In my NLP training we dived into the Meta Model. It’s a fascinating model that “consists of a series of categories identifying various areas of verbal communication that are susceptible to considerable ambiguity and which may create limitations, confusion or miscommunication.” That’s from the manual and describes the concept well.
But that’s not what I’m going to talk about today. As it was a very cognitive based exercise to go through this we actually ended the class with something much more movement based.
It started with walking differently. Then it was using your body like rubber. Music was added and people began to dance. In the end two people would dance together mirroring and then leading one another.
First of all I found it very interesting how the teacher Michael Colgrass was able to lead everyone into dancing. I know it was an NLP training where people are trying to learn, but I just think about how many people would have slipped out the backdoor if he had said “Okay, now we’re going to dance,” rather then how he lead us step by step into doing it without telling us where we were going.
Here we not only had to move and dance but in front of tons of others while making eye contact with our partners each time.
Anyway, my main point was about kinesthetic movement. I’m not much of a dancer, but I can move my body pretty well. By that I mean I have control over each part of my body (think joint mobility), whereas many people did not. During specific times I thought in terms of leading the movement by different parts of the body. What would happen if I led with my hands and everything followed? What if my spine becomes the major role? And so on and so forth.
Even those with some kind of dance background didn’t necessarily have the same ability to move in many different ways. But what they did have was beautiful, flowing movements. Being able to move from one position to the next seamlessly, with different parts of your body moving different ways.
The “flowability” is not just something in dance. It can be trained just as well in movement, especially with various forms of bodyweight exercise. I was reading a recent article from Ido Portal where he talked about learning new ways of moving from different acrobatic dances, martial arts and the like. I had never even heard of the three he mentioned in that article, but the main point was something like this…
What would it be like if you thought in terms of collecting movements, and learning how to integrate them all in a flowing manner? In the beginning, just like dance, you move be stiff, not know what you’re doing, and be afraid to do it in front of others. But what if you spend some time and can truly create this flow with your body as the instrument? I’ve been doing this more in my own training lately and I encourage you to try doing the same. I’m sure I’ll talk about this subject more in the future.