Continuum

I'm old enough, and was born in the right place, to remember the real New Age. The basis of the New Age movement was the hippy idea that we could change the metaphors we live by. If we changed the games children played from competitive ones to cooperative ones, and we change the stories--the mythologies-- our society perpetuates, we could bring about a new way of being, a New Age. Frankly, it was a fun time to be a kid, even if putting my Cheerios underneath a pyramid didn't really change the taste and even the most cooperative game can be made competitive if there are enough eight-year-old-boy hormones to go around.

That experience was still not enough to stop me from cringing at the New Age bravado apparent in these videos and web-links about the bodywork system known as Continuum. (I recommend watching the "research" video first.)

Still, I think it is one of the cooler bodywork ideas out there. They take the Chinese ideas of huntun (totally undifferentiated chaos) or hunyuan (original chaos?) and really make them tangible. And while I doubt I'll ever say it quite like Emilie Conrad, I find myself agreeing with most of what she says about fear, change and the nature of human movement. (Her book.)