https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9aXGD2PjS9s
Welcome everyone to another episode of Voices with Raveki. And today I’m going to talk with Seth Dillinger. Seth reached out to me and said, you know, I think some of what I’m doing is relevant to your work and your work has been sort of helpful to me and do you want to talk and and and we met virtually we had a conversation and I was impressed. I ordered a couple books on his recommendation. I haven’t read the book so I’m still ignorant, but I have them and I will read them. They just arrived not that long ago. And so I thought it’d be really valuable to talk to Seth I was mentioning to Seth before we began the embodied movement summit is on right now Rafe Kelly he’s running it. I was there for the opening panel. And they, I’m a keynote speaker, it’s obviously recorded virtually for the conference. And so embodied movement and relationships to the cultivation of wisdom is important embodied movement and mindfulness are coming together that’s what my talk was about. And that really overlaps with Seth’s work tremendously you can see him nodding and his eyebrows are going up in approval. So, and when he talked to me I found him very present, very authentic, and very knowledgeable so that’s why he’s here so welcome Seth. It’s great pleasure to have you here. Why don’t you introduce yourself a bit and a little bit about, you know, your background and then how you came to my work and why you reached out to me and, you know, take your time on that too don’t rush it like like that people know how you, where you’re coming from what your stance is, what the connection is between you and I. Yeah. Well thanks so much for that invitation, including how you just framed it which is just feels really warm and welcoming and yeah, I’m glad you also offering me a few minutes because it’s kind of like a lot has happened in my life. I was one of those people that you were talking to in the first ish episode where you say, you might have heard of people like Plato and Aristotle but you may or may not have read those books and I hadn’t. I’m someone who sort of heard about philosophy from a distance and I’ve heard you talk about academic philosophy but I just didn’t know how it was relevant right at this point I’m kind of like blown away that I didn’t know that there’s been hundreds of years of people thinking deeply about human transformation which is what I think about all the time but like, and it’s actually not you know Plato is not like fringe like everyone knows about Plato except me. I don’t know if you know that but you know in the last episode or last few episodes you’re talking about ecology so practice one of the things you talked about was guys and stocks circling and I’m now part of that train right. Right. So, I have you to thank for even knowing about circling and then I’ve jumped into that which has been a big expansion in my understanding what I do. I want to go back. I’ll try and do this quickly but I feel like I should I should begin as a kid. Sure, when I was walking to school. I used to talk to myself. I was physically speaking in tongues, and I think the only explanation I can give is like, when you’re a kid. No, no, there’s, that’s a normal thing to do it right. You’re just playing with language and I used to wonder like, why, why does this word, you know, start with this letter and and it’s such a weird like if I repeated enough times and I forget what the word means. It’s such a weird sound and then like, what other sounds could I make out of the alphabet if I didn’t only restrict myself to the ones in the dictionary and I, I just played with language, all my life. When I went to college, I was at Middletown, Connecticut. And I ran into Anthony Braxton who is a jazz. Well, he’s much broader than jazz it just just call him a composer and as saxophonist multi instrumentalist, but really kind of a philosopher as well and he created a whole just system of music. And so when I was around him he was playing something he called ghost trance music. And he would set up a pulse that that that that that that except it was, it was through notated it was like, it was like the jazz, it was like the baseline. It never repeated. And he would write like 50 pages of this. And then he’d have 10 people on stage and I eventually got to be in his ensemble for a while. And they all play these notes together at the beginning and the word ghost trance. There was some I don’t know if it was a ghost dance or something but it was kind of a play on a phrase that came from Native American kind of trance ritual of some kind I don’t know the exact history. But then, eventually the band would break into three bands and they would start playing the same piece at three different tempos. And you just got this field and we would play for an hour and a half or something like this and it was really like in the middle of a piece you could, it just felt like you were in the Amazon rainforest or something. So he opened me up in a big way and I was involved with music. And during that period in time I took my childhood fascination with language, and I created my own language. And it’s a meaningless language. It doesn’t mean a thing. But there’s 88 syllables on a grid and I memorized how to say it in all these different directions. Because if you listen to a language that you don’t understand, you know, someone’s next to you on the subway like I lived in New York for a while and that was always, well it sounds like, gosh they keep spitting out these sounds but they never, you know, they never stumble, like they can put these sounds in any order. And so there’s a musical quality to it, especially if I’m not distracted by understanding what they’re talking about. I just hear the slow sounds and tones. So I was trying to do that. And this, I guess this is relevant to now because, because I’ve continued, first of all, making music with my voice and playing with language. But also, one of the things you and I talked about is this book, John Roussin’s book, I’m bearing witness to Epiphany, which I also didn’t know about until you began to talk about it. But you often talk about musicality, just in terms of like kind of like how the universe works or how we experience reality or something like that. But it’s all there in speech. So as I’m talking to you now, if one of the people listening wasn’t an English speaker, they would hear the rhythm, they would hear my voice going up and down, you know, and anyway, so what I want to say, so after college I kind of got distracted from music. I traveled to Cuba and I actually became a socialist for about 10 years. And so it’s been really interesting listening to, you know, because I was I had grown up as a kind of middle class kid in the US, I went into working in factories, mostly in meat production for about 10 years. And the one thing that I was able to hold on to musically because I sold my bass, but I still had this language, and I would be in the factory and that’s the, well, I’m sure it happened other points like playing soccer as a kid, but I had these nights where I was working the factory, it was working on a, on a, a band saw, cutting up meat. And there’d be my coworkers yelling and singing in three different languages and the boss coming in and people pushing around carts. And I would get into this kind of, I didn’t know what that it was called, but it was a flow state. Yes, and it was a flow state, I was working, I was had a task to get it done. It was like I felt like I was dancing, right. Right. And so there was this way that it’s like it’s musical but it’s also, you know, a lot of music is like 12341 to this very life isn’t like that right. But then again, Braxton’s music for back in college was was this weird. Right, right. So I even went back to it. And thank you for indulging this long kind of background but. So I did that I became political that runs in my family my grandfather was a lifelong activist so I was sort of following his path in some ways. But that came to an end let’s just put it that way. And then I was kind of like I don’t know what I’m doing. I had become a dad had become a husband but my marriage didn’t last probably was never meant to be. And then I hit this point of like I don’t know what I’m doing. Like, you know, I’ve lost my connections to my musical peers and a lot of like, where am I going what am I doing. And the only idea that came to mind that made sense is like, maybe I can improve my health. I started running. And eventually this leads me to discover the Feldenkrais method which when you talked about the books that you ordered one of them was this book awareness through movement by Moshe Feldenkrais and awareness through movement is the name of the movement practice that people like me I’m now a certified Feldenkrais practitioner is what we teach. But before I found that just to give you a sense, I, as I started looking around I started reading