1THE METHOD
Movement, Connection, and Play
In my life as an acrobat and movement teacher, I have spent thousands of hours observing the physical shapes and complex movement patterns of the human body. Regardless of the style or discipline, I have found that the foundational qualities and concepts of human movement are the same around the world because we are all governed by the same physical laws.
Over time I have used the scientific method to organize my observations, and through that process I have been able to distill my insights about human movement and connection into the key practices and principles that are featured in this book. After decades of teaching movement to children and adults in dozens of countries, I can say with confidence that the magic ingredients that turn people’s lives upside down can be boiled down to movement, connection, and play. In the next several pages, I will share what it is about this combination that is so powerful and essential for humans to live a full and happy life.
This planet has seen a huge variety of life-forms over the past 3.5 billion years. From single-celled organisms floating in the primordial sea to billions of humans climbing to the top of the food chain with unprecedented dominance, life has evolved a lot. I enjoy looking at life at its extremes—from the big to the small, the seen to the unseen. Human beings have evolved into one of the most unique and complex expressions of life in the known universe. Our bodies have organs that are made of tissues, that are made of cells, that are made of compounds, that are made of atoms, that are made of space, energy, and matter. From the obvious to the subtle, we are thoughts, words, actions, feelings, energy, vibration, and spirit. When analyzing the human experience, it is helpful to understand the many individual layers that make up the whole. When life is lived well these individual parts can be harmonized to maximize our happiness, wholeness, and oneness. If that sounds like a tall order, that’s because it is, but you have your whole life to get better at it, and this book will offer you many different avenues to explore on your way there.
MOVEMENT
Nothing happens until something moves.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
Movement is a natural expression of life. Each day water flows in its natural cycle from one place to another: giant icebergs melt into cold arctic oceans; sunshine evaporates the water back into clouds that rain; mighty rivers bring these water molecules back to the sea where they started their journey. Movement and temperature are different words for the same thing—a way to quantify energy. Take the example of water: At zero degrees Celcius water freezes, and at one hundred degrees it boils. There is an even more extreme temperature discovered by the scientist Lord Kelvin, who developed the Kelvin scale: He calculated a number called absolute zero. At this temperature there is no molecular movement. Absolute zero defines one of the endpoints of movement. At each degree from absolute zero to a sunny beach day, molecules vibrate more and move faster until they reach a range where life and movement coexist. This sweet spot as we know it is roughly between minus 20 degrees and 120 degrees Celsius. Within this range of temperatures, life has the possibility to express and move as it has been doing on Earth for 3.5 billion years.
Movement defines life, and life evolves and adapts to its environments and unique situations. It is therefore important to know how we evolved to understand the movements for which we were designed. For thousands of years, Homo sapiens wandered the world in search of food and shelter like many other animals. We were not top predators until very recently; we were actually preyed upon by many other animals that had bigger muscles, teeth, and claws. However, we did develop an upright posture to see danger or food from farther away. We also developed huge brains and opposable thumbs that, over time, proved to offer us opportunities that other animals had not yet exploited.
As a species we evolved over three million years ago from a common ancestor called Australopithecus Afarensis. Lucy, as she is known, is the world’s most famous early human. She had both ape and human features, including long ape-like arms and an upright posture. She stood about three and a half feet tall with a brain size similar to a modern chimpanzee. How we evolved as a species was based on our environmental pressures and opportunities: by taking advantage of those opportunities we were able to thrive and propagate. We had great diversity in how and where we moved based on the food sources we subsisted on. How we moved ranged from walking, running, and jumping to climbing, swinging, and swimming. Where we moved was all over God’s green and icy earth! Early humans had active lifestyles that supported our health on many levels. We moved constantly to find wild food sources and avoid being eaten ourselves.
Our bodies communicate through movement and touch, and ultimately our senses are more at the core of how we learn about life and the world around us than things like spelling and long division. For the first year of human life there is little to no speech but there are thousands of hours of touch and millions of little movement breakthroughs that eventually culminate in our first steps.
On the macro level, life aligns with the movement and cycles of the sun and moon. The sun’s cycles have directed our circadian rhythm since life began eons ago: Exposure to the sun in the morning tells our brains to produce serotonin, helping us be awake, focused, and happy. As the sun sets, our body temperature lowers and we get a dose of melatonin to help us get ready for dreamland. The moon affects the tides, our emotions, and women’s menstrual cycles. From sunrise to sunset, new moon to full moon, crawling to running, and birth to death, movement is an essential aspect of life.
