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Beautiful to watch. What were the simple rules for this particular exercise? Or they emerged as you moved along?

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First we practice a one-way exercise. The right hand of one person, facing down, LEADS the left hand of the other person, facing up. (Lefties make the appropriate adjustments).

Then we put the two (four) hand together. You have to lead with your right (dominant hand) facint down, and follow with your left hand, simulatneously with your partner.

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I could feel this description while watching.

Mesmerizing.

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oh I can see how that would feel...and then you put people sitting in a specific formation and can also see the pattern from the outside - a la "allocentric" mode. if the bodies were one body...

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I assume you're working with beginners in this exercise? Or just people infatuated with mundane mysteriousness.

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Mundane mysteriousness ... the depths of which we could not ponder beforehand.

Send me something of yours?

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If these people are discovering these kinds of practices for the first time, or maybe exploring them again for better understanding, then from their perspective there's nothing mundane about them. My comment about "infatuated with mundane mysteriousness", and perhaps I shouldn't have used the word 'mundane', was intended to shed light on the group of people who become infatuated with, and even addicted, to mysteriousness itself and never explore the nature of the mysteriousness. They just let the mystery hang out there, just out of reach and get high off the idea of something unknown that they choose to perceive as unknowable.

I have nothing to send you. I don't lead retreats or teach anyone. I'm an explorer. "Do not follow where the path may lead. Go Instead where there is no path and leave a trail."

Me and my brothers were doing the follow-the-hands thing in our early teens... three at a time, with our eyes closed, and switching partners to follow without reorienting our hand position. We built enough things together that the balance exercise is second nature. Stacked bricks by throwing and catching them one handed, using peripheral vision to keep track of the bricks. I really wish for your participants to reach some semblance of what I have described.

As a landscaper, primarily a shrub trimmer, I like to learn the individual personalities of the shrubs I take care of. Most of them are still "attached" to the wild entelechy(spelling?) of the plant they were hybridized from. Often I can show them the new entelechy their hybridization gave them and show them how to "cooperate" with the environment they've been placed in since they can't choose to be somewhere else.

So for me the exercises in the clips are mundane. And while I still marvel at the fundamentals beneath the exercises and occasionally bathe in the the awe of the magic, I continue to expand my possibilities rather than be awestruck by the simple applications.

I have a question for you. Could you direct me to something that explains how relations make things, as you and a few others have mentioned in passing as proof that relations are primary. I'm still skeptical.

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Beautiful comment, thank-you! I only took up this kind of "work" after 33 years in the landscape design-build industry. I liked your phrasing of mundane mysteriousness ... I think it did capture what we were playing with. We were also working with soft focus and a way of attending that affords the mundane to become mysterious and as such, pleasurable.

In answer to your question, I would say that experience is primary, relations make experience possible. Here is a rather long winded (but maybe helpful) essay

https://open.substack.com/pub/bonnittaroy/p/the-topology-of-process-relations?r=108vl&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

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Beautiful! This is akin to what we do in the PatternDynamics workshop when embodying the Dynamics pattern.

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