about breath and of course breath has become. People are much more aware of the role of working with the breath these days. And so I would go running because I was running I want to be more healthy. And I had read something about you know when you run, breathe in for this many steps as you run and breathe out for that many steps and then if you’re on a hill adjust it like this. And so I did that a little but then I started kind of just getting distracted because I was thinking back to Braxton. When I played music with Braxton sometimes you’d have to count four beats and then three beats and then seven beats and then two beats and then the time would speed up and slow it was like super erratic. It’s actually a little like, like the irregular rhythms of language. But so I started running and doing things like while I would run I would breathe in for two beats and out for four beats and then in for three beats and then out for seven beats and I would run for several miles doing that. And then at the end of the run I’d be like, wow, I feel amazing. What am I, how did that happen and I was like I was doing experiments my own body. And then when I found Feldenkrais I was kind of blown away because an awareness through movement lesson you don’t do it while you’re running you do it lying on the back. But it’s like that it’s like an experiment that you do in your body and your body changes it shifts. And so I thought, wow, you know this guy Feldenkrais he’s kind of like, he’s kind of like Braxton or he’s kind of like Beethoven because you know when you listen to a piece of music, it takes over your nervous system. You’ve never, I never felt that way before until I heard that song and it just, you know, it created this thing. So, all right, so I’m, I’m giving all kinds of background here but you see there’s music, there’s movement, and then there’s like, there was just that sort of crisis where I didn’t know what the hell I was doing in life. Feldenkrais started to put this together for me right started to like the Feldenkrais practice and we can talk more about how Feldenkrais practice works. I’ve made a lot of progress in a lot of ways but one thing I could say that I realized, and kind of jumping forward to finding your work and defining circling is what I realized is Feldenkrais really clarified a lot for me in my body, but it was very possible for me to lie on the floor here and do a Feldenkrais lesson, stand up, feel wonderful, and then go out and in the midst of socializing, all the patterns went back because I did not translate it to being with others. Right, right, right, right. So circling is really much, very much about that and I’ve probably said enough, but Yeah, well, okay so just just to really complete like how you and I maybe overlap in this book. As I said to you before, I don’t know if it’s John Roussin’s phrase or your phrase but you did a conversation with Guy Sengstock where you used the phrase musicality of being. And I didn’t know if I had the same meaning that you did but I just love the phrase and I’ve been putting together stuff over the years so I thought yeah I like that phrase. So I have a blog post that people can find online called the musicality of being and I now teach musicality of being workshops. Wow. Yeah. And what happens in those workshops I draw a lot on the Feldenkrais method but I have a sort of way that I’ve condensed something. But also John Roussin has this idea that essentially life is musical. And Of course we could oversimplify that but he talks about the three elements of music. He talks about rhythm, which is this sort of cyclical thing like I breathe in, I breathe out, I go to sleep. At night I wake up in the morning and it’s just repeating. And then there’s harmony, which is in music you know several tones played together but it’s like, I’m talking to you, I can hear the cars driving out there, you know I’m hotter and colder. It’s the simultaneity of experience. Yeah, all the different things and then melody is kind of how one thing after another happens. Yeah. But of course we could also say many other things like melodies kind of the narrative or it’s kind of the, if you listen to an orchestra but there’s a soloist, that’s kind of the part that your focus is drawn to. So these workshops I lead people through doing things like noticing the breath and noticing just how rich and, you know, layered experiences in every moment. Since we spoke a week or so ago whenever it was I’ve actually listened quite a bit to your series on the cultivation of wisdom. And I was just amazed like the savoring practices that the curian. A lot of that stuff was like, oh, that’s the kind of thing so that that’s kind of a flavor of what those workshops are that I know would be a reference point that makes sense to you. And then I don’t know I’m just blown away by your whole discussion around an ecology of practices. Because this is as you can hear me saying like I found a little something here and a little something there but it’s not the one practice that did everything for me even though certain practices were really put a lot together. But just sort of understanding, you know how there’s many different there’s so many different elements to our experience and there’s there’s ways that I could like, I love this practice or I’m really good at this practice and then after a while this is just like I know this part of the world but I’m kind of like not dealing with all this other stuff. So the Feldenkrais method I mean, this is the final thing I want to say I guess just to sort of kick off our discussion is, you know, this book which I mentioned, awareness through movement. This book contains 12 movement lessons and people can do it and they’ll have physical benefits for sure. But if you read this book and you read his other books, he’s talking about Freud he’s talking about. He, I haven’t found a lot of direct references to, like the Western philosophical tradition but there’s there’s one of the trainers Dennis Leary who writes explicitly about how a Feldenkrais lesson is kind of a Socratic inquiry, and you can you can find yourself through the movements state of a poria and then what do you do. Wow, wow. But, but Feldenkrais was always talking about the human experience as a whole and he just thought movement was the way in. Right, he was not only a movement guy by any means. And so, your focus on, on, on wisdom, and just thinking about that since we last spoke like, oh, yeah, I, you know, I’m always frustrated when people say Feldenkrais is a movement practice or they just noticed the movement aspect but it’s so much more than that but I always said I’ve always said so much more which is kind of vague. But what I’ve hit upon since talking to you is like, oh, it’s, it’s, it’s a wisdom practice it really is. And I’ve even started making a YouTube series going through this book with that in mind and I’m doing commentaries on the book but anyway so so what what what really has happened for me is like I’ve had this movement practice for many years, it’s transformed my life in so much more than that. So, yeah, I mean, I’m very similar with, you know, my practice of Tai Chi Jiu Jitsu, I’m very similar with, you know, my practice of Tai Chi Jitsu, I’m very similar with, you know, my practice of Tai Chi Jitsu, I’m very similar with, you know, my practice of Tai Chi Jitsu, I’m very similar with, you know, my practice of Tai Chi Jitsu, I’m very similar with, you know, my practice of Tai Chi Jitsu, I’m very similar with, you know, my practice of Tai Chi Jitsu, I’m very similar with, you know, my practice of Tai Chi Jitsu, I’m very similar with, you know, my practice of Tai Chi Jitsu, I’m very similar with, you know, my practice of Tai Chi Jitsu, I’m very similar with, you know, my practice of Tai Chi Jitsu, I’m very similar with, you know, my practice of Tai Chi Jitsu, I’m very � K at a physiological level and a practical level. But for me, the reason I keep practicing it is the way it’s transformative at the level at which I’m making sense. And again, and the musicality of intelligibility and being, these are metaphors that run through Tai Chi Chuan very much. And so for me, and I’ll use a metaphor, musical metaphor, I resonate very much with what you’re saying about Feldenkrais method with, or Feldenkrais practice with the, again, you can practice Tai Chi Chuan just for the sort of physiological and practical benefits, but you’re really only sipping from the cup, right? You’re not drinking deeply from what’s there and available and the way it can percolate through your psyche and permeate through your lives and transform things. I often tell the story that I first picked up on, I was doing the practice, I was doing it very religiously, hours and hours a day, and I was getting all the phenomena, you’re burning like lava and you’re cold like ice and all these weird things. And you get all these weird senses of different ways in which you’re