As Others See Us

Body Movement and the Art of Successful Communication

Ellen Goldman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135932831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

As Others See Us, first published in 1994 by Gordon & Breach, is a book designed to introduce the reader to a new way of thinking about the movements, both conscious and unconscious, that we make every day and every second of our lives.Goldman describes the human experience as a continuous stream of body movements, though we are only aware of a small fraction of the more obvious and intrusive physical acts. The aim of this book is first to increase awareness of the subtleties and complexities of our body language, and then to encourage the reader to perceive these intricacies in their own movements and in those of others. Finally, with a more complete understanding and appreciation for the power of body language and non-verbal communication, one can achieve a deeper connection between physical and intellectual spheres, to allow for a fuller and more engaging experience of communication and expression. This new knowledge of the human body's movements not only permits one to more accurately perceive the emotions and thoughts of others, but can allow a glimpse into one's own mind, to see how we present ourselves to the world, and whether our thoughts are in sync with our actions.

Central to the text is the author's treatment of the Integrated Movement, a term used to describe the merger of a posture and a gesture with a consistent quality, dynamic or shape. This approach to understanding and explaining human movement offers a unique way of thinking about conscious gesture, unconscious body language, and verbal speech as interconnected communication, a synthesis that allows for a more complete view of ourselves and others around us. The structure of the book follows a logical framework that mirrors the progress of the reader, from perception of movement, to the close inspection of gesture and body language, to the introduction and experience of Integrated Movement, to the application of one's new awareness to different aspects of life. Biographical sketches of leading figures in the field are included, as are suggestions for additional reading and resources. Perhaps the most unique feature of the book are the personal exercises (boxed-off text) that appear on almost every other page. These exercises are designed to allow the reader to experience the power of body language in real-life situations, while working towards the increased awareness and perception that is the goal of the book.

NINE
THE BODY

Your body is a living, breathing, complex combination of chemical interactions and physical forces all humming along, maintaining your health and being a diligent servant. You owe it to yourself to take care of this body and listen to its wonderful rhythms and pulses. Make friends with its accomplishments, even its ailments, as you influence them with knowledge and gentle attention.

This chapter will help you become more familiar with your own skills, tensions or blocks in the sports and exercises you do. A study of gestures, postures and Integrated Movements will enhance the enjoyment you already get from your exercise activities.

Gestures are a means of stimulating circulation, differentiating joint articulations and preparing specific muscle groups for action. Postures stretch the body and elongate tired or sore muscles, thereby releasing tension and restoring resilience. By concentrating on postures and gestures in a warm-up, you are consciously avoiding stress or strain in specific parts of the body, making sure each one has what it needs. By using Integrated Movement you are preparing a totally coordinated effort.

You don’t have to be an expert in a sport to know that something is interfering with the smooth process of action. You are perceiving the lack of integration.

A swimmer reported that when her mind was focused on the movement of her body in the water she could swim the length of a pool in seven strokes. When her mind wandered, it took nine. The sense of total investment and concentration on the Integrated Movement brought her greater efficiency.

As you pay attention to Integrated Movement, you emphasize the moment when the whole body lets go to action. The mind is focused on the feeling and experience rather than on the goal. You stay present in the moment. A way to capture this experience of exhilarated physical performance is to identify the image or metaphor you feel at that moment: sailing through space, a speeding comet, sculpting shapes in the snow. Then you can use the image to recreate the satisfying movement experience instead of muscling your way through.

A SKIER

Alex, an expert ski instructor, showed Integrated Movement as he “skied” down a grassy slope. He explained the process. “You create a nice, slow sine wave as you shift all your weight to the uphill ski, flattening it, letting it turn downhill then beginning the process again as you enter the fall line.

“You think about bringing your whole body forward as you follow through. You accelerate, then get a really good rebound. You feel like you are falling down the hill.

“You can also skate straight down the hill to get the acceleration. It’s kind of intimidating so you think of skating to someone. You pretend that you have a line attached from your belly button to that person. It’s a total commitment.”

Listening to Alex, it is clear that he is integrating his movement even when he talks about skiing. Athletes find a way to use their Integrated Movement whether or not they give it a name.

