March 18, 2009
Although I’m not a traceur myself, but I do receive the American Parkour newsletter. As I’ve mentioned before, I think Parkour has at it’s core some important principles that can just as easily be applied across the spectrum of experience.
In the most recent newsletter, there’s a small article explaining what a practioner can do when a day they’ve planned on devoting to training turns out to be ruined due to bad weather. The full article is here, but the exercise they give sounds like a really good way to integrate the mind and body through the sense of touch. Most body practice is more focused on things like balance and movement, but sensitivity to texture is not often mentioned:
“Look around you, wherever you are and pick the first thing that catches your eye. Look at it and study everything about it. Study the colors, the textures and the little imperfections and imagine how it would feel to touch or hold it. You should feel like your hands are actually touching the object, like when you can really taste a particular food you are imagining.
The above may take a small bit of practice to get the hang of but is well worth the effort.
After having done this touch the object and see how close your imagination was to the real thing. Chances are first, or even tenth time round it wasn’t but keep trying and eventually you will understand how your sensitivity works and after doing this for a while your brain will have built up a multitude of new textures which you will then recognize from sight. This will help your parkour immensely by giving you the ability to understand how object textures and your own body work.
As you touch the object begin to gage your grip to find how much is is too much and too little. This will help you to examine objects in a run more quickly and thoroughly, and the benefits of that are obviously huge.”
Huh. Just came across this in the “browse” links twice in a row today. It seems that this is sort of what I’m doing with ideas. Trying to get a good feel for all of them, so when I contact them later, I am more familiar and have a better idea what to do with them…
Sort of like that parable about the three blind men and the elephant. Just keep dancing around the ISness….
Comment by Ian — February 2, 2010 @ 1:23 pm