Body Language: E

An Excursion Through the Alphabet in Somatic Terms
by Thomas Myers

"Breath…is internal music, and the body is a resonating chamber for it. To breathe with an aesthetic appreciation for the power of the breath is to be born again each moment to the seeds of possibility within us."
- Emile Conrad

In this issue's Body Language column, Thomas Myers begins the exploration of the letter E, in a two-part series. Myers discusses the relationship between the origins of the letter E, the exhalation of breath and Emilie Conrad's Continuum Movement. The original, pre-Semitic sound for E is heh, "with a meaning exactly like its sound: the exhaling breath," writes Myers. He continues with describing the pictogram of the Egyptian hieroglyph of heh as a "person at prayer." Myers connects the sound and meaning of heh into the idea "that each breath should be a prayer." This concept of "breath-as-prayer," as Myers states, is a principle element in Conrad's Continuum Movement. Myers describes his own personal experience of Conrad's movement workshops, and offers the healing story of a woman with a spinal-cord injury who went from wheelchair-bound to walking with braces and who now teaches her own Continuum Movement workshops.

Read Part Two

Return to March/April 2001 Issue