A Thought on Punctum and Presence

A Thought on Punctum and Presence

When something touches us from beyond the habitual

My studio is divided into two halves.

One side is for mind-body work — teaching, movement, somatic practice. The other is an artist’s studio — painting, photography, poetry.

Most of the time these two lives run in parallel. Last week they unexpectedly met.

I had just finished leading an Alexander Technique retreat for teachers and had written a reflection about it. The following day, a gallery in Paris invited me to participate in a group exhibition. The theme: Dialogue — Punctum.

I had to look it up.

Roland Barthes described punctum as that unexpected detail in a photograph that pierces us — that reaches past explanation and touches something personal, something we cannot quite name. It is not the careful composition or the deliberate message. It is the thing that arrives unbidden and changes how we see.

I have been sitting with this ever since.

Because it describes something I recognise from teaching.

In Alexander work, we spend time cultivating awareness — attending to the ground beneath us, the breath, the back, the subtle organisation of the body. We create conditions. We prepare the ground.

But the most important moments are rarely the ones we consciously arrange.

They arrive.

A new perception appears. A moment of ease opens. Something touches us from beyond the habitual — from somewhere less predictable than our intentions.

Barthes called this punctum.

In Alexander work, I might call it a moment of embodied presence.

In both cases the conscious work prepares something. But the experience itself comes from elsewhere. The photograph pierces us. The direction lands. The system reorganises in a way we did not plan and could not have forced.

Perhaps dialogue works the same way.

We speak. We listen. We attend.

In Alexander terms: we inhibit — we create space. We direct — we invite conditions.

And then, sometimes, something appears between us that neither person could have anticipated.

A moment of contact.

A moment that touches.

A moment that changes the conversation, the habitual reaction -