I wonder if ecstatic dance works on the same principle.
I wonder if I've tried ecstatic dance while dancing around to Lana Del Rey everywhere last summer.
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Still doing weird shit while actively tweeting and having multiple other threads open in awareness.
This is definitely not replicable with every technique, at least after so little practice.
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Feels almost like it's... litigating past movement errors? These are all recognizable movement patterns that are happening.
Curious. Most curious.
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Breathing and rhythm keeps changing, tonally as well, with each new pattern.
Almost like some sort of automatic troubleshooting process.
Correction: exactly like that.
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I don't feel like I'm qualified to say much more right now, but I'll definitely do a few hundred hours of this now.
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fascinating. what IS body-centred meditation though? a technique? a school of thought? any links i could read to learn more?
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Good question! So there are some approaches (Alexander Technique, various improvisational acting tools) that seem focused on this, but I don't know them well.
I've been doing sitting meditation for over a decade. I just apply techniques used in those contexts to the body itself.
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(Note: those approaches tend not to brand themselves as meditation, but follow similar patterns of awareness-and-attention-and-focus manipulation.)
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But most meditation techniques I've used to date tend to have fairly mental or emotional orientations.
Emphasis on things like focusing on a mantra, letting feelings come up into awareness, trying to keep awareness as open as possible to all thoughts and sensations...
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If you use similar patterns, but change up the object, you get:
- Focussing on a specific sensation at some point in the body.
- Trying to keep awareness loosely spread over as much of the body (and space surrounding it) as possible.
- Letting (un)comfortable sensations be felt.
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Then there are applying all tricks learned from meditation.
E.g.: I've learned to change the resting point of my awareness, so it feels like "I" am experiencing everything from some specific area. Can use this to center awareness on different body parts/space around body.
Doing any one of those things or some combination seems to lead frequently to stuff like spontaneous movement, flexing/unflexing etc.
There's a very distinct feeling like the body (and specific parts of the body) can and does act on its own volition, for its own purposes.
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Thanks very much for this detailed reply! I'm definitely going to check AT out.