STUDY WITH ALFONS

„I was amazed to discover how many of my patients told me they could not feel whole areas of their bodies. Sometimes I’d ask them to close their eyes and tell me what I had put into their outstretched hands. Whether it was a car key, a quarter, or a can opener, they often could not even guess what they were holding—their sensory perceptions simply weren’t working.” – excerpt from: Bessel van der Kolk MD, „The Body Keeps the Score”

I was trying to verify this quote. How many people are like this? How many people ask others to close their eyes and put objects into their outstretched hands? And how many people can’t tell a bottle opener from a car key with closed eyes? How big is this problem?

As I see it, using all my senses, in many instances I wouldn’t be able to tell a bottle opener from a fridge magnet, considering in how many shapes, sizes, and colours these things come. Some time ago my mom brought home a pocket sized cat that on closer examination was a nail brush, and another time a pocket sized frog that was secretly a bottle opener. A friend of mine ordered a watch from China that from afar looked like an ordinary, rather clunky looking wrist watch; but its main feature wasn’t to show the time, it was a cigarette lighter.

Interesting question, nonetheless.

I didn’t find relevant studies yet, but I found a study called „Human perception of shape from touch”, Helmholtz Institut, Netherlands, Astrid M. L. Kappers, 2011, which yielded two interesting quotes:

„In actively dealing with objects, both the cuteanous sense (input from receptors in the skin) and the kinesthetic sense (input from receptors located in muscles, tendons, and joints) convey information.”

Technically speaking, I like the accurate description of what Feldenkrais people simply call skin-to-skin and skin-to-tissue and skin-to-bone contact (and any variation thereof). When we touch someone else we can do that to various degrees. For example when I use my hand to touch someone’s arm I can imagine touching their skin, to check the tension of their skin, if it’s soft or hard, dry or moist, hot or cold. Or I could feel deeper into their arm, to get a sense of their muscles and tissues, or I could feel even deeper into their arm, to feel their ulna and radial bone. All this with very little changes to where I put my hand and the amount of pressure I apply – just by changing what I think about and what I’m looking for.

Socially speaking, just by touching someone’s arm, there’s probably just as many, if not more, ways to touch another human. To say something and to receive something by doing so.

I found the second quote, which is concerned with touch or haptic perception as well, even more interesting:

„What the research on after-effects has shown convincingly is that the haptic perception of shape or curvature is not veridical. A flat surface will not always be perceived as flat and conversely, a curved surface might feel as flat. Moreover, this percept changes continuously during the day, as the perception of human subjects will be strongly influenced by everything they touch. A few seconds in contact with an object is already sufficient to cause a change in the perception of the next object. It is even the case that what a hand or finger feels is partially influenced by what the other hand or another finger has touched before.”

This states in clear terms what I knew from my own movement practice, as well as of my practice with working with people: touch is not infallible, not absolute truth, but is influenced by experience, calibration and by the things we touched before. The left hand might find an object to be flat, while the right hand might find the same object to be curved.

The study states that haptic perception research had just started, and a lot has  yet still to be discovered.

Thinking about it.

I have a sweet tooth. I like good pastry. I was born in Vienna, in the middle of Europe, and was always exposed to an abundance of good pastry, cakes, and delicate sweets.

The thing with sweet desserts is that some are almost too sweet to eat. And maybe you can relate to this: you take a bite of a sweet dessert, and find it quite sweet. But then you take a bite from an even sweeter dessert, or you take a sip from a cup of hot chocolate where you dumped way too much sugar into, and suddenly the first dessert, that was quite sweet, doesn’t taste that sweet anymore. Did you ever have such an experience?

Sensory after-effects are common to all senses. Not just touch. Not just vision.

