Dear Marie,

many thanks for Task 41. Below you can see my response and below that you can find your Task.

Video by Francesco Cochetto

Video editing by video artist, Hannah Baxter-Gale.

Task 42 – A Lexicon of Experience

More and more I find that the vocabulary I have available to me cannot capture my experience of working with the body. I experience sensations I cannot describe in words. They are thus condemned to a tacit/nonverbal realm. This might not be a problem necessarily, but it can be frustrating when I am trying to explain how or what I sense/feel to someone else. Also, it makes it more difficult to find these sensations again, because without a linguistic anchor I have to rely solely on body memory or mere chance.

I am also quite disappointed at the very dry, cause-effect language that marks the Iyengar Yoga approach on the one hand, and the kind of New Age blather than is often used in other approaches (what I mean by this is poetic and comforting words which however again do not capture the here and now of the somatic experience).

So, your task is to first of all find moments/experiences/sensations in your yoga practice that you do not have the words to describe. Then you have to come up with new words that you think might capture what has so far remained unnamed. You can make up new words, create composites, borrow from more than one language, use sounds etc. I hope you enjoy and who knows you make come up with a new verb to capture what we mean by ‘enjoy’ in this project!