Tag Archives: Learning

Hey, WTF, Life isn’t a Sport

17 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by in Election 2016, Sports

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Sports – competing, winning, losing, betting, taking sides. Winners and Losers.

Has our discourse become  sport? Is a tweet a pitch across the mound? Have our opinions become serves we lob out to score against someone? Do we share information to ‘win’ an appearance of being smart or good or better? Do we gossip to elevate ourselves above those idiots who lose points with us by doing/being/looking  off side? Of course we do!

We score with our righteousness we earned by reading some news story or listening to some juicy tidbit. We have banners and mascots and images and fashion and colors for our side. We gather our sound bites as wins and once a point has been scored you can’t unwin it. That would be unfair! Unfair to the game we are playing.

Well life isn’t a game. It’s a dynamic biological interaction that our consciousness rides on. But we can make it a game. By choice. We all need air and water and food and community. All that other stuff, opinions and religious beliefs and political alignments can be changed. But we often hang onto ideas as if they are air, fight for a point like it’s food. Can we keep our love of sport in the world of sport and deepen our discourse and listening? I don’t know.

The following is an excerpt from my podcast #5;

Time for a horror story. Nothing has shaken me to the bone more that what I am about to tell you. You are about to hear a super sad tale of horror and woe. 

A friend of mine teaches grade six science and math in a public school. Every year she teaches a three week block about fractions. She has them learn very hands on, a looking, touching, practical approach that leads into the abstractions of the number system. She has never had a child fail the test in her fifteen years of teaching. This year, all went as planned, lovely involved kids, enjoying the learning, except that not one student passed the test and the same thing was happening to these children in their other classes. It was a mystery, a sad horrible mystery.

And I wondered what could possibly have happened to these children that was not apparent during instruction, why not one of these active, participating students could pass a sit down test.

And then it hit me.

 

Now, I hope I’m wrong but – could it be that these children are the first generation of children to reach grade six who were raised with both themselves and their parents spending large amounts of time on cell phones, decives and computers. Because with deep sadness I can explain how that could be the cause.

 

A child learns through modeling. Not runway modeling, modeling means that their developing selves require them to have another more mature biological entity spending time with them, performing mature brain operations, to give their brain a template of how to branch out.

Now you know what the experience is of having ‘devices’ how they can own you. How we become like dogs in a park full of smells. We most certainly live in blocks of distraction. Distraction is a state of being that is expressing how our neurons are firing…and they fire according to how we are using them.

I know you know this state of unsettled distraction.

And here is something else you know. You know what the feeling is to have an idea, it’s a physical sensation. and you know what it feels like to ‘hold an idea’, yeah? This ‘holding of an idea’ is essential to abstract learning. It’s being able to grasp a concept with our inner world and hold it there, to build it, nurture it, come back to it, question it, wonder at it.

Children can learn by mimicing in the early years but the power of learning through mimicing fades and the being is designed to grow into the glory and joy that is holding and interacting with abstract ideas.

So what if, as a child, this modeling of this essential ability ‘to hold an idea’ was not nurtured at the right time due to parents and children being disrupted on devices.
Watching screens is not holding an idea within yourself. You know that because you know what the physical experience is of having a place inside yourself where concptual ideas live and you know what it’s like to be on screens.

Can you even imagine what life would be like without this ability to have an inner container for an idea. Scan yourself and imagine that there are no containers for lovely ideas and concepts just the ability to hop from bit to bit of information. That’s horror.

 

Thinkings purpose is to be used to think on an idea. Thinking longs to be in service of an idea. Using thinking to bung up your random thoughts is stressful because thoughts are meant to come and go, to inform us and fade away like the scent of a flower.

Thinking is for ideas, not creating anxiety and panic launched off false premises.

One of the great joys of being human is to be at play with an idea, a concept, to share and discuss ideas with others, to have and develop your own ideas. It’s brain sex, it feels that good. It can feel better than gossip.

