ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author shows that words can serve a representational or symbolic function, communicating various meanings that mark and distinguish experience for shared understanding. The rhythms of speaking emerge from within an array of embodied tempos registered as breathing, movement of limbs and torso, and especially formations of gaze and facial display, and including the impact of internal processes such as blood pressure and other embodied changes that impact skin colour, sound, taste, touch, and sight sensations. From this perspective, enactment in a clinical encounter is constituted by two rhythmic bodies weaving complex, polyrhythmic patterning often occurring on micro-dimensions of the exchange, and always carrying and carried by significant emotional navigation. This polyrhythmic patterning is simultaneously emerging and learned, entrained, as C. Trevarthen, D. N. Stern, and others have suggested, from as early as intrauterine experience.
