Exploratorium
WIM in Action --- practical explorations of WIM in life:
The Exploratorium started as newsletter articles in a section called Tips for Making Life Easier. These are simple, practical application exercises you can explore to deepen your understanding of yourself and how you work. Have Fun Exploring! Scroll below for these articles:
1. Move yourself, not the object
2. Listen to your system
3. How's Your Wholeness
3. Try Wholeness
4. Listen to Yourself
5. Cooperating with your Coordinating System
6. Try Delight!
1. Move yourself, not the object
2. Listen to your system
3. How's Your Wholeness
3. Try Wholeness
4. Listen to Yourself
5. Cooperating with your Coordinating System
6. Try Delight!
The past Newsletters below include short articles on the subjects listed. This is an accessible way to see WIM in Action.
Conflict Resolution Perspective
The Power of Inclusive Awareness for Peace
Spring in Your Step
Frustration Two Hand Gesture Tool
Movement Poetry
Sensory Intelligence
The Recuperative Power of Your Skin Sense
Thriving At a Desk Job
How is Your Wholeness
Conflict Resolution Perspective
The Power of Inclusive Awareness for Peace
Spring in Your Step
Frustration Two Hand Gesture Tool
Movement Poetry
Sensory Intelligence
The Recuperative Power of Your Skin Sense
Thriving At a Desk Job
How is Your Wholeness
Move yourself, not the object
It is the time of year when many of us have projects to do that involve lifting and moving things. One of the most helpful ideas to get through this time of year without injury is the idea/practice to "move myself, not the object" When you pick an object up off the ground you are supporting it.
When you support it, the object is literally part of your system. When you move, it comes with you. This thought coordinates your system differently than thinking you are holding and carrying an object. It is a powerful shift in focus.
Several students have said, "This is like magic." See for yourself with this exploration:
a) Go over to a chair and, while thinking, "I am going to lift this chair and carry it." Then pick it up and walk a few steps. Put it down and step away.
b) Now go back to the chair, bend so you can grasp it gently but do not lift it yet. Take a moment to see if you are easily balanced by noticing if both feet are evenly contacting the ground and your joints are flexible. If you are familiar with my work, remind yourself of the "center of support" idea. With the chair in your gentle grasp come to standing while saying/thinking, "I stand and the chair comes with me". Then as you walk, think/say, "I walk and the chair comes with me."
c) Notice if there is a difference between lifting the chair and moving it, versus you moving and it coming with you (the "move yourself" version).
It may take going and back forth between the two versions a few times to notice a difference. Many people report that the chair feels lighter and there isn't as much strain or effort in the upper body in the moving yourself version.
At first the move yourself method may seem to take longer because it is a new idea. Once you play with it, it can become the way you work, a new way of functioning. Have Fun Exploring!
When you support it, the object is literally part of your system. When you move, it comes with you. This thought coordinates your system differently than thinking you are holding and carrying an object. It is a powerful shift in focus.
Several students have said, "This is like magic." See for yourself with this exploration:
a) Go over to a chair and, while thinking, "I am going to lift this chair and carry it." Then pick it up and walk a few steps. Put it down and step away.
b) Now go back to the chair, bend so you can grasp it gently but do not lift it yet. Take a moment to see if you are easily balanced by noticing if both feet are evenly contacting the ground and your joints are flexible. If you are familiar with my work, remind yourself of the "center of support" idea. With the chair in your gentle grasp come to standing while saying/thinking, "I stand and the chair comes with me". Then as you walk, think/say, "I walk and the chair comes with me."
c) Notice if there is a difference between lifting the chair and moving it, versus you moving and it coming with you (the "move yourself" version).
It may take going and back forth between the two versions a few times to notice a difference. Many people report that the chair feels lighter and there isn't as much strain or effort in the upper body in the moving yourself version.
At first the move yourself method may seem to take longer because it is a new idea. Once you play with it, it can become the way you work, a new way of functioning. Have Fun Exploring!
Listen to Your System
When you get a back-of-the-mind message like "I should stop now." Listen! Stop for a bit. The best way to GET hurt or strained is to let the "I have to get this done now" message override the "I need to stop" message.
Learn to detect rushing. Rushing is strain. Can you do what you are doing in the time it takes to do it? "Here I am and I want to go there. I am not there yet. The distance is closing but I am exactly where I am. I am getting closer." Where you are can be literally where you are in space or where you are in how much you have gotten done. This is a subject for another month's exploration. Have Fun Exploring!
