14: While not greatly moved on an emotional level by anything going on, I was very much receiving signals as to what was necessary for me.
This unnerved the person I was with at the time so much that I slipped back into my body just to prove I could... and exploded with rage.
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15: It wasn't that the feelings that had prompted this little act of dissociative rebellion were gone, but rather they were just body-local.
When viewed from inside the body, they were still very much the dominant force in awareness. From outside, not so much.
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16: However, more than being just a simple tool for dissociation, out-of-body awareness had a lot of other strange side-effects.
I became deeply attuned to sensations in my environment. I could pick up those kinds of sounds that people hear without really hearing, for example.
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17: I noticed that, while my own emotional sensations were very low-resolution, other people's visible body language was much more salient.
This caused some unnervingly odd side-effects like feeling like I was reading minds. I could *see* the emotional processing on other faces.
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When I'm teaching Alexander Technique I often unnerve people by pointing out exactly what is going through their mind at the time.
Whether it's some kind of processing, that their awareness is closed off in a certain direction or that they are off somewhere else.
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That's very interesting.
Where would you say your own anchor, to use my own terminology, is located when you are doing this?
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In my example my awareness stays firmly 'here', so to speak.
Part of the work as a teacher is to notice the effect the student has on your own subjective experience, the pushes and pulls, and to leave yourself alone while noticing changes in the student.
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Getting caught up or in some way dragged along by the experience of the student means I'm no longer able to be useful - I'm on the same rollercoaster they are.
My role is to provide an external anchor – an awareness true north in the here and now – that they can hook onto.
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Sure. Spending all your time inside someone else's body is very destabilizing. It's like trying to read on a screen when someone else is constantly changing what's on the monitor.
I found that being outside both my own body and the other person's body made me sensitive to both.
I'll typically bounce between awareness of someone else's body language or my own.
Either excessively self-aware or excessively other-aware.
Outside, it's both.
(Side-note: I am not very neurotypical, so can't attest to what a common experience of this is like.)
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Yeah there's a place you can get to with this where it's both:
- you and them and the world
- inside and outside are the same
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Agreed.
So when I'm teaching with hands on the student, there's a moment of 'connection'.
I can put my hand on your back and it's just a hand on your back. Then I make a change (hard to describe) and now my system is mapping your system (and we can both feel this).
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It's very easy to get drawn into your body, but again, the trick is for me to stay *here* while also being open to the experience of *all of you*, and even specific parts of you, without letting myself get pushed around by that experience.
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