analog v. digital thinking

We understand thoughts to be objects. Not embodied, sure,but definitely items that can be manipulated, viewed from multiple perspectives, have the potential to direct action (and so become embodied), and clutter our brain-space. But of course, they are always in response to Context; the world in which we float presses in and causes ripples, and those ripples are "thoughts". The ripples bounce around, interact and evolve until they (sometimes) become coherent enough to be explicit directives. 

That process is always in conversation with the world around us, and so can be fundamentally effected by how we choose to relate with our surroundings. When we relate "in analog", we are letting what is actually there to cause an impression. There is a mechanical directness to the way that concrete reality is translated into our internal world, and most of our energy is directed outwardly so that we might collect information with utmost clarity. 

When thinking becomes "digital", though, the world around us looks to be filled with representative objects, each with stories and meanings and weight that we have given them. The inherent peace of our inner mind is shattered by the noisy, never-ending, almost-political calculation of what our reality "means".  There are thoughts about thoughts about thoughts, and action becomes wooden and slow. 

I'm going to go put a record on. 

look ahead, just not too far

Dan John once told me (and then Stevo followed suit):

"Success makes tracks, sure, but most of us are too close to the ground to notice."

--or something along those lines. I always assumed, and I think rightly so, that this was an observation intended to enlighten the coach. In our role as a superstructure of sorts, propping people up (at first, for a while) until they can find autonomy and direction, us coaches are relied on to be forward-thinking. We translate wants and priorities into goals and procedures, and we do it by having more objective foresight than those who work with us. If we aren't looking up, keeping an eye on the horizon, than we are at the whim of everyday life just like everyone we coach. 

But today another meaning of Dan's quote glinted, and it was much more individual, and maybe primary. Just like the runner who instinctively looks 8 feet ahead when she hits rocky terrain, handling the rocks under her with ease but without her exact gaze, all of us rely on a live- delay (like the ones on TV, although much shorter) to negotiate life's terrain. It's where much of the magic lies in terms of people finding the autonomy, fulfillment, drive, and ability that makes people deeply, truly happy-er. 

Part of the coach's job, then, is to help people gain faith in their own "broadcast delay." We must manipulate their context with stories, stress, advice, support; in short, we must lead them to the place where they are confident in their own ability to handle the rocks on the road.  

shoulder bladding

I still remember the first time anatomy made sense to me. I was sitting in a coffee shop in Boston, and it was hot and sticky outside. Outside was like one big blast of Redline-T-air, and inside there were a bunch of cute girls. Ahem. 

I had been reading Anatomy Trains for the last 8 months (damnit that thing is dense), looking up muscles as I went along, and trying to understand how any of this might apply to training people better. I was not a massage therapist, or better, a PT, who could diagnose and treat the kinds of dysfunction that Thomas Myers so adroitly articulated. 

He was writing about how the rhomboid and the serratus, which make up part of his "Spiral Line", act as one muscle at the middle of which the scapulae "float". I immediately thought of something that I had read somewhere (still can't find the reference), that was basically saying that the scapulae are just boats, anchored in a sea of muscle-tissue. And something clicked. 

It's easy to think about muscles and joints as a bunch of elastics and levers, but's it's not quite true. It's a little harder to think about them as a series of smoothly-coordinated contractions around fixed joints, but that description is still not quite satisfying.

What I realized that day in the coffeeshop was that at its most simple, anatomy was still pretty complicated. Yes, all of our muscles are pulling and levering off of our joints, but at the same time those joints are just floating on a sea of muscles, all at varying degrees of tension. That tension might be consciously modulated or not, but that is as simply as anatomy can be reduced without losing something really important. 

This was huge for me. It helped explain how a bag of meat and bones became an "upstanding individual" (or at least the physical part). It made clear why, really, a practitioner who knows anatomy might be able to help their clients better than one who doesn't.

And it addressed something else, too: nothing is fixed. Even the things we rely on for stability are alive, moving, subject in their own way to the pressures of the universe. Together, we have strength, but it's a strength that moves, and a strength that trusts.