In fact, I reckon that after-effects are common to probably everything we do. If we slouch a lot, the slouched shape will slowly creep into our bones and bend our skeleton. The same goes for excessive exercise: the constant, higher muscle tone will eventually bend the bones, re-shape the skeleton, and obstruct the work of the nervous system, lymphatic system, and whatever else is floating inside the bio-tensegrity network of muscles and tendons. I once met a healthcare practitioner who took this idea even further and said that in her experience constant, long-term high muscle tone can cause organs to swell up and eventually cause them to fail.

Take home point: knowing neutral, being able to feel neutral, and being able to find back to neutral are important concepts to work on and work with in lesson of Somatic Education. Fitness has stretching, we have „finding neutral”. Not only for muscles, but also for the state of the nervous system. And maybe it could be extended to more philosophical viewpoints too.

Today I collected two very different styles of teaching. One is from The Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education, and one from a Physical Therapist.

The Feldenkrais bit is from a live class by Gaby Yaron, one of Moshé Feldenkrais’ original Israeli students. „During the second and third years of the San Francisco Feldenkrais Professional Training Program, 1977 and 1978, Mia Segal and Gaby Yaron shared the teaching of Awareness Through Movement classes two evenings per week. These were exciting classes attended by over 100 people including many training program students and members of the general public.” Says the cover of the textbook.

The following text is my own re-telling of the lesson, and not verbatim from the textbook – as these transcripts were never made available for purchase to the general public and intended for Feldenkrais practitioners only. However, I think my re-telling still is a very close representation of how sentences and ideas were phrased in this series. This lesson from San Francisco Evening Classes, taught by Gabi Yaron, „On the side, turning with a straight arm in an arc” started like this:

„Lie on your back, extend the legs. Arms and hands next to the body. Scan your body, feel how your body is resting. Compare your right and left leg. Same length? How do the hip joints feel, the knees, the breathing, the pelvis on the right and left? Compare ribs, shoulder blades, shoulders. Slowly, roll your head left and right. How far is the left ear from the floor, how far the right ear?

Slowly roll onto your left side, bend the knees, put the right one on top of the left. Now extend both hands in front of you on the floor, right palm on left palm.

Slowly lift your right hand towards the ceiling, follow it with your eyes, allow your head to roll along. Move your hand further behind to the right, as far as it’s possible without effort. Allow your head to roll along and keep looking at your hand. Return the hand. Lift the right hand, look at it, move it behind to the right, see how far you can go. Do not lift your right knee. Feel how you are breathing. Continue, forwards and backwards with the hand. Now lift the hand towards the ceiling, stay there, look at it, lengthen and shorten the arm towards the ceiling. The shoulder-blade lifts when the hand moves upwards to the ceiling. And back again. The shoulder-blade moves along. It lifts from and lowers to the floor. Do not bend the elbow. Only the shoulder-blade lifts and lowers.

[..] Slowly roll onto your back, extend the legs, close the eyes, scan your body. How do the heels lie, the ankles, the knees, the hip joints, the pelvis, the chest, the shoulder-blades, the fact? Do you feel how you are breathing? How is the movement in the rib cage? Does it expand to all sides? Do the small ribs at the waist move? Is there more space in the mouth, in the throat? The nose lets more air flow in. Roll your head to the left and right, how does it roll?”

The class started with a so called „scan”, which was then followed by movement instructions, and ended in another „scan”. In this way students have time and opportunity to observe some of the after-effects of the lessons, and the differences it made.

The second text I’m quoting is from a class by Physical Therapist Jeff Cavaliere, which was recorded on video. The teachings couldn’t be more different, both in style and reach. Unlike the textbook of Gaby Yaron and Mia Segal, Jeff Cavaliere’s video is public and free-to-watch. It’s called „The Official Bench Press Check List”, and has been watched more than 8 million times. Here’s the first few paragraphs of the transcript:

„What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com. Today we’re going to talk about the bench press. Classic exercise. Now, it’s probably one that you’ve done a million times, but you’ve got to make sure you’re doing it right all the time because one bad rep on a bench press could lead to a lot of problems. A lot of times, in your shoulders. Sometimes in your elbow. Sometimes in your wrists. Sometimes in your chest, with a torn pec. You’ve got to make sure you’re doing it right.