Learn to detect rushing. Rushing is strain. Can you do what you are doing in the time it takes to do it? "Here I am and I want to go there. I am not there yet. The distance is closing but I am exactly where I am. I am getting closer." Where you are can be literally where you are in space or where you are in how much you have gotten done. This is a subject for another month's exploration. Have Fun Exploring!
How's Your Wholeness?
How’s your Wholeness?
Wholeness of being is our nature. Culture, science, and our perceptions split us apart from the world and ourselves. When we live from this split-apart perspective we become vulnerable to a host of struggles like pain, stress, fatigue, anxiety.
It can be a challenge to change our split-apart way in the world. Below is a stepping-stone tool to help you reconnect with your inherent wholeness.
The first set of questions are feeling & sensing in nature. The second set of questions are open-ended and invite inquiry.
Feeling & sensing questions:
(These are yes/no questions that have a preference embedded in them.They are a good first step.)
Inquiry questions:
(These are open questions that don’t imply a preferential way to be. They develop your self awareness. It can help to think of a continuum of possibilities, suggestions below.)
My work delves into these 4 aspects of your wholeness:
Wholeness of being is our nature. Culture, science, and our perceptions split us apart from the world and ourselves. When we live from this split-apart perspective we become vulnerable to a host of struggles like pain, stress, fatigue, anxiety.
It can be a challenge to change our split-apart way in the world. Below is a stepping-stone tool to help you reconnect with your inherent wholeness.
The first set of questions are feeling & sensing in nature. The second set of questions are open-ended and invite inquiry.
Feeling & sensing questions:
(These are yes/no questions that have a preference embedded in them.They are a good first step.)
- Am I floating?
- Am I aware of the world around me?
- Am I calm?
- Am I free and balanced?
(If you mimic bouncing a basketball, that’s the feeling.)
Inquiry questions:
(These are open questions that don’t imply a preferential way to be. They develop your self awareness. It can help to think of a continuum of possibilities, suggestions below.)
- What is my relationship with the planet? (On continuum of heavy to floating)
- On what is my attention? (On a continuum of narrowed and/or inward attention to open attention to the world around me or attention out ahead of me to attention present in the world)
- What is my state of being? (On continuum of terrified/rageful to peaceful/joyful)
- What is my sense of my body? (On continuum of compressed or tense to free or light and open)
My work delves into these 4 aspects of your wholeness:
- Your relationship with gravity
- Your attention
- Your state of being
- Your physical balance.
Try Wholeness
This tip is an experiment in what wholeness means on a practical level. What happens when you do the follow things:
a) Experience what it is like to see yourself as one whole, to literally say, "I don't have a separate body I have a responsive self." If you tend to take your attention inwards to feel your body, don't for a week or two and see what happens. (That experiment utterly changed my life.)
This is NOT about ignoring sensations. Sensations are key. If you are hungry, eat, if you are tired, sleep. You get responses/sensations — you act... not your body.
b) Receive sensations rather than look for them by turning your attention inward. If you have a practice that invites focusing attention internally, such as watching your breath, see what it is like to not go in with you attention to perceive and focus. Receive the perception of the breath. You can close your eyes and get quiet, but instead of going in to feel your breath just stay open and receive the sensation of you breathing.
Sensations come to you rather than you going to find them. What happens?
c) Continue an open attention when pain narrows you to itself. If pain calls your attention to a body part, see what it is like to NOT let the part pull your attention in to the part. Try saying, "I hurt" rather than "my neck hurts". You may notice that saying, "I" rather than "my neck" invites a different, broader sense of being.
d) At that moment you notice pain instead of narrowing into the sensation and the location of the pain include more into your awareness — the sensation of the earth under you, the colors in the room, the sensation of moving. The moment you notice you are hurting, you are no longer attending to whatever you had been attending to seconds before your attention switched to the sensation of pain. You've already changed, the whole of you.
e) See what it is like to experiment with conceiving of yourself as one whole being at every given moment, exactly as you are, rather than having a body that somehow needs improvement.
Some wholeness musings:
Lightning and thunder is the classic example of a whole experienced as separate parts. A high-voltage discharge of electricity between the clouds and the ground is perceived by us as light and sound. Because light travels faster than sound there is a delay between what we see and hear. Experientially, lightning and thunder seem like separate events. We see one thing, hear another. Neither gives us the whole.
There is a parallel between our experience of high-voltage electrical discharge and our selves. I hear my voice, I see my body, I feel my body, my feelings, my thoughts. Often in our lived experience and reflected in our use of language we experience a collection of parts and perceptions. Just the expression — my voice, my body, the possessive pronoun — demonstrates this separated experience of our selves.
