On time, and an Interview with Movement Practice Paris

When I was playing capoeira many years ago while working at a coffee shop, during my 15 minute breaks and longer lunch breaks I would go to the back parking lot to practice. Between school classes, same thing. Didn't matter where I was, or how odd I seemed juxtaposed against the backdrop of dumpsters, asphalt, etc.

In my masters, I would wake up long before internship began, put my mattress up for some space, and train in my room. During lunch breaks at internship, I would practice the work Ido had begun sharing in the blog. After classes, I would go to capoeira class. To maximize time, I ate in the bus/train my long-since-cold tofurkey and pasta from a tiny tuperware (yes, EVERY fucking night).

The pattern repeated itself in my phd, and elsewhere besides.

It has been a long time since every aspect of my life became unified around one thing - practice (and also since I ate tofurkey). So I briefly forgot these moments. It was only in this recent interview (in French) with Alain (of Movement Practice Paris), when we discussed how people deal with lack of time, that I recalled these to give them as examples of managing time.

Alain asked me what a person with 10 minutes in the day should focus on, what would be most important to practice. My answer was this - stillness practice. Because from there, the agitations and disturbances that otherwise disorient you the rest of your day settle a bit, and you begin to see where your own actions actually created blockages and leakages (including subtle choices and habits that prevent you from pursuing the things that matter to you). This is something that has become most evident to me after studying the work of the psychoanalyst Kourosh Dini who has talked about engaging work in ways that have been very influential for me.

And now, I ride the bus, and it’s a moment to work on my eyes. The time between engagements of the day is not sacrificed to the god of scrolling, but to practices of emotional intelligence and other personal projects - whether reading old entries or examining posture or playing with somatics... (and sometimes semantics). Hell, even writing a post... it's all practice.

So is it possible to make practice central in your life, when you have other things going on? Yes, of course it is. It’s about prioritization. Maybe it was easier in the era prior to social media, but I think not - my peers were busy talking or smoking cigarettes or eating to pass the time, long before Facebook (or even myspace), but I had no such interest.

Cognition, Vision, & Corrective Eyewear

The optic nerve has a direct synapse on the reticular activating system, which in turn regulates arousal and consciousness. Dr. Huberman explains that this connection results in a unique relationship between visual habits and states of mind: visual focus on a single object produces a distinct psychophysiological state as opposed to letting the eyes rest on landscape. Allowing the eyes to saccade over a landscape allows the nervous system to tone down arousal.

Plot twist: eyeglasses affect your visual habits. Jake Steiner, who has the blueprint for reversing myopia, has observed that people who wear glasses change the position of the head, rather than move the eyes around, to visually take in an environment.

I hypothesize the following interaction - wearing glasses causes a longterm shift towards perpetual low-grade arousal, and deprives us of the psychophysiological release that vision would otherwise cue. A simple piece of curved glass causing profound and persistent changes in our mental and cognitive habits.

All my life, I assumed so much of my personality was due to some genetic innate thing.... and yes, my DNA reveals some pretty weird mental and psychological predispositions (like anybody else, I have to assume), but this realization separates something I thought was PART of me, a certain cognitive-mental-psychophysiological profile and default state, giving me distance from it.

And of course, it won't remain theoretical - my journey to reduce my eyesight yields consistent fruit: by changing habits and reducing the corrective power of my glasses, I'm down 2 diopters and still improving...

On planning, reacting, and teaching classes

“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.” - Nikola Tesla

A personal challenge I am overcoming: over-valuing deep thinking & planning of classes & projects and under-appreciating simple clarity. I have tied myself up into vicious gordian knots countless times by looking for the perfect Pythagorean harmony of concepts... at the expense of asking simply - what comes next?

The addiction to the search for first principles trips me up. I begin to plan a class, for example, and quickly imagine all the things I need to transmit, across all time scales and domains, all the connections I could draw, and hours later the product is a convoluted tangled mess which fails to deliver the potency expected.

But I realized, I don't need some amazing plan - I need simply to observe. From there, I can think clearly, much more so than by over-focusing into a psycho-ciliary spasm.

(And so it is, in almost every facet of living...)

There are no extraordinary plans; I'm reminded of something Ido mentioned in a past interview - that things aren't being executed according to some elaborate plan, but rather that there is a process of reaction going on. And the wisdom of that makes sense to me now at another level than it did then (it's been sitting inside my mind for years, as I've been trying to digest that single idea...). It requires maybe a comfort with the chaos, a willingness to handle the unpredictable by keeping your eyes peeled and staying on your toes, refusing to sink into the complacency of a pre-made plan. But the result is that classes now feel more like a process of research, a shared journey, rather than executing some perfect plan... and I am more alive for it.

Natural Movement

We are often accused of participating in “natural movement”. As though there were anything else, any other kind of movement. It’s natural, all the way down.

Maybe a better way to think of natural, when speaking of movement, is not to use it to refer to some primal/ancestral type of dogma, but rather to describe the situation in which the movement is natural to the person executing it, meaning that it belongs to that person in the deep sense that it no longer requires consideration for execution, can occur without invoking Feldenkrais’ “supralymbic” system.

This suggests that the characterization of natural is not actually about the “movement” itself, as some decontextualized phenomena (as though a movement can exist apart from a mover!). Rather, we use it to describe the relationship between movement and mover (maybe analogous to the nondualist sense of a mind and a thought).

On Frustration, Practice, and Awareness (aka Escape from the Hypercube)

A common sentiment - frustration when the thing that worked yesterday, doesn’t work today. By all logic, I should be better… and yet, the same approach that brings me from point A to point B in the past may bring me up against a wall today.

In the movies Cube and Hypercube, a group of people must escape from a building. However, the rooms of the building change and reorient in 3 planes (and four, in hypercube) every time they move (imagine trying to escape a transdimensional Rubiks cube).

Plot twist - each room kills the subjects, always in a different manner.

The path is never as straightforward as it seems. This characterizes a real practice - you can’t fall asleep with your foot on the pedal… We aren’t interested in a process which invites somnolence; life is too short to be doing things half checked out. I’d rather play inside the hypercube of practice; here I can learn and practice to be “awake” - at the very least, so I can be awake at the moment of my death.

Every day we wake up, and we try again. The challenge shifts, slightly, playing that game, dancing that dance. The frustrations come. Baruch Hashem. Movement practice is an antidote to the grooves of routine.

Every day, the mind begins to predict the task, to defer to what worked yesterday. That’s what the mind does, to be fair - it conserves effort. Summoning the impression, recalling it, clarifying it, is strenuous psychic work…

But if something is straining to overcome the mind… what’s that thing? This, the hardest of the soft problems, the softest of the hard problems…a movement practice helps to reveal.

Be like the hero in cube - stay on your toes, keep thinking, and don’t die.