So I’ve put together a checklist, and we’re going to go through it step by step and make it really, really simple so we’re making sure you nail each portion of this.

The first thing, when you load the bar, ideally you’re doing it in a cage here. Secondly, you’re putting a clip on the bar for safety.

However, I will point out – as someone that has learned this from experience if you’re training at home – you may not want to use the clips. Why? Because if you get stuck and there’s no one around to spot you, your only option to really get out from under that bar is to dump it and if the clips are on here, you’re not going to be able to do that. So again, not something I advise.I would rather you setup in a rack to do it.

Now, the next thing. This is stupid simple, but look over my shoulder here. What is the placement of the bar in the rack itself? Is it centrally located? Because a lot of times you’ll come up and find them kind of like that. All of a sudden it’s already throwing off your alignment and it’s really easy – again, stupid easy to do – but make sure you do it because it’s important.

[..] The next thing is the chest itself. You can’t bench with a flat chest. You’ve got to get your chest up. So what we do is, we pull our shoulder blades down and back, which again, creates a stable base that I can actually push off of. Same thing as I always talk about. You can’t fire a cannon from a canoe. You don’t want to try and jump from a canoe, or jump from sand. You want to jump from a hard surface. You want to be able to press from a firm surface on the other side. So we pull that together.”

As the title promises Jeff Cavaliere goes through a comprehensive list of things that are important to know for the fitness exercise „the bench press”, and ends in a call to action (purchase from and support the video creator).

At a first glance his teaching style seems to differ from the default Feldenkrais Method style in the following ways:

• easier to read / listen to
• brighter, highly energetic language
• short, expressive sentences mixed with longer, more difficult ones. As in engaging essay writing.
• great use of presentation techniques for multi-modal learning
• makes himself relatable, explains how he has also had to learn this and where he struggled with it
• easier to understand what he’s getting at
• works through an easy to follow list of important points
• mixes in phrases of encouragement

There’s one point very similar to Moshé Feldenkrais:

• Storytelling. Mixing-in personal stories to illustrate and to underline the importance of his points. And to give students a rest, time to integrate what they have just heard or learned. A moment to breath. In his teacher trainings in Amherst and San Francisco, Moshé Feldenkrais used storytelling extensively.

I see moving through extensive movement sequences a bit like Steven Krashen sees extended reading, for the purpose of improving reading and grammar: during extensive reading we might not notice that we are learning new vocabulary, expressions, or grammar. Nevertheless, learning and language acquisition is happening. We might notice only quite a while later when we are suddenly using expressions (or language) we didn’t even know we knew.

I haven’t watched enough of Jeff Cavaliere’s videos (yet) to see how his energetic style holds up in one-on-one sessions, when walking a person through a set of movements, step by step, while also responding to this person’s learning needs. For example if he had a client who cannot feel or control his shoulder movements, and has no concept (or self image) for the movements of his shoulder-blades. Or how Jeff Cavaliere would go about movements that are beyond stretching and strengthening. Teaching how to correctly hold a hammer to hit a nail might be different from teaching how to re-learn to play the violin after an accident that left one hand largely paralysed. Let’s see. I’m very much looking forward to learn more and to further explore his teaching style.

Ok, this is not a master thesis, just my daily blog post. Baby steps. Tomorrow I will try to re-write the Feldenkrais bit. Keep the core concepts of Feldenkrais, and freshen them up with some „Jeff Cavaliere.” To the best of my abilities, that is. This is an exploration how movement instructions can be combined with essay writing, no promises.

„Somatic Movement Education teaches you how to release, lengthen and completely relax habitually contracted muscles.” – quote from a high-end therapy website

Despite my love for reading good diction, I hardly make it through the first few paragraphs of most movement instructions.