At first glance this seems logical. It is the way we seem to be. Yet on some level we also know that just as thunder is not separate from lightning — it is one moment experienced differently by our senses — so too, there is no me and my this or my that. There is one moment of me, one moment of being. Anatomically we can name parts. But functionally we are whole even while we can name the parts.
Recall a time when you performed the way you've always wanted to, or if you aren't a performer, a time when you felt utter joy and contentment. During that moment were you experiencing yourself as a collection of parts: body/mind/voice/feelings?
Having asked this question of hundreds of people over the last 20 years, those moments of life are usually felt as moments of wholeness. In that wholeness you experience Being. In many cases there is a sense of inter-being, of unity not only within you but with the world around you. These moments show you there is no me-and-my-anything; there is simply you, one whole being.
As someone who has been in the dance field my whole life and in the somatic field for 35 years I have spent countless hours in exercise that essentially perpetuated the separation of me and my body. We were learning to embody ourselves (which is rather fishy when you think about it for a moment — aren't we innately embodied)?
We were learning to get out of our heads; we did body scans and spent hours going in to feel our bodies to gain body awareness. Ironically, these exercises were essentially in the pursuit of wholeness, while at the same time asking us to feel parts. I recognize that for anyone who has spent more time in thought, imagination and ideas these exercises can be illuminating and recuperative. I am sure there are people whose lives where literally saved by spending time "coming back to their body". For centuries the human body was seen as lesser than mind and in some cases as the source of evil/sin. Of course embedded in this idea is the idea of being separate parts like lightning and thunder. In this historical/cultural context it has been an incredible gift to celebrate our bodies, reclaim the miracle and beauty of sensation.
However, going in to feel our body or reclaim our body is still rooted in the same faulty body-as-separate-from-self construct. The alternative to disconnection from the body isn't to connect with the body. It is to see there is no body on a functional level.
You don't actual feel your body, you feel your functioning. (This is a fundamental point. We can look at this in more detail in future articles.) There is just one whole you that is perceiving and experiencing as a whole when you simply stop going in to feel parts.
At any moment, thought, sensation, chemicals, feelings are individual perceptions coming through different senses of one moment of being. Each sense gives us one view of one aspect of a greater whole. Like the blind men feeling different parts of the elephant. The snake of the trunk, the tree of the leg, the wall of the side, these are accurate experiences of parts. But, individually they aren't an elephant any more than a thought, a feeling or a neck is you.
When we make a part a whole we are vulnerable to misinterpretations and partial solutions. When we can interpret our experience from a construct of a whole harmonious system we are liberated from one of the great root misconceptions of our time.
a) Experience what it is like to see yourself as one whole, to literally say, "I don't have a separate body I have a responsive self." If you tend to take your attention inwards to feel your body, don't for a week or two and see what happens. (That experiment utterly changed my life.)
This is NOT about ignoring sensations. Sensations are key. If you are hungry, eat, if you are tired, sleep. You get responses/sensations — you act... not your body.
b) Receive sensations rather than look for them by turning your attention inward. If you have a practice that invites focusing attention internally, such as watching your breath, see what it is like to not go in with you attention to perceive and focus. Receive the perception of the breath. You can close your eyes and get quiet, but instead of going in to feel your breath just stay open and receive the sensation of you breathing.
Sensations come to you rather than you going to find them. What happens?
c) Continue an open attention when pain narrows you to itself. If pain calls your attention to a body part, see what it is like to NOT let the part pull your attention in to the part. Try saying, "I hurt" rather than "my neck hurts". You may notice that saying, "I" rather than "my neck" invites a different, broader sense of being.
d) At that moment you notice pain instead of narrowing into the sensation and the location of the pain include more into your awareness — the sensation of the earth under you, the colors in the room, the sensation of moving. The moment you notice you are hurting, you are no longer attending to whatever you had been attending to seconds before your attention switched to the sensation of pain. You've already changed, the whole of you.
e) See what it is like to experiment with conceiving of yourself as one whole being at every given moment, exactly as you are, rather than having a body that somehow needs improvement.
Some wholeness musings:
Lightning and thunder is the classic example of a whole experienced as separate parts. A high-voltage discharge of electricity between the clouds and the ground is perceived by us as light and sound. Because light travels faster than sound there is a delay between what we see and hear. Experientially, lightning and thunder seem like separate events. We see one thing, hear another. Neither gives us the whole.
