LM (part 2)

To give you a taste of the LearningMethods work, on the 'bodywork' side of things. In other words in its work on human movement and posture and other anatomical and physiological type things.

One of the most beautifully simple of Gorman's demonstrations runs as follows. From standing bend down to the ground to pick something up. Do it a few times and notice how much of you is actually doing the picking up. Chances are it will be about half of you, from your head down to about your waist, as you reach down to the ground. This is the usual way people go about picking something up.

Now try it again, but this time don't cut yourself in half. In other words go into the activity with an assumption that it's all of you that's picking the thing up. Don't try to DO anything different, except have a sense of you as being all one thing, from your head right down to your feet on the floor, rather than that sense you probably had the first time of you being just from your head to your waist.

Then try the same experiment with getting into and out of a chair. Do it your normal way and notice how much of 'you' is generally involved in doing this. (Normally people approach this with a sense of themselves being not much more than their head and torso, which they then alternately let drop into a chair or try to haul out of the chair.) But if you try the same thing assuming you are literally all of you, from your head down to your feet, you might notice something quite different about the sitting down and getting up. Again no need to pay attention to any more bits of you, it's the sense of you that's the experiment here, how much of your body you think of as you when you do things.

(Notice with chairs for example that your feet are already on the ground, they're not in the chair at all, so the idea that we need to 'get up' or 'sit down' is quite strange, because not all of us is ever in the chair, in either case. The words we use betray that shrunken sense of ourselves that we take into these activities.)

Anyway, see how that goes. Trying all sorts of different activities as 'you' where you is the whole of you, rather than bits and pieces. I'll try to explain it a bit more clearly in the next post, if it all just seems a total confusion.

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