My problem is „good diction.” Language that is well formed, instructions that can actually be followed, and lessons that are useful for my own life.

I couldn’t make it past of what I quoted at the beginning of today’s post. Whatever else there is to read on that website, I didn’t get to it. I was thrown off. I had to stop and think about it. And I already spent more than two hours writing and deleting and re-writing and deleting, and trying to finally write something I wouldn’t delete. I’m looking for the culprit, I simmer the can of tomato juice down to a thick broth. That wasn’t the right image. Let me try this: I do gold panning, I pan the gravel to find the nugget:

1. How to release, lengthen and completely relax habitually contracted muscles.
2. How to completely relax habitually contracted muscles.
3. How to completely relax muscles.

There’s just no way to completely relax muscles other than cutting them off from the nervous system, like in an amputation. And even then they will stiffen up and go into Rigor Mortis within a few hours.

In fact, just last week I saw a guy dozing off on a flattened sun lounger next to the pool. A muscular fellow, I guess: three times a week two hours at the gym. He was lying flat on his belly, head slightly turned to a side, a neck like my leg’s quadriceps in its best days. He looked like sleeping, but his legs and arms and fingers were held in a way that were clearly tense. If it was my client my first lesson would be to learn how to lie down without holding that much habitual tension. I wonder how these people sleep at night, with a residual muscle tone greater than what I can show for at the gym. But then, I’m not into workout programs, cocaine and hard stimulants, what do I know about these kind of problems.

I shift my thoughts to think about my friends who are into Yoga and positive thinking. I reason „completely relaxed” must be a figure of speech. A phrase that entails an intentional deviation from ordinary language use in order to produce a rhetorical effect. A compassionate, flowery image to help people wind down and restore, to find their inner goddess and guidance from higher self.

It keeps nagging.

I can’t sugarcoat it. I can’t give it a pass. Call me stubborn, but this will not go down my throat.

Nobody alive ever completely relaxed any of their muscles AND kept them on the body. Ok, I agree, nobody ever teleported, and nobody every competed in a game of Quidditch, and yet we can imagine it, talk about it, and work with it in the form of feelings, inner posture, and reveries. On Dec 14, 2020 a group of BASE jumpers recreated a game of Quidditch from Harry Potter and leaped off a 650ft mountain on broomsticks.

And even if there was a way to completely relax muscles, how could they be lengthened and relaxed at the same time? And released where? Into all that I AM? Released from all assignments?

I don’t know how to overcome that sentence. Maybe it’s not my muscles, maybe it’s my brain that needs to fully relax. Maybe I should head back to that website and register for their classes to find out how.

While the Great Inuit Snow Vocabulary is an urban myth, hundreds of years from now the survivors of The Holecene Extinction will look back at our time and say: „People at that age were so troubled they had more than 100 words to describe pain.”

Poignant, but undeniable, you too will have no difficulty compiling such a list. The pain in my knee was…

„abrupt, acute, agonising, anguishing, beating, bitter, bittersweet, blind, brief, bright-stinging, chronic, cold, considerable, constant, cramping, crippling, cruel, crumpled, cutting, deep, deep-seated, discomforting, distant, distinctive, distressing, dizzyingly intense, drilling, ever-present, excessive, excruciating, explosive, fierce, fleeting, gross, gruelling, haunting, highly localised, hopeless, hot, icy, immediate, ineffable, intense, intolerable, intricate, irritation, itchy, knife-like, knot-like, limp, loud, low-grade, mild, miserable, nagging, numbing, old, pang, permanent, poignant, pricking, pulling, pulsating, real, severe, sharp, sickening, slight, smashing, sore, spasm, squeezing, stabbing, steady, stinging, strain, sudden, sullen, tender, terrible, thrilling, throb, tight, tingle, torment, torture, twinge, unbearable, unceasing, unendurable, unnecessary, unspeakable, in utter pain, waves, weighty, worrisome, wrenching”

How about positive words that describe the quality of physical motion? After all the main reason for having brains is to produce movement, and the main difference between plants and animals is that we can move about freely and can make funny faces. How to google that? „Define graceful movement”?