There is a parallel between our experience of high-voltage electrical discharge and our selves. I hear my voice, I see my body, I feel my body, my feelings, my thoughts. Often in our lived experience and reflected in our use of language we experience a collection of parts and perceptions. Just the expression — my voice, my body, the possessive pronoun — demonstrates this separated experience of our selves.
At first glance this seems logical. It is the way we seem to be. Yet on some level we also know that just as thunder is not separate from lightning — it is one moment experienced differently by our senses — so too, there is no me and my this or my that. There is one moment of me, one moment of being. Anatomically we can name parts. But functionally we are whole even while we can name the parts.
Recall a time when you performed the way you've always wanted to, or if you aren't a performer, a time when you felt utter joy and contentment. During that moment were you experiencing yourself as a collection of parts: body/mind/voice/feelings?
Having asked this question of hundreds of people over the last 20 years, those moments of life are usually felt as moments of wholeness. In that wholeness you experience Being. In many cases there is a sense of inter-being, of unity not only within you but with the world around you. These moments show you there is no me-and-my-anything; there is simply you, one whole being.
As someone who has been in the dance field my whole life and in the somatic field for 35 years I have spent countless hours in exercise that essentially perpetuated the separation of me and my body. We were learning to embody ourselves (which is rather fishy when you think about it for a moment — aren't we innately embodied)?
We were learning to get out of our heads; we did body scans and spent hours going in to feel our bodies to gain body awareness. Ironically, these exercises were essentially in the pursuit of wholeness, while at the same time asking us to feel parts. I recognize that for anyone who has spent more time in thought, imagination and ideas these exercises can be illuminating and recuperative. I am sure there are people whose lives where literally saved by spending time "coming back to their body". For centuries the human body was seen as lesser than mind and in some cases as the source of evil/sin. Of course embedded in this idea is the idea of being separate parts like lightning and thunder. In this historical/cultural context it has been an incredible gift to celebrate our bodies, reclaim the miracle and beauty of sensation.
However, going in to feel our body or reclaim our body is still rooted in the same faulty body-as-separate-from-self construct. The alternative to disconnection from the body isn't to connect with the body. It is to see there is no body on a functional level.
You don't actual feel your body, you feel your functioning. (This is a fundamental point. We can look at this in more detail in future articles.) There is just one whole you that is perceiving and experiencing as a whole when you simply stop going in to feel parts.
At any moment, thought, sensation, chemicals, feelings are individual perceptions coming through different senses of one moment of being. Each sense gives us one view of one aspect of a greater whole. Like the blind men feeling different parts of the elephant. The snake of the trunk, the tree of the leg, the wall of the side, these are accurate experiences of parts. But, individually they aren't an elephant any more than a thought, a feeling or a neck is you.
When we make a part a whole we are vulnerable to misinterpretations and partial solutions. When we can interpret our experience from a construct of a whole harmonious system we are liberated from one of the great root misconceptions of our time.
Listen to Yourself
Can you recall a time when got hurt and realized later you'd had a back-of-the-mind thought to stop or change something but didn't? How about a time when you had a gut feeling or sensed the possibility of an injury or illness and you kept going and ended up sick or injured?
What would your life be like if you followed the guidance coming to you through your system's sensations and back-of-the-mind thoughts? Put another way, what would your life be like if you didn't ignore your system's messages?
Here are a few New Year's suggestions for discovering how wise you are if you don't ignore yourself.
1) Listen to your back-of-the-mind thoughts and gut feelings as if that flash-of-a-thought was a coming from a wise advisor. See what happens if you follow that message rather than the companion argument to ignore the thought and keep it in the 'back' of your consciousness. Bring the back-of-the-mind thoughts forward. I add a cautionary note here because for many of us the skill of dis-identifying self from thought or being clear that thoughts are just thoughts and not reality is key to clarity. Back-of-the-mind-thoughts and gut feelings are not the same as spinning, stressful thoughts. Use this tip wisely.
2) When you feel the start of an ache or pain stop for a moment and change something like the pace at which you are working. See if you can determine why you are hurting before you keep doing what you are doing. Pain is commonly caused by 'how' you are doing what you are doing. So when you change the 'how', you change the pain.
3) Take time in your day or week to be still and silent, 'to be' for a few moments without purpose or accomplishment or doing. Conceive of this in the same way you might take time to exercise or eat well. Stillness/silence is part of fitness. Fitness for life. Fitness for your whole being.
4) Ask yourself what gives you joy? If you can't answer this question decide to find out.