And of these children? The brain can find a work around. Meditation can certainly help them, adults conciously modeling how to hold an idea can help them, limiting screen time will help , and art can help – playing and expressing themselves in music, painting, gardening, crafts, dance, theatre, poetry – art is essential food, today more than ever.

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Podcasting and Ballet

14 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by in Adult Ballet, Dance, Pete Egoscue, Philosophy, Podcast

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So I have posted episode #4 ‘Inventing’ – If woman had invented the world.

Will post #5 ‘Saddest History ever!’on the weekend and have just recorded #6. It takes a few hours to write each 15-18 minutes piece, the recording is reasonably quick though I do have to work around planes, trucks, dogs, leaf blowers and construction noise. It takes Patric and I about 8 hours to add the music and sound effects. My plan is to string them all together in one piece once it is complete so it plays like a 2 and half hour radio play or rather monoplay that delivers a download from the premise ‘everyone’s first home was a woman’s body so what the hell happened’. Then I am going to get a bunch of people together to get high/or not, lie on the floor and listen to the whole thing. Then I will interview them. Let me know if you want to take the trip when it’s done.

If you haven’t checked it out you can listen below on itunes

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/what-is-woman-because…its/id1088536792?mt=2

or

just go to the podcast link  on this page. thanks.

http://itsabsurdtobeawomanonplanetearthetc.com

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Ballet. Lovely ballet. My body figured out the pain issues with the help of the Egoscue book ‘Pain Free’. A few things  made a huge difference;

1) realizing that basically the entire back of the body is for strength and the front for flexibility – it’s easy to check myself and remind the back of me to hold me as my default has been to ask the front of my hips to hoist me around (psoas) and that pulls on my lower back.

2) my lower spine functions better when allowing it’s natural curve – I had tended to tuck my tail under, even when hiking uphill and I see now how that forced me to use the wrong muscles.

3) the body needs space to naturally find it’s desired comfort place – every chance I get I allow my body to let go and take it’s comfort position as I can get stuck in a holding pattern which is not natural for easy daily movement.

I am going slowly.

 

 

Adult Ballet.6 – Being in Space

27 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by in Adult Ballet, Align Ballet, Bjarne Hecht, Dance, Learning

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My teacher, Bjarne, gave me an adjustment about balancing and it opened the door to many things.

– The exercise I was doing – balancing on one leg with the other leg in front of me, bent at an angle (in attitude).

–  He could see that I was in my head which leads me to struggle for the         balance.

– His solution was to look out into the room, not fixated on a spot, just be in the space.   He explained that when he went into a new theatre to dance he would go on the stage and ground himself in the fixtures of the theatre – the little  red light at the back, the exits signs etc. He would align his geometry  with the geometry of the theatre he was in.

– I understood what he meant and how relaxing it is to calmly be where I am, in the room. So challenging to repeat but a new goal. I could feel within myself a thread of worry that was part of my state of being that when brought into balancing brought uncertainly, and tension with it. Is this worry a result of being a student in a class? More likely, always with me and a habit that has embedded itself in the fiber of my being.

Well, that opened up an exploration of what it is to be in space. Just like our eyes are constantly adjusting their focal point and our feet are giving feedback to our bodies to balance us, our bodies are constantly getting feedback from the world around us. Because this sense ‘spatial awareness’ is not included in the commonly known five senses – touch, sight, hearing, seeing and tasting – we tend to be asleep about it but it is part of our operational package. A blind person is conscience of this innate sense and uses it as effortlessly as we use our eyes.

We are constantly sending out sensors to tell us where we are in space. That is why we can sit in a chair without looking at it, feel differently in a cathedral than we do in a baseball field or an elevator. There is nothing woo woo about this sense, it’s as important as any of the others for our basic functioning. I wonder if our lack of including it in the basic five senses that we teach all school children makes us so obsessed with how we are feeling/doing/thinking/behaving. It keeps us focused on self. We don’t bring to consciousness this skill that is the connective tissue to our world, to each other. It is this sense that reaches us out of ourselves while touch, sight, hearing, seeing and tasting are all contained within us.

