Composing Experience

Perceiving and interacting with the world around you — a Feldenkrais perspective

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Composing different experiences

November 27th, 2007 · Action, Choice, Effort, Perception, Perceptual process

This entry is part 4 of 8 in the series Perception

When I teach Composing Experience in workshops, I often begin with a direct experience illustrating how strongly your unconscious choices can affect your experience — even in situations that seem clear and straightforward. This is one of those experiences.

The situation is one in which you put one hand on your forehead and hold it there, while a partner grasps your wrist and slowly applies force to pull it away. Your resulting experience will depend on how you organize your perception of that situation, as the following video shows. Don’t just passively watch, but pause between the variations and play with them. If you watch with a friend, try each variation along with the video. If you watch alone, see how much of each experience you can recreate in your imagination as I describe them.

The exploration should not be approached as a contest between you and your partner, where he wins if he pulls your hand away and you win if he doesn’t. Rather, your partner should endeavor to provide the same stimulus each time — the same kind and amount of pull on your arm — so you can see how your perceptual choices affect the resulting experience for both of you.

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Back on track

November 21st, 2007 · blog admin

In my last post I noted that I’d realized that the reverse chronological order in which blogs present material was not appropriate to what I’m writing, and that my material needed to be presented in its logical order instead. After a long and circuitous trip I’ve found a way to do that and am back on track. You can now read Composing Experience from the beginning by clicking on the link in upper right corner of this page. You can navigate through it by using the Table of Contents at the top of each section. Posts like this one that are not part of that overall development are not included.

The solution I finally adopted was simple and direct, but my path to getting it in place took me through some interesting though seemingly irrelevant territory. After deciding that a conventional WordPress blog wasn’t what I wanted, I began to investigate Content Management Systems (CMS). Drupal looked like a good candidate, because it offered a specific layout for presenting material in book format. Learning Drupal and converting to it, though, would have been a major task. I found some blogs about using WordPress as a CMS and began to think about that as a possibility. Some described customizing the way WordPress displays static pages, and I considered presenting Composing Experience as static pages separate from the blog itself. I then realized that it might be easier to continue to write in the blog and construct an alternative navigational structure to present the material in a more logical order. I was working out ways of implementing this when I came across In Series, a WordPress plugin that comes pretty close to what I wanted. It provides the Table of Contents and navigational structure I’m now using, and saved me from reinventing the wheel and building my own. Through all this, my understanding of WordPress, PHP, and the Apache web server has grown — though I’m still far from competent in any of these technologies.

Thinking about the time I “wasted” looking at stuff that wasn’t “really needed” to implement my eventual solution, I realized how much my process had in common with a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement (ATM) lesson. I spent time exploring variations on a problem I didn’t understand very well at first — “mucking around” as Moshe Feldenkrais sometimes described it — and eventually I found a solution. Once found, the solution looks like I could have achieved it much more directly, but that may not be true. The “mucking around” is what led me to it, after all. It also gave me a broader awareness of the “universe” in which the problem and solution lay — the inner workings of my computer system — in the same way that ATM lessons give me a broader awareness of the inner workings of my sensory-motor system. That broader awareness may help my future dealing with my computer in ways I can’t now predict, just as what I learn from ATM helps my future movements and actions in ways I can’t predict when I do the lesson.

This may be an example of what Moshe was talking about when he described his Method as being about “learning how to learn,” and about producing “flexible minds more than flexible bodies.”

I’ll try to get another substantive posting up this weekend. I’m working on one about composing very different experiences from what initially looks like a straightforward situation amenable to only one, and will include video of workshop participants exploring that.

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The Perceptual Process Model

October 12th, 2007 · Choice, Perception, Perceptual process, somatic organization

This entry is part 3 of 8 in the series Perception

Think of experience as having two primary components, perception and action. Perception includes those processes through which you know yourself and the world around you — vision, hearing, proprioception (body awareness, balance, position in space, movement), intellectual and intuitive understanding, etc. Action encompasses what you do to interact with that world — getting a drink when you’re thirsty, moving away from a threat or toward an opportunity, buying a car, making love, etc. Perception and action are not as distinct as giving them two different labels makes them seem, of course. Your actions are among the things you perceive, and perception itself involves choices that result in actions that contribute to perception, such as how you organize your awareness and where you focus attention. Perception and action are intimately intertwined aspects of the complex process which is human experiencing.