5) Decide to have more joy in your life. How often do you give yourself the time and energy to follow your joy? If the answer is "rarely", find some ways to do things you love to do. From the point of view of listening to your system's signals, the sense of joy and ease is one of the most powerful ways your system tells you what you need for your deepest wholeness and health.
As the great comparative mythology scholar Joseph Campbell said many years ago to his students at Sarah Lawrence:
"Follow your bliss. You'll have moments when you'll experience bliss. And when that goes away, what happens to it? Just stay with it, and there's more security in that than in finding out where the money is going to come from next year. For years I've watched this whole business of young people deciding on their careers. There are only two attitudes: one is follow your bliss; and the other is to read projections as to where the money is going to be when you graduate. Well, it changes so fast. This year it's computer work; next year it's dentistry and so on. And no matter what the young person decides, by the time he or she gets going, it will have changed. But if they have found where the center of real bliss is, they can have that. You may not have money, but you'll have your bliss."
"Your bliss can guide you to the transcendent mystery, because bliss is the welling up of energy of the transcendent wisdom within you. So when the bliss cuts off, you know that you've cut off the welling up; try to follow it again. And that will be your Hermes guide, the dog that can follow the invisible trail for you. And that's the way it is. One works out one's own myth that way."
Pathways to Bliss by Joseph Campbell, p. xxiv
What would your life be like if you followed the guidance coming to you through your system's sensations and back-of-the-mind thoughts? Put another way, what would your life be like if you didn't ignore your system's messages?
Here are a few New Year's suggestions for discovering how wise you are if you don't ignore yourself.
1) Listen to your back-of-the-mind thoughts and gut feelings as if that flash-of-a-thought was a coming from a wise advisor. See what happens if you follow that message rather than the companion argument to ignore the thought and keep it in the 'back' of your consciousness. Bring the back-of-the-mind thoughts forward. I add a cautionary note here because for many of us the skill of dis-identifying self from thought or being clear that thoughts are just thoughts and not reality is key to clarity. Back-of-the-mind-thoughts and gut feelings are not the same as spinning, stressful thoughts. Use this tip wisely.
2) When you feel the start of an ache or pain stop for a moment and change something like the pace at which you are working. See if you can determine why you are hurting before you keep doing what you are doing. Pain is commonly caused by 'how' you are doing what you are doing. So when you change the 'how', you change the pain.
3) Take time in your day or week to be still and silent, 'to be' for a few moments without purpose or accomplishment or doing. Conceive of this in the same way you might take time to exercise or eat well. Stillness/silence is part of fitness. Fitness for life. Fitness for your whole being.
4) Ask yourself what gives you joy? If you can't answer this question decide to find out.
5) Decide to have more joy in your life. How often do you give yourself the time and energy to follow your joy? If the answer is "rarely", find some ways to do things you love to do. From the point of view of listening to your system's signals, the sense of joy and ease is one of the most powerful ways your system tells you what you need for your deepest wholeness and health.
As the great comparative mythology scholar Joseph Campbell said many years ago to his students at Sarah Lawrence:
"Follow your bliss. You'll have moments when you'll experience bliss. And when that goes away, what happens to it? Just stay with it, and there's more security in that than in finding out where the money is going to come from next year. For years I've watched this whole business of young people deciding on their careers. There are only two attitudes: one is follow your bliss; and the other is to read projections as to where the money is going to be when you graduate. Well, it changes so fast. This year it's computer work; next year it's dentistry and so on. And no matter what the young person decides, by the time he or she gets going, it will have changed. But if they have found where the center of real bliss is, they can have that. You may not have money, but you'll have your bliss."
"Your bliss can guide you to the transcendent mystery, because bliss is the welling up of energy of the transcendent wisdom within you. So when the bliss cuts off, you know that you've cut off the welling up; try to follow it again. And that will be your Hermes guide, the dog that can follow the invisible trail for you. And that's the way it is. One works out one's own myth that way."
Pathways to Bliss by Joseph Campbell, p. xxiv
Cooperating with Your Coordinating System
What kind of focus of attention allows for most skilled and efficient movement for the task at hand? The following exploratorium is an opportunity to discover for yourself the implications of different points of view regarding human movement or human coordination.
1) When practicing or learning a skill, whether it is golf, singing, or yoga identify when you give a direction to a part of your body, an internal focus. For example, say to yourself, "Bring my shoulders back or use my abs or take a breath."
