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Everything Moves: How Biotensegrity Informs Human Movement
'What a multi-sensory pleasure in learning! I will be a better teacher and better clinician using what I am learning from this book.' Carol M Davis DPT, EdD, MS, FAPTA The emerging science of biotensegrity provides a fresh context for re-thinking our understanding of human movement, but its complexities can be formidable. Bodywork and movement professionals looking for an accessible and relevant guide to the concept and application of biotensegrity need look no further than Everything How biotensegrity informs human movement. In order to work with our own bodies and the bodies of our students, clients and teams most effectively, we need to understand the nature of our human structure. Everything Moves offers the enquiring bodyworker or movement professional, who wants to take their understanding of how to apply biotensegrity in their work to the next level, a practical and relatable guide to the biotensegral nature of our bodies, in which all of the parts are one, yet all are constantly changing. Throughout Everything Moves, concepts and ideas are presented with activities and exercises to make them tangible, accessible and applicable. The material presented is suitable for coaches and movement teachers new to biotensegrity, as well as those with more advanced levels of understanding. Whether your focus is performance, sports, Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, yoga, Pilates, martial arts, or dance, any arena in which bodies move can be informed by Everything Moves!
280 pages, Paperback
Published September 29, 2020
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November 21, 2023
A psychedelic experience!
Not psychedelic in the pop-culture-taking-shrooms-for-a-rocketship-to-the-moon type of 'psychedelics',
but psychedelics as in...
psyche, as in 'soul/mind' and dēloun, as in 'to make visible/to reveal/to shed light'.
Yes, you read that correctly,
this book is in its essence a soul-revealing
read and experience.
No fluffy fluff or whoo-whoo (whatever you may call it),
but rational and palpable experiences that guide you through a process of self-SELF-realisation.
Susan makes an absolutely mind-expanding attempt at capturing the fractality of 'experience',
starting with a breakdown of our dominant assumptions, models and metaphors for reality.
What is your body? Is it a stack of bricks? Is it a machine? Is it a mechanism? Is it a collection of separated parts?
Or perhaps it's none of the above.
-------
Allow me to continue...
(But make haste slowly, especially if this sparks your interest)
Because indeed this entire read is a constant '?' instead of a '.'
And in embracing the 'questioning, empty or beginner's mind',
you find yourself as Susan gently puts it:
"In a charming state of confusion."
The 'Introduction and Chapter 1 are already an entire life's work'.
Here is a quote from page 45 to add tension to my statement:
"Each of our lives is part of a flowing river through time that includes our entire human species, the larger continuum of all living organisms,
and the material continuum of the atomic elements within us...
Life is a continuum of continuums."
Let those words vibrate across your undissected neural network.
-------
But what makes this book even more remarkable...
is that you get to 'touch' these ideas through the tensegrity model and small experiments (or experientials).
NOT just 'think' the ideas in your skull
(major scotoma/blindspot in our educational process),
but TOUCH/EXPERIENCE the ideas through your fingertips.
And this 'necessity' to touch your ideas and experiences,
is something you are losing in a reality of abstraction and dissection.
You are losing your so-called:
'kinesthetic literacy'.
To quote Tom Myers on page 11:
"We must face the challenge of how we educate our children to move and feel in the natural words."
Does tensegrity solve this problem?
Well, it by itself, does not....
...but it is the thing that gets us to the thing.
You would expect nothing less from a model that reveals life in 'verbs/processes/dynamics'.
Susan immediately points out in chapter 1:
"All models are wrong."
-------
And in chapter 2:
"Whatever the model, whatever the metaphor,
hold it lightly and keep an open mind.
It's when we think we know something that the doors of the mind begin to shrink."
So after the first two chapters, you are gently and kindly reminded that it's better to have a mind that seeks better questions,
than a mind that seeks answers.
The first two chapters already made me question everything:
every axiom, every statement, everything I once learned but never questioned for myself.
Including every question.
Are you still following me?
So let's return to the pragmatic and practical.
-------
In the following chapters, Susan makes you go through experiments,
every single one 'marking' a moment in time of insight.
From the small insights that you are pushing the Earth and the Earth is pushing back,
to the bigger insights that 'space' is a function of structure.
