From the monthly archives:

January 2011

Falling

by Annie on January 31, 2011

I find the concept of ‘falling’ fascinating.

It is imperative to learn the ‘how’ of ‘falling’ with trapeze and trampoline work I have done and of course essential in martial arts. However, learning how to fall doesn’t eliminate the fear.

Fear of falling is one of the three fears that are instinctual for human beings:  The other two are

  • the fear of being imprisoned in a tight space
  • the fear of loud noises.

We love falling when we are children and fall so often that it is impossible to keep count.

We fall with ease, laugh when we fall and even if there is ‘a hurt’ involved we are soon up and falling again. What happens to change all this?

If we could enjoy falling once, why not again?

Our early falling is the means to our learning to function upright – discovering the ‘how’ (last month’s newsletter) of being ‘human’

However at some point, we give up the joy and learning that falling affords us.

Falling becomes more associated with failure than discovery.

Over time, like so many skills, we lose our ‘ability to fall’ and worse still, it becomes something we fear and avoid.

A ‘catch 22’ situation develops

  • We fear falling therefore we limit our movement  – we stop exploring and discovering ’how’.
  • Our fear of falling becomes greater, so we restrict the variety of our movement and the use of ourselves even more.
  • More anxiety about a fall.

We have 3 ways of dealing with a fall

  • Righting ourselves

Having a wide variety of skills in our movement vocabulary enables us to right ourselves rather than fall.

  • Changing direction and turning it into something else

How do we break the trajectory of our fall and do something new?

The way we fall is largely determined by our past habits. These forces pushing from the past carry us in a predetermined direction unless we develop the art of turning while falling,

When we are overwhelmed by change it seems as if we are in an impossible situation.

We must learn to change direction and fall gracefully

Go with the fall

Allowing ourselves to fold, soften and ‘go with the fall’ whilst breathing out and keeping our head off the ground.

In learning how to fall we remove the worry ‘what will happen if I fall’?

When we are no longer children it is more difficult to change the trajectory of our lives.

However the more possibilities we experience, the greater the experiential options for balance and the less chance we have of becoming a victim of our fear of falling.

We can break the vicious feedback loop, the self fulfilling prophecy of failure that can shrink our world.

Learning to fall is for most people something new – Maybe, just maybe, it could be fun.

As Hemmingway said about the great bullfighters “Mastering the art of falling is a matter of ‘grace under pressure’ – it gives fallible beings the chance to begin again.”

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The importance of HOW

by Annie on January 6, 2011

“Give a man a fish and he can feed himself that day. Teach a man how to fish, and he can feed himself for the rest of his life.”

Why is How so important when it comes to movement?

What you do is easy to identify – you exercise.

How is not as obvious and is often given to explain how something is different or better.

How is important to me as it differentiates me from others.

In the recent past people didn’t expect to move so well by the time they reached their forties and fifties. And lots of people didn’t expect to be moving much at all by the time they reached their sixties and seventies.

Many of the habitual movement choices we make (how we sit, stand, walk, turn, bend) seem automatic – just part of who we are’.

In fact many of these habits grew out of our early years under less than optimal conditions and without the benefit of choice or further examination.

Thank goodness this is changing.

Continuing to move well as we age however takes a new way of thinking. We need to concentrate on how we move so that we put less stress on our joints, breathe easier, move more youthfully, move and think smarter.

If like most other forms of exercise we learn by visual imitation we do not advance our body awareness and instead we perform what we already know how to do. We mimic someone else’s movement.

Why do we want to copy someone else?

Surely it makes sense to find out what is good for us – what works for us as individuals.

We appreciate that pain can limit movement, But many of us fail to understand that how we move can actually create pain where there was none.

By changing our thinking to include a ‘how’ in our learning we can relearn and clarify many of the fundamental patterns of action we rely on everyday. And we can learn what it means to embody concepts like balance, flexibility, strength and posture.

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