6. Emotions in Motion

Humans are hard wired to feel, but are stultifiyingly suppressed when it comes to expressing them. Unless you’re a toddler, or a Labrador.

Emotion is a complex psychological and physiological state that arises in response to a stimulus or experience. It involves a combination of subjective feelings, cognitive appraisals, behavioural expressions, and physiological responses, such as changes in heart rate or hormonal levels.

Emotions play a crucial role in guiding human behaviour, communication, and decision-making. They are typically categorised as either basic (e.g., happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust) or complex, which involve higher cognitive processes, such as guilt, shame, or pride.

Both emotion and movement are a universal language that transcend verbal communication in the form of dyads.

We know environment informs emotion.

How do we know this?

Because airports, public transport and being around many people we don’t know.

When we can’t control our environment, for example in a classroom, what can we creatively catalyse to correspond our emotions in this momentarily immobilised meatsuit?

• Breath

• Movement

• Sound

• Visual

We know emotionally suppressive behaviours stultify immunity: If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to sit next to a baby on a plane, you will be acutely aware that suppression of emotion is a learned behaviour.

The role of the emotional defence barrier is to invite in what is nurturing and good, and to keep out what is toxic and bad.

The immune defence barrier has a corresponding duty to perform the exact same function: to invite in what is healthy and keep out what is toxic.

It comes as no surprise then, that those who suffer chronic illness perform emotionally suppressant behaviours such as repressing anger and aggression, which in turn represses the immune system.

A long as emotional trauma remains unresolved, the body secretes stress hormones, which create inflammation and are a catalyst for chronic illness.

Environment informs emotion —> Emotions drive behaviours —> Behaviours have consequences.

Our scaffolding, our structure can influence emotion. If a pose equals a state; then what movement transitions out of that state into another?

• Different movement / different thinking?

• Language of movement + language of emotion?

• Gross vs fine motor movements - brain activity?

• Joint isolation - contract one area of the brain while maximising another?

• Improvisation - accessing a broad base of knowledge

• Intuition is the rapid processing of experienced information

• Improvised movement / improvisation in business allows people to identify exploit opportunity