Talking bad

Playing with my head

The image of a glass pane sliding down into my body comes from Moshe Feldenkrais. I took the existing idea and modified it to play extensively with the tongue, jaw and relationships. I don't know if he used the glass pane to get people to feel the difference of the left and right side use but I can come up with no other reason. The training in his method is very experiential. With four years of training I still could not talk about it in a way that that I could make other people see the sense in it.  That may be largely due to shortcomings of my own communication skills and not what was being said.

What I feel to be unexamined about the head is the functional relationship between the left and right side.I am getting a totally new experience of using the musculature of the back of the neck coming from my work with the left eye, face, tongue, anterior throat. It is suggesting to me a reversal of how I think about the pain in my neck. I can now feel a difference in how I can use both sides of the musculature on the posterior side of my cervical spine but that came about from my self study of the anterior structures used in my attempts at communication.

Structured Calisthenics

The difference the way I perceive the left right discrepancy may have a large cultural component. There was an old youtube clip of the Iraqi's doing exercise under US troop guidance.  There is a certain degree of prejudice implied by the clip but they are of course as competent in using their bodies as any average American. The question then occurs to me why do they have such a "foreign" reaction to our calisthenics? My sense is they do not see what I see when I watch the exercise. I would not look as good as the troops but I would actively be searching them for the cultural structured cues to imitate. Like yesterday in the park it feels to be for me a very right side mode activity. I would quite likely look as silly to them doing activities that are Iraqi in origin. I doubt I be able to visually discern the differences that would mark me as a foreigner.

Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception

Thus, it appears that differences in judgment and memory may have their origins in differences in what is actually attended as people view a scene.

http://www.pnas.org/content/102/35/12629

 

Playground differences

Went to the trail today. The playground area was fill of kids on monkey bar type apparatus updated with a different feel than when I was a kid. Bill Cosby had a cute bit on playgrounds. Being a Saturday many parents were there. A dad was pushing a bunch of kids on the thing that goes around and I felt myself shift very much into the right sided mode as if to relate to him and his facial cues. As soon as I felt it I tried shifting into my left sided mode just to get a feel of the differences. The right sided mode almost has a sense of being able to understand commands in a physical sense. In recalling the sensation it is almost like I turned on not in anyway sexual but a heightened sense of how can I cooperate with the activity. The sort of feel I got playing a team sports. I had to be aware of not only my teammates but what the other team was trying to do. Shifting to the left mode seemed to turn it back down a notch. As if I had more of a feel of interest what others were feeling than how to cooperate with what they were doing..

I played a great many sports growing up The old saying "The older I get the better I was" has some truth. Playing with lefthanders always seemed to have a slight different feel. Like they were more independent from the rest of us righthanders. I think they could be as adept as a righthander in reading the cues necessary for sports. It may be just that they were different hand dominant, but going into a very subjective sense they often seemed to have a sense of being  "cooler".

Old link

Painful

The left head, neck and tongue movement picture is still changing.  In a strange way it almost feels like someone else is making the movements. I often play with it long enough that there is quite a bit of pain. I suffer from the illusion that if I keep playing with it long enough I will break through the restricted feeling but I don't know. It is feeling more and more like I have two separate movement images of the head and I was only aware of the right. I identified the movements through the right side image with the left neglected or never developed. I may or may not be correct in my thinking and I am very unsure if there is any benefit for me to continue to play with this. The pain would be a good indicator not to.

