Evolving through embodied presence
An inner-view on authentic movement
Welcome to inner-views, a seasonal series of conversations with artists, thought leaders, and practitioners whose work is featured in the Rumored Woman Book Series. These conversations explore the correspondence between our inner and outer worlds.
Authentic Movement with Lee and Lynn Fuller
Lee Fuller, MA BC-DMT and Lynn Fuller, MA MFCC are two sisters that have been teaching Authentic Movement separately and together for nearly fifty years. They’ve trained extensively with Joan Chodorow and Janet Adler, pioneers in the practice and discipline of Authentic Movement. Since the time of this interview, my beloved friend and teacher, Lee Fuller, has transitioned. She died on April 3, 2024 and our relationship is evolving.
Inner-View
Morgan: “Welcome Lee and Lynn Fuller. I’m honored to have my first ‘inner-view’ with both of you. The work you’ve dedicated your lives to: healing, integrating and evolving through embodied presence, is so essential, especially now in a prevailing culture that doesn’t value stillness, silence and the body. It’s been a privilege and profoundly healing experience to have you as my teachers of Authentic Movement for over twenty years. Before we dive into your reflections, let’s pause and remind our readers if they are unfamiliar with the practice, they can find a definition of Authentic Movement on your website.”
“The core of the movement experience is the sensation of moving and being moved. There are many implications in putting it this way. Ideally, both are present in the same instant, and it literally may be an instant. It is a moment of total awareness, the coming together of what I am doing and what is happening to me. It cannot be anticipated, explained specifically, worked for, nor repeated exactly.” -Mary Whitehouse
Morgan: What was your pull towards the practice of Authentic Movement, how did you begin?
Lee: At The Jung Center in Houston with Joan Chodorow when we did Authentic Movement, I realized “this is it”, I had no idea what that meant. I just knew in every cell of my body, this is it. I told Lynn and introduced her to Joan.
Lynn: I started going to Joan’s class in Santa Barbara. Hearing her say the words,”There is no right or wrong way to move”, when I’d been told all my life what was a right and what was wrong way: it was freeing to leave such rigidity behind. When I closed my eyes, my body loved moving. I was passionately enthralled with closed eyes moving, with no right or wrong. Lee and I were both synchronized swimmers. When you’re underwater it’s about locating in a sensory way, now to be able to do this on the land– oh my God. It was luscious. It was deeply creative and healing.
I went to class and worked individually in Joan’s studio. It was slow going, when we were beginning in the field. I moved for four years before I ever witnessed. To be seen that clearly was profound.
Both Lee and Lynn simultaneously say “Without judgment, without projection and without interpretation!”
Lee: Then Lynn introduced me to Janet. I’d been showing Janet’s film to whomever would watch it and hosted little workshops. Come see this, come see this—the title was “Looking for Me.”
Lynn: Because of Joan’s relationship with Janet, she brought her to Santa Barbara. I fell in love. I was six months pregnant when Janet came out. She started a class on the West Coast and invited me and Lee to be a part of her first study group. We studied with her for nearly a decade, at first going five times a year, then it whittled down to three times a year.
Lee: Then Janet said, “You all have graduated.” It took many of us by surprise. She was opening the door for us to step out into the world on our own. Our studies continued individually and in small groups in California and in Canada when she moved, for over a decade.
Morgan: What did this thread offer you in your life?
Lee: It grabbed everything about me and that became my focus, it became my reason for being. Things started making sense—it was an undeniable calling.
Lynn: I would add this was a deep healing in my own psyche and soma to be witnessed, exactly as I am and everything is included, nothing is left out. That phenomena—learning how to be present to phenomena rather than in story about it, to listen to what is here and for that to have value just because.
Authentic Movement takes the body and psyche to bedrock. I say that because movement and dance is our very first language, culturally and biologically. It was a return to bedrock, part of the pull was because of trauma that occurred in my bedrock. It was a place to be valued, loved, seen and healed in a landscape that had been filled with pain and suffering.
Lee: It was happening to me unconsciously, not knowing why, just that it was correct, it was necessary, without knowing the intricate ‘becauses’, it was like water. I had to go. I had to go back. What arose from these waters was a greater sense of empathy, creativity and awareness, and valuing of my body. I experienced an increased spontaneity of thought, an ease in communication and action, increased appreciation and gratitude, and ultimately an increased enjoyment of simply being.
Lynn: All this arises because this is developmental practice that supports integration of awareness over the years.