It is not the absence of structure, it IS structure.
You are slowly pulled into a 'paradigm shift' that slowly cultivates a more holistic, integrated, interconnected lens.
A paradigm of 'unifying polarity' instead of just 'yes/no',
a paradigm of how the forces around us and within us 'both contribute to a harmonious concatenation' in chapter 5 for example a section starts with:
"The unity that arises from duality".
Are you a part of a whole?
A whole made of parts?
Partly whole?
You live in a world with made-up boundaries.
So, expect your boundaries to be dissolved when you go into the universe of microbial clouds and biomagnetism.
Because, where does your part begin and the rest of the parts end?
Well...
It's not so obvious
and 'the part of being a part' is a big 'part' of it.
So you can completely forget about his whole...(part).
-------
This omnidirectional expansion continues all the way to chapter 11.
A highlight was chapter 8 and the work by Gerald Buckberg,
who in a similar fashion to Susan finds self-similarity across multiple scales in what seems to be 'a self-emerging code of the universe'.
From Fibonacci, to the distant galaxies, to the folding of the first organ in your body.
I will never look at my heart in the same way again.
Again in the words of Susan:
"Life is helical."
Besides that,
I thoroughly enjoyed making models and found myself gobbling down seemingly 'dry' mathematics with the juiciness of...
...a soft-matter strawberry-grape-watermelon fruit-salad.
Yummy.
In the remaining chapters,
Susan keeps 'widening the panorama of your already immense event-horizon of not-knowing',
connecting ancient Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism to our understanding of 'interpenetrating' systems.
But does so in a spiritually 'non-spiritual' way.
Creating traversing links to living organisms (from the Portuguese man-of-war to lichen).
Pointing out the absence of gaps in nature.
Finally, revealing an intimate continuity across space and time.
-------
Clearly, this book is aheaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad of its time.
Like Galileo Galilei, who shattered our world-view of the earth as the center of the universe (example from the book),
Susan shows you a new way of seeing the same thing with the same eyes, differently...
...this book reveals the manyfold hidden dimensions
that make up your seemingly day-to-day mundane experience.
Replace 'mundane' with 'magical'
and you have a map/model that more closely resembles your reality.
-------
More concisely put:
Everything moves,
WILL move everything in YOU
and does so through a psychedelic
'fingertip' feel.
R.
Ps. I practically never write reviews on GoodReads (too lazy like most lurkers), but I had to put my time and energy into this one. So if you are reading this and have any intention of radically shifting your paradigm and embracing a more holistic approach to your physical experience, get this book! N.O.W. (or when you are ready for it).
Pps. I co-created a dedicated Movement school in Amsterdam, called 'Hiddenbody'. We have been using 'EverythingMoves' as a pivotal book in our educational program.
Not psychedelic in the pop-culture-taking-shrooms-for-a-rocketship-to-the-moon type of 'psychedelics',
but psychedelics as in...
psyche, as in 'soul/mind' and dēloun, as in 'to make visible/to reveal/to shed light'.
Yes, you read that correctly,
this book is in its essence a soul-revealing
read and experience.
No fluffy fluff or whoo-whoo (whatever you may call it),
but rational and palpable experiences that guide you through a process of self-SELF-realisation.
Susan makes an absolutely mind-expanding attempt at capturing the fractality of 'experience',
starting with a breakdown of our dominant assumptions, models and metaphors for reality.
What is your body? Is it a stack of bricks? Is it a machine? Is it a mechanism? Is it a collection of separated parts?
Or perhaps it's none of the above.
-------
Allow me to continue...
(But make haste slowly, especially if this sparks your interest)
Because indeed this entire read is a constant '?' instead of a '.'
And in embracing the 'questioning, empty or beginner's mind',
you find yourself as Susan gently puts it:
"In a charming state of confusion."
The 'Introduction and Chapter 1 are already an entire life's work'.
Here is a quote from page 45 to add tension to my statement:
"Each of our lives is part of a flowing river through time that includes our entire human species, the larger continuum of all living organisms,
and the material continuum of the atomic elements within us...
Life is a continuum of continuums."
Let those words vibrate across your undissected neural network.