I digress.

What I learned from that one correction was that I have a thread of worry/concern that I carry with me. When I am able to be free of it by doing what Bjarne recommended I feel calm and elated and present and free. And balancing is so easy.

I find this extremely difficult to do and the change will happen by building second on second. But the dance is in this adjustment,  the dance of my life.

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Adult Ballet.4 – Brain to Brain

02 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by in Adult Ballet, Align Ballet, Ballet, Bjarne Hecht, Learning

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In my last post I wrote about how my legs had always felt heavy, probably due to the splints I wore as a baby. My teacher, Bjarne, read the post and came up to me after class.

And this happened.

Bjarne said that he could help me with the idea that my legs feel heavy. (BTW, this is a man who floats around as if gravity bypassed him)

He stood in front of me and said, ‘Just imagine that there is a cloud above your head. Let yourself go up into the cloud’. I let myself imagine and felt myself drifting up into the cloud. Then a space opened up in the middle of my chest as a density dropped down. Tears flowed out of my eyes.

That was it. Something shifted.

I thought maybe I had let go of an ancient concern/effort I had always carried about while trying to crawl and walk while braced. I don’t know.

What I do know is that my legs are now light. The change is so dramatic that sometimes I get a wave of fear that I might have a wasting disease. At times I feel that I might be unstable or that my muscles aren’t strong. But I am the same in terms of my slowly developing technique. New issues on the front burner now.

But here is the take away.

Joseph Chilton Pearce writes that the brain is designed to entrain and learn from being in the presence of other brains. I am sure that people can learn from the internet and books but the gold standard is to be in the room with great teachers.  What happened to me happened not so much because of what Bjarne said to me but because of what he lives and knew how to share. 

When my son was learning to read we would have a practice session during his bedtime story. He was almost there and then the next night he would be back to where he was. I felt frustrated and that was not a good feeling to have about my child’s efforts. I looked at myself and thought, what it I hold in my brain what it is like for me to read when we read together instead of trying to get something to happen.

When I made that small adjustment he started to read with ease. He got it.

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Adult Ballet. 3 – The Image

03 Saturday Oct 2015

Posted by in Adult Ballet, Align Ballet, Ballet, Bjarne Hecht, Michael Cornell

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So the ‘Beauties’ fresh from ‘Align 2’ Workshop have arrived in our class. Bjarne’s arms and head requirements gave them a bit of a jolt and I wonder if any were on the verge of tears as I was in my first class. One delicate dancer was gripping the bar so hard it was squeaking and rattling.

I am happy that the class is a little slower because I have so much to work on and I can address my ‘to do’ list better when I go slowly. My list is;

– be as free of the bar as possible.

– let the dance be in my whole being

– let legs be as arms

‘Let legs be as arms’ has been a mystery to me my whole life. My legs seem heavy to move around and yet I see dancers (like Bjarne) toss them around as easily as their arms. I struggle to lift those babies. And coming back to dance after more than thirty years it has been very humbling to ask my leg to extend away from me and it just doesn’t go. I have lost much. But if I am to build again I want to do it differently or there is no point.

Bjarne talks about using an image to balance. Ballet is filled with one leg balances on the ball of your foot. I have had moments of understanding when he first explained it, ‘Look slightly up and let your body be lifted and held by your inner vision’. When I gave myself over to the image it worked like a charm. But I haven’t been able to repeat enough to make it mine.

Yes, it takes time to built the muscles in my feet and calves but the hardest thing of all for me is surrendering completely to the image. Even though I have done it and when it works, it’s easy and thrilling. As if I live in a room and when the image is applied I live on the window ledge with the wind in my hair.

How I want that. Why don’t I let it be easy? Am I battling my logic that an image can hold me? When the image leads my whole body comes under one director. My body understands how to bring all its parts together when an image is clearly applied.  I know this image space is where the dance lives.