sort of pushing off your environment and all this stuff. And I was all sort of, ooh, about that. But I was in graduate school at the time and my friends came to me and said, what’s changing with you? And I said, what do you mean? And they said, well, you’re much more balanced in how you treat people. You’re much more open and flexible, right? And it’s like, oh, the Tai Chi was moving into, unbeknownst to me, it was moving into areas of my life and transforming me on deeper levels of my psyche than I was aware of or even explicitly pursuing. That’s when I realized, oh, I have to pay attention to it at this level, right? In fact, I often tell my students, pay attention to when other people are noting transformations in you, much more than when you notice transformations in you. So I totally get that. And I mentioned the work I’ve been doing with Rafe Kelly and the work I do with Dan Schiappi around Marlo Ponti, 40 Cognitive Science Embodiment in Action. All of this just resonates, again, the musical metaphor. And Rusen, I should let you know, Rusen is actually coming, well, coming in virtue because he couldn’t come in person because of Omicron. He’s coming to the University of Toronto in next, not just coming weekend, but the next weekend to speak at our Cognitive Science Conference. So I’ll get to talk to him directly. Fantastic. I’m actually reached out to him myself and I’m gonna do a conversation with him. Excellent, excellent. Right around that date. I don’t know if it’s a little before or a little after, but very auspicious. Yeah, I know he’s had a conversation with Guy as well, with Guy Sandstock. Yeah, I watched that, yeah. There’s a lot going on and a lot of this is taking off. And so it’s exciting to talk to you. So if we can very carefully make our way about, tell us more about the practice and then how it can be part of, as you said, how it can be a wisdom practice, how we, at this deeper level that you and I are now talking about, what does it look like there? And then how at that level might it fit into an ecology of practices? Does that make sense as a proposal to you? Perfect, yeah, that’s great. Yeah, so let’s move it through, let’s go through those three steps. What is it, and then sort of the wisdom, cultivation, dimension, depth of it, depth dimension of it, and then how at that level does it integrate with other practices within an ecology of practices? Yeah, great. Well, so your story about practicing Tai Chi and what changed for you, it’s like Feldenkrais kind of had an understanding that movement can do that from the beginning. And he designs these movement lessons to really help us find, let’s just call it efficient biomechanics. But he had this understanding, the way he described it is there’s four elements of action which are always present. We’re always thinking, sensing, feeling, and doing. So sensing is more like sensory, like the feeling that I’m getting through my senses and then feeling is more like the emotional tone. And specifically, he had an idea which is explained in that book. There’s a whole chapter called the self image. And it’s on the simplest level, it’s like my image of myself is that I have two arms and two legs and my head’s on top of my spine. And so when you lie down on the floor, you’re usually lying down when you practice an awareness through movement lesson, although there are all kinds of lessons. And I’ll just say there’s including, there’s lessons to do the hands, to do a headstand, to learn the splits. Like people tend to, because the practice is usually slow, there’s a lot of rests and that has to do with how you’re using awareness. But one of the first things you’ll do typically is lie on the ground and no matter what, because there’s hundreds of different awareness through movement lessons that Feldenkrais created and since that time, other practitioners have created new lessons using his same basic approach. But the first thing you generally do is you lie on the floor and you do a kind of a body scan. And I’m sure plenty of people listening to this are familiar with the body scan, but you get pretty specific. So it’ll be like, for example, you’re lying on the back, can you feel your shoulder blades? Okay, yes. But how does the left shoulder blade lie? And how does the right shoulder blade? Do you notice that one of them is more connected to the floor than the other? You’ve got pressure on the back of your pelvis, but where is it? And when you listen to the feeling of your left leg and then your right leg, does it seem like one of those legs is longer? And some people don’t like this because they just find out how asymmetrical they are. And it’s like- Right, right, right, right. I can see that. It’s kind of uncanny. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and then the worst is, you know, Feldenkrais would teach these lessons. Like in the beginning, one of the trainings he did for several years was in Amherst, Massachusetts. He did two different US trainings. One of the first trainings in Amherst was basically lie on your back, close your eyes and move your eyes to the right. Now bring your eyes back to the middle. Now move your eyes to the right again. And then he starts talking and starts telling all of these stories from his judo days and doing all this stuff. And every once in a while he’s like, hey, you stop to move it. Keep your moving your eyes to the right. And it’s like for almost 45 minutes, he just has the people moving their eyes to the right and never to the left. At the end, it’s like the whole right side of the body feels completely different, totally asymmetrical. And it’s like, now stand up and walk around. And it’s like, whoa, every time I step on this leg, I have a totally different sensation through my body than that leg. But what he’s doing is he’s working on the level of the image. So when I stand up after doing a one-sided lesson, and not all the lessons are one-sided, but many of them are for this reason, what happens is I just have literally a different sense of my limbs and everything in space. And it makes me move differently. And so what he says, this idea that these four pieces of action are always present, the self-image is kind of like the thought. Like, if I wanna leave my apartment, I need to have a sense of where the door is. I actually have to have a sort of a map or I’ll never find it, I’ll never get out the door. So if you slow movement way, way down, what you could say is the very first embryonic moment of the movement is the thought to make the movement, right? So he’s working with the image in this way. And so another thing, so, and this might begin to move in the direction of, how is this a wisdom practice? So he was a physicist. He worked with Joliet Curie in the lab in France. He was like, he could have been a high level scientist, right? He also in his background at one point meets Jigoro Kano, who’s the founder of Judo. He becomes one of the first Westerners to ever be a black belt in Judo. When the Nazis go to France, he gets out on the last boat. He has suitcases with heavy water. He’s like, he escapes to England and he becomes part of, you know, like a raid, I’m not good with this kind of history, but he’s working on like submarines and like picking up signals, you know, like for the war effort. He was a cartographer at one point. One of his early Judo books, he like, he mapped mathematically the Judo throws, like, and like, you know, like, so he had this deep understanding of both physics, like, and then he has this martial background. And the whole method begins because first he injures one of his knees playing soccer, and then later he injures the other knee. And he goes, oh my God, I’m finished now. What am I gonna do? He wakes up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and he goes, what is going on? I’m standing on my bad knee. And he realized his brain reorganized because he has this freshly injured knee that his brain knows you don’t wanna step, you don’t wanna put weight on that. And he’s walking suddenly on this other knee, which is totally messed up, but somehow he’s, and so he gets this kind of realization. And he’s, so there’s, he really understands neuroplasticity before the word is even being used. And he has this sense of, you know, it’s bullshit that we reach a certain point and our brain can’t form new patterns. No, you can do it all your life. So anyway, as he goes along, he develops this practice, you know, he understands efficient movement because he’s practiced Judo, but he also, he really began the practice by teaching himself to walk again, because at the time he saw a surgeon, the surgeon’s like, well, you might walk again after the surgery, but you might not. And he’s like, no, thanks, I’m not doing that. And he spent months in bed with anatomy books, making tiny, tiny movements to figure out, you know, how can I heal my knees? And his, one of his insights too, is like, it’s not just structure, it’s behavior, because every time I take a step, I put, you know, how do I walk? And if I walk in a funny way, well, every step I take is a shock. So he starts to develop this idea of action. And later when he talks about posture, he actually says, his joke is, posture’s for posts. And then he says, actor, that’s the word we need because it relates to action. So he develops principles. And so this is one of, I think one of the juiciest ones. So what is good posture? Now, when I asked that question, I don’t know, you know, what kind of ideas of posture you might’ve encountered, but I’m sure for a lot of people who might be listening, it’s like, oh, good posture means put your head here, your shoulders like this, your hips like that. Feldenkrais said, good posture is the ability to move in any direction at any time without preparation or hesitation. It’s like poise, it’s like readiness. And it’s very martial because the opponent could come from any direction. