STEPPING ONTO A PATHWAY OF ETERNALLY ENHANCING EXPERIENCES.
[or, How can it be better than this?]
Have you ever watched a small child playing with building bricks? Have you noticed how they stack them one on top of the other only to knock them all down, to begin stacking them on top of each other once more?
This is imagery I’ve often used to invite people to begin to explore Somatic Movement. To create a shape with their physiology, and then to ‘uncreate’ the shape. In Hanna Somatics there is the concept of pandiculating a muscle: contract a muscle to a point of feeling fully contracted, and then release the contraction to a point of feeling full released.
Have you also then seen a small child only partially knock down a pile of bricks and then instinctively go to completely knock them all down. Intuitively they know the benefit of fully destroying what they’ve created. For them there is ‘no right way’ to be doing what they do and this enables them to start anew and produce a new stack. Each time they pile the bricks, they have the opportunity to refine their stacking abilities. There is the creation of the stack and then the creation of new neuromuscular connections inside themselves that enable them to refine their stacking.
If you stand back from this process you can observe it as a metaphor for learning and growth. In terms of somatic explorations we begin engaging in an action and then we gradually release out of the action. We pause at the end of the action and rest before we then engage in the activity anew. Interestingly, we let go of a physical change process to allow a neurological change process to happen as we lie still. In the physical non-doing a change in the neurological organisation (the internal wiring – so to speak) takes place that then gives rise to new and enhanced physical activities.
It’s as if children have an innate, inner knowing that in order for development to occur they need to release their completed creation (the stack of bricks) so that they can enhance their creative expression (in the re-building). Only by knocking down the pile of bricks can they discover a new and more refined way to stack their bricks. The creation and then the destruction of their brick stacks enables them to develop more refined coordination.
Part of enhancing the way we do anything comes in the letting go of what we’ve done before.
When we engage in somatic movement explorations, we can learn to let go of old patterns of behaviour (sensing and moving), and we get to experience how to develop new and enhancing ways of sensing and moving – with no right way to do this!
As we get older we may sometimes be introduced to ‘the right way’ to do something. Some external authority figure introduces us to ‘what is right’ and if we accept this, we can then become fixated and obsessed with ‘the right way’.
Can you imagine the small child, who is stacking the bricks, never wanting to knock them down because they did it the right way; or knocking their stack down but then becoming fixated on placing their bricks back together exactly as they did the time before because there is only ‘the right way’?
An adherence to ‘getting it right’ and subsequently maintaining that rightness, leads to the long-term inhibition of greater development. Maintaining what is right, limits what is possible, restricts creative growth and often leads to internal and external conflict. This then can escalate into people attacking what is different, and defending ‘The Rightness’ of their fixed point of orientation in the world. They don’t get to combine their bricks differently to produce better stacked bricks. Refinements in behaviour are inhibited and they become stuck in a lesser stage of development, sustaining the rightness of their creation, unable to grow into what is possible for them to become. They are contained within the limitations of what is ‘correct’.
What is possible when we let go of correctness? and accept ‘no right way’
How do we open up to new possibilities: new perspectives, new ideas, new awarenesses, new consciousness of greater potential?
How could you let go of limiting your own development, based on sustaining the rightness of what you have learnt as the right way to do something? Unaware that if you release your current strategy a more refined way of developing is already there waiting to empower you to experience something greater?
Would you be willing to let go, to explore, to experience ‘no right way’: to allow the refinement of your whole being – a recalibration of your whole somatic potential – to manifest something new, something wonderful, something of a different order of magnificence than you previously considered possible?
Check out our more recent blog here where we apply this approach to breathing
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