We’ll examine the information flows involved in composing experience using a framework I call the Perceptual Process Model. This framework builds on and extends ideas developed in The Reality Illusion. There I focused primarily on perception, whereas here we will also examine action as a component of experience, and somatic organization as the ground that underlies our actions. We’ll eventually consider the nature of emotional experience as well, where action and perception are combined in an unusual way.

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“Composing Experience” describes life

September 28th, 2007 · Effort, Perception, Perceptual process

This entry is part 2 of 8 in the series Perception

 Life presents us with an ongoing stream of experience — with experiences of situations and events, of interactions of all kinds with our environment and the other people in it. These experiences are multidimensional, involving visual images, sounds, physical contact, sometimes smell and taste. We attach emotional reactions to them. Some experiences feel good; we are drawn toward them and want more like that. Others feel bad and we try to avoid them. We tend to think of experience as something that just “happens to us” as we go through life — the automatic result of the events and situations in which we find ourselves. It doesn’t feel like something over which we have much direct control, except by taking action to change the situation being experienced.

It’s really much more complex than that. You have a great deal more control over your ongoing experience than you may realize or acknowledge, and many aspects of experience that seem determined by external events actually result from choices you make. These choices are automatic and unconscious, for the most part, which is why they don’t feel like your choices, But they are. The more you understand that, and the better you understand the mechanisms by which you make those choices, the more control you will have over your life.

You compose your experience on an ongoing moment-to-moment basis. You do this by filtering and selecting bits and pieces of information from the much richer stream of information in which you are constantly immersed. You combine those bits and pieces with information and structure from your past experience to create your current experience. The kind of life you have — happy or sad, secure or fear-filled, bland or exciting, meaningless or rewarding — may ultimately be determined more by the way you manage that creative process than by the external circumstances you encounter.

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Choice and Experience

September 13th, 2007 · Action, Choice, Feldenkrais, Perception, Perceptual process

This entry is part 1 of 8 in the series Perception

Choice and life are intimately intertwined. Life presents us with choices, and the way we make those choices determines how we experience life. Some high-level choices seem big and in the foreground, like choosing a career, or a mate, or where to live, or what U.S. foreign policy should be. We give those choices a lot of thought and attention — sometimes.

Other lower level choices lie more in the background and further from consciousness — like the choice of which muscle fibers to contract, how strongly, and in what sequence as you walk across a room, pick up a glass of water, swing a golf club, or take part in a conversation. But how you make those choices, and how well you do so, plays a major role in whether your actions are fluid or stiff, graceful or clumsy, in whether you experience yourself as empowered and competent, or bumbling and incompetent.

Yet other choices seem lower-level still, so deeply backgrounded that we hardly register making them. Many choices you make in composing your experience of yourself and your environment are like this — how much available information you actually take in (awareness), for example, or what parts of that information you notice and incorporate in your decisionmaking (attention). These things may appear to “just happen” on their own, without explicit choice on your part, but that appearance is illusory. You do choose, though you may do so automatically and unconsciously. The unconscious choices you make at very low levels may ultimately have greater influence on the direction and quality of your life than do the more obvious higher-level choices of which you are more consciously aware.

This blog will explore some of the choices life offers, the mechanisms through which we make those choices, and the effects they have on how we experience life. I believe that better understanding of those mechanisms can lead to better choices and a better quality of life. I’ll focus particularly on the choices that determine our experience of our physical and emotional interactions with the world around us — the choices through which we construct and maintain the collective illusion we call reality, as I’ve described it in the past.

There are many ways to frame these issues. In The Reality Illusion I framed them in terms of constructing reality, and I’ve experimented with various other framings since. I currently find the idea of composing experience a good one, and that will be the central theme around which I organize my thinking here.

You compose experience on an ongoing moment-to-moment basis. You filter and select bits and pieces of information from the much richer stream of information in which you are constantly immersed. You combine those bits and pieces with information and structure from your past experience to create your current experience. The kind of life you have — happy or sad, secure or fear-filled, bland or exciting, meaningless or rewarding — may ultimately be determined more by the way you manage that creative process than by the external circumstances you encounter.

Better understanding of the mechanisms you use to compose your experience is an important first step to managing those mechanisms to improve the quality of the experience you compose. I hope this blog will help you reach that better understanding.

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