Physical posture also follows this awareness state.
Compressed awareness, e.g. not 'being able to notice' that there is space around you, leads to your body unconsciously shrinking as if to fill the smaller space.
These two are the same thing, but manifest differently.
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I think this account leaves out simpler forms of noticing. For example, "whiny" is not hard to notice once you learn early in life what "whiny" sounds like. Even when in bad posture you are aware "I'm being whiny" but sometimes you choose to stop, other times you don't.
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even simpler. Somebody tells you "stop whining" and you decide they're right and... do it. ie, I think mental posture is both easier to program, and can be programmed in more ways than physical posture, and physical posture can follow rather than lead for the right personality.
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So here I agree actually - certainly for a thinky person (such as yourself), it's probably easier to engage at the level of mental than physical. We're certainly more comfortable interfacing with the mental than the physical, because we've made everything mental.
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I'm getting a lot more somatically aware in my middle age out of necessity -- aches and pains and stiffness etc. are more noticeable/less ignorable now, so in a way, I'm only now, at age 46 getting the body awareness that natural athletes, dancers, actors etc probably gain at 16
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Yeah it's a shame that it takes something going wrong (pain) for us to pay attention to this. I was the same - only got into 'body work' after decades of chronic knee dislocations.
Anyway, fun talking to you, and I'll leave the next tweet lightly in case of interest
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Next time you notice aches and pains, see also if you notice a kind of habitual response to them.
A lot of the time we end up unconsciously 'doing' things that can make the pain stronger.
It's fun to notice and explore not doing those things.
Quote Tweet
1] A crucial skill in life is learning how not to respond to stimuli.
In a minute I'm going to ask you to pick a colour. (Stimulus)
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Are you already thinking about colours? (Response). I said "in a minute".
Notice, without judgement, how you responded.
Let's do it again.
Show this thread
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Have you written much about all this or just done youtube stuff...? welcome to contribute an essay to ribbonfarm on this topic if of interest
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Thank you, that's very kind - happy to explore something that would work for ribbonfarm.
Most of my journey here is actually figuring out how to communicate this stuff.
This is the most accessible intro piece I've written on the core principle.
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yeah, I read that I think the last time we exchanged tweets... I mean something more general on postures, noticing, etc. the stuff we've touched on in this exchange
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As an aside, another theme I'm coming from is posture of organizations, militaries etc. Aggressive posture, pacifist posture... where most of the data is mental (eg. press releases). There's a "somatic" side there too, like whether offices are clean, desks are cluttered etc.