So I seek an image for moving my legs like arms. Something that will unite my body and engage the right muscles. I have to be patient as I need the muscles to be developed inch by inch as I search to connect to the right image.

This is so important to me that I would not take class without trying to implement this goal. Perhaps feeling like my legs are a burden started when I was a baby. I was born with a floppy foot and had aluminium splints put on both my legs from the time I was 6 months to 18 months and my crawling and and walking impulses were lived out with bound legs and feet. Can the image be stronger than cellular habit? Will awareness and use of image overcome an old and no longer relevant idea? We shall see. Inch by inch.

  • The photo below is of a window on Beverly Blvd near Kings Rd in Los Angeles where old point shoes go to rest.

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Adult Ballet.1

15 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by in Adult Ballet, Learning

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How surprised I am to find myself nine months into Adult Ballet classes. I struggled painfully through ballet classes as a teenager while loving modern dance class. I considered ballet a hip destroyer that expresses movement from an era we should leave behind. Grinding your body into grid like perfection while on the outside trying to be ‘pretty, little and quick’.

And then…

I was at a neighbours annual Xmas party last year when a woman came up to me all aglow and told me she was finally living her childhood dream of taking ballet. She had been studying for a year and had just gotten point shoes! I was intrigued. This enchanting woman was in her 70’s.

An itch I had never properly scratched floated up from my subconscious. Ballet – the struggle not to be awkward and stupid and shamed. Was there something to be solved here, something to be faced, and if not conquered, at least met with the perspective that thirty years can inform?

I looked up the classes where my friend studied, ‘Align Ballet’. It was down the street and I signed up for ‘Align 1’, a workshop for beginners. I was comforted by the idea of it – a ballet bar gone over in minute detail, something for a true beginner. I wouldn’t be expected to know anything. The class held almost thirty women and men ranging in age from early 20’s to mid-60’s. Some had already done some serious shopping and wore backless lace leotards with matching skirts and leg warmers and some wore sweats. I had on some ancient leggings, a t-shirt and brand new ballet shoes where my feet felt trapped and longed to feel the floor.

An ex-ballet dancer named, Michael Cornell, developed the technique and taught the class. Not having a classical ballet body, he struggled to develop one and after many years of dancing professionally he moved into personal training. He believes that if you start teaching ballet by simply copying the shape, the movement, all else will follow. ‘I can make that shape, no big deal.’ Then adjustments get made once the brain starts to wire in the shapes and get comfortable with making them. Yes, I can make that shape, I can copy the movement.

And then there is the music, mostly classical, some modern lyrical. I felt my old dance neurons start to fire and feel the joy of moving in rhythm with a roomful of people. My legs and feet felt almost dead. Numb stumps that were being asked to articulate and respond in a sophisticated way. But they wanted to, they wanted to answer the call and have that lovely liquid energy flow through them as they were being challenged to be more alive, to carry me, hold me, turn me. Inside, I felt moments of floating and connecting to the music and moving with hard working strangers. On the outside, when I glanced in the mirror I would see what looked like an animal being slowly poisoned as I did my best to ‘make the shapes’. Michael is telling us how beautiful we look and it sounds like he believes it. I know he means the good kind of beautiful – pure human effort and I deeply appreciate his perspective, we all do.

After six weeks in ‘Align 1’ I moved on to ‘Align 2’ which finishes up what a ballet bar is and adds a few movements in the centre. About ten of the people have dropped out. Ballet is a language, like math, it’s not for everyone. I didn’t think it was for me but I find myself committed to solving something I know I will never solve. Facing ‘the Fool’ that all beginners are faced with I have decided to dance while Rome burns. In this mad world, I only have my body and what it houses so taking moments to meet a poetic self seems like a life line.

*Next up ‘ALign 2’ – open classes and a new teacher, Bjarne Hecht.