-------
But what makes this book even more remarkable...
is that you get to 'touch' these ideas through the tensegrity model and small experiments (or experientials).
NOT just 'think' the ideas in your skull
(major scotoma/blindspot in our educational process),
but TOUCH/EXPERIENCE the ideas through your fingertips.
And this 'necessity' to touch your ideas and experiences,
is something you are losing in a reality of abstraction and dissection.
You are losing your so-called:
'kinesthetic literacy'.
To quote Tom Myers on page 11:
"We must face the challenge of how we educate our children to move and feel in the natural words."
Does tensegrity solve this problem?
Well, it by itself, does not....
...but it is the thing that gets us to the thing.
You would expect nothing less from a model that reveals life in 'verbs/processes/dynamics'.
Susan immediately points out in chapter 1:
"All models are wrong."
-------
And in chapter 2:
"Whatever the model, whatever the metaphor,
hold it lightly and keep an open mind.
It's when we think we know something that the doors of the mind begin to shrink."
So after the first two chapters, you are gently and kindly reminded that it's better to have a mind that seeks better questions,
than a mind that seeks answers.
The first two chapters already made me question everything:
every axiom, every statement, everything I once learned but never questioned for myself.
Including every question.
Are you still following me?
So let's return to the pragmatic and practical.
-------
In the following chapters, Susan makes you go through experiments,
every single one 'marking' a moment in time of insight.
From the small insights that you are pushing the Earth and the Earth is pushing back,
to the bigger insights that 'space' is a function of structure.
It is not the absence of structure, it IS structure.
You are slowly pulled into a 'paradigm shift' that slowly cultivates a more holistic, integrated, interconnected lens.
A paradigm of 'unifying polarity' instead of just 'yes/no',
a paradigm of how the forces around us and within us 'both contribute to a harmonious concatenation' in chapter 5 for example a section starts with:
"The unity that arises from duality".
Are you a part of a whole?
A whole made of parts?
Partly whole?
You live in a world with made-up boundaries.
So, expect your boundaries to be dissolved when you go into the universe of microbial clouds and biomagnetism.
Because, where does your part begin and the rest of the parts end?
Well...
It's not so obvious
and 'the part of being a part' is a big 'part' of it.
So you can completely forget about his whole...(part).
-------
This omnidirectional expansion continues all the way to chapter 11.
A highlight was chapter 8 and the work by Gerald Buckberg,
who in a similar fashion to Susan finds self-similarity across multiple scales in what seems to be 'a self-emerging code of the universe'.
From Fibonacci, to the distant galaxies, to the folding of the first organ in your body.
I will never look at my heart in the same way again.
Again in the words of Susan:
"Life is helical."
Besides that,
I thoroughly enjoyed making models and found myself gobbling down seemingly 'dry' mathematics with the juiciness of...
...a soft-matter strawberry-grape-watermelon fruit-salad.
Yummy.
In the remaining chapters,
Susan keeps 'widening the panorama of your already immense event-horizon of not-knowing',
connecting ancient Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism to our understanding of 'interpenetrating' systems.
But does so in a spiritually 'non-spiritual' way.
Creating traversing links to living organisms (from the Portuguese man-of-war to lichen).
Pointing out the absence of gaps in nature.
Finally, revealing an intimate continuity across space and time.
-------
Clearly, this book is aheaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad of its time.
Like Galileo Galilei, who shattered our world-view of the earth as the center of the universe (example from the book),
Susan shows you a new way of seeing the same thing with the same eyes, differently...
...this book reveals the manyfold hidden dimensions
that make up your seemingly day-to-day mundane experience.
Replace 'mundane' with 'magical'
and you have a map/model that more closely resembles your reality.
-------
More concisely put:
Everything moves,
WILL move everything in YOU
and does so through a psychedelic
'fingertip' feel.
R.
Ps. I practically never write reviews on GoodReads (too lazy like most lurkers), but I had to put my time and energy into this one. So if you are reading this and have any intention of radically shifting your paradigm and embracing a more holistic approach to your physical experience, get this book! N.O.W. (or when you are ready for it).
Pps. I co-created a dedicated Movement school in Amsterdam, called 'Hiddenbody'. We have been using 'EverythingMoves' as a pivotal book in our educational program.
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