ChristianKl comments on "Spiritual" techniques that actually work thread - Less Wrong

7 [deleted] 11 March 2015 10:35AM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 11 March 2015 12:32:20PM 4 points [-]

In my experience most of the interesting things are not easily explainable.

Take "move up" and "move down" while walking. A year ago at the Berlin Bachata Congress a teacher danced and switched from moving down to moving up. He asked what he did differently. No one of the audience besides me saw the difference. When I told him what he was doing, he said that I was the first person to get it (he teaches the class at different dancing congresses before) and I probably took the class before.

Yet only around 9 months later I finally think I got what move up means. That means I got it in a way that allows me to move my body in a more healthy way to the extend that a person who simply watched me moving around a week before that event would notice a difference.

In Alexander technique movement directions are also an important concept. An Alexander teacher writes a blog where he also says that understanding what moving up means took him years. For me I took three years of being in a somatic discipline albeit not professionally.

Learning new phenomenological primitives is hard.

Yes, it's possible to explain a self-hypnosis 101 induction where one walks down a staircase without new primitives but to me that's not where it get's interesting.