Lee Salzman

Vague attempt to counter thread drift... Forgive me, please...

Some other relevant things I have been finding in my own training of movement quality that I wonder if other people have also figured out in their own training: not trying to feel the body as a set of bones running down the center of things, especially the spine. This seems to actually cause disconnects, rather than bridge them. The muscles along the surface are what are doing the movement, so this is what I need to literally feel (not visualize, actually feel) activating. I am not thinking or visualizing the action of the muscles, I am driving them, as in doing something. Feelings come as a side-effect.

Likewise, not thinking of the center of joints, thinking of all the muscles running continuously across their surface and the actions they need to or could perform to assist and resist the joint in movement. Like when the elbow extends, the triceps are releasing into the back side of the forearm and the biceps are tugging into the front side. Or the torso, not thinking of the spine as a shaft running through the center of it, focus on the left and right sets of muscles running up and down both the front/abdomen side and the back/spiney side. Especially thinking of the trying to move the spine as this ropey/stick thing in the center prevented me from getting an actual feel of how the torso drives into the legs and vice versa, or the same with the arms. It was more like a snakey elliptical barrel of muscle, that can split off or tug on things as it runs into the upper and lower parts of the body. In other words, I had to completely and utterly discard the idea of having an axis, especially a central one, and feel myself as an actual tube of muscle.

Or positioning a joint at both of the extremes of its ranges of movement (especially at various locations at the spine that you feel can be moved, any and all of them), and then noticing how at either extreme force conduction just feels... wrong. So trying to consciously keep the joint in a more balanced position with respect to its extremes rather than just having it relax there by accident. Also examining the rotational capacity, also abduction and adduction, of certain joints, like upper arm, and upper leg, really helps there too, as they do a lot more than merely flex and extend.

After working with all of that stuff, I can seem to sense a lot of stuff that seems to in hindsight feel like winding, spirals, microcosmic orbits, bla bla, etc. in my body, but not as something I set out to do, but merely as curious side-effects of getting the joints to drive correctly with respect to given movements. Trying to do it in reverse, i.e. thinking spirals onto my body, did not seem to do any good and was counter-productive.