An interesting week

After an exciting and exhausting week fridays offer less stimuli and a more intimate atmosphere. Libby did all the turns and the group work. She spend quite some time talking me through the directions. I'm working again to get rid of my sensory amnesia, which might make me forget my directions.

We didn't do any debriefing for Vivien Mackie's visit in the school yet, most likely because Vivien will stay a bit longer in school. Like always, the performance session turned out to be entertaining and enlightening, and I'm glad that I got up to perform.

Libby went with us through some essential body mapping, with the idea of a plumb line from the A-O joint though shoulder, hips, knees, ankles (or rather, symmetrically around this line). Feeling the curvature of the spine on each other offered a great opportunity to explore the uniqueness and differences of the human body.

It seemed like all of us enjoyed the task of talking each other through semi-supine. We had quite different approaches. Sharon and I focused on the 'wholeness' of semi-supine, renewing directions several times before lying down, and exploring movement (a bit like dart procedures). Ana, Carsten and Stephen focused more on imagery to help release of tension.

Back on track

As I still don't trust my sensory awareness too much, I didn't really know how well I fared without school and without semi supine. All in all, I think unicycling did a good job in advancing me on my way, although I nearly forgot how much more I gain during a turn when I feel less urged to talk.

The turn with Marigold gave me a good idea about working much more subtle, especially when we moved our hands together. Although my visualisation skills feel quite underdeveloped, my attempts to visualise movement/release/extension work out somehow, and seem to prevent extra effort.

Yoga felt okay. It's getting easier for me to let go of end-gaining, and stay with easy movements, instead of going to and through pain to make the postures look good. We worked with movements from the hip joints, and continued doing so in the group work as well. I'm not too sure how much distance (if any) existed in my body map between sitbones and hip joints, but it certainly increased today. Bending forwards towards a ball felt just wrong after I released my hips more, there's still the strong habit of judging movements by specific tension patterns.

More hands-on

I arrived less exhausted today, and cooled down in semi-supine before I had a great turn with Jenny. Her idea of perceiving the activity of thinking a free neck as gateway to sense the entire body makes more and more sense to me. This indirect procedure accomplished more freedom, without thinking about ankles, knees and hips these joints moved easily.

I played a bit with Anne on the table, taking her head, arms and legs. I get aware that the situation affects my use still a lot, although I get better in using another body as stimulus to direct myself.

The group with Vivien favored Steven a lot, although we could learn heaps by observation. We did some more hands-on with Jenny, after she asked us to inhibit the most typical hick-ups in putting on hands.

Eye dropper

Do I hang around too much in my limbic system, or why don't I get into a more cheery mood in the mornings? I used the semi supine session to reconsider the patterns related to the movement of my eyes, quite interesting.

I detected the habit to look down in a lot of situations, which usually drags my front down with it. I suspect the downward direction gets me into 'feeling mode' in NLP terms, got to confirm this. Wow, the eye accessing cues really offer some revelations - one of the downward gazes links to the kinaesthetic sense (bingo!), the other to 'auditory digital' whatever this might mean. The upward direction link to visual memory and construction, which might explain my troubles visualing.

Looking upwards feels quite unusual to me, with my head commonly tilted backwards my eyes hardly need to go there. Somehow my idea of having my head 'balanced' links to the level of my eyes in my skull - a nasty double bind place. I tend to drop my eyes into their 'normal' position, getting into 'feeling mode'. There I indulge in sensory debauchery, connecting the sensory information for an effortful position with normality.

I need to construct some two way mirror at home to convince my eyes of their consequence for my directions, and find other ways to get my eyes out of their two dimensional fixation back to more depth.

Tailbone

I worked with Libby on distinguishing better between directing and doing directions. Both produce movement, yet of different qualities. The chair work helped a lot to identify some of tensions on my leg I acquired during my injury.

I played a lot with my cj ball before the group work started, and even played with taking Cal's arm while she laid on the table. The group work itself posed some challenge. We experimented with thinking about the tailbone movement during the breathing cycle, directing it forward with the in breath, and imaging the air rising through the front of the body with the out breath.

Dropping the tail bone slightly feels a bit like rounding the back, yet increases the movement of the back of the ribcage significantly. The thought of up through the front prevents collapsing, together an amazing tool (at the moment) to feel connected throughout the body. We extended the exploration of the tail bone into some table work, and I went through the challenge of taking Jenny's tailbone while she laid in semi-supine. It felt less awkward to work between her legs than I expected, staying directed and just synching into her breath cycle took most of my attention.

However, I resisted the temptation to feel what happened, and tried to cope with the amount of stimuli and thoughts presented to me by thinking about myself. I'd liked to have seen whether I still coordinated myself, Jenny's feedback (and release twitching) made me quite content with today's hands on experiments.

Voice

I wanted to learn all the names today, instead I saw plenty of new faces. Vivien Mackie, a Cellist and AT teacher, came to the school, as did Daniela, Shiromi and Phil. We had to perform today, and that surely made me a bit nervous.

I had my turn after the break with Margaret, doing table work. She asked me about my semi supines and noticed the changes while I was describing the focus of my attention during this part of the work.

Kaz played his cello in the first group session, which improved after some of Vivien's suggestions. Playing an instrument seem like a good opportunity to focus on the mean-whereby instead of end-gaining. Each song has its own tempo, and each note can be lived out.

I recited Goethe's Faust and noticed some habitual patterns emerging from this observed speaking situation. The throwing back of the shoulders and tensing the neck belong to those undo-able reactions. With a slump (or what felt like it) and bended knees it worked much better.

I started at least the document for my homework, time to read now the man himself.