Hi Tim,

In the description of Tru Balance Dynamics on your web site, you refer to "the body's own innate balancing processes." Could you please describe more specifically what these innate processes are and how they are inhibited from functioning normally?

Thanks,
Steven

Humans have the inborn ability to right themselves and orient themselves in space. Small children are a good example, they all have perfect posture that requires no conscious thought to maintain. We distort our posture through learning (imitation), sometimes as the result of trauma and from sitting in unnatural positions much of the day.

So for most of us, the process of correcting bad postural habits is through awareness and inhibition, rather than attempting to force the body into an alignment we think is correct. It's more like "letting" the body right itself rather than forcing it to "straighten up."

Hi Tim,

Do you have any exposure to Alexander Technique? Your description of "awareness and inhibition" as the path to naturally realigning the body is exactly the same as that taught in Alexander lessons.

Barry,
I've heard of the Alexander Technique, but I've never studied it. The origins of most of my ideas are from the Chinese Internal martial arts.

Tim,

You may be interested in a book called "The Alexander Principle" by Wilfred Barlow. I have read this and found it very useful. It even encouraged me to start seeing an Alexander Technique teacher. I think the Technique has really practical methods for helping one to learn how to "inhibit" for want of a better word.

I've been told, by someone who had the experience of growing up with Alexander-technique, that its method of inhibition, in the long run, ends up inhibiting your further growth, and that it is a partial system only (e's doing T'ai Chi full time, and has been for 25 years).

The explanation was, that it is better to settle into a natural position through involution, than to have to mentally control/patrol yourself and your habits - of course, the inhibition ends up being a habit, but one logged further up the hierarchy, than the position of the "patrolled" posture modification, that you for example are trying to implement for bettering your structural alignment. This 'extra circuit' becomes a stumbling block...

FWIW,
Janus

Janus,

I don't understand what you mean. What's involution?

Sorry to confuse with wierd, unexplained terms... The sentence should be clearer like so:

"The explanation was, that it is better to settle into a position by relaxing into it naturally, than to have to mentally control/patrol yourself and your habits - etc."


'Involution' designates a transformatory process, a becoming. It snug in above, stolen from the source below...
"Becoming is involutionary, involution is creative. To regress is to move in the direction of something less differentiated. But to involve is to form a block that runs its own line "between" the terms in play (f.ex. a human becoming-lion) and beneath assignable relations.
... Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressing-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or producing through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, "appearing," "being," "equaling," or "producing."" -from "A thousand Plateaus", Deleuze & Guattari, a chapter entitled "1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible...".

"We possess our body by chance and we are already pleased with it. If our physical bodies went through 'ten thousand transformations' without end, how incomparable would this joy be!" -Chuang Tzu.

Janus