Goose
Bumps...How the Body Clues Us In
—Julie M. Daley
Goose bumps. You know that feeling, when something feels so right in your experience that your skin breaks out with goose bumps? Your body is telling you something that is hard to put into words…it is beyond words and is more about experience than anything logical or analytical.
The body is pretty amazing. It has so much intelligence and so many instincts, allowing our body to alert us as we experience the world around us.
I was speaking to my mother the other day, and she shared that goose bumps are a part of how she knows when something is right. She is a figure skating judge…has been for about forty years. She loves it. Having been an artist her entire life, she brought her “desire to create” to her skating. As a judge, she gets to revel in many of her passions…music, children, and the artistry of skating.
As an artist, she especially enjoys judging artistic performances, a special type of performance very different from the kind of performance we see at the Olympics. Figure skating Showcase Competitions provide skaters with an opportunity to display their artistic abilities on ice through these artistic performances. This type of competition is more difficult to judge because it is subjective by nature. You can’t hang your hat on the jumps and spins a skater executes. There is no logical standard to check against where the judge can know she is right. Instead, judges consider things like the skater’s ability to “skate the music”.
Each judge must rely on something else, an indicator within that signals there is resonance with the creation she has just witnessed and experienced. This is where the goose bumps come in. As my mother and I discussed her judging, she began to share with me how she feels when a performance is spectacular. She explained that goose bumps are one of her main indicators when a program was skated with grace and fluidity and when the skater’s actions were aligned with the music to create an overall experience of pleasure. “If the skater feels the music so strongly that she and the music are one, and the judge is drawn into the skater’s performance to the point of getting goose bumps, then it is a candidate for first place…unless another skater comes along and gives me bigger goose bumps.” She went on to say she gets “caught up” in the experience of the skater expressing her heart to the world.
What this all means is that to really take in the experiences we are swimming in each day, the more we are fully present in our body and the more in tune we are with our five senses, the more we can feel the experience and the resonance or dissonance that follow.
This is an important point. Going back to the example of judging artistic performances, it can feel difficult to judge something when there is no quantifiable way to measure a performance. By tuning into the body, by developing a keen sensual awareness with the world we swim in each day, we begin to trust an entirely different kind of intelligence…the intelligence of our body. Let’s face it: the world is not analytical, even if we try to make it that way. Our presence in the world is experiential. We can analyze some things, but many things we can not…we must experience them.
How does this fit with wild creativity? Embodiment is one key to learning to fully express your creativity. The signals your body sends you are powerful signposts to what is true for you. If you listen to them, they will guide you to your authentic self, that part of you that is at the heart of your creative resource and your authentic voice.
This is where the real juice and joy are of being alive…smack-dab in the physicality of your experience, using all your senses. When you begin to trust the wisdom within your body’s signals, such as goose bumps when you experience something really magnificent, you learn to be more fully yourself, not relying on some system of measurement outside of you, but instead on the best indicator you can count on…you.
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2004-2005 Julie M Daley and Creative Wellspring. all rights reserved.
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credit to Julie M Daley and Creative Wellspring.
