Mind And Movement: The Practice Of Coex, By Tony Crisp: How Practicing Coex Can Naturally Heal Your Mind and Body

Mind And Movement: The Practice Of Coex, By Tony Crisp: How Practicing Coex Can Naturally Heal Your Mind and Body
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What is Coex?

Coex is “consciousness and expansion,” the technique of consciously co-operating with or listening to the processes of life active in the unconscious, and allowing them to become known. By practicing coex, you may be able to naturally heal your physical and psychological problems, gain information within yourself that is usually kept unconscious, use the creative process of the unconscious to enrich your work and relationships, tune into the body’s self regulating processes to discover a spontaneous form of exercise or dance which releases tension and keeps the body fit and discover connections with the rest of life and cosmos.

Tony Crisp feels that by letting things happen without criticism or interference you can actually allow the dream process to break through into waking life and express in full body movements, speech, a dramatic theme, and deeply felt emotions. The energy itself can be expressed as physical movement, sexuality, emotions, drives such as parental caring, or the process of thinking. Usually, as a tension dissolves, you experience spontaneous movements that are an extension to the usual spontaneous movements we make all the time, such as breathing, sneezing and yawning.

How to Practice Coex

When practicing coex you need to wear comfortable clothes which you can easily move and relax in, take your shoes off, put a blanket on the floor and clear a space big enough for you to stretch out. Also, it is important to give yourself permission to express sounds and movement freely.

It is generally a good idea to start with structured coex. Structred coex involves bringing to your mind the idea or image of an unplanted seed. The aim is to consider how you and your body feel in relationship to the idea and sense of you being the seed. Then continue your feeling exploration to find out what will occur when the seed grows, puts out leaves, blossoms and fulfils its cycle. You can consider it a successful coex experience if some aspect of what arises is spontaneous or unexpected.

Once you are comfortable with structured coex, you can move on to unstructured coex, which begins by circling your arms, bringing awareness to the shape your hands are making in space and giving yourself permission to doodle, to make any sort of shapes your feelings or body inclines you to. As you become more advanced you can allow any sort of posture or movement, as active or quiet as you like. Working with a partner is an even more advanced form of coex Tony Crisp describes as sexercises and can illicit powerful feelings and responses from either person.

From reading Tony Crisp’s book, it appears that there are many stages and depths to this technique. He teaches people that feelings and fantasy can combine with the movements eventually leading to insight into what is being expressed. Practicing coex is a natural way to help you heal your body, release tension and stress, and even find answers to specific questions or problems.

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