2) Experiment with broadening your intention from the body part to the larger purpose of the skill, the external focus, such as where you want the ball to go, or where you want to go, or the meaning and quality of the musical phrase, or the over all shape in space of your body.
3) Compare the felt experience of these two different approaches. If you aren't familiar with the broader intention approach it may take a few goes before you can tell any difference.
The underpinning for the above exploration is the question of how your body is designed to function. Do you have a system that works best when parts are manipulated to produce results, or does it work best when the system is free to coordinate to your intention to produce results? If you enjoy a skill, answering this question can be one of the most important clarities you'll ever make. Coming to an answer to this question isn't an intellectual exercise. To truly answer it, you need to experiment for yourself and feel the differences.
Here's some information to inspire your investigation: There is a growing body of research pointing to the answer that our human system is a Coordinating System.
Coordinating System is not the term given in motor learning research. It comes to me via David Gorman's articulation of how the system seems to be designed to coordinate the billions of bits of information into action when left free to organize around intention. Personally, I think the term would be an asset to the motor learning/skill acquisition field.
The following link is to a PDF file of a paper by Hossner and Wenderoth called "Gabriele Wulf: Attentional Focus and Motor Learning: A Review of 10 Years of Research" which summarizes ten years of Wulf's research. Here is a short excerpt from the article:
"Importantly, not only performance, but the whole learning process seems to be affected by what the learner focuses on while practicing a skill (for a comprehensive review, see Wulf 2007). That is, how fast a skill is learned, how well it is retained, is largely determined by the individual's focus of attention that is induced by the instructions or feedback given him or her. The present article reviews the findings from studies, conducted over the past decade, that have specifically examined an internal versus external focus of attention. As originally defined by Wulf, Hob, and Prinz (1998), an internal focus is one that is directed at the performer's own body movements, whereas the external focus is directed to the effects that his or her movement have on the environment. As I will demonstrate in this review, there is considerable evidence that an external focus of attention is more effective for performance and learning." - Hossner and Wenderoth
[my italics].
Most of these studies are applied to sports like golf, volleyball, jumping and others. This motor learning research is confirming what David Gorman observed and articulated 20 years ago. I created the Wholeness in Motion™ movement class 8 years ago to see if it was possible to teach movement, based on my experiences with Gorman, with minimal body-part directed teaching and maximum whole system, intentional or external focus. I was using different words to describe the difference between internal focus and external focus than that of the motor learning world but was essentially asking the same question applied to Yoga and dance like movement as well a "postural" re-education. Anecdotally, and experientially, the evidence was mounting that it was not only possible but preferable to scaffold movement teaching away from body parts manipulation (internal focus) to the whole system in action (external focus) as the root pedagogical approach.
During this time I was also working extensively with singers in private practice, through residencies, as well as through the VoiceCare Network. A few voice teachers began to shift their approach toward teaching with a Coordinating System perspective. Together we are seeing results of not only fine skill acquisition and retention but students gaining autonomy as artists and confidence as learners. Granted this is anecdotal, but it is enough evidence to suggest that a study in the application of the Coordinating System to arts education would be well warranted.
The key isn't really in examining these anecdotes or studies; it is asking yourself how do you go about your practices, teaching, coaching, artistry, or sport. Almost every movement class I witness, from aerobics to Yoga to personal trainers, is embedded with the manipulating point of view. It is how we have understood body and movement. Many classes are wonderful and important and life saving for people. My goal in writing this and in teaching is to invite the possibility that what is already lovely can be fantastic and give even greater benefits when more aligned with how we actually function. The fact is focusing on a specific body part and particularly trying to align it or put it in a better position interferes with the freedom of the whole to be able to most efficiently coordinate movement. Our system is too complex a system to think we can tell parts what to do. Someone says, "Your body is perfect and this class teaches you to be free," and in the next sentence asks students to, "lengthen your neck, open your chest, drop your tail". All of these directions are part driven and override the fantastic ability of the system to function in open suspension and to freely coordinate action.
What you feel is the way you go about action. You don't feel your body per se; you feel your current state of functioning. That is why you can feel heavy and strained in one moment and open and light in the other. You feel your current coordination. So how you go about an exercise completely determines which muscles fire, which lengthen, which move. Two apparently same movements will elicit very different coordinations depending on how you approach it.
Let's say the movement is to touch your head. If you simply touch your head, like you are scratching an itch, your movement will be different than if you instruct yourself to take your hand to the top of your head and move your fingers back and forth on your scalp.
The video demonstration of this exercise is on the Coordination page.
