Contemplative Corner | February 2025

Watch This Space! Julia Zay offers practices under the “contemplative” umbrella that invite us to connect with our senses and each other.

Last December, I wrote about composer Pauline Oliveros in relation to listening, learning, and embracing vulnerability together. This month, I’m sharing another Oliveros score–this one for a collective movement piece that invites participants to slow down to a near stop while walking. 

Extreme Slow Walk, in Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composers Sound Practice (New York: iUniverse, 2005), 20. 

Moving as slowly as possible, step forward with the heel to the ground first, and let the weight of the body shift along the outside edge of the foot to the small toe and across to the large toe. As the weight of the body fully aligns with that foot then begin the transition of shifting to the other foot. Small steps are recommended as balance may be challenged. Maintain good posture, with shoulders relaxed and head erect. Use your breathing. The challenge for this exercise is that no matter how slow you are walking, you can always go much slower.

This apparent contradiction—moving while feeling as if you’re not moving–forms the compelling core of the experiment and draws our attention to the subtle, almost imperceptible aspects of a rather ordinary action for many: walking (or rolling–though the score does not indicate it). There is also abundant collective comedy in witnessing each other attempt something that feels so impossible, so absurd. This theatrical aspect is heightened when conducted in a large space with several groups of people, each starting from a different edge of the area and moving toward the center.

The post-walk collective dialogue is a critical part of the exercise, a time to practice reflection and deep listening. Oliveros’ score concludes with this instruction and commentary:

Partner:

Choose a partner after the Extreme Slow Walk. Discuss the experience of the exercise together. Try to use whole body listening as you take in what your partner says. After a ten-minute period of sharing information return to the full circle. Each partner speaks for the other, sharing with the group some highlight of what their partner said that was interesting. 

Group: 

Offer your experience of the exercise. Notice how much information comes from what others say, even if it is a little. Your contribution is valuable to the whole group. 

Commentary: 

Discussion of the experiences is an important part of the Deep Listening practice. Listening can be ephemeral and escape us easily. Discussion with a partner or contributing in the circle can be grounding and help to capture some essence of what you experience in the process.

As you prepare for spring quarter, consider first-day or first-week activities that encourage students to connect in an experiential context beyond conversation. While Extreme Slow Walk concludes with a discussion, it emphasizes a collective embodied experience that enables participants to engage and communicate through multiple senses. As in many experiential learning activities, participants co-create a shared reality in real-time and reflect on it, cultivating a sense of agency and identity as a learning community.   

See Also:

• The Bureau for Listening’s website offers this page of artists’ scores for listening + walking.
• Lisbeth Lipari’s book Listening, Thinking, Being: Towards an Ethics of Attunement (2014) addresses ‘our failure to listen for the other’ and the need to conceive of communication, particularly listening, beyond Western culture’s emphasis on speech, which privileges visual and spatial conceptions of the communication process.” -Publisher’s website (link above)