As complex as the human body is, there are a finite number of bones and angles that those bones are able to achieve. These parameters create the potential for human movement, and this potential can be put on a scale and measured. There are three primary factors that comprise your movement potential: strength, flexibility, and technique. They are the key ingredients that form any movement art. This is explained in more detail in later chapters, but for now they are important factors to know.
Human strength can be compared to the amount of horsepower in a car engine. You can have a powerful engine with exceptionally high horsepower, but if the car is extremely heavy the extra horsepower won’t make you very fast. (Picture Shaquille O’Neal, for example.) On the other hand, you might have a smaller engine with less horsepower, but with an aluminum-frame car you can have a tremendous amount of speed (Bruce Lee, for example) because the car is lightweight. This concept is known as a strength-to-weight ratio.
Flexibility would be the car’s turning radius, or how many degrees the wheels can rotate to make a sharp turn. Imagine your joints as the wheels.
Finally, technique is the art of maneuvering the car through a course without damaging it, using the right amount of power and acceleration. In our bodies, technique is the intelligence to operate the machines we are in. The human body may not be the best at any one thing—swinging, swimming, running, or climbing—but what is amazing about our vehicle is that with very little training we can do a bit of everything.
The coordination of our movement can be attributed to our cerebellum. This movement command center is located behind the top of the brain stem, where the spinal cord meets the brain. It receives information from our sensory organs, spinal cord, and other parts of the brain, then regulates our motor movements. It coordinates our posture, balance, and speech, resulting in smooth and coordinated muscular activity. Although it is a relatively small portion of the brain (about 10 percent by weight), it contains roughly half of the brain’s neurons. We are built to move from our brains to our bodies—this is how we have evolved, and this is the genetic potential we can claim in our lives.
Our design as humans is a recent expression within the animal kingdom and an experimental design at best. The technical term for our most common form of movement is bipedal locomotion. This means our two feet are our main engines for movement. This frees our arms and hands to use tools, high-five our friends, pick fruit, and make housing structures. Our vertical design combined with our heavy heads puts a significant load on our spines. Everything in life has a cost and a benefit, and many of us pay for our upright stance and big brains with stiff backs and sore necks.
Our primate cousins rely on their arms to do more of the heavy lifting to get from point A to point B. They evolved a form of movement called brachiation, meaning their arms are their main engines for movement. This is a fancy way to say that they swing through the trees! Even though we have evolved away from this as our primary movement modality, we still have the joints and genetic memory to swing from the branches, Tarzan style.
Many other animals get by just fine as quadrupeds, meaning their four feet are their main engines for movement. The creatures with this design experience way less lower back pain than we do, but without the same ability to chuck a spear.
Our development of opposable thumbs gave us the ability to make many different tools. In the beginning, early man did not make anything too fancy. We were opportunistic omnivores on a good day, scavengers on a bad one. After a top predator would abandon a kill, we would sneak in and break the bones open with our tools to eat the marrow. The might of our intellect supported us to survive and succeed as a species, but we were far from the most dominant animal on earth. We followed other animals as a source of food and clothing, becoming wanderers and dreamers. Our nomadic lives led us to become generalists: We are proficient at many things, not especially great at any one thing. We move faster than a sloth, but nothing compared to a cheetah. We can out-swim the cheetah, but dolphins would be highly amused by our flailing about in the sea. We can out-climb a dog, but our primate cousins would poke fun at our attempts to maneuver through the jungle canopy. Our adaptation toward generalism has engineered our bodies to get by doing many types of movement.
For there to be movement there has to be force, and where there is force there is energy. The law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another. For instance, chemical energy is converted to kinetic energy when a stick of dynamite explodes from its potential energy form. Much of what we do in AcroYoga and in life is dance with potential and kinetic energy— from static to dynamic, from inhale to exhale. Let’s explore the laws of this energy together.
NEWTON’S LAWS OF MOTION
Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most influential physicists of all time, discovered many natural laws that govern motion. You can think of these laws like the rules of a game. The game is how we move our bodies through life.
First Law: Law of Inertia
An object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity unless acted upon by a force.
This law speaks to the concept of inertia. Inertia is usually discussed with regard to inanimate objects, but it can be applied to humans, too. In AcroYoga there are many static poses and eventually students learn how to transition from one pose to another. This first law teaches us how we control leaning into points of contact to become still and stable, or to co-create movement.
Second Law: F = ma
The force (F) of an object is equal to the mass (m) of that object multiplied by the acceleration (a) of the object.
