How to Make Your Own Differentiations

Eventually, you will make up your own differentiations. Here is the basic template:

- Move muscle systems together in their habitual way. In the case of looking over your shoulder, that could be a lot of systems – eyes, neck, shoulder girdle, but also pelvis, pressure of feet on the floor, breath…

- Move one thing differently – cattywumpus, the opposite – from the rest; keep going softly, slowly, gently, until the weirdness melts a bit, or more than a bit. In the looking-over-shoulder example, you could cast your gaze in the opposite direction of your turn… but there are dozens of possibilities.

- Or, just move one part and keep the other softly still – which probably means really small movements. In this example, you might notice that your tongue gets involved and you find a way to convince it to sit things out. Or maybe you curl your toes… see if you can let that go.

- Go back to your habitual grouping and see whether your movement has become smoother.

Most of the time, after differentiating, you'll go back to moving everything together as before, but with an almost inexplicable improvement. Clients say it feels 'cleaner.' Sometimes, though, you discover that parts of you are involved that would be better off resting – they just make more work or more confusion. In those cases, after exploring, you don't put it all back. (Unless you do, in which case don’t ‘work’ to make the curled tongue or involved toes go away – trust that they will in their own sweet time.)