Huh, I’m not aware of having deleted that post! I wonder where it went.
FWIW, after teaching a bunch of folk the unbendable arm, I’ve had to revise my impression in that original comment. Telling people the physics helps in a few cases, and seemed to help pretty dramatically in the first few (hence my original comment), but the variance was just way wider than I thought.
(Aside: wanting to acknowledge that the strength of my earlier comment wasn’t in epistemic integrity. It’s part of a communication pattern of mine that I’ve been examining lately.)
My impression is that people actually get to the full unbendable arm more reliably from the firehose imagery. In most cases, describing the physics does not help them find the surprising ease. They might succeed in keeping their arm straight, but it tends to be a struggle.
The firehose thing is not how I do it though! It’s more like, there’s an extension feeling in my limbs. When someone tries to bend my arm, if I’m already focusing on the extension feeling, they just can’t bend it. If it starts to bend a little bit, I reach a little more. No effort against the force. It’s more like I’m trying to reach the far wall — but just a little.
But telling people to reach doesn’t seem to help as much. IME folk tend to reach by bending their spine, which seems to destabilize the whole thing. (Doesn’t have to, but in practice it does.) They also switch from reaching to fighting once the pressure is on.
Things like Alexander Technique seem to help a lot more. Getting them to focus on the horizon and being peripherally aware of the pressure, instead of collapsing their awareness on the struggle at their arm.
Maybe more detail specifically about unbendable arm PCK than most need! But since my earlier comment now looks deceptive to me, I wanted to offer a correction.
Huh, I’m not aware of having deleted that post! I wonder where it went.
FWIW, after teaching a bunch of folk the unbendable arm, I’ve had to revise my impression in that original comment. Telling people the physics helps in a few cases, and seemed to help pretty dramatically in the first few (hence my original comment), but the variance was just way wider than I thought.
(Aside: wanting to acknowledge that the strength of my earlier comment wasn’t in epistemic integrity. It’s part of a communication pattern of mine that I’ve been examining lately.)
My impression is that people actually get to the full unbendable arm more reliably from the firehose imagery. In most cases, describing the physics does not help them find the surprising ease. They might succeed in keeping their arm straight, but it tends to be a struggle.
The firehose thing is not how I do it though! It’s more like, there’s an extension feeling in my limbs. When someone tries to bend my arm, if I’m already focusing on the extension feeling, they just can’t bend it. If it starts to bend a little bit, I reach a little more. No effort against the force. It’s more like I’m trying to reach the far wall — but just a little.
But telling people to reach doesn’t seem to help as much. IME folk tend to reach by bending their spine, which seems to destabilize the whole thing. (Doesn’t have to, but in practice it does.) They also switch from reaching to fighting once the pressure is on.
Things like Alexander Technique seem to help a lot more. Getting them to focus on the horizon and being peripherally aware of the pressure, instead of collapsing their awareness on the struggle at their arm.
Maybe more detail specifically about unbendable arm PCK than most need! But since my earlier comment now looks deceptive to me, I wanted to offer a correction.