Scratching an itch is an external focus with a single intention that allows the whole system to coordinate the movement. Taking your hand to your head and moving your fingers is a parts-based internal focus in which you are focusing on the hand moving to your head. Almost anyone doing this experiment will feel the ease and effortlessness of the former and the greater strain and "arm feel" of the latter. These are not the same "exercise". In other words, when you exercise you are exercising different things depending on how you go about the movement. THIS HAS HUGE IMPLICATIONS FOR ALL MOVEMENT TRAINING AND EXERCISES FOR REHAB!
The question arises. "What do we do when habitual patterns have organized the body in a harmful way?" The Change in Action section below addresses this question.
1) When practicing or learning a skill, whether it is golf, singing, or yoga identify when you give a direction to a part of your body, an internal focus. For example, say to yourself, "Bring my shoulders back or use my abs or take a breath."
2) Experiment with broadening your intention from the body part to the larger purpose of the skill, the external focus, such as where you want the ball to go, or where you want to go, or the meaning and quality of the musical phrase, or the over all shape in space of your body.
3) Compare the felt experience of these two different approaches. If you aren't familiar with the broader intention approach it may take a few goes before you can tell any difference.
The underpinning for the above exploration is the question of how your body is designed to function. Do you have a system that works best when parts are manipulated to produce results, or does it work best when the system is free to coordinate to your intention to produce results? If you enjoy a skill, answering this question can be one of the most important clarities you'll ever make. Coming to an answer to this question isn't an intellectual exercise. To truly answer it, you need to experiment for yourself and feel the differences.
Here's some information to inspire your investigation: There is a growing body of research pointing to the answer that our human system is a Coordinating System.
Coordinating System is not the term given in motor learning research. It comes to me via David Gorman's articulation of how the system seems to be designed to coordinate the billions of bits of information into action when left free to organize around intention. Personally, I think the term would be an asset to the motor learning/skill acquisition field.
The following link is to a PDF file of a paper by Hossner and Wenderoth called "Gabriele Wulf: Attentional Focus and Motor Learning: A Review of 10 Years of Research" which summarizes ten years of Wulf's research. Here is a short excerpt from the article:
"Importantly, not only performance, but the whole learning process seems to be affected by what the learner focuses on while practicing a skill (for a comprehensive review, see Wulf 2007). That is, how fast a skill is learned, how well it is retained, is largely determined by the individual's focus of attention that is induced by the instructions or feedback given him or her. The present article reviews the findings from studies, conducted over the past decade, that have specifically examined an internal versus external focus of attention. As originally defined by Wulf, Hob, and Prinz (1998), an internal focus is one that is directed at the performer's own body movements, whereas the external focus is directed to the effects that his or her movement have on the environment. As I will demonstrate in this review, there is considerable evidence that an external focus of attention is more effective for performance and learning." - Hossner and Wenderoth
[my italics].
Most of these studies are applied to sports like golf, volleyball, jumping and others. This motor learning research is confirming what David Gorman observed and articulated 20 years ago. I created the Wholeness in Motion™ movement class 8 years ago to see if it was possible to teach movement, based on my experiences with Gorman, with minimal body-part directed teaching and maximum whole system, intentional or external focus. I was using different words to describe the difference between internal focus and external focus than that of the motor learning world but was essentially asking the same question applied to Yoga and dance like movement as well a "postural" re-education. Anecdotally, and experientially, the evidence was mounting that it was not only possible but preferable to scaffold movement teaching away from body parts manipulation (internal focus) to the whole system in action (external focus) as the root pedagogical approach.
During this time I was also working extensively with singers in private practice, through residencies, as well as through the VoiceCare Network. A few voice teachers began to shift their approach toward teaching with a Coordinating System perspective. Together we are seeing results of not only fine skill acquisition and retention but students gaining autonomy as artists and confidence as learners. Granted this is anecdotal, but it is enough evidence to suggest that a study in the application of the Coordinating System to arts education would be well warranted.
The key isn't really in examining these anecdotes or studies; it is asking yourself how do you go about your practices, teaching, coaching, artistry, or sport. Almost every movement class I witness, from aerobics to Yoga to personal trainers, is embedded with the manipulating point of view. It is how we have understood body and movement. Many classes are wonderful and important and life saving for people. My goal in writing this and in teaching is to invite the possibility that what is already lovely can be fantastic and give even greater benefits when more aligned with how we actually function. The fact is focusing on a specific body part and particularly trying to align it or put it in a better position interferes with the freedom of the whole to be able to most efficiently coordinate movement. Our system is too complex a system to think we can tell parts what to do. Someone says, "Your body is perfect and this class teaches you to be free," and in the next sentence asks students to, "lengthen your neck, open your chest, drop your tail". All of these directions are part driven and override the fantastic ability of the system to function in open suspension and to freely coordinate action.