Maybe I could start with… easy, elegant, enjoyable, graceful, pleasant, smooth, supple … that’s 7 words right there… and then I could jump in to help with negatives: effort-less, un-interrupted, with no jerky movements or stops in between… and add some neutral terms, just to make the list look longer… accelerating, circular, decelerating, fast, slow… a mere 15 words from the top of my head…

Maybe if I hadn’t just jotted this down so swiftly and leisurely, the list could be a bit more refined and polished. After all, a well executed movement can look quite exquisite, stylish, or even flashy.

„Better to open a shop than to curse the darkness”, wrote Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations in 1776. Me too, I want to inspire, not lament. With which positive words for movement can you come up with?

There’s this shoulder lesson, the one that has proven to help people with injured shoulders who seemed to be beyond help, and has proven to help them in record time too. Hands-on, you could say, miracle healing. The kind of lesson that makes people travel for half a day – for a one hour session.

I was teaching a verbal-instructions-only version of the shoulder lesson, in standing, in a One-On-One via Skype, when suddenly the generality of the strategy became apparent to me.

Usually we move our arms, and stabilise our torsos, and this lesson works because we stabilise the arm, and move the torso instead. It’s a bit like ordering food instead of going to the restaurant. While the result seems to be the same – we get food into our stomachs – it’s a very different experience. Especially if you ordered-in during the entirety of the past six months and find yourself in a wonderful restaurant for the first time since the first lockdown.

But even without the anticipation, even if your shoulders are just fine, these kind of movements can make you feel better. They might be worth trying just for the learning experience, the deeper understanding of connections and inner workings.

I’ve seen clearly how the „reversal of proximal and distal”, or whatever you want to call it, can be applied to the hip joints, and how we could include or exclude everything above the pelvis.

I’m trying to get a feeling of how it might be applied to every joint, coming from every side, and to include and exclude any number of joints. What does work, what doesn’t? What does make sense, what doesn’t? What does have meaning, what has not?

„After a few months in my parents’ basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things is dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations. The moment I took my first burning snootful, I understood that this was the drug for me. Speed eliminates all doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit? These are questions for insecure potheads. A speed enthusiast knows that everything he says or does is brilliant.” – from David Sedaris, „Me Talk Pretty One Day”

Coffee, the psychoactive drug and neurotoxin, will hardly be called for what it is, by anyone: a drug. Even though coffee has its dangers, it’s cheap, widely accepted, and purchasable by just about anyone who is willing to drink it.

Contrariwise, my favourite drug is not even a drug, it’s a sports supplement. And contrary to coffee, hardly anyone talks about it. You have probably never heard anyone say „I’m taking Creatine Monohydrate.” If you have ever heard anyone talk about it, they’d probably said something along the lines of „Quite some time ago [decades] I’ve tried it [for a short period of time] but didn’t feel anything. It’s just not for me.”

And yet, Creatine Monohydrate is the single best-selling workout supplement of all time. It has more published human studies than any other supplement in history. It costs around USD 20 per pound (half kilogram). If you take a standard dose of 3–5 grams per day, it will last you around three to four months. It is the most popular nutritional supplement in the United States with approximate annual sales of USD 400 million.

And yet, you have probably not heard of anyone bragging about that scoop of Creapure they had with breakfast yesterday.

I understand that people have different reasons for taking the things they take. We have surprisingly specific, emotional profiles for purchasing, using, and long term consequences. For some people alcohol is the perfect match, for some it’s weed, for some it’s fat, for some it’s sugar, for some it’s cocaine, for others it’s pain killers.