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And so if I do sort of classic bad posture, I’m like this, you say, oh, that guy has bad posture. Look how his head’s to the side. Well, yeah, but why is this bad when the opponent comes? Because my weight is this way and I have to make an extra effort to even get to here to go that way, right? But if I’m in this sort of place where I’m perfectly balanced, I’m also perfectly poised and ready, right? So he notices other things like another principle is that in ideal action, the breath is free. So it just means if I do something and you’re observing me and you say, yeah, but you just held your breath, which Feldenkrais got to the point where he could see, he’s like, you just held your breath. But if you held your breath, you use more effort than was necessary. And so it’s interesting, this idea of ideal, like some people don’t like that, like, come on, you’re like, no one’s ideal. But he talked about the importance of having an ideal so that he would have a sense of what he was doing. And he would work with people with cerebral palsy, but he would be thinking, how can I help them get closer to moving in any direction without preparation or hesitation, right? So he used these principles as ways of, and so this might be the idea of a sense of wisdom, right? When we talked before, we were talking about, a little bit about, you know, we can, and you talk about this all the time, like we can deceive ourselves. And I said something like, well, I think the body can help us do that. And you were like, well, be careful because we could also BS ourselves with saying, oh, I knew it in my gut, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, yeah. It’s totally true. In fact, I think I’ve spent plenty of time in that kind of magical thinking in my past, right? Right, right. But when you do something and you observe your breath, you can’t bullshit yourself if you just held your breath, like you just held your breath. Try it again without holding your breath, can you do that? And so, but the beautiful thing is, if I don’t know how to do this movement, but I just keep doing it slowly and I keep listening to my breath and I keep experimenting and hear, like he often talked about babies, babies don’t have a manual for how to sit up. They make random movements for a long time. Then they get curious about a toy, get curious, oh my God, I just rolled over for the first time. It’s a mistake, but it comes from their curiosity about being, right? At one point he was married to a pediatrician and he spent all day in the waiting room just watching the baby. So a lot of his movement lessons are like, just about like rolling from the belly to the back, but can you do it without holding your breath? Can you do it, another one of his principles very much a judo principle, an ideal movement is reversible. Right. I’ve never over committed, I could stop and change directions at any point, right? And then he would talk about how our thinking should be like that. So that’s a zooming back out for movement to say, this is how life works too. So that was so rich and juicy. So let me try a couple of things that were coming up in my mind. Yeah. First, well, the two things I wanna talk about is the imaginal and optimal gripping, because I think, so there’s a way in which, I try to talk to people about the imaginal, how it’s different from the imaginary. Imaginary is when you use images to get away from perceiving the world, right? Whereas the imaginal is when you use the imagination to enhance perception. So you’re right. And it’s not forming images, like pictures in your mind, it’s about enacting in a certain way. So a prototypical instance of the imaginal is, a child, putting on a particular hat, floppy hat and picking up a stick and I’m Gandalf, right? And they’re acting out and they’re not forming a mental picture, they’re trying to see and be in a different way and try it out and explore it and see what that personality feels like and what kind of skills might be important, et cetera. And of course, this is how mammals and especially primates and most especially human beings develop. So that’s the imaginal. And then when you talked about how Felton Christ is finding the body image and then you said it’s like when you’re going out the room, right? I’m not, when I’m allowed to leave the room, I don’t make a mental picture in my mind, right? I might, but typically I don’t. But what I’m doing is I’m imagining for the sake of perception so that I can move out of the room and into the hallway. This is Marla Ponte talks about this. And this is very much, right? Like the body image, I think is a prototypical kind of the imaginal for us, right? It’s a way in which we are, how do I wanna say it? Because the verb is gonna mislead people, but use the verb in the imaginal sense, not the imaginaries. It’s a way in which we imagine ourselves into our bodies so that we become aware of the virtuality of our body, the powers it has, the potentials it has, the virtuosity it might cultivate. And so it struck me that, wow, when you said that, I was thinking, oh, well, that’s really interesting because being able to bring that body image into awareness and get people into that imaginal relationship to it, that in and of itself would be such a powerful practice because we have very good evidence, increasingly so from 40 Cognitive Science, that we take how we are sort of navigating the world and inhabiting our body, and we exact that into how we move around and inhabit conceptual space. So those two are, and what bridges between them is something like the body image, right? And then you said, and what you can learn to do is sort of get that in this place of excellence or an ideal place. And I immediately thought of something I talk about a lot. Well, first of all, Marla Ponti has the idea that all of cognition is sensory motor looping. You don’t sense, and then it’s sensory motor looping. And then what you’re always doing is getting what he tries to say, an optimal grip. So do I want the details? Do I want the gestalt? Do I want it front-to-front? And there’s no right answer. You’re constantly adjusting, right? You’re constantly evolving. And then I’ve been talking, and this goes back to discussions I originally had with Dan Schiappi about what you were saying, a couple of the, like when you take the fighting stance in Tai Chi Chuan, you don’t actually use that stance. Like in that sense, it’s useless. What it is, and I hope this makes sense, it’s a meta-optimal grip. It’s a place where I can put my body so I am equally posed to all of the specific optimal grips I might need to block or to strike or to dodge or to trip. Right. And that you’re trying to get this, right? You’re trying to get this sort of meta-optimal grip place and you’re trying to not overcommit or undercommit. Like we were always talking about like the 70-30 rule. You never, if I’m moving forward on a leg, I never go past 70%. I always keep 30% back because I might suddenly have to shift direction. And the way you were saying, being able to move in any direction without preparation or hesitation, that’s exactly what you’re after. And then, if you put those together, this sort of accessing the, bringing into awareness the body image, getting this sense of meta-optimally gripping and then the possibility that that could, like the Tai Chi Chuan practice, permeate through your life and percolate through your psyche. Wow. The possibilities that that could really help the cultivation of wisdom. I mean, think about how much we invoke balance when we’re trying to talk about wisdom. Yeah. Well, so here’s a good example of like the question of balance. So one of his classic awareness through movement lessons was called A Plane Divides the Body. And so what you do is you lie on your back and then you’re asked to imagine your midline. And you might spend a few minutes painting your midline in your imagination. And one of the first things that you