Reasoned Considerations

Disassociation even though everything moves

As human beings, we possess some characteristics of interest to us. We are 3 dimensional; we are living organisms and we are made to be constantly in movement. Our “envelope”, our skin, makes us self-contained. Although we are clearly delineated, we still have numerous movement possibilities and different configurations and reconfigurations available to us.

When there is movement – actually, when WE move - in one place, this movement - we -create(s) movement everywhere: everything moves because of an intricate network of pushes and pulls. This grants us great adaptability.

Being constantly in movement gives us stability and not fixity. When standing still we ARE IN MOVEMENT. Being constantly in movement, we reconfigure our body which does not mean we move everything together as a lump. We have the ability to disassociate.

What does associating/bundling movements mean?

When we bundle or associate movements together, we think that at least two movements have to be performed together in order to carry out an activity.

This way of thinking and of carrying out an activity is similar to creating a shortcut key on a computer keyboard that meets our requirements. It is not necessarily a combination everyone would use and, as individuals, we are likely to use different personalized combinations.

Such personalized combinations are not necessary, which led FM Alexander to say, (…) energies [are] projected to parts of the bodily mechanism which have little or no influence on the performance of the desired act (…) (Man’s Supreme Inheritance, p. 80).

Those personalized combinations can actually get in the way of performing an activity.

Let’s consider a few examples to figure out what associating/bundling movements is.

Associating/bundling moving at the hips and moving at the “shoulders” (gleno-humeral joints)

One day a Wellbeing Improver was experimenting with raising a hand in the air. As soon as Wellbeing Improver reached a certain height, she was also moving forward at the hip joint as if the two were going hand in hand: the movement from the hip joint had to happen before and together with the movement of the arm so that “raising the arm” could continue.

Associating/bundling fixing the head to be able to lift the shoulders

In another instance, I came across the following scenario in the way a wellbeing improver would move: She would think about the poise of her head in relation with her body in movement and would comment that she would feel very light and would always be surprised at how her neck could move without effort.

As soon as she would think of lifting her shoulders though, the first thing that would happen would be fixing her head, which would “allow” her then to lift her shoulders. Is, however, fixing her head a requirement for lifting her shoulders up?

The Freedom of disassociating

Let’s go back to our two wellbeing Improvers and what happened to them when they stopped associating movements/bundling movements together.

In the first example, Wellbeing Improver did not know she was moving from her hips; she thought she was only moving her arm. Once she came to the understanding that moving her arm did not require, in the present circumstances, to move from the hips, moving her arm was neater and required less energy.

In the second example, once she allowed movement in her neck while lifting her shoulders up, the movement was better and more fluid.

In both cases, there were less and more, and there was an improvement in the quality of the movement.

Breaking the thoughtless shortcut

This improvement in quality only happened once the chain reaction (shortcut) occurring after thinking about a movement was altered or broken.

This required a different understanding as well as putting into place a thinking process with several steps. In time, this thinking process will become familiar, will require less time and less energy. However, it is not as automated in the sense of a thoughtless shortcut.

He understood that the brain knits together actions and turns them into complex “automated” sequences, so that one no longer has to use a lot of mental energy to put multiple movements together. (Doidge)

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∞ Superhero of my body!

An everyday activity: sitting or MY sitting?

Sitting down is an everyday activity. For some of us, it has become uncomfortable, even painful to remain seated for long periods of times. Desk work and bad posture are some of the culprits often put forward.

Before finger pointing, what do we mean by sitting’?

MY sitting

First thing first: if we look around us and we will notice that, although we can all sit, we do not necessarily all sit the same way.

There is however no doubt: all these different ways of sitting are what different persons understand, recognize, and identify as sitting for themselves.

There is a connection between sitting and familiarity. We have an habitual way of performing the activity of sitting: it is in fact OUR familiar way of sitting to the length that we, sometimes, call it a habit. We can even be recognized by our habitual way of doing some movement:

We first make our habits, then our habits make us. (Dryden)

If we have created an habitual way of sitting different from somebody else’s way of sitting, we are likely to be able to change that habitual way of sitting and prevent discomfort - should we experience any.

So, what are the kind of questions we can ask ourselves?

What are the joints involved in ‘sitting’?

What actually happens in the activity we recognize as sitting?

The activity of sitting is in fact a folding action of the legs where the head, trunk and pelvis (which constitute the axial skeleton) are transported from a higher level to a lower level.

For the change of level to happen, the angle at the hip joints – the space between the femur and the pelvis – gets smaller.

This bending action or flexion, in this instance a forward flexion, leads to the knee joints and the ankle joints to follow and fold as well.

Do you meet your seat?

Another question is, do you slam into your seat? It usually looks like you are landing onto a seat potato-style, together with a possible grunt. In such a case, you land where you land and, true, you find yourself seated. You are, however, not sitting in a controlled way. Should you want to avoid wet paint on a bench, you are unlikely to be able to.

How about considering the following?

Now that the joints of your legs are folding, you are folding in such a way that your seat is ‘rising up’ to meet you. Indeed, according to the third law of Newton, when we sit on a chair – or anything – the chair pushes up on us.

This ‘meeting’ between us and the seat does not stop, i.e. when we are on a chair we are still in movement and still in the process of sitting.

With this in mind your sitting is very likely to look different and to sound different.

Do you support your seat?

Let’s imagine now that you find yourself seated and it is still uncomfortable. Let’s just have a look at a possible reason why it might be the case.

Consider answering the question: are you supporting the seat or is the seat supporting you?

It might sound like an outlandish question. Still consider it with care. How much tension do you notice as you ‘act on the chair’? How much of the tension you notice is of any help for you to sit?

Should you consider the above questions and provide answers to them, you are very likely to have a different perspective on what sitting involves. You might even notice that you are sitting down in a more controlled way. Should you find yourself in the situation where you have to not finish sitting down because you have just noticed the sign ‘wet paint’ on a bench, you might find out that you are not going to ruin your clothes in the end!