I’m a low risk person who doesn’t like to waste money, easily worries, and is concerned about his health. Creatine Monohydrate fits me like a glove.

Quality Creatine Monohydrate is very stable and almost tasteless. It does not work as a stimulant, and it does neither heighten nor numb my senses. Judging from my feeling alone I wouldn’t know that I have taken any. It just sits there, somewhat chemically transformed, in my skeletal muscle tissue, silently, waiting patiently, doing nothing.

But good heavens. When I choose to do muscular work, just a little bit more than what’s easy, it will kick in. It has that certain punch to it. It’s like a good friend, a guardian angel, „Oh, you just got into a strenuous movement, but don’t worry, I will flatten that out for you.” It makes me able to sit for hours at a time, hunched over my laptop, without feeling sore or tired.  It brings a smile to my face every time I squat up from a chair, or when I push open a heavy door as if it was made from air. Or when I step up a stair. Sometimes I feel like I’m flying up stairs. Or I feel like I could be pushing the watts in the gym like Chris Froome (for 10 seconds at least). It brings my lower back safely through the night and helps me get up in the morning without feeling tight in the back, as if I had never had any lower back troubles. It fuels my muscles like electricity fuels a Tesla Model S when going from 0 to 60 in less than 2 seconds.

We humans like to share our happiness and good experiences. But if you talk about sports supplements, especially Creatine Monohydrate, you will quickly learn that people do not respond friendly, and thus hardly anyone talks about it.

The first rule about Creatine Monohydrate? You don’t talk about Creatine Monohydrate.

In human biology, handedness refers to the faster, more capable, more precise, and preferred hand – also known as the dominant hand. 

The other hand didn’t get a name. It’s simply called the non-dominant hand. Maybe a political choice. If they would call it something like „the underdog”, or „the hand that’s not on the original flag of Saruman the White of Isengard”, questions would arise, and hands would go up. Studies suggest that approximately 90 percent of people are right-handed.

Ocular dominance, sometimes called eye preference or eyedness, is the tendency to prefer visual input from one eye over the other. Studies suggest that approximately 70 percent of people are right-eye dominant. 

I didn’t do a thorough reading of sufficiently many of those studies. I don’t know which country or culture they are talking about. I don’t know the people they looked at.

For the ears it’s called „left ear dominant”, „right ear dominant”, or „no distinct ear preference”. Ear dominance is tightly related to which task it is used for. One study showed that for pitch perception 75 percent of people questioned were left ear dominant. However, „for general listening most people prefer the right ear”, that’s what another study said.

For the legs it’s called footedness or limb dominance. Several studies have shown that humans are typically right dominant for activities requiring mobilization and left dominant for activities requiring postural stabilization and strength. 

We short-hand that to „the moving leg” and „the standing leg”.

Leg preference in babies can be detected from the beginning. One study examined babies’ leg preferences. 78 percent of the babies showed a clear leg preference when standing up from a half-crawl position or from asymmetric four-point kneeling. Moreover, some babies preferred the same lead leg in all pulling-to-stand movements within a few months of acquiring these capabilities. The researchers noted that the preferred leg at this stage may not necessarily be the dominant leg at a later stage. One of the researchers, Dr. Atun-Einy, called to attention: „No effort should be made to influence or intervene in this preference.”

For the following explorations you will need another person. 

Find someone to lie down onto the floor for you. Flat on their backs, for example on a Yoga mat or cozy blanket, with their limbs casually extended.

