysfunctions. Emotional, mental and spiritual matters would show up in this process.
On the first day, as I was helping to set up the room for the workshop, on the border of the Galilee Sea, I suddenly felt a presence watching over me. In my felt remembrance, it was similar to a spiraling breath, moving, seeing, and penetrating everything in this room.
A second later, at the door, stood this woman, radiant, full of life and fierce. With this weird and intense sensation of being seen like never before, I was meeting Emilie Conrad.
To me, she embodied the living alchemy of the Eye of the Spirit in a friendly and engaging way.
From this beautiful woman, yet in her mid seventieth, emanated waves of fluid motion penetrating matter, body, personal history, psyche, atoms, cells and molecules.
Through her, the Eternal was breathing. Inhaling Form, exhaling the dissolution of Form. Rhythmically and cyclically, transforming the physical world into a constant process of renewal and regeneration.
Emilie’s presence was all that, and that was her teaching, a life long inquiry, the history of Continuum Movement.

 

 * HOW DOES IT WORK?

Continuum is a prayer. Nothing religious though, but a longing for meeting the fluid resonance of the Spirit penetrating the material world.

The invocation occurs through breath and vocal sounds, touching with their vibrations the vast web of connective tissues and all the waters and fluids present in our bodies. All sounds are waves motions carrying frequencies of information; Emilie would say that the physical world is a consolidation in time and space of these waves, a balanced and stabilized orchestration in forms of the frequencies of the universe. Our body stores information, memories, personal and transpersonal histories through neuro electrical circuits and water. The water that composes 75% of our physical body vibrates according to the resonant field of the universe and all the contextual events, and narratives happening on the planet. That is where we get stuck, where trauma and stress shape our bodies and mind into survival modes. Breath becomes disrupted; body tissues and behaviors are locked into repetitive/degenerative patterns. It feels like lead.

The alchemy of sound and breath in Continuum, vibrating in making the “Theta Breath”, the “Petals O”, or the “Lunar Breath” will generate waves motions in our bodily tissues, informing our bio-systems that we are part of the vast world of Nature. We can let go of form, of personal history, and of dictatorial authority…like living water finding its way trough rocks and hard matter. Always making its way through, no matter what. The bio-intelligence of fluid movements creates alternate systems. Living forms that pulsate, undulate and spiral through the embryonic mandala of creation, the human fetus, the emerging fern, the solar system or the movement of water twirling down the syphon…
The invocation of sound and breath respond throughout the body with sensations and movements. That is the way the bio-intelligence communicates. Like a dance, the body starts to undulate, serpentine motions, reconnection of lost limbs, flooding arid and desert parts of our body with new moistened drops of living water. The body can release its mental, emotional and physical toxins, the bio-intelligence of waves motions will move through, healing the wounds and the scars, allowing for cosmic and primordial connections. We then reach the universal, bodily tissues being the matrix.
The alchemy feels delicious, ecstatic, sensual, and sometimes unbearable due to foreign sensations, the loss of the original resonance. This alchemy is in its nature rejuvenation and medicine.
The lead is compression of time and space, holding trauma, stress, and personal history in deep tissues. Another metaphor for lead represents the social straitjacket of bodily concepts such as fitness or workout, limiting the expression of how we move creatively and gracefully through life.

* OUROBOROS

The mystery school retreat in Israel was about the embodiment of the symbolism of the Ouroboros, the Eternal Return.
We learned a sequence using specific arrangement of sounds, breaths, mapping the body with soft touches for opening the layers of bodily tissues. The room was filled with a carpet of sounds, vibratory field supporting the unfolding process of Returning to an Eternal place, the home of all species, the yolk of continual re-creation. I am engaging my tongue into making a circular path in my mouth while humming; this feels very ancient, slow, and archaic. I go into “Open Attention”, the receptacle in which we receive the Grail, the nectar of SENSATIONS.

My system shifts and starts to undulate from the ground, a very old place of power. I spit fire, I shape shift into the old creature: Dragon I am, in this place, out of time, in the middle of these people, on the seaside of Galilee. Ancient waves keep on surfing my spine, my core.
I asked Emilie: “What is that?” She looked at me and replied with a smile: “It’s an Initiation, it’s pretty good!”, while I was recovering from this very unusual somatic experience.
This was my entrance into the mystery that was carried and brought forth by this dark haired woman-scientist-artist-shaman-healer-dancer-visionary and ultimately human being.
Years passed, Emilie left us a couple of months ago with a flamboyant lesson of life: the absence of fear in front of Death.

Ouroboros Egyptian – Gnostic Gem with Scarab © Walters Art Museum

 

June 2014, I am in the studio, in Santa Monica, CA, Emilie’s laboratory.

One afternoon, we dive, sound, move, suspend, inquiring the expression of the fluid wisdom. The alchemical Mystery manifests itself again: all cells, molecules, atoms in my body are penetrated, I am dissolving in the space, I am no longer matter, the breath of Spirit blows me into the quantum. It feels ecstatic, yet I am fully present, aware of the time and space.
My inner eye shows me a vision, a black curtain closes the room creating a dark chamber, in the center a God-like-Being lays in the shape of a sarcophagus.
I look at its face, which looks like the embodiment of a “sensory system”, anthropomorphic, Hathor’s ears.
Above its heart a delicate, unknown device, resembling a feather, rotating and spiraling. The God Being emits a sound, which is carried through the actual sound present in the room made by the group.
I hear it, but I am not able to describe it.
I do know it is the Sound-Song composing all-the-Feelings-of-the-human-specie. In this depth, I hear “You have lost your Song!” Tears fall, I cannot stop the watery flooding, even when I write this, it is still with me. How comes, that we lost our Original Song?
How did we lose the templates of feelings representing who we are?

* THE LEGACY

It was Emilie’s belief that we are at a time where we need to make a choice in our own evolution:
What is the future of the human specie?
What are we envisioning? In an everyday more technological and controlled world, the question arises bit by bit, every second: are we becoming robots? Are we muting into a specie that replaces bio-organic components with new composite materials, implanted electronic chips under the skin, or software penetrating the intimacy of our body?
That future would sing differently on this planet from that created by our ancestors. The alchemical outcome will be certainly very different between these two directions. Are we part of the evolutionary process of the Earth?
Are we searching for our original Song?
The stakes are the understanding of fluid resonance and living tissues. Some scientists, such as Mae Wan Ho or Gerald Pollack, have begun to seriously inquire the field.

I have chosen my path: I am following Emilie’s last words that she said in her last class:
“I will never give up my humanness”.