Learn your Body A-Z

The BODY A-Z is a primer on bodywork, body attention and awareness. It is an invitation to you, dear reader, to think about these subjects and how they appear in your life.
Feel free to share your experiences and tips on matters of attention.

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What kind of body language are we talking about?

For the purpose of this primer, body language means how your body communicates with you, and you with and in the world. It should be food for thought how integrating this knowledge allows you to align body and mind to create a full experience of reality, which is the basis for good decision-making, integrating your knowledge into daily life and to apply it in difficult or stressful situations so you keep your goal in mind and don’t get hung up on the problems.

It is not about body language in the common sense of the word, e.g. how to interpret it or how you should pose to make a certain. This body language primer aims to make you consider what your body is telling you when you get angry or stressed and how you can use this information to become more of yourself and tap into your unused potential. And to use this energy to support you on your path  rather than you being busy with fighting certain situations or unpleasant experiences, which is mostly the case.

Do words matter?

Yes and no. Words are our way of describing reality. And therefore they connect us to our experience. But in many cases when I try to talk about a specific experience in the body or understanding, language falls short. Nevertheless, I believe it is necessary to put experiences into words as part of making sense of the world we experience.

As a starting point, I use the terminology I learned during my training as a Grinberg Method practitioner in Vienna, Austria. The goal is not to convince you about anything, but to offer a basis for a discussion and a joint development of understanding the human experience and bring the knowledge into our lives for the benefit of everyone.

Please consider this primer a work-in-progress, an exploration on how you can perceive your body. The goal is to maybe find a shared way of describing our realities, but first and foremost for you to come up with your own definitions and how you experience life. So, before you continue, take a deep, conscious breath. It’s not about being right or wrong. It’s about having an experience. Being able to make sense of life – for you, not everyone. To give you new ideas of how you can relate to yourself and others in a way that is less limiting and more open to new experiences.

We often define ourselves by prominent habits or behaviors we have developed over time. I’m a hard worker, one might say. And by a quality that you can be proud of, you miss the moments when you do not want to be a hard worker.

You will find attempts at definitions how I have learned to relate to certain terms in the field of bodywork, body awareness and attention training. And how I use these terms in my work.

I believe it’s necessary to talk about these words as we need words to make sense of the world and our experiences. Many of them are words of everyday use but become technical terms in my work. E.g. seeing fear as an energy in the body that makes you awake and aware of yourself and your surroundings.

No matter if you’ve have experience with body-based approaches or bodywork or not, the idea of this A-Z is to provide food for thought so you can make up your own mind, test, see if it makes you see the world more as it is. When you can let go of your narrative, the way you learned to explain the world to yourself, you will have a different experience of life and see new options, new possibilities and have the chance to make new experiences.

Living in a community, we need a common language. And you can learn to read your body, be your body.

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