The easier paths

I worked with a stroke patient at one facility. The MD had left a gastric enteral feeding tube in place even though he was eating as the patient was not expected to improve much. He began standing with nursing staff at bedside by pulling on the bedside rail. He then worked worked with several of the therapy staff who had not had extensive stroke rehab experience. I did not either but had much more than the other therapists for stroke rehab.  When I started working with him he was very unbalanced, and unable to transfer without two people assisting. After several months of us working together he was able to leave the facility. He was walking a couple hundred feet with a quad cane and was able to manage minor steps up and down stairs. I was never able to help him become fully independent with standing without use of the rail however. It was hit and miss, with me usually giving tactile cues, as he did not need the physical assistance as much as the guidance. Most of the people who assisted him in his daily tasks used the rail to facilitate his transfers for increased safety. There is a debate in rehab with those who a employ a pure "neurologically" based rehab and those who are more generalists in the way they progress patients. The problem of letting a patient cheat and use the rail to stand at first by pulling with their good arm is that they become very good at standing in that pattern. If a rail is not around they can lose the ability to rise their body above their feet.  My feeling if I was a better more experienced therapist I could have helped him more with coming to stand independently as I would have been better at finding the key that would have led to the understanding that he needed.

In my own movements I feel once a efficient moving pattern is established it can become habitual. Once habitual if I want to change what I am doing I have to recognize what I am already doing. How I find what I am doing often is far more challenging than the actual change. The simple act of me looking for another person's right eye I believe established my habitual head postural position. It exists whether or not another person is there for me to relate to.  I was not looking for this 'understanding" of my eye influence on my head but found it more by accident after many years of following other cues provided by studying the works of Moshe Feldenkrais. I believe I did not relate to the left half of people's faces in my past. Now I often consciously look for it first and it allows me to feel the difference between my usual and what I am trying. As I pay attention to the discrepancy, what I usually do becomes clearer in it's artificiality. It is still my normal mode of moving and relating to people by a vast margin..

I have always had the view that I have one tongue and throat with two sides now I feel I have both a left and right tongue and a left and right throat. To be more exact the musculature of my left under tongue and my left anterior throat had no sense of differentiation. I could not access that area to relax what it was doing habitually. Now it feels I have some control and it immediately relates to how I use my posterior head and upper and lower back musculature. At this point I am not able much to change how I usually function as with my former patient my predominate habits are the much easier paths.

Skeletal reorganization

I have spent an inordinate amount of time playing with the left tongue/face head connection and I have progressed very little in terms of a objective discernible difference. However if I take a retrospective look on my subjective perception of what I am feeling there has been a tremendous change. Today I went to a farmers market and was talking to a peddler of a certain ware and he was working hard to sell me his product. I was trying to make the left eye to left eye connection and it feels like it requires a musculoskeletal reorganization to facilitate the connection. It is just not seeing the left eye but to get my left face to mimic/empathize the emotion expressed there needs to be greater muscular range and expression for my whole left side of body. I suspect there are many people who incorporate both sides in normal conversation but I was not one of them. Using the musculature in the left side of my face in this way is a new activity for me. I am not sure exactly what I was expressing in the left half of my face before. My best guess it was a semblance of the right but unable to initiate the actions on their own. My normal of what I feel in my left half of face reminds me of what I said of the girl in this link. Almost like a lower neurological processing of expression.

She appears to be using her the left side and mirroring the movements partially with the right when she talks.

Taking it from my left chin

I often open my mouth without thinking and regret what I say. I think I do it with the right side dominant and the right side perspective. The left side perspective did not exist until very recently. I believe it ties into the function of communication and the left side role was to stay out of the way and support the right side dominance. To put the right side in a slightly dominant position I keep the left side musculature slightly contracted and undefined with the right with greater play and definition. The left side play and perspective did not exist and to maintain the imbalance it involves far more than the jaw. My smaller muscles are supported by the larger musculature like links in a chain the extends far from the point of my left chin. Playing with my left chin position from the left perspective I get strong connections to my posterior neck and lower back. I am not able to maintain the sense of opening the left jaw from the left perspective as most of my muscular habits are from the right side perspective. I can play with it in a very limited range and fatigue quickly compared to my normal right side dominant movements. There is a sense of vulnerability as I feel I can easily hurt and strain muscles that are out of the normal positioning.  It feels like I could much more easily screw up my neck than get any benefit.