One skill you never knew that you didn’t have…pecking like a chicken!
The “walking lesson” referred to in the conversation on the recording wasn’t recorded–it’s AY 501-2, for those who have the books. We’ll record it some day.
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Hard being a chicken. You are not allowed to fly, get your eggs taken away then you get eaten. Free range isn’t all its cracked up to be either because then foxes can get ya. Was very nice lying on the stomach my head was turned much more to the side. That was a result of the previous lesson. Quite difficult to take the chin forward without the neck becoming shortened and squashed. Only way to do it seems if the whole spine lengthens, chest comes forward and shoulders go back. Does that sound like the general idea?
Hi Daniel,
Not a nice image is it? For the era of industrialized chicken production. But perhaps it’s better to be a chicken discontent that a Socrates who doesn’t know how to differentiate his atlas/axis/skull, lengthen his spine, and peck? Didn’t JS Mill say something like that?
Yup, one might try jutting the chin forward and tilting the back of the head back, and shortening the neck, and that would not be the idea. Hence the pecking image of taking the whole head forwards to really get to that grain. And to do that you have to let the whole spine lengthen and that’s a nice discovery!
Now comes a question that often comes with a lesson–is this new trick I’ve found really the movement the lesson is looking for, or have I introduced some other “parasitic” movement?
Try doing it pulling your shoulders back and try doing it leaving your shoulders quiet. Can you find two options here? Spend a little time on each idea. If you do it just once, you may not feel it.
If you keep exploring, you may find that there’s a slightly different option to that of the shoulders back/chest forward one. I don’t know a better way to describe it than to say that the shoulders can rest and not engage, and the spine comes along “like pearls on a chain,” lengthening one vertebra at a time instead of the whole chest going forwards more or less as a unit. You may have to go slowly and start with a very small peck and grow it gradually to find it!