YOUR EXERCISE REGIME

Let’s consider your current exercise methods and analyze them. Do you bicycle? Where do you think your Integrated Movement could be? Perhaps on the push of the pedal or, if you have toe straps, on the pull up? Maybe you integrate more on the release, or in the breath of recuperation after the exertion. Experience the moment when your whole body supports a specific part of the action. You may want to notice too, where your body is tightening and holding for the sake of another part. Is this creating strain?

Do you jog? The next time you are out jogging, catch the moment when everything feels consistent and continuous throughout your whole body. Is it the strong push into the ground, or the light moment in the air? Is it the convex moment when the torso arches ahead? If you are not sure, start by looking for gestures. Notice foot gestures, how the lower leg swings forward. Notice the arm gestures. The point where one of these gestures links up with the rest of them is your Integrated Moment.

Seeking an Integrated Movement will put the emphasis in the right place and may result in a shift of attitude allowing the body a more unified, pleasurable experience. If you find one, you are probably enjoying what you are doing. If you cannot find an Integrated Movement in the exercise you do, the whole process may be a series of gestures. You may want to change.

Exercise regimes have much to offer. They develop strength, flexibility and aerobic benefit. However, to do them without a sense of the whole body, the spine, the head-tail connection, is useless in terms of activating a sense of Integration in the whole body. You may be moving your leg, but how are you holding your head? Support the leg by lengthening up through the head and feet. Feel the effect of the movement on your whole spine, organs, arm. Go at your own pace. Move from an inner sense. Be present in the body’s experience. You will feel much better when you are finished, with a sense of vibrancy about your whole person, not just a feeling that you have done a chore.

Whatever objects or equipment you use in your exercise routine will influence your experience, body and mind. Machines will promote muscle-building, combatting the forces of gravity directly, grounding in physical presence. Rolling on an exercise ball will promote flexibility and instinctive reflex reactions. Low-to-the-floor trapeze work will promote a combination of strength with mobility, grounding with instinctive flexibility. Think about your needs in your exercise work. Mix different techniques to avoid letting any one routine become so familiar that you do it without attention to the body.

An exercise system can help manage body problems, like problems of alignment. The exercise can provide relief to an area and keep a problem at bay. For example, problems of poor muscle use or over-use can be improved by strengthening muscles around the area which supply additional support. Enough stomach muscle work will keep the lower back from aching even without directly addressing the alignment or usage patterns causing the pain. Nervous tension and habitual body stiffness can be managed with exercise. Exercise reduces stress by dispersing these movement elements, tiring them, leaving the body ready to act as a whole.

“I feel I have more control over my conversation if I have exercised. I don’t have to talk out of nervous energy. I feel more grounded.”

This predominantly gesture-oriented approach to exercising the body has benefits and dangers. When attending to one area, stress can inadvertently be created in another. Too vigorous an approach to one problem area can increase damage. Keep the whole body under surveillance. Use Integrated Movement when making a transition from one exercise to another. Review critical areas of tension, i.e., the neck and shoulders, for unnecessary strain. Keep a sense of the whole body in supportive alignment for the exercise and let your breath be the integrating aspect.

PROMOTING INTEGRATED MOVEMENT

Exercises using body diagonals involve the whole body and prepare for Integrated Movement. They are not common in most exercise systems but are well developed in the system of movement called Bartenieff Fundamentals ™ . These exercises promote an understanding of the diagonal connections from left foot to right arm, activating abdominal obliques and deep spinal muscles. The principle is feeling an active connection of limb and torso, right and left, upper and lower, and front to back of the body.

To experience this, lie on the floor with your arms and legs apart so that the body looks like an “x”. Imagine you are stretching large rubber bands diagonally, first through one part of the “x” then through the other. Let the foot rock on the heel and let the momentum carry through one line of the “x.” Feel the elasticity through your body. Do not let the shoulder move up, and down, but instead, feel that the arm comes out of the middle of your torso. Repeat this, on the opposite side.

