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.
Conversation
Replying to
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).
1
1
This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more
Replying to
Sounds like the same kind of deal.
Does this fit? Your hands become not just a 'doing' to your girlfriend, there's a quality of listening as well. This is a non-doing touch, even though you're massaging. It's like there's a non-verbal communication between your system and hers.
2
1
There's a very conscious (or at least it CAN be conscious once you know it) switch between pushing someone around with your hands and 'the two of your systems moving as one system'.
1
1
The best prompt I've found to teach this is to ask an AT teacher trainee to put their hand on someone and not do anything at all, just listen.
"Let you hand be shaped by their back."
This is the quality of physical listening that activates the connection I mean.
1
1
Replying to
Haha AT is just a systematised way of accessing things that I suspect are accessible to everyone, it's just that
i) we don't know that these things exist
ii) we don't know how to access them if we did
iii) we don't know what to do with it once we have the skill!
1
2
Replying to
Yeah. For me the main sense I had when I first got into this stuff was that I'd made some sort of disjunction from just "meditating".
These exercises feel qualitatively different from the meditation I was taught/self-taught.
I'm happy to realize I'm not the only explorer.
1
1
Replying to
It's not at all meditation, though I can see how skills from meditation can be applied here.
And welcome! This is a *thing* and you have found us 🙂
1
1
Replying to
I would say "not at all" is maybe overstating the gap.
I very much so slid into the DMs via meditation, so to speak. X)
Replying to
Yes fair enough, one can be accessed by the other.
I guess I'm just saying that someone who is experienced in meditation could have no clue that this exists. So for sure they are overlapping in the Venn diagram, but the extent to which they overlap may be minimal.
1
1
Replying to
Yeah, that's fair. I would never have guessed that I'd just casually end up here, doing that.
1