notice, because again, I might have my head like this, it’s like, wait, my midline, suddenly it’s going to the left of my breastbone. Like that doesn’t feel like the middle anymore. And so it’s already just to paint your midline. I actually hated it the first time. It drove me crazy. But then, okay, so you kind of get a sense of your midline and then you close your eyes and what you’re asked to imagine, you’re lying down, just assume like, you know, the floor is behind me. But you’re supposed to imagine that there is a, like drop down from the ceiling, like something like a paint, a pane of glass, but literally that the world has been divided in two and that there’s a surface here. And then you sit there and you’re supposed to put your hand on the surface and make movements on the surface with one hand, but you can’t pull away, you can’t cross through it and your eyes are closed. And depending on the teacher, sometimes you’ll be asked to open your eyes and you’ll go, oh, there it, oh, okay. And that’s my image being a little off. Or in this book, Awareness Through Movement, he says, try this, how big is your mouth? Close your eyes and you go, okay. And then you put it and you’re like, oh, that’s too wide. My mouth is not wide. I mean, if I had taken more time, maybe I would have been more accurate, but you’re mapping. And so you do this and then you, if you imagine this as my leg, you kind of lift your leg up and you’re trying to put the sole of your foot on the plane and then, you know, you do it all on one side and then lying there, you feel really weird, you feel one sided, but then you bring in the other side. And then eventually it’s my left hand and my right foot and they’re moving on the plane. And of course now there’s a considerable amount of weight up in the air. And then I’m feeling the floor under me. How am I using that? And then when I get up, I feel way more balanced. Like I could teach that lesson to someone who said, you know, my issue is I’ve come to you because I’ve been falling. I’d say, okay, let’s, you know, do a session. I might teach them a plane divides the body. And what they’re, the thing that, another one of the beautiful things is like, this goes to wisdom too, is like, there’s a number of Felton Christ lessons where if you watch the series of movements, you’re like, so what? Yeah, I’ve seen, you know, lots of practices, but it’s also very much how you do the movements. So like I mentioned the breath before, if I’m doing this and I’m getting excited, like, but I’m not breathing. And especially if the teacher’s looking at me, the teacher will say, are you breathing? You know, you should be able to do this and breathe like a baby while you’re doing it. Right, baby. Yeah, yeah. And there’s a lot of like, you pause and you rest. So after I do that movement with the hand, I pause and rest. And then I’m asked again, feel your right shoulder blade, feel your left shoulder blade. Well, my right shoulder blade was pretty involved. And in fact, my left one might’ve been too, but all my attention was over here. It’s not even so much that one part of the body was used, but this thing, so one of the things that he talked about again and again, and if you want to compare Feldenkrais to almost any other movement practice, but especially just what we call exercise. Like there’s this always this, like the most famous is like the no pain, no gain, right? And he was completely like that, do not push through, make the smallest possible movements. And how would it feel if this movement was effortless? Keep making every movement more comfortable than the last movement. And of course, what happens is you make the movement smaller and smaller, or there’d be a movement lesson that’s like a crunch, I’m holding my knee and my hand, and I’m bringing the knee towards the elbow like this. But he would say, don’t touch the knee and the elbow. Why do you have to touch? Why are you so determined? Like, don’t do it. It’s not about touching the knee to the elbow. What’s going on with your whole spine? And like, where’s the moment where you begin to effort more? Stop there and make the next movement smaller. So he was constantly, that’s the area where I think we could say like, potentially like a lot of us when we practice movement, we start bullshitting ourselves in that way. I touched my knee to my elbow, therefore I’ve done something that’s good for me. And he’s like, no, you’re straining and you’re potentially injuring yourself and you’re teaching yourself that effort is how to solve problems and that’s not it. So that’s how the movement practice became a, I don’t know if I kind of, did I answer your question? Cause I know I went a number of places. You did know, but no, I think we’re still in sort of, you’ve done part one and we’re solidly into part two right now. Okay, yeah. So I have a question. Like when you’re doing, and maybe this is part of what you’re doing in your practice, like those people that you’re doing that with, and do they come back and do they ever report the balance beyond just physiological balance? Do they report sort of a more balanced experience of their life or their relationship or how they’re dealing with different factors in a simultaneous fashion? So that happened. Yeah, for sure, for sure. And in the beginning, I was just kind of like, I remember the very first woman I did one of the hands-on lessons with cause there’s a way that I can do, it’s not massaging the muscles. It’s like, I hold your leg and I move your leg. And the point is you don’t have to, it’s that same idea of minimum effort, but you get to feel, oh, something’s happening in my hip joint. It’s moving around and all I have to do is feel it cause this guy’s holding my leg and moving around. But what I barely knew what I was doing, my first sort of so-called client who came, just as a volunteer, I was doing my best trying to do this thing. And at the end, she said she felt better. And I was like, well, thank God, like I didn’t. But then she started telling me about a relationship to her daughter. And I was like, what are you talking about? At this point, like I assume that’s the case now. I’ve been working with someone who has a very different view of the pandemic than the rest of her family. She’s being being ostracized for like two years and every day she’s, you know, and she’s doing something based on her own particular health history that is different than, you know, sort of what everyone else is doing. And not even to get into that conversation, but in her experience, it’s like, she’s doing what feels right to her. And she’s dealing with, you know, and so she comes in with various things going on in her body, but it’s also like, we talk about like, what’s it like, you know, to like, you know, your friends don’t want to be around you or all of this stuff and like, you know, and it’s, there’s a lot of, of course, emotional stuff, but it all comes back to, oh, when I think about that, I can’t breathe. Or when I think about that, I begin to shrink and collapse. And my spine is compressed. And so, you know, so, so, so I’ll talk to the larger life things, but you know, at a certain point I’ll say, you know, maybe now we’ll just stop the conversation, we’ll lie on the table and then we’ll explore movements and we’ll find out, oh, I, this is fine. This is fine, but oh, every time I start going that way, I get stuck. And so then we just, we go back to what I can do. Just not only to, to feel what feeling easy feels like. Anyway, so, so in any case, absolutely. The practice, the practice impacts the person on every level. And part of, I guess what I was saying before about my frustration with the idea that it’s just a movement practice is, I think anyone out there, you know, if you’re curious, go see your local Feldenkrais practitioner. But with all due respect to all of my colleagues, I don’t know if the way I’m talking about it is what you’re gonna hear from everyone. Now, if you pick up any one of Feldenkrais’ books, you will definitely get that this guy’s talking about human experience on the whole. But you know, we do exist in a marketplace. A practitioner needs to make a living. And you know, back pain is a common problem. So that’s kind of how the method is known, you know, at least that’s the first way people know it. It’s like, people have all kinds of pain. They see all kinds of people for help, nothing works. And then they see the Feldenkrais practitioner. Oh my God, that was the first time something really shifted. My contention would be it’s because, I mean, the guy was brilliant when it just came to movement, but that the practice really treats the whole person. I mean, I have people come to me all the time and they tell me, like, they come for the first sort of discussion. Why are you here? And then they kind of get this, you see this moment where they’re like, oh my God, this guy’s a movement expert I’m talking to. And then they go like this. Or they’ll