There might be ways to guess which is their standing leg, the leg they use for activities that require postural stabilization and strength. Paul Newton, Feldenkrais Trainer, in a workshop, summarised the characteristics of a standing leg as follows:

1. The standing leg is more turned-in towards the midline.
   The toes (and the knee) of the standing leg are pointing more towards the ceiling, than the toes (and the knee) of the moving leg.
2. The head is carried more over the standing leg.
   If you look at the imaginary midline, which divides the body into a left and a right side, in lying supine the head is found resting not in the exact middle of the shoulder girdle, but more towards one side. That’s the side of the standing leg.
3. The pelvis tilts easier towards the standing leg.
   Gently place your hands onto the right and left Ilium, the Iliac crest, and with the lightest pressure, in each direction at a time, observe to which side the pelvis is more inclined to roll with ease. That would be towards the hip joint of the standing leg.
4. A push through the foot travels up to the head.
   A gentle, little push from below the foot, to travel up through the foot, up through the ankle, up through the lower leg, up through the knee and the upper leg, into the hip joint. You would observe the response of the rib cage. The side of the standing leg would be less available to side-bending in the rib cage.The push would travel up straight to roll the head and extend the neck.
5. In standing, the shoulder that is shorter and higher.
   Often times that’s the side of the standing-leg.

Then change roles. Next it’s you to lie down on the floor – if you haven’t yet already. We need to play in both rolls, to know thyself.

Then, as a next exploration, or observation, stand in front of each other.

If you’re home alone you might stand in front of a mirror, or a window that’s blackened out by the night. Close your eyes and lift your arms overhead. 

Obviously read the instructions first, then go ahead. 

Close your eyes and lift your arms overhead. Lift your arms as if you would like to reach up with both hands towards the ceiling. But keep your face facing forwards.

Hold that position. With your arms up, up. Freeze like this. Don’t move anymore. We want to see a snapshot of the reaching-up position. We want to see the raw data, how you do it. Not how you correct yourself, not how you think you should do it. To quote Dr. Atun-Einy again: „No effort should be made to influence or intervene in this preference.” We need the truth. At least here, in this lesson. 

Then open your eyes again. Look at the person in front of you.

1. Is one arm closer to the head than the other?
   If you would eyeball the distance, measure the space between each upper arm and the cheek next to it, in other words the space in between the head and each upper arm, on which side is it wider?
2. Is one arm further up towards the ceiling?
   Is one hand, the tip of one middle finger, higher up than the other? And if it is, can you find why? Is it the entire side that’s longer, starting at its foot? Or is it because something in the middle of the body seems to be longer on that side? And does the other side seem to be a little bit contracted, pulled together, like dried fruit? Or is it because there’s some obvious side-bending involved?
3. Is the head in the exact middle of the shoulders?
   Maybe the head is not in the exact middle. Maybe the head is closer to one side than the other?
4. Is one shoulder higher up than the other?
5. Are both arms rotated equally much?
   In which directions are the palms facing? Are they turned inwards, towards the midline, facing each other, or forwards, or somewhere else? Where are the elbows turned to? The shoulders? The shoulder-blades? 

Do you see differences? You should see differences. If not, ask another person to raise their arms for you. Do this with as many people as it takes to see some differences. See how they raise their arms, see how they hold their arms. Don’t correct, don’t intervene, don’t influence. See who they are. See who you are. 

And, while extending your own arms upwards, maybe you can also feel some of the differences.

Then bring the arms down again.

„There are two quite different ways of talking about language. On the one hand, you can talk about its physical aspect, about characteristics that can be measured, this may be called surface structure. On the other hand, there is a part of language that can neither be directly observed nor measured, and that is meaning. We can say that someone is talking loudly or softly, or fast or slowly, without reference to what is being said. We can say that a line of print is five inches wide, without fear that someone will contradict us by saying that we haven’t understood the meaning of the text.” – Frank Smith, Understanding Reading

This lesson might seem to be about actual differences between the left and right side of the body, lateralisation, about which side of the chest, or which leg, is better at what kind of activity. But that’s not the point of this lesson.

This lesson is about improving the ability to observe, more than skilful observing. The ability to observe ourselves (and others) without being triggered, without trying to change or correct what is observed. Without jumping to premature conclusions, and without being tricked to believe in shallow conclusions that exclude meaning.

I see this as an entry point to improving everything else.