To My New Uruguay AT Friends, When I teach, whether in workshops or online, I follow up with notes. So here, I will finish giving you the li
Follow Up Notes to the Uruguay Workshop AT Teachers and Trainees.
To My New Uruguay AT Friends,
When I teach, whether in workshops or online, I follow up with notes. So here, I will finish giving you the list of AT principles I began at our workshop, the principles that have fascinated me for half a century.
Often, we think to ourselves in words. But sometimes, most of us also think in images. For me, directions, or messages, can be imagistic. With practice, we can get good at sending messages from our brains to parts of our body, or to our whole body, and sometimes even to the space around our body. Good images are full of information that can tap into our innate integration, that can energize our primary governance, or primary pattern, or primary movement. You want to find images that possess geometric power and beauty, that are three dimensional, that move beautifully or that are beautifully still, (like mountains). Fluid images can be particularly effective. (The octopus).
If they are to work, images need to be precisely located in the body and they must resonate with the body’s physiological design. Imagining a little baby sound asleep, laying upon your diaphragm, breathing, and you watching that baby as it sleeps and softly breathes can free your breathing in a way that trying to breathe correctly could never do. That image would not work for your feet, but imagining that you have huge, soft, furry bear feet does work for the feet.
Images can communicate, instantly, a large amount of information: size, shape, texture, timing, quality of movement, direction of movement, initiation and sequencing of movement, etc. It might take ten pages of words to express what we see and feel in one second when we see a great photo or painting. Images can also be positively emotive for people, that is, they sometimes communicate positive feelings which can help us feel peace and poise. The full moon over Mount Fuji. The mermaid swimming in the ocean. I mention just a few of the images we played with during our day together. I have hundreds of images that help people move well and feel well.
[Thanks Bruce Fertman]