Pride and Prejudice; movement edition.
We are human. Let us assume that we have to some degree, a functioning brain. This brain likes to be organized so that it can efficiently keep you safe- quickly evaluate the environment and make decisions about the possible dangers or threats.
We then try to create a safe environment for ourselves; utilizing interactions and experiences from our life so far, having noted the good vs the bad, trustworthy from non. We begin to categorize the population that surrounds us- it’s much quicker for the brain to process dangers this way and therefore trigger any actions that may be necessary to save/protect ourself. We begin to form some stereotypes about these categories of people that we’ve interacted with, though this isn’t necessarily bad (yet), just our (very) generalized observations.
One day we observe someone new in our environment, but we don’t come close enough for an interaction. Another person from our category of ‘trustworthy’ conveys to us (lacking any logical prose) that this new person is a danger to our safety, and so we ‘choose’ to close ourself off to any possible interaction with this person- we now believe in the stereotype that we created and as such, cross the line toward imposing prejudice. The brain has reorganized this as efficiency- we are now quicker at making decisions in regards to our safety, we do not need to interact with these new people or new environments because we no longer need the extra time of interaction to deem something or someone as a threat- we have created it for ourself. We have thus created, fear. We do not understand what this other group talks about or believes, because we do not interact with them.
In the same scenario as above, the new person in our environment is conveyed by our trustworthy group as someone who is also trustworthy. Even with any amount of hesitation at all, we are already much more open to the idea of this new person being accepted into the trustworthy category. Despite our interactions, we still don’t really understand what this new person talks about or believes either, but they’re in the trustworthy category, so we blindly believe them. A group consensus has formed, despite gaps in communication.
In these scenarios, we remove ourselves so far, that we hang onto the external branches of a system, that is meant to be a place of internal interpretation (the roots) of our experience. It seems the experience has been removed for many people these days, making it hard to discern reality from not.
In the same way that we categorize people and environments, we do so with movement and we must think of it in the same way- we must not lose sight of the root; our experience.
In a scenario where we want to be healthy and get ‘fit’, we already have preconceived notions of what this means, because this is how we organize information, words provide a meaning to actions whether they are accurate or not. So we hire a coach to help us, and they tell us about squats, deadlifts, pushups and pull ups- each exercise has been defined into a category, perhaps, some we’ve defined ourself at one point in time, but many fall to the beliefs we’ve taken from somewhere else- a coach, friend, magazine, website.. we continue to learn exercises by name and create definitions around them, and as we do so, we are pulling the exercise away from its intention, sometimes we lose the meaning all together.
A coach could spend a lot of time trying to instruct someone on the details of how to properly hinge, what it should look like, and often the student just doesn’t get it, it doesn’t make sense, yet- there’s has been no prior connection to this type of movement that we can relate it to. If you instead told them to pick a penny off the floor, they probably will ‘naturally’ hinge better than with the coaching cues.. picking something off the floor, has not yet been constrained by a definition..
To this I suggest a mind that is open to experience; organizing the internal experiences (into categories) rather than external information (into categories). Do not lose sight of the beginnings- definitions should not be confused with principles.