Welcome:
I’d like to talk about my goals for creating the Body of Knowledge Course and what you can accomplish with it.
The course will help you create, day by day, a safer and more functional self-possession with which to live your life. It’s really an opportunity to build a new kind of intelligence for yourself.
Human movement and learning are essentially the same thing: they are a form of intelligence.
We move to perceive the world, and ourselves in it, more clearly.
In fact, there is no action you can take, no goal you can fulfill, no experience you can have, that does not rely on movement.
Even thoughts and emotions—internal shifts in your orientation—are movements of the mind.
At birth, you arrived with almost no movement or cognitive skills that came wired-in with your brain.
It was all capacity. Thus, almost everything about the way you learned to move and sense and think and feel had to be slowly acquired, through experience, trial and error.
This is a training of sorts, but it’s not likely one you remember.
And yet you’re living it all the time.
In a sense, we all know what it’s like to live with deeply grooved behaviors, and yet to feel untrained.
The way you move now has within it a kind of signature, with its own signal-to-noise ratio, that determines a lot about how comfortable you are, the kinds of activities that attract or frustrate you, your propensity for balance and strength, and whether pain, stiffness and fatigue are really your fate, or just your conditioning.
To understand this is to understand a secret to cultivating a better life—the only one you’ve got.
Most of us, at some point, look for practices to help us—exercise, meditation, diet—where we learn to live in greater health and dignity.
And so I offer you: Awareness Through Movement®.
The practice trains your physical and mental equipment in a single, unifying context, where movement and attention are given equal weight.
And it’s the main practice we’ll use in the Body of Knowledge course.
It requires no special clothing or equipment.
What makes it different from any other approach?
The way it integrates the physical benefits of exercise and the mental poise of meditation.
Awareness Through Movement creates a context of patience, accuracy and efficiency, and avoids an emphasis on willpower, and the injuries that result when we combine effort with ignorance. It’s the best practice I know of to control both the nature and the speed of your own improvement, and to make your body both feel good and work well.
We’ll start by transforming your relationship to posture—a word in need of a renaissance of sorts—so you can see how well organized movement and perception work hand in hand.
And we’ll build progressively on that foundation by introducing principles, strategies and techniques that refine not only your physical skills but the mental capacities (knowledge) that allow you to understand and sense them more clearly in each moment.
Currently the course is comprised of talks, the occasional video demonstration, and Awareness Through Movement lessons, some about 10-20 minutes, but most of which are full lessons of 45 minutes to an hour. These longer lessons are much the same format I teach when I do live classes and workshops, and some of the recordings are from those workshops.
The reason for the longer practices is simple:
in order to really glimpse your potential, to stabilize your new purchase on posture and movement, more time, context and practice are necessary. I hope it is not only enlightening and enjoyable, but provides the measure of both discipline and freedom you’ve been looking for.
The laboratory is ourselves, the context is movement, the application is life.
Welcome to the Body of Knowledge course.
Sincerely,
Andrew Gibbons
