Embodying Experience (forming a personal life) - Stanley Keleman

"Every activity involves movement, and every movement, however gross or subtle, has an organizing process. This organizing process is based on the biological law that muscles contract and that contraction is followed by elongation.

Muscle action has a tidal function……………..Muscle elongates and contracts; it expands and shrinks. This rhythm of expansion can be either small or all-encompassing, a micro-tide or a macro-tide of different muscles states called tonus. In the continuum of muscular movement, there is sometimes more tension, sometimes less. The tide alters but never stops…. All activity, even inhibition, involves this organizing process of movement. An understanding of the organizing process is essential in learning how to do things differently because the muscle tonus can be altered by the neural centers of the synaptic junction of the spinal cord, or through higher brain synaptic junctions.

All sensations, all emotions, all thoughts are, in fact, organized patterns of motion. By altering basic muscular pulsatory waves, people manipulate their emotions or develop physical stress patterns."

The methodology of Formative Psychology teaches individuals how to participate in their embodiment. Through practice, a person learns to grow and form a personal future throughout the different stages of a life. Developing a voluntary relationship between body and cortex, a person invokes bodily attitudes just below awareness. The intent is to generate experience by changing the intensity of these attitudes. The voluntary management of behavior gives personal identity. Innate responses become personal acts. The cornerstone to becoming who we are meant to be is the ability to manage one’s shape and behavior. The purpose of the practice class is to help individuals experience their somatic patterns of organization and to give them personal and social expression.

The 5 Steps:

1. identify a structural pattern in yourself
2. Intensify it by contracting the muscles
3. Then disassemble the contraction.
   Does the assembling and disassembling in steps with slow, deliberate effort.
4. Pause after each step
5. Determine what disappears and appears during the organization. 
   When the figure is repeated over and over in different situations, it becomes a reliable personal pattern.

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