Teacher Hand Student Hand

Last week I wrote about what we can learn from our canine earth mates. This week I want to talk about how we can learn from ourselves what we already know.

Language is a reoccurring theme for me. I see language affecting our consciousness, in the same way, that computer code effects software. It sets the parameters of what is possible. Whatever obstacle we face can be overcome if we can find the precise enough language to reveal all our options. For centuries people looked up at birds and dreamt of flying. To overcome this physical restriction we had to invent planes, jets, rockets, and helicopters. To manifest any of these technologies we first needed to conjure languages around physics, metallurgy, electronics, etc. Through the magic of language, we now live in a world where we feel justified complaining if our transatlantic flight is delayed a few hours. Orville and Wilber Wright would be proud.

Fun as it would be for me to belly flop down this rabbit hole, my purpose here is not to go on a tangent about aerospace technology. I only bring up air travel because if we can overcome the gravitational pull of the earth I have to wonder what other limitations can we shed by updating our language. This brings me to what I want to talk about today, which is the language we use to describe our bodies. More precisely the language we use to describe our ability to do things easier with one side of our body than with the other.

Too often I hear people use words such as their good hand and bad hand. As if one hand went to the gym after volunteering in a soup kitchen, while the other hand stole our money and wasted it on video poker. Could we not come up with a better way to describe our bodies. I think we can. So let's begin by examining what exactly is the difference between our right and left side? We have pretty much the same bone and muscle structure on our left and right side although one side is almost always more developed. In other words, the hardware is the same it is merely the software that differs. We programmed our sides differently. If we used both our side the same way they would be equal.

Of course, we don’t do that. Our left and right sides each have their skills that we have spent years teaching them. There a utility in favoring one side of our body for a particular task. However, when we are being purely utilitarian our learning ceases. We merely find the most efficient means we know to do something and go through the motions of doing it. To transcend this pattern I play with occasionally switching which hands I do what with. This can start small. I brush my teeth, stir a pot, send a text left-handed. While these are simple tasks, it can be quite a humbling practice. I often have to think about my movements establishing new neuromuscular pathways rather than automatically performing these actions.

Often doing this I have to think as to how exactly the other side of my body moves to performs such an action. Doing this practice I started to refer to my different sides as my teacher hand and my student's hand. This reframing makes it easier for my body to distribute the knowledge it already has. If my right side knows how to do a task, then I know how to do that task. Thre no reason why I can't do that same task with another almost identical part of my body. I find engaging in this process is beneficial on multiple levels. It brings the awareness of what we know how to do into skilled areas of the body. This enables us to have a more exact idea of our biomechanics so we can be better support ourselves. It also develops abilities in less dexterous areas of our bodies which will provide us with more movement choice as we develop these areas.

This integration is also helpful to balance our mind-body connection as well. If we do all our task with one side of our body then we are overusing neuromuscular pathways on one side of our body while underusing them on the other. Behaving in such a way makes me think of rush hour traffic where on one side of a divide a bunch of cars are jammed stuck while the other side is empty. If we become too accustomed to only using one side of our body then our mind begins to feels feel like rush hour traffic. One side overused the other side underused. By bringing kinetic knowledge of how we do something into a different side of our bodies we begin to have a more balanced thought flow.

Anthony Bruni