There are few questions in life more important than “Which way is up?” We joke about that, describing someone who doesn’t grasp what’s going on around him by saying “he doesn’t know which way is up.” The question, though, is one that you really do need to answer almost constantly, whenever you’re awake and upright. If you stop answering it, you won’t stay upright very long. The question is so important that evolution developed mechanisms to answer it continuously and automatically, so you may hardly be aware of dealing with it. Fortunately, there are different sources of information available that you can use, so that’s not usually a problem.
The subconscious choices you make about which source to rely on can have important implications for how you experience and function in the world. This is a clear example of the idea I explored earlier, that you can compose very different experiences from the same external situation depending on how you filter and select information from the perceptual stream that constantly engulfs you.
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Being grounded is a natural way of being — part of our human biological heritage honed by millions of years of evolution. And yet, in contemporary society, really being grounded is relatively rare. Being ungrounded is much more the norm. It’s part of a class of behaviors that I think of as pathologies of civilization — shaped by contempory lifestyles and cultural conditioning but at odds with who we really are as biological organisms.
As I noted previously, being grounded has both structural and perceptual components. Structurally, it requires the body to be supported in relaxed balance on the skeleton, with the musculature used primarily to align the body to maintain that balance rather than to support weight directly with muscular effort. Perceptually, it requires a nervous system attuned to perceive and perpetuate this balance, capable of controlling the musculature to maintain it while engaging in the ongoing activities of life.
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In May 2008, I presented a five day Feldenkrais advanced training in Composing Experience in Devon, England. The Winter 2008 issue of Functional Information, the Feldenkrais Guild UK Newsletter, included an article on the training and participants’ reactions. A portion of that article is reproduced below. A description of the material presented in that workshop can be found here.
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Much is written about being grounded. A google search turns up more than 700,000 entries for the term. Some are about the kind of being grounded that happens to a child as a form of punishment, but most have to do with connection to the ground and its consequences. Some writers see it in terms of an energetic connection to the earth, others in terms of calmness and presence, others in terms of feeling empowered and in control. It is all these things, I think, but at it’s core, it is about your proprioceptive experience of connection with the earth beneath you.
Today I want to explore the experience of being grounded from a physiological and a perceptual perspective. What is that experience, and how do we create it for ourselves? In particular, what forms of somatic organization facilitate the experience, and what forms of somatic organization detract from it? And how can we encourage those which facilitate it?
You live in a field of gravity. Gravity is an ever-present force pulling you and everything around you toward the center of the earth. You end up being pressed against whatever supporting surface is immediately beneath you — the ground itself, the floor if you’re in a building, a piece of furniture you’re sitting or lying on, or whatever. Supporting yourself within the gravitational field is an ongoing activity that you manage automatically and largely unconsciously. Your sense of being grounded, or not, grows out of how you do that. [Read more →]
Tags: Awareness·balance·grounding
November 10th, 2008 · blog admin
Earlier this year I got distracted by other interests and pretty much abandoned this blog. I’m restarting it, and intend to post more frequently.
I’m also restructuring the way material is presented. Last year I set it up as an ongoing manuscript that should be read in logical order, rather than in reverse chronological order as a blog. That was part of what got me off track and away from writing, because I felt like I had to plan several chapters ahead and make it all coherent. I’m going to give up the goal of that kind of continuity and let myself write in a more spontaneous way, with the posts appearing as they are written. When several deal with the same or closely allied subjects I’ll then pull then together into series and provide alternative links to access that series in the appropriate order.
The material I wrote last year constitutes the first such series, now titled Perception. In terms of my overall thinking it constitutes a fairly self-contained piece, describing the nature of perception and the basic processes we use to construct our experience. Future series will deal with things like the nature of action, of emotional experience, and whatever other patterns emerge as I write.
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