The Dance of Inner and Outer Communication
Guided Patterns of Learning for Lived Function
Over the past several days, I have been bringing together patterns of learning that have developed through many years of observation, teaching, personal exploration, and lived experience.
The accompanying diagram reflects an emerging integration of three areas of study that have been central to my educational work:
- Nature and human nature through Feng Shui: exploring the relationships between people, their environments, and the nine life areas through which lived experience unfolds.
- Inner and outer patterns of transitional movement: exploring how the body organizes itself in relationship with gravity, support, balance, movement, and changing circumstances.
- Inner and outer patterns of listening and interpretation: exploring how information is received, sensed, interpreted, and expressed through inner language, communication, behaviour, and choice.
Although these areas have often been presented as separate educational subjects, I have increasingly recognized a common process connecting them.
How do we organize ourselves in response to our experiences, and how much of that organization is habitual rather than consciously recognized?
In functional movement education, a person may have developed familiar ways of shifting weight, finding support, or transitioning from one position to another. These patterns can become so automatic that other possibilities are no longer readily available.
The same question can be explored through inner language, listening, and communication.
A person may respond to a situation through a familiar interpretation without recognizing the process through which that interpretation arose. Their response may feel immediate, natural, or inevitable, even when another possibility exists.
The diagram introduces three interconnected dimensions of lived experience.
The inner process represents how an individual receives information, senses, interprets, and responds to experiences arising within themselves and from their environment.
The orientation of attention explores how particular values, intentions, and life areas may influence that processing, sometimes without conscious recognition.
The nine life areas offer a way to differentiate the contexts in which life unfolds, including Health, Relationships, Community, Career, Knowledge, Past, Future, Wealth, and Fame.
At the centre is a person in nature.
This placement is intentional. A person participates in the natural world and in relationships regardless of whether they consciously recognize the processes influencing their choices.
The nine life areas are not separate compartments of living. They are distinguishable orientations within an interconnected lived experience.
One or two areas may become so dominant that they influence how a person interprets and responds within many others. This may restrict available choices without the individual recognizing the underlying pattern.
The intention is not to establish equal attention to all nine areas or prescribe a correct way of living.
It is to make the organization of experience more available for conscious recognition.
This is also the foundation of Awareness Through Movement learning.
The learner does not have to reproduce the experience the teacher helped create. The learner can begin to recognize how learning happens within their own lived experience.
Through guided patterns, the learner is invited to notice familiar responses, differentiate the processes involved, explore variations, and discover possibilities that may not have been previously recognized.
This emerging educational focus brings movement, communication, inner listening, and life orientation into relationship without requiring them to become the same subject.
It is an exploration of the difference between habitual participation and conscious choice.
How am I participating in the process of my own experience, and can I discover another way?
Renee Lindstrom
@insideawareness
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