If you like this experience, you can follow the movement through into a sit-up, exhaling, hollowing the abdomen, feeling the ease with which the body-diagonal brings you to a sitting position. You can fold the x in half, bringing right elbow and left knee together, then alternate, feeling the elasticity of the torso. You can circle one arm over the head making a full circle across the body, feeling the effect throughout the torso and into the legs.

With this preparation, you might experiment with all the body diagonals you can find. Using the momentum created by the first folding and unfolding “x,” shift your weight to sitting, to hands and knees, to hands and feet and eventually to standing. Roll, twist, sit up, turn over, feel connected, feel the sense of rubber bands, feel the continuity of movement and a clear beginning and ending.

Playgrounds, especially the swings, provide interesting opportunities to rediscover Integrated Movement.

Start to swing with the usual kick off the ground, until you have a good momentum. Allow the lower body, the swing of the legs, to initiate the movement. while this upper body counterbalances. Feel the moment of extension as you reach out and up with your legs. Feel the contraction as you reverse the movement, leg back, body forward, while folding up. Here the shape of your body is changing contour and dynamics. If you break up this movement into gestures, you are not able to swing high or develop momentum.

In any exercise, as movement travels through the body, there can be spots in which you feel tension or strain, even pain. If you notice this, stop the movement at or near that spot, where the tension is not too extreme.

Focus your breathing into the area of strain. Feel as if a balloon were filling and emptying around that area. Feel each muscle fiber and cell expand and contract. As you inhale, feel you have reached the limits of the cell body wall. The tension, like the sides of the balloon, have increased to their fullest. (The flow is bound.) Now let the air out, feeling the sense of freedom and release. (The flow is free.) Body fluids, lymph, and blood are flowing through the area. Make adjustments until the body can move through the exercise with ease.

INJURY

We usually pay the most attention to the body after an injury. The body’s natural defense is to create a ‘splint’ around the area by tensing the surrounding muscles. This protective instinct increases pain and eliminates Integrated Movement. So, the first step to greater comfort is to reverse this reaction.

Here are some steps you can follow or adapt as a basic approach to reducing the pain of a spasm, sprain, or other injury.

RELIEVING PAIN

Hands On:

1. 1.Put your hands on the area of pain. Breathe.
2. 2.Ask the person you are helping to breathe into the area of pain. The conscious, controlled use of the breath brings movement to the frozen muscles and lets them relax. The attention increases the flow of blood and provides some relief.

Comfort:

1. 3.Make sure the injured person is comfortable and that knees, head, sides of the body are supported. Use pillows.

Support:

1. 4.Go to parts of the body that are far from the injury. If it is in the back, try supporting a lower leg. Move it around. The movement will gently massage muscles near the area of tension. All of this is done slowly with constant attention to the injured person. Fear that a movement will cause pain can cause the person to tense in anticipation. Do very small movements very carefully. Rest. Then try again. Once the movement is familiar, it will not cause pain, but relieve it.

Specific Breath:

1. 5.Ask for specific breath support: “breathe to the count of four, now exhale to the count of four.” “Inhale as I lift the leg up. Exhale as I put it down.” Give tactile support, and support with your own body weight.
   Supporting the weight of the limb with breath and giving careful guidance along the appropriate path often eliminates pain on the second repeat. The body gradually relaxes. The secondary pain leaves. A sense of relief follow...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
• PROLOGUE
• ONE: PERCEIVING MOVEMENT
• TWO: LOOKING AT MOVEMENT: GESTURES AND POSTURES
• THREE: INTEGRATED MOVEMENT: THE MOMENT OF TRUTH
• FOUR: EXPERIENCING INTEGRATED MOVEMENT
• FIVE: FRIENDSHIP
• SIX: RELATIONSHIPS
• SEVEN: FAMILY
• EIGHT: GETTING TO WORK
• NINE: THE BODY
• TEN: THE ART OF LIFE
• ELEVEN: REFLECTIONS
• EPILOGUE: OUR QUANTUM LEAP
• NOTES
• PHOTO CREDITS
• BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF LEADING MOVEMENT THEORISTS WHOSE INNOVATIVE WORK FORMS THE BASIS OF THIS BOOK
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• FURTHER READINGS IN NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION