FIGHTING-MONKEY

“I move, I want to move, be moved from the inside out.”

These words came from my body. It was a quiet Saturday afternoon at the gym and I was feeling an itch to express something, my body incapable of stillness, I took to the green turf and began to move. As I moved words rose in me, spilled out my hands and onto a piece of paper, a poem of the body was born. 

I rehearsed and performed this piece at Mother Tounge, a space for women to share stories and poetry, from that performance I was asked to come back as a featured poet, bodies speak and they are powerful.  

All bodies hold poetry in their skin, lessons in their muscle and stories in their bones, and Its moments like the one above that I am reminded about the mystic ways of the human body, how magical it can be and how much it can teach us about ourselves, others and how we interact with world around us. 

I would like to share some insights I had from participating in a workshop ran by

Fighting Monkey which was founded by Jozef Frucek and Linda Kapetanea, I hope these insights will interest you and encourage you to move with poetic intent.

Insight 1: Monkey Fighting 

Insight one is the overarching theme that is Fighting Monkey. How do you deal with your monkey? Your monkey being the internal dialogue that arises when you learn something new or when you are presented with a task to solve. 

It not about what exercise/game is presented to you, but what those exciserses/games reveal to you about yourself and your body. 

There was clear moment that I remember with my beautiful monkey. I was learning the infamous Lizard Crawl, the “I’m not good at picking things up” monkey would dance in my mind which would cause internally frustration, but this time I said “One step at a time Nic, breath, take your time, hand here, leg here, reach here” with this voice I learnt the Lizard and monkey and I worked together. Compassion and patience always win. 

Insight 2: Balance 

Go with me here; we are like trees, we have roots: toes feet and legs, we both have trunks, branches for arms and leaves for fingers better known as phalanges (I love that word, phalanges.) 

If the tree didn’t have strong roots it would not be stable and it would fall over with a medium strength gust of wind.

If our roots are our feet then as Jozef puts it, the western world is “dying from the feet up” 

I invite you to play a balance game:

Stand up, eyes open, stand on one leg, once you have got that, enter the darkness…close your eyes, aim for 1 min on each leg without opening them, even if you stumble.

It’s a whole new world right. No sight of still things to navigate your balance only your internal sense of balance.

Once I experienced the disorientation of the blackness I had a thought, the end game to balance is not stillness, it’s the game of staying on that foot and swimming your skull, rib cage and pelvis around one another.

As the balance games got more challenging I felt my feet/roots light up, they became my feedback, as my awareness of them grew so did my ability to swim myself around myself to stay balanced. 

Balance is little undulations of movement; we are never completely still. 

Insight 3: Co-ordination 

I facilitate a class at 5th Element called Primal burn, its a class where I show and explain different types of crawls and movement patterns. The biggest monkey people find when I show them a pattern is “I’m just not co-ordinated”, this is the monkey stopping them from moving past the first phase of learning a new motor skill. 

I pieced something together at Fighting monkey…I googled “process of learning movement patterns” and this table popped up…