This second law is one of the most vital to understanding how partners are moved. These variables dictate the amount of force needed to create movement. Acceleration is a change in velocity, and the greater it is, the greater the force of an object will be. The faster you can do push-ups, the more force you will have to lift your partners in AcroYoga. This is why moving quickly is an important part of martial arts and acrobatics. Speed is one of the essential spices in the movement palette of acrobats.
Third Law: Action-Reaction
When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body.
The third law is related to how we interact with the earth and others’ bodies in acrobatics, therapeutics, and yoga. For example, when attempting a handstand, as I push my arms and hands into the floor, the floor exerts an equal and opposite force that travels through my body, helping my body stay inverted over my hands. This is how and why bone alignment with the earth and with one another is vital to finding ease in AcroYoga.
THE CURSE OF MODERN SEDENTARY LIFE
Long before Newton’s time humans knew how to move as it was vital to their survival. Survive we did; thrive and spread around the globe we did too. Around ten thousand years ago humans started a revolution that has affected our health and happiness more than anything (possibly with the exception of smartphones). We began the drastic shift from being hunters and gatherers to being farmers. We learned how to domesticate animals and plants. (Or maybe more accurately, plants and animals began to domesticate us!) Settling down in one geographic area offered us new comforts and opportunities. With farming and raising livestock, our food sources became more abundant and predictable. However, the dense concentration of animals and humans in small spaces made us susceptible to contracting new viruses and illnesses that were never seen in our nomadic past. For all the benefits of having your next meal readily available, there are just as many if not more substantial and unpredictable costs.
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 is the most recent major expression of this modern reality. We’ve taken more and more steps away from our original ways of living; today there are very few humans living as we did in the past. Anthropologists have studied the lives and lifestyles of early hunter-gatherer societies, and the findings stand in stark contrast to the quality of life (or lack thereof) that we have rushed into at the speed of modernization. Consider this excerpt from Captain James Cook’s journal entry about the native Maoris of New Zealand in 1772:
“As there is perhaps no source of disease either critical or chronic, but intemperance and inactivity, it cannot be thought strange that these people enjoy perfect and uninterrupted health: in all our visits to their towns, where young and old, men and women, crowded about us, prompted by the same curiosity that carried us to look at them, we never saw a single person who appeared to have any bodily complaint … a further proof that human nature is here untainted with disease, is the great number of old men that we saw, many of whom, by the loss of their hair and teeth, appeared to be very ancient, yet none of them were decrepit, and though not equal to the young in muscular strength, were not a whit behind them in cheerfulness and vivacity.”
For many of our new technological advances we end up paying a heavy price, oftentimes unknowingly. We went from lives full of movement to lives full of sitting, typing, commuting, and slowly killing the wild parts of us that have been genetically cultivated over millions of years. We have become a domesticated, depressed version of our wild, true selves. Our literal and metaphorical cars have been upgraded with lots of technology, power windows, satellite radios, and so on, but they have lost peak performance on most levels—and they break down much more frequently.
As I write this, more than one billion adults, or 1 in 8 people across the globe, are overweight, and about a third of those adults are clinically obese. These numbers are the cumulative effects of our modern lifestyles. Things have gotten so easy for us that we hardly break a sweat unless we decide to in our artificial jungles—the gym. When we are done with our workouts we walk back to the car, and as luck would have it we got a great parking spot so we didn’t need to walk far. On the ride home, we can drive through any number of places that will give us a 2,000-calorie meal for under $10. By the end of the day, we go to sleep with a caloric surplus that is unnatural and unsustainable for us and the planet. In 2009, rates of obesity in the UK reached nearly a quarter of all the nation’s adults—a fourfold increase in just thirty years. It has become such a concern that the National Health Secretary described childhood obesity as a “national emergency.”
Modern life has changed the movement-loving primate into a caged version of its original self. In a recent study of six thousand adults in the US, 25 percent reported sitting for more than eight hours per day and 45 percent were inactive with little to no exercise all day. Only 3 percent of adults in the study reported sitting for less than four hours per day and being sufficiently active. My guess is they were professional athletes or AcroYogis.
FROM JUNGLES TO GYMS
My love-hate relationship with treadmills is ongoing, but if I had to choose between running on a treadmill or no movement at all, the choice would be easy—I’m running! Any movement is better than none. But, if faced with the choice of running on the treadmill or running outside, I would choose to go outdoors because being in nature offers many more benefits than running in a static indoor environment. Running outside forces you to be alert. What happens if there is a rock on the path? Or even better, what if there’s a snake on the trail, or any of the countless things we cannot predict? A wild environment demands that our minds be present and alert.