say, I know I’m not sitting the way I’m supposed to. And I know what they mean. And especially if they’re sitting, you know, in some awkward way, but the idea that I’m supposed to sit a particular way, it goes back to school, be quiet and sit still, you know, and kids want to move. So that’s like the beginning of a lot of people’s back problems is what happened when they were a child. And so I think the method, and I don’t mean to disparage colleagues because everything I know came from my teachers and other colleagues. But I don’t think that, just don’t think it’s understood as well as it should be for being this kind of a practice. And I also think that people who have no sense that, you know, I’m not recovering from any injuries. I’m actually an athlete. I go running all time. I’m very fit. I feel good in my body. You can still learn massive amounts about yourself from this practice because it really is this inquiry. I would get that often. I would get people who came into Tai Chi because they wanted to relax. And then as they went into it, they realized, oh, and the reasons why they continued doing it were very different from the reasons why they started doing it. But I would also get other martial artists who would come in, right? And they would be taking it and they would go, oh, they would also have an experience like, oh, right. And they would start, oh, I can see. And they often expressed how Tai Chi was, you were supposed to always learn Tai Chi after you learned a bunch of other martial arts because what Tai Chi does is it helps you relearn those other arts at a deeper level and also to generalize the lessons into life lessons other than just combat lessons. And so I’m totally getting that, which leads me, I think, to the third point. I mean, you’re being very gentle and you’re being very respectful as you should to your colleagues. And I don’t wanna draw you into controversy or conflict with them. But there’s a sense in which I hear you saying, like, this would be, we would get to the depths of this if we put it into relationship to other complimentary practices. And those practices would also benefit by being, like, I hear you saying that you want to put this within an ecology of practices. Absolutely, yeah. So let’s take the point that the point’s well made, that there’s, beyond the initial therapeutic benefit, there’s a sapiential benefit to doing this practice. How does it fit into other wisdom-cultivating practices? How do you see it? Like, use your own case. How are you forming an ecology of practices around that? And what are you learning from that formation process? Yeah. Well, I mean, for one thing, countering your work, I’ve been doing things like Lectio Divina. Just in the past week, for the first time, I did the View From Above, which to me was amazing. And I won’t go on a long tangent here, but I would just say to you, why does the View From Above work? What is it about shooting yourself into outer space? Like, literally thinking about there’s a direction, there’s a distance, but also the View From Above has this intention of changing my perspective. But why is it that that particular, like if you mapped it in the physical plane, what is it? But yeah, for me, or if I just sit in meditation, like here’s, I actually wrote a blog post once where I compared a number of quotations by Feldenkrais with Shinya Suzuki, who wrote Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Yes, great book. Yeah, amazing. And that was my basic first book about meditation. And one of the things I talked about in there is like when you’re sitting, you can do that body scan. You might be sitting in meditation, and then after a while you realize, yeah, and I’m sitting to the left. Yes, I teach my students about this all the time, yeah. Right, right. But what you could do, which, so when it fell in Krais’ little maxims was, to correct is incorrect. So rather than saying, oh, that’s wrong, I need to center myself. What you could say is, huh, I’m sitting on the left. I guess that means I have no idea what it’s like to sit on the right. I never do that. Let me go sit on the right for a minute. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, and then let me sit on the left again, and then on the right again, and then let me just sit, and then I kind of go, oh, I feel more centered. That’s interesting. And what I just did, and this is a classic fell in Krais’ thing, is you identify a habit, and then you very deliberately do the non-habitual thing. Yes. Like when we talked, I showed you this one, you know, you interlace your fingers, and everyone interlaces with one thumb on top. Right. And then if you switch it, which switches the joints all the way up my arm, if you do this, one of my trainers showed me if you close your eyes and do this, and you switch, your eyes shift. Yeah. Eyes shift. Right? But like the other night, I taught a class where the class was called, the class series was called Movements of Thought and Attention. Right. And we were doing movement work, but it was like, how does your brain work? And so this last class was just kind of like, here we are in this world full of gizmos, we’re all distracted. So it was just like, and so we did a kind of a meditation type thing. There’s four elements I always kind of work with to sort of boil down a lot of what I’ve learned from fell in Krais, and this also goes to what I do in musicality of being. But the breath is one. Right. And of course there’s many qualities to the breath that you could talk about. But then there’s ground, like, you know, my connection, where’s my weight. There’s the feeling of surrounding space. Yes. Yeah. And for me, just in this moment, the wall to the left is closer. The wall to the right is farther. Even without reaching out and touching it, that feels different. Right. Because like my peripheral vision ends a lot quicker over here than it does over here. Right, right, right. And I can feel that if I pay attention. And then the last thing is sound. There’s sounds all around me. And my breath makes a sound, even if I’m not speaking. You know, so my sound. And so what I did in this, I led them through that. I said, let’s, we tuned into all those four elements. And then I asked people to interlace their fingers the non-habitual way and keep doing it. And the longer it went on, it was like the more, it was basically provoking anxiety. Right, right, right. But it was like, keep going. And can you pay attention to those four elements? And for everyone, it was like, it was a hell of a lot easier when I didn’t have my hands like that. But it’s like, we just kind of turned up the volume, made it a little dissonant for a few minutes. And then when we let go, it’s like, oh, okay. And I just invented that, but I’m drawing on, you know, different things. What I’ve done, I did a class for a number of months. I’m taking a month off to kind of assess it. But I was teaching the class called Expand Your World. And that was very much inspired by attending the DioLogos Encircling Workshop, the first one. I’ll be at the second one too. I’m really looking forward to that. But I had this sense like, so there’s that video, many videos you did, but you were talking with Guy and with Chris and with Jordan. And you guys, you just, if someone would watch it with no volume, by the end, you guys are all kind of grooving. Like your bodies are doing, I left a comment on one of the videos that I was actually, because it’s cool. Like if Jordan was talking and you were gonna talk next and you could just watch and then you’re getting excited and then you’re like, and then you talk, right? But the coolest thing was like, and Guy and you guys, when you’re really connected, what you would do is like, you could see, oh, John wants to say something, but he’s also feeling that the other person’s still speaking. And then sometimes they would finish what they said and then you would speak. And it would be like the horn player comes in after the other horn player. It was like, come in on the downbeat, right? So there was this flow in the DLogos, which I was just, and what actually, what like very specifically happened in that workshop was, at the beginning, in the circling portion, I think the first thing we did was you sent us all into a breakout room with a person. And I think we didn’t even talk. And then we went to another breakout room with another person and then another. It was just like how feeling, how each person, but then when we started doing a little dialogue, what I noticed is I was tracking that person’s movements. And just like when I listen to music and I do something like this, I was trying to like, and I was like, oh, when I do that, I feel a little more in tune. And that’s already kind of like what we do in the musicality of being workshopped. But in the expand your world classes that I was doing, what I would do is I would bring up a subject of conversation and there was always a monthly