SILENT
Meditations of the Body
an event by
Souvik Paul in collaboration with
Rebecca Ketchum under the guidance of
Emilie Baltz
Silence is the word I use to describe the empty presence we experience within our experience - between our thoughts, between each other, between ourselves and the world. We feel the silence when we daydream, when we appreciate the beauty of a sunset, or when the love of our life truly walks away. It is an inward sense, often experienced as longing or an ache. It is the feeling of emptiness and fullness at the same time. The silence is the aspect of our consciousness that makes us feel slightly heavy. It is the source of the feeling of loss, but also of a sense of awe.
Healing Story is a term for the stories we have come to believe that shape how we think about the world, ourselves, and our place in it. They can be as simple as “Everything happens for a reason” or as sharp as “How come nothing ever works out for me?” Healing stories guide us through good and bad times; they can be both constructive and destructive. They come together to create our own personal mythology, the system of beliefs that guide how we interpret our experience. Quite often, they bridge the silence that we carry within us and are essential to how we live.
Matthew W. Sanford, from Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendance
A Letter of Thanks Thank you for participating in Silent: Meditations of the Body. This event was created as part of my graduate thesis for the Products of Design department at the School of Visual Arts. My thesis explores how the different disciplines of design can be used to help people with spinal cord injuries, after a good friend of mine was injured in a car accident and sustained a spinal cord injury two weeks before I started my graduate studies. This book is meant to explain the thought process behind the event, from its conceptual start as an idea in Emilie Baltz’ class called
“Design Delight”, to the design decisions behind the event that you just participated in. I hope that you enjoyed the event as much as I enjoyed putting it together.
Why Yoga? When someone sustains a spinal cord injury, the medical understanding of their condition is that the connection between the body below the level of injury and above it is partially or completely severed. This restorative yoga event explores the connection between the mind and the body in a way that isn’t fully explained by existing medical paradigms, but that is, all the same, a visceral connection that can be felt by experienced yogis, even ones with spinal cord injuries. Matthew Sanford, quoted earlier, and whose memoir influenced the design of this event, is one such practioner.
Restorative yoga is a yoga style whose contemplative and deliberate movements stand in stark contrast to the constant transition between poses of other styles of yoga such as vinyasa yoga. Because of this, restorative yoga is particularly well suited for practitioners of all physical abilities. The emphasis of restorative yoga is on the development of the mind-body connection through the thoughtful contemplation of the body in stillness and in silence, something that benefits both people who are able-bodied and people who have disabilities.
Silent When I originally conceived of the event, and of using yoga in my thesis experience, I wanted to play recordings of individuals with spinal cord injuries reflecting on what their paralysis feels like during the yoga session. I learned very early on in my thesis research that not everyone’s experience with paralysis is the same; instead of being a uniform feeling of non-feeling, sensations of paralysis are highly idiosyncratic. Hearing how paralysis feels was a visceral experience in empathy for me. I was forced by the power of recorded words to imagine a
world and experience completely removed from mine. I thought that hearing these stories during the practice of yoga would heighten yoga’s ability to reframe and recontextualize participants’ perceptions of their bodies. I eventually decided to expand the recordings to include accounts of able-bodied people as well, for two reasons. The first was to avoid the fetishization of disability - as an able-bodied person with an obvious and undeniable bias, I had to be extremely conscious of how this event would be perceived by the disabled community. Second, as this event wasn’t meant to be an adaptive yoga session - that
is, a session intended for only people with disabilities. Instead, I wanted both able-bodied and people with disabilities to practice yoga together, side-by-side. It only made sense to include a range of perspectives of lived experiences within the human body. I chose to call the event Silent in reference to both the silence that Sanford so eloquently describes as a concept and experience that is necessary for healing and bridging the mind-body gap in his memoirs. I also wanted to reference the supposed silence that people with paralysis feel a silence that could be felt just as loudly as normal sensation.
The subtitle, Meditations of the Body, refers to both the passive act of listening to the recordings and the recordings themselves - i.e. meditations on the subject of the body - , as well as to the act of meditating through movement and action, and the active practice of restorative yoga.
Sequencing The sequence of poses that you just completed were the result of a thoughtful dialogue between myself and Rebecca Ketchum. I gathered the audio recordings from people whom I know personally, and edited the audio down to the short segments that you heard during Silent - these were my contributions to the dialogue. Rebecca, with her extensive knowledge of yoga and her experience in teaching yoga to people in wheelchairs, was able to respond to my contributions with both the poses and the instruction around each pose.
When developing the pacing and sequence of the yoga class, we made sure to include silences to go along with the stories - the healing stories, as Sanford would call them - contained within the recordings. We wanted you to have the time for personal contemplation after hearing the stories of someone else’s body.
Symbolism In addition to sequencing the event in order to include healing stories and silences, there were many instances of symbolism designed into the event. The first was the use of the mandala, pictured above, in the event invitation and on the cover
of this booklet. The mandala is a yogic symbol that symbolizes wholeness, and the world beyond and within our bodies and minds - the wholeness that I hoped you would personally cultivate during Silent. It is contained within a split box, one that references the break in the spinal cord of someone with a spinal cord injury - the break that was the original motivation
for my thesis and this event. Together, the mandala and the split box defy how people with spinal cord injuries and other disabilities can be considered less than whole by society, as do the recordings that you heard during the event. The yoga mats collected for the event were all either purple or blue, the colors associated with the crown and throat chakras. The crown chakra is physically associated with the central nervous system, the cerebral cortex and the upper spine. Emotionally, it’s associated with spirituality, consciousness and thought.
The throat chakra is physically associated with the respiratory system and the ears - chosen for Silent’s focus on deliberate breathing and mindful listening. Communication, openness and ideas are the various emotional components of the throat chakra. The lighting of Silent echoed this color scheme - the lights, white prior to the yoga session, turned to blue and purple after it conclusion, a physical manifestation of the the sharing of ideas of lived experiences, and the increased consciousness and new ideas about others’ experiences that you’ve contemplated by the end of Silent.
Finally, just as the event featured healing stories and silences, so too did this booklet, with its explanatory prose bookended by deliberate negative space.