Guide to Reading the NEVRIN (Xerox) Article-DUE 2/15

Nevrin Article (Empowerment and the Body)

“Empowerment and Using the Physical Body in Modern Postural Yoga (MPY)”

-What is the importance of the practice environment? Can you see any of these elements in the setting in which you are practicing?

-What is the importance of “performance” and “sequence” in modern postural yoga? (in the Krishnamacharya school) Do you see this in the setting in which you are practicing?

-How might one see the practice environment as a “ritual setting”? One that might induce a certain state of mind or encourage a kind of experience?

-Consider what Nevrin calls the “elements of experience”:

--How are these important (you may elaborate from your readings), and again, do you find them in your practice setting?

1) context/scene

2) ritual enactment

3) importance of the “embodied experience”

Consider the three aspects of “embodied experience”

1)      Attending to movement

2)      Heightened sensitivity

3)      Emotion

-What is the “bodily felt sense” (Levin)? How is it significant here?

-What is kinesthesia (sheets-johnstone)? How is it significant here?

-What does the Laban Body Movement technique say about the relationship between the body and mood? --How is this significant here?

-What is EMBODIMENT? Can you define the lack of embodiment? (Zarelli, Classen,Leder?)
-What does embodiment have to do with our experience? Can you relate to this state of being?

-Why does being a part of a community of practice (public practice) provide a different experience of emotion?

-What does embodiment have to do with EMPOWERMENT?

-What is the difference between social and individual empowerment?

-How does public practice change us, compared to solitary practice?

Laban technique demonstrated
Laban Personal Practice

Delasarte Technique (3rd graders)

• Consciousness

  • the body-subject as an alternative to the Cartesian "cogito." This distinction is especially important in that Merleau-Ponty perceives the essences of the world existentially. Consciousness, the world, and the human body as a perceiving thing are intricately intertwined and mutually "engaged." 
  • The phenomenal thing is not the unchanging object of the natural sciences, but a correlate of our body and its sensory-motor functions. Taking up and "communing with" (Merleau-Ponty's phrase) the sensible qualities it encounters, the body as incarnated subjectivity intentionally elaborates things within an ever-present world frame, through use of its pre-conscious, predicative understanding of the world's makeup. 
  •   The world and the sense of self are emergent phenomena in an ongoing "becoming."
  •  The object of perception is immanently tied to its background—to the nexus of meaningful relations among objects within the world. Because the object is inextricably within the world of meaningful relations, each object reflects the other.
  • Through involvement in the world – being-in-the-world – the perceiver tacitly experiences all the perspectives upon that object coming from all the surrounding things of its environment, as well as the potential perspectives that that object has upon the beings around it. 
  • Each object is a "mirror of all others." Our perception of the object through all perspectives is not that of a propositional, or clearly delineated, perception. Rather, it is an ambiguous perception founded upon the body's primordial involvement and understanding of the world and of the meanings that constitute the landscape's perceptual gestalt.
  .
   
• Rehabituation: how experience is changed when one learns new ways of making sense of and using their bodies
   
• Kinestesia: (Maxine Sheets Johnstone) not an object of consciousness or perception, but more accurately a “felt unfolding dynamic” Knowing where you body is in space all at once. Something that athletes possess. Movement and attention to movement can produce a heightened sense of awareness and less stressed sense of identity---a less rigid sense of self. What does lack of movement do therefore? Changing one’s way of moving our bodies also has an impact on how we feel about ourselves and the environment.
                  “…Depression is often experienced in the body as a passive giving in to weight.. The slightest movement can diminish this. What is important is the indication of participation, rather than passivity”
  Embodiement
  (Philip Zarelli). Relational modes of experience. When we engage with our bodies we are able to have more heightened levels of experience in which we see ourselves as full human beings…the body connected to the mind in a dialectic
  
  Flow:
  Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.
  
  According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate experience in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task^. although flow is also described (below) as a deep focus on nothing but the activity – not even oneself or one's emotions.
  
  Flow has many of the same characteristics as (the positive aspects of) hyperfocus (near death experience/obsessive behavior). However, hyperfocus is not always described in such universally glowing terms. For examples, some cases of spending "too much" time playing video games, or of getting side-tracked and pleasurably absorbed by one aspect of an assignment or task to the detriment of the assignment in general. In some cases, hyperfocus can "grab" a person, perhaps causing him or her to appear unfocused or to start several projects, but  complete few.
  
  Colloquial terms for this or similar mental states include: to be in the moment, present, in the zone, on a roll, wired in, in the groove, on fire, in tune, centered, or singularly focused.
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  Reacding Notes:
  
  Modern Postural Yoga From Krishnamacharya School shares the following Qualities
  

  • arduous training
  • instruction in postural conventions which are sequenced (precision)
  • breathing techniques
  • forms of mediation (based on attention to various rules and precision as well as RITUALIZED behaviors-names of postures, drishti (fixed gaze), precise muscle use, ending in savasana)
  • emphasis on PRACTICE

  Interest DEEPENS over time
  • chanting
  • philosophy
  • history
  • etc

  The YOGA SHALA is a RITUAL SPACE (not neutral)
  • symbols
  • lighting
  • smells
  • music
  • statuary
  • set up (alter)
  • props
  • mats
  • rules for interaction
  • etc.

  Ritual Progression
  • SEPARATION
  • TRANSITION (liminal)
  • INCORPORATION

  Yoga as Embodied Experience
  • Attending to movement
  • must learn to feel the body move and then feel it move differently
  • Alexander, Feldenkreis, Laban, Authentic Movement

  • learning to experience proprioception and knesthesis
  • may result in "sustained dynamic flow" (sheets johnstone)
  • no goal except the movement and the experience of the movement itself
  • PRACTICE leads to deeper modes of sustained flow
  • Liberating; More fluid sense of self

  • Heightened sensitivity
  • breathing
  • inner awareness
  • comparison of inner and outer worlds
  • experience the health of the body and emotional states
  • emotion
  • community
  • relievs burden of individuality
  • collective sensibility
  • shared community
  • like minded
  • emotional pose

   EXISTENTIAL EMPOWERMENT in body adjustment and community practice