theme. So like one of them was one month we did connecting insides and outsides. Another one we did deep grounding. Another one was sensitivity is a superpower. We spent a month doing that. And so I might bring up a subject in that class, for example, like, hey, what is sensitivity? And people start talking about it. And some people would talk about hypersensitivity, like, oh, that person’s too sensitive. And then there’s like, oh, that person’s really sensitive and this is a wonderful thing. So we’d have a conversation. And this came from the idea of Lectio Divina. I would bring in a few quotations, maybe from like in recent classes, I’ve used John Roussin, you know, or David Bohm, the on dialogue book, which is another connection. But then after a while, I’d say, great, let’s take a break from the conversation. Let’s lie on the floor and let’s do awareness through movement. Let’s change our image of ourselves. And then let’s come back with these kind of new images and let’s continue talking. Oh, that’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. Oh, wow. That’s really beautiful. I really like that. That’s beautiful. And I’ll say, this is a thing that actually, if I could ask you a question, because this was something that came up for me. Like the first time I did Dialogos, I had this experience of like this group flow state. And it was so amazing. And it was also just like, you know, I haven’t had a lot of relationships in my life where I could just talk about something like the virtues for it. This just feels good. You know, like we’re not trying to get anywhere, but like, I really care about this stuff and that just felt good, right? But this feeling of a group flow state, I was like, there’s something, to be honest, I think that I kind of thought the awareness through movement lesson could be like a shortcut to getting there faster. Like if we just all like have this expansive breath, if everyone’s spine feels super long and we all feel totally connected, then when we talk, and what I’ll say is it worked sometimes, but then there were other classes where I realized I was really being a teacher and I was really leading the witness. And I was really telling them, after you do this, you’re gonna feel this and now. And so I’m kind of actually, if I could ask you a question, that’s kind of my curiosity, because it’s like, I’ve watched you teach so much and you’ve worked out a lot of things for yourself, but there’s a difference between knowing something and then meeting the person who’s at a different stage. So that’s part of why I’m on pause, because like some of my classes, I thought, that was pretty cool as like a guy teaching a class, but the group flow state is not because you have a good leader, it’s precisely because everyone’s kind of like creating together. So that’s one of my kind of inquiries right now. I think that’s right. I certainly don’t want these practices to be dependent on my presence or Guive’s presence or Chris’s presence. But from what I can tell from other people that are practicing that that’s not the case. That’s why I do, that’s why we do that progressive program. We don’t start with dialectic and dialogous. We start with some basic meditative practice, contemplative practice, then we do a bunch of circling practices, then we do philosophical fellowship around a text, which is kind of like shared lexio divina. And then we move into dialectic and dialogous. And I’m constantly on the lookout for other things to put into that program. I think some of the stuff, some of the practices you’re talking about, I think would fit in here really, really nicely. I think some of the practices that I’ve seen with Edwin Royce’s empathy circling. Oh yeah, I saw the empathy circle you did. I think they have a place. Chris and I and Guy have been talking about we need to get, we’re not necessarily gonna do that this time, but we need to get in. We need to get into a practice that addresses projection. My slogan is, projection is to dialogous what distraction is to meditation. You need to become aware of it and work with it. Because again, we’re working at this imaginal level and that’s precisely the place where projection takes place often in a way that’s very transparent to people, they’re not aware of it. They’re seeing through it, but they’re not aware of it. So my hope is by building a very careful program of scaffolding, a pedagogical program of scaffolding, that will enable people to get to the place where they can do that and it’s not dependent on the teacher. That’s the hope. And it’s very much a workshop. And we advertised it to you, we advertise it this time. This is still a work in progress. It’s still very much participant experimentation. And we’re trying to figure out, like I said, I want to expand it, I want to add in. I wanna talk to you perhaps about adding in some of these exercises. Because I think there’s increasing evidence about doing this kind of work. And my own experience of Tai Chi Chuan. The fact that there’s no mindful movement in the program and all the discussions I have with Ray Kelly is on my mind. And that’s why I’m very excited to talk to you because it sounds like these are things. The problem with Tai Chi Chuan is when people, it takes a while before people understand what’s happening, right? You know what I mean? And I’m not trying, this is not meant to be an insult. It’s meant to be a compliment. But I’m getting the sense that Feldenkrist is a faster way of getting people into the imaginal aspects of their body. So it could be directly like if, like a thing you’ll commonly hear in awareness through movement class is, if you have an injury, just imagine the movement. And there are whole lessons that are taught in the imagination. There’s, like for example, if anyone at home hearing this could try this, you turn your head to one side and you kind of feel how far you can go. This is when I say this is how far I can go, I’m using that criteria of like my breath. Because yes, I could go over here, but I just wrench my head around. And I, you know, but if you go here and you just sort of like, see, that’s how far I can go. And you’re honest with yourself. I can go to there. And then you close your eyes and you just imagine turning your head. And you don’t just imagine, you might really try to make it rich. Like for example, one of the things that I would do is I’m say, imagine what your nose does. Imagine what your left ear does. Imagine right ear goes and you get this really rich. And then just by imagining the movement several times, which of course doesn’t take a lot of effort, right? I’m using the image. And if you’re really paying attention, just imagining, like I can feel the muscles in my neck change when I do that. You are actually, it’s not true that you’re not moving at all. You’re just doing the tiniest little germ of movement. But then it literally leads to like, wow, I can turn my neck. I just turned my head further. And how did that happen? And people don’t get it. Like they’re, you know, but yeah, it’s very, this was one of his big pieces. He was very, he went deep into, he would do things like there’s a lesson, it’s called lengths and fists. And you’re holding one arm out to the side and one up in the air. And you have two fists. And then he asks you which one feels larger. And just because the situation where it’s, one of them does feel larger. It just, and you’re kind of, that’s weird. I don’t think my fist, but then you’re supposed to imagine that they’re the same size. And when you do that, there’s a tiny little muscular activity that you’re doing. But all you think you’re doing is thinking that they’re the same size. And then, you know, and then you rest and you’re like, I feel like my body’s differently against the floor again. And it’s just, so he’s constantly using it. He just, anyway, it’s, so just one thing I wanted to say about what you were saying about, you know, that you don’t feel you wanna be present all the time. This is a little bit of my conundrum because of the Feldenkrais training is four years long. Right, wow. Because in the beginning, like I mentioned this thing about we go slowly. They said, go slowly every day of the whole training. And in the beginning, you don’t know what slow means. You think you’re going slow and they’re like, that’s not slow because, you know, because you’re still over-efforting. So there’s a lot of, I mean, it’s, and the human body is pretty complicated, you know? Walking is a pretty complicated pattern. So to learn how to teach all that, you really do need training. And at the same time, I don’t want it to be like, well, you better take a four-year training or else. Yeah, that’s not gonna help for a lot of people. Yeah, and the thing is, I mean, it’s practical that if you want to explore the Feldenkrais method, the first thing you do is you find a Feldenkrais practitioner. There’s really not a big way. I mean, but you can also find recordings. I