Busy Bodies

Fabio and I just got back from a week in the South of Brazil where we joined a group of permaculture students occupying an abandoned school and most of the homes in a community called Dom José, an area abandoned after a huge hydroelectric dam was built there about five years ago destroying the local economy and scattering the local inhabitants. The school building where we stayed had hosted up to four hundred primary students at one time, and is now home to about fifteen adult permaculture students by night and up to forty by day, as many of them have rented local homes which were also abandoned, as the rent is minuscule, and accommodations in the school are not exactly five star.

Our friend Marcos Ninguem started this permaculture program last year in association with a federal university here in Ceará, and up to fifteen students will be eligible for postgraduate recognition by developing their own projects during their time in the program. The students comes from all over Brazil, and have formed a tight knit family in the months they’ve spent together, ranging in age from about twenty up to fifty something. Marcos invited Fabio to teach a course in renewable energy and guide them in mounting a solar panel. I went to offer body consciousness workshops, which I thought I would be doing in conjunction with Fabio’s classes, and which I do when we have permaculture certification courses at the Eco Aldeia here in the Northeast. I call these short classes ReinCORPOra, which means “reincorporate” in Portuguese, with the emphasis on “corpo,” which means “body,” and I’ve found them to be a welcome opener when we receive students for field trips at the Eco Aldeia, as well, helping us to become more present, and more open to have full bodied experiences and not get lost in the social context of chit chat and cell phones which dominate our lives.

This to me has everything to do with permaculture and sustainability. If we want to study Nature, her cycles and ways, then we must be willing to study ourselves and our beings, including our physical beings, which are a part of each and every one of our realities, as we are not only a part of Nature, but we ARE Nature. Denying, avoiding, neglecting, or even simply overlooking the body due to “time” or “more important things” in my understanding can not really be permaculture. When we come to the body, we are much more accustomed to deal with image, identity, judgment, and external value systems than to feeling, sensation, multi-dimensional pathways for understanding, learning and communicating, from the inside out, but this is what the body is truly for, and this is the core of permaculture values. A woman that I recently met at a contact jam who is studying plants on a postgraduate level commented that basically all that plants do is feel. What great teachers they are to us! Or can be if we let them.

We use our bodies to learn. It is through our bodies in space and time that we learn to mount a solar panel. Fabio taught his first class on a Monday night and we had talked about me leading everyone in a warm up before he started the class. He was nervous, however, and forgot, so I jumped up and insisted, though I kept it short sensing that he and Marcos were wanting to get things moving, but everyone seemed to enjoy it and I certainly felt a shift in the energy in the room and personally felt better after a little dab of embodiment practice. As soon as we started moving everyone was smiling and more relaxed. It’s nothing complicated. You don’t need a PhD to do it. It’s simply a matter of taking the time and bringing the attention to the body in practically any way shape or form, but making it a practice and a priority.

The next day Marcos’ brother Jappa said that he and Marcos had talked later that night and wanted to know if I would be willing to teach some classes in the local schools with another woman who was there visiting. I said yes, wanting to help out in any way, but I suspected that they found my presence there more useful in the elementary schools than in their own, and an easy way to fulfill some of their community outreach obligations. That afternoon we headed into town to meet with the teacher’s association and set up some classes. We even did a little sample session with the group of adults, mostly women, which was sweet. I always love to witness people loosening up, especially when they weren’t expecting it. We ended up setting up classes in every single school in town and in my naiveté I spent the next three days, sun up to sun down, teaching high energy movement and embodiment classes to probably every single child in the area. It was an awesome experience and even though I ended up coming home with a nasty cold (it was also freezing in the South of Brazil, I somehow forgot to mention, and as we live in th Northeast, we were ill prepared,) I valued it tremendously and loved what we came up with for the kids. We taught them a sweet little song about a seed that gets watered and fed nutrients from the ground, and then sprouts, and then buds, and then grows up into a full plant, and then we worked with the four elements of water, fire, air and earth before singing the song again and doing a little plant dance. It was very satisfying and motivated me to want to work with kids more, but I ended up not doing anymore embodiment warm ups with the grown ups after that first day when I had insisted, and afterwards upon talking to some of the women in the program found that they were missing some sort of physical consciousness stimulation. We’re starting another permaculture design certification course starting this Friday and I’ll be teaching two ReinCORPOra classes. Maybe I’ll teach the grown ups our sweet little seed song and enjoy sprouting together with them.