"The lover can see, and the knowledgeable."
—Annie Dillard, "Seeing," Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

24 September 2008

sweat & the biology of bliss

click here for some reading on proprioception and mirror neurons. It is an excerpt from the book The Athlete's Way: Sweat and the Biology of Bliss by Christopher Bergland (left) and provides a good explanation of how our bodies and brains help us understand each other's movements, increasing our sense of muscular empathy (our ability to sense how and what others are feeling). This information is helpful for learning yoga itself as well as for understanding why Dr. Bland and I work at putting fitness yoga and life drawing together.

The more you become aware of how your body feels in all kinds of movements and situations, the more aware you become while observing others' movments. In turn, you get better and more refined with your movements, yoga poses, gestures--and ability to see the model; turn his/her poses into felt responses on the paper; draw with your whole body not just your fingers; and choreograph your hand and eye movements to occur nearly simultaneously.

How to make use of this information is simply to 1) pay attention to how your body feels, 2) when you are watching others in a yoga pose or looking at the model in a pose, imagine in your mind/body what that pose feels like.

When you imagine making a particular movement for yourself, you shift the pose/gesture from being an external, removed, "seen" image to an internal, connected, "felt" sensation. The latter is what gives you the ability to refine yoga poses, get better at life drawing, and become more sensitive and empathic to what is happening in and around you.

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