mean, I have all kinds of recordings. People can, and that’s how actually I started, just listening to an audio recording. But when I was talking about kind of my backstory and I was telling the story about the improvisations, including the sort of improvisation with my breathing, which was like, to me, it felt like I was doing what I did in music, except rather than sound for an audience, it’s in my body. What I’ve kind of discovered, and this is, for me, the musicality of being is, like, I’m a little torn, because like, I actually want people to experience the Feldenkrais method, to do many lessons, to, a lesson typically is like 45 minutes to an hour on the floor, which is one, another reason why a lot of people might never do it. It’s just like, that’s too much of my, you know, but some of these principles of how we listen, and, you know, rather than doing a whole lesson, just understanding that every time I hold my breath, I’ve just kind of short-circuited something. Let me try that again. There’s ways that there’s a little more of a kind of like, an improvised, yeah, I understand. It’s related, but it’s like, I have to be really careful I put together some, like, dumbing something down, or it’s, so, I encourage improvisation with my students a lot, and, you know, Feldenkrais did this in many ways too. You know, when you repeat the movement, it’s not about do it 10 times, because 10 times means it’s good for you. It’s like, try it 10 different ways until you find- Oh, no, I get that. I have the same problems also with, you know, my meditation course usually is like, you know, 16 weeks kind of thing, or something like that. And when we’re doing the workshop, I do sort of, you know, half an hour, and I get it, I understand. But on the other hand, like you, I like, but, you know, I can’t say to people, well, first of all, meditate for five years, and then do Tai Chi Chuan for five years. I know. And then do philosophical fellowship for five years, and then I’ll teach you, right, dialect, because then, you know, seven people in the world will take it up. Right, well, I’ve been really following those conversations on the artful scaling of the religion is not a religion, because- Exactly, exactly. And like, or what Jordan Hall’s always saying to you in the conversations, like, it’s not like we have a lot of time to figure all this stuff out and- Exactly. You know, seek- I want to extend an invitation, and I think I would like maybe if we get a chance at the workshop for you and I and Guy and Chris to talk, because I think there’d be, if there’s a way, first of all, I’d like to learn this, because it sits so well with what I do with Tai Chi Chuan and other practices. It already feels like it would just fit in the psychology of practices very well. I’d like to learn this, but I’d also like to, I’d like to see if there’s a way, if you could do with it what I’ve done with the meditation and the contemplation practices, can you condense it down so that we could do something that would fit within the pedagogical program and help it develop? Because I think, I also like the idea about this way of inhabiting your body, if I can put it that way, that will help people also detect when they might be projecting or they might be distorting, because typically people, their body changes, I think of Gendlin and their felt sense of the shift. Anyways, I extend that invitation, and I hope we can make it happen. Amazing, I’d love to do that. I mean, yeah, thank you. Good, because I mean, like I said, I want to get this into a set of mutually affording but also progressive practices to get people to the place where they can more reliably get to the depths of dialectic into dialogus. That’s exactly what I want. Well, not what I, people don’t care what I want, what I believe needed, what I believe I need. Right, right, right. Yeah, I mean, it’s a real question. I mean, another thing for someone like me, the Feldenkrais method to a lot of people is just obscure. Right? And then there is, we got to pay the rent, right? So there’s the marketplace. And like, so this whole thing I said before about back pain versus cultivating wisdom, it’s like, well, you need to explain it in a way that you’ll have some clients, you know, because otherwise you’re not helping anyone at all. And it’s like, but that to me is also so interesting in terms of like the world we’re in now, even just like the YouTube algorithms and all of this. Like that’s what’s so fascinating about the method is like, Feldenkrais died in 1984, and people have continued to really develop this in a lot of ways. I’m gonna be also talking to David Cates soon, I would love for you to meet. He’s the person in the little that I know, who’s kind of one of the best historians of Feldenkrais himself and the whole Jewish wisdom tradition that Feldenkrais comes out of. He has a book called Making Connections, which is all about that. But like situating it in the world today, you know, and just the fact that my phone is always screaming at me, pick me up, pick me up, look at me. Like those are the things that I think we kind of have to figure out in some ways. But yeah, so this idea that it could be a wisdom practice, cause like, see, I don’t think I have it all worked out yet. But like when you were talking about- I had amazing experience though, when I was with my partner and we were together and she was talking to me and I thought something, blah, blah, blah, blah, she, blah, blah, blah, she. And I noticed the third person. And then I thought, I’m kind of in the having mode. And then I was like, I wanna be with her. And then I started looking at her and she’s speaking, but in my head, I’m saying you and I’m saying us. And I felt something change in my body. Yep, very much. Having mode doesn’t feel the same as being mode. And then for me to teach a Feldenkrais lesson and say, okay, are you in the having mode or the being mode? That’s too simplistic maybe, but like, there’s a way that when I have to touch my elbow to my knee, that’s kind of what it is. It’s like, so I see all of those potential mappings and it’s like, okay, but, you know, the way, I mean, the way you’ve done some of your YouTube series is what kind of inspired me to be like, oh, this is so simple. If people just actually knew what was in this book the guy wrote, they would see that it’s more than movement practice. So why don’t I talk through the book and make it serious? And so those are the kinds of things that, yeah, that I’m thinking about. Anyway, there’s just been like a ridiculous amount of stimulation since I found out. This has been fantastic. And some of the stuff you said has really been beautiful and eye-opening and tasty. And I meant what I said, I really want to try and see how we could work this in to a more developed, you know, something obviously that wouldn’t take place over a weekend, but like a more developed course. That would be so fantastic. I’d be happy to send you some recordings that you could just, you know, find out what this feels like to do the plane divides the body or one of those things. Yes, I would, I like that, but I would like you to do that, please. Yeah, and people, you know, they can find that stuff on my YouTube channel too. Yeah, so again, yeah, Seth is gonna send me all kinds of links that I’m- Try not to send me too many. No, no, people generally want as many as they can have. And so I think this is a good place to draw it to a close. I, well, I fully expect and hope that we will talk again and that perhaps we can start doing some work together because this sounds like something that really would weave well in. And I mean, I like I said, I wanna talk to you more at length about how Lexio Divina, like does this sensitize your body so when you’re doing Lexio Divina, you’re reading with your body and not just with your mind. Yeah, I expected that. Yeah, so I wanna talk to you about that, but let’s draw this one to a close. And is there like any brief final thing you wanna say or? Well, I’d love to just extend an invitation to people watching this. I mean, I know eventually this will become a old news on YouTube, but next month on February 13, I’m doing the next musicality of being workshop. And maybe one of the links I’ll send you is I have a training, it’s like a free training. People can, you know, join my mailing list and get the training and they could get, you know, kind of like a firsthand experience of some of the stuff I’m talking about. So I could include that with what I said. Please, please do, please do. Well, Seth, this has been wonderful and I wanna thank you very, very much. Likewise, it’s been a real honor to talk to you and I feel like a lot of the ideas that I’ve shared have actually been clarified through your work over the last, you know, again, just half year, but you’ve been really stimulating me and helping me to put a lot of these things together. So much appreciated. Thank you for saying that.