What you feel is the way you go about action. You don't feel your body per se; you feel your current state of functioning. That is why you can feel heavy and strained in one moment and open and light in the other. You feel your current coordination. So how you go about an exercise completely determines which muscles fire, which lengthen, which move. Two apparently same movements will elicit very different coordinations depending on how you approach it.
Let's say the movement is to touch your head. If you simply touch your head, like you are scratching an itch, your movement will be different than if you instruct yourself to take your hand to the top of your head and move your fingers back and forth on your scalp.
The video demonstration of this exercise is on the Coordination page.
Scratching an itch is an external focus with a single intention that allows the whole system to coordinate the movement. Taking your hand to your head and moving your fingers is a parts-based internal focus in which you are focusing on the hand moving to your head. Almost anyone doing this experiment will feel the ease and effortlessness of the former and the greater strain and "arm feel" of the latter. These are not the same "exercise". In other words, when you exercise you are exercising different things depending on how you go about the movement. THIS HAS HUGE IMPLICATIONS FOR ALL MOVEMENT TRAINING AND EXERCISES FOR REHAB!
The question arises. "What do we do when habitual patterns have organized the body in a harmful way?" The Change in Action section below addresses this question.
Try Delight!
Sometimes the simplest choices have the deepest results. Here are a few explorations to enrich your New Year.EXPLORE DOING THE FOLLOWING, as if your health and well-being depended on them, (it just might):
- LAUGHING OFTEN
- DOING SOMETHING YOU LOVE
- TAKING TIME FOR JOY
- CHOOSING STILLNESS - NOW AND AGAIN
- LEARNING POEMS BY HEART
1. LAUGHING OFTEN — There is neuroscience, immunology and psychology research looking at the health effects of laughter. A fascinating body of research comes to me from Leon Thurman, one of my mentors, a groundbreaking voice educator and a brilliant synthesizer of neuroscience.
Jack Pettigrew discovered, by accident, the effects of laughter on interhemispheric switching in the brain, a key theory in understanding bipolar disorder. Here are links to articles about his work: http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Pettigrew_01.html and http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1444-0938.2005.tb06662.x/pdf.
There are many general articles, like the one below, discussing various studies on laughter and health: http://women.webmd.com/guide/give-your-body-boost-with-laughter
In the spirit of self-knowledge and embodiment your experience is more than enough. You can find out if your life is more or less enjoyable when you laugh more. Is your health and well-being in any way effected when you laugh more often?
Thanks to Katharine, who said she was choosing to laugh more often. Her story inspired me to do this experiment.
2) DOING SOMETHING YOU LOVE - TAKING TIME FOR JOY — There is an article in Dive Training magazine, (September 2011) called Your Brain on Scuba. It is full of scary statistics about how Americans don't take time for fun.
Here are some highlights: Americans average 13 days off per year, English 26, Germans 27, French 38. Several studies found that the "most significant predictors of heart health was whether women took vacations." For men, another study found that, "Men who took vacations were 21 percent less likely to have disease than those who didn't and 32 percent less likely to suffer heart attacks."
In the article they correlated vacation with pleasure. Doing joyous things is good for health. It is also good for happiness. "Studies show experiences can make us happier than material things." Frequency of experiences is more important than intensity.
This relates directly to the fundamental question underlying my work: Does your system give you accurate signals to guide you? If so, is it possible that joy, fun, and pleasure are reliable guides to show you what is good for you? This is a radical proposal in a culture with a history of marginalizing joy as frivolous, at best, and selfish, at worst. It seems that the Calvinist/Puritan perspective may be bad for your health.
Barbara Fredrickson is a pioneer in the investigation of positive emotions. Here's the link to her Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab: http://www.unc.edu/peplab/. The following link is to a research center here in Wisconsin, Center for Investigating Healthy Minds: http://www.investigatinghealthyminds.org/. We have years of research into illness. These two centers are in the forefront of researching health. (Thanks again to Leon for the Fredrickson lead.)
3) CHOOSE STILLNESS - NOW AND AGAIN
Just try it.
4) LEARNING POEMS BY HEART — No science for this one, just personal experience in the depth of relationship that happens when a poem is in my heart.
Climb Mount Fuji,
O snail,
but slowly, slowly
- Issa