Weightlifting can be another great way to move and increase your strength, but each movement practice comes with its benefits and drawbacks. In weightlifting, the drawbacks are that repeated motions with heavy weights can cause repetitive stress injuries over time. Also, many things we do in the gym are seated—a position we already overdo on average. For me, most exercises in the gym are a bit boring and soul-numbing. The benefits are tangible, but what if I could still get the post-workout glow by doing exercises that were super exciting instead? This is one of the many winning combos of AcroYoga.
I still love bench pressing—it’s a go-to for many who work out in gyms. But a way to make it even more rewarding is to bench press a human on your hands! It is much more interesting and requires the complexity of using many stabilizing muscles that are easily missed in most workouts. When your weight giggles and encourages you to do two more reps, there is a decided advantage over lifting dumbbells. We have evolved to work with the chaos of the natural world by adapting and eventually harnessing it; but as a byproduct of our desire to control, gyms have taken us out of our natural movement environment. We can reclaim our old human potential when we move like the wild creatures we once were. It is more fun, too, so once you start you will find a natural motivation to keep pursuing this multidimensional way of playing in your body.
Using the treadmill versus running outside is like doing yoga for a workout versus developing an overall yogic awareness in your life. The physical practice alone is beneficial, but the benefits grow exponentially when you practice all the other aspects together (like non-attachment, mindfulness, meditation, breath control, etc.) You can get more out of your daily movements as you define what your goals are and expand the ways you challenge and support your body’s movement potential.
THE MOVEMENT MIRACLE
If I could choose one remedy for humanity that would have the biggest impact on health and happiness, it would be functional movement. From the moment we are conceived, we grow, pulsate, and move for our whole lives. Many of the most important systems in our bodies function at their best when they are stimulated by movement. Obesity rates, depression, and many other conditions would be greatly reduced by daily doses of activity. Step one is realizing and deciding that movement can be part of our daily lives. From there, we can begin to make simple, impactful changes.
Do you have an elevator where you work? If so, you could take the stairs a few times per week, especially when you are mentally or emotionally off, to get into your body and press the reset button. Could you ride a bike to get your groceries? This has two benefits: first, you are moving, and second, you cannot buy as many things since you have to bring them back on a bike! As you find more daily movements you enjoy, you will unlock a new quality of life.
CONNECTION
You are related to everything alive. You share a common ancestor not just with all other human beings, but with your pets, and even the trees outside your window. Go back far enough and all our grandest of parents were the same cells in the ocean. Stand in the forest and all around you, from the towering trees to the ants crawling underneath your feet, are members of your extended family. Every second you are inhaling oxygen that flows into your blood and keeps your heart pumping.… When you eat other life, be it plants or animals, that life is transformed into the very composites that are your flesh and bones. You are not separate from mother nature. You are a part of it, from the air you breathe to the minerals in your toenails.
—JEVAN PRADAS
We were born because of the brave, sexy steps that our parents took toward each other. Being that we are mammals, we are connected to our mother’s milk and kindness from birth. For many of us, our mother or father or both were there for us—feeding, cleaning, and holding us. As infants we have no concept of self; we just exist in a body—growing, learning, playing, and connecting to our internal world and the world around us. Around eighteen months into life we begin to recognize ourselves in the mirror. This illusion of individuality and separation grows and persists throughout our lives.
There are many plants and animals that are more deeply rooted in the awareness of community than self-identity and ego. Aspen trees often share a single root structure within the same aspen grove, so what appears as one individual tree is actually just part of a bigger underground organism. The way that fish school, birds flock, and ants colonize is an expression of unity, connection, and the natural order of how much of life organizes. As much as we need protein, sugars, and fats, we also crave the deep nourishment of human connection. From these first relationships between infants and caregivers we inevitably expand into our first friendships and become part of our first communities. We have our first fights over our toys being taken from us. We feel fear and loneliness and many of the human emotions that make connection such a key component of our emotional wellness.
As we grow older we learn more about who we are and how our self-knowledge relates to others. Am I a person who likes a lot of space and personal time, or do I crave closeness and intimacy? Where do these desires and potential imbalances come from? In what ways can I solicit my friends and community to support me as I learn who I am and what I need to be fulfilled in life? How can I provide the same gifts to others? We can create and co-create the life we want, and support others to do the same, by engaging with practices that connect us. Without these vital threads we can become depressed, lose our sense of purpose, and suffer many physical effects.
Copyright © 2022 by Jason Nemer