Lee: Yes, and it’s a developmental form for consciousness. I had to go back. I felt called and had to attend to this experience of embodied presence. It was mysterious and I had to keep trusting, something in me that knew it was essential to my wellbeing.”
Lynn: Staying true to the body, one invariably encounters a shamanic way of knowing and being that cultures have cultivated for centuries on the planet. It can be referred to as kundalini, it can be referred to as love. Authentic Movement gave me permission to move my body in ways that my ego would never have allowed. Having the experience of my body being movement, took me to a ‘unitive’ experience, an experience of awe, of knowing we are part of something larger than ourselves. I loved it. I had done psychedelics and now I could close my eyes and have a full bodied unitive experience without any substance.
Lee: When we got on the plane to go, we both acknowledged our scaredness. I’d ask, “Why are we doing this? Why?” We had an expression: “Here we go”, it felt like jumping off a cliff.
The healing was arduous and we were scared. We wondered if the container would hold us or if it would shatter? Our experience was that it held and it held us. We had deep work to do that was trauma based, at times, and very scary. It takes a long time to bring the pieces back in place. All the structures that were breaking down and being rewired. We were discombobulated. Reintegrating was intense and it changed our lives.
Lynn: Neuroscience would use the word, dysregulation—the work we were doing and are doing is a deep reintegration.
Morgan: We’ve spoken briefly about your experience as mover—what is the experience of being a witness like for you?
Lynn: They are intimately connected. As a mover, I’ve learned to love whatever arises within me, through seeing myself in the presence of a loving, compassionate witness. When it becomes my turn to open my eyes and offer that seeing to another, what arises as I witness is an infinity, it can’t be predicted, it can only be seen in this field, of no judgment, of containing projections and offering compassion and then the world arises, everything arises. I become privileged to see another in their fullness and infinitude.”
Lee: Witnessing—worlds unfold in front of me. That’s it in a nutshell; I witness unfolding. It’s incredible to witness unfolding. This amazing unfolding, this awestruck unfolding is a witnessing of the relational, in its unadulterated form, it’s just raw down to the bone, whether it’s between mover and self, between mover and mover or between mover and witness. The energetic relational quality is present.
Lynn: I want to jump in on this, what we are witness to is the phenomenology of interconnectedness at all levels. The interrelated Now at all levels, that can only emerge in the presence of self and other. I’m not just sitting on the cushion by myself. The relational component is essential to seeing life as it really is, its interconnectedness.
Lee: As a witness I see with my eyes, and all my senses, my presence. I witness the Sacred. This Mystery is startling and I trust not knowing.
Morgan: How does this impact your everyday life?
Lee: As a result of years of moving and witnessing there is a deepening capacity to see clearly, a deepening capacity for compassion, a capacity for presence, and when I allow that to be up in front rather than my complexes, I can witness my own complexes with more compassion and clarity. It’s an inner and outer way of being in the world that is so different, than before I started doing authentic movement.
Lynn: This practice is an opportunity to change at a cellular level. I’ve experienced a change at a cellular level that manifests in a capacity to be present, to value my being and others with a greater wholeness. It has opened me to wonder and curiosity that is more than just a mentalizing, that is an embodied experience of wonder and curiosity. I think it reveals an inherent coherence, an inherent integration that is our birthright.
Lee and Lynn spontaneously and simultaneously announced … “AMEN AMEN” and we all beam a broad faced smile at one another.
Lee: That was good! Because it’s true, that’s what happens. Our inherent coherence includes our unavoidable relationship with and to nature and that we are not separate. It reveals that we are nature at cellular level and there is no going back.
Morgan: How does it change your relationship with others?
Lynn: That place in all of us where I can witness my own reactivity and find the space to see my reactivity, I can be present to what is arising in myself and with another, simultaneously. That’s a phenomenon of ‘you fucking asshole and I love you,’ asking us to hold the both and.
Morgan: Yes! That captures it, “you fucking asshole and I love you.” I become more dynamic, less fixed, more capable of moving beyond the either/or, us and them orientation. My capacity for living with complexity expands.
Lynn: What it is, is the non-dual. This takes you right into an embodied knowing for the non-dual nature of the world.
Lee: When we give our nervous system the whole body, there is a chance to explore the cohesive knowing that is there, it’s our birthright, we can turn into it.
Morgan: Thank you both for this ‘inner-view’ about your relationships to Authentic Movement. If readers are curious to learn more about Authentic Movement, please visit their website, LeeandLynnFuller.com. Here’s an article, entitled Elegant Vessel.