Your state is a way of being in a moment in time. It is both an experience, a feeling, and it has a natural expression. You can choose to what degree you allow your state to turn into physical expression, but regardless, it will affect your body. Your breath, posture, and impulses for movement. And so, it follows that if you want to move with ease, you should be in a state of ease. If you want to express strength, you need to feel strong. All qualities start inside, and vice versa, your expression affect your internal state. This is the missing link that I’ve witnessed people forget time and time again. When you miss it, when your state and how you act is in conflict, there is tension, a lack of flow and harmony. To sum up, you’re making things hard for yourself.
A concrete example from my years as a personal trainer: I’ve seen people feeling weak, and then lift weights in order to become strong. The optimal way would be to access a state of strength (every human being alive has some strength to tap into, otherwise they would be dead, and the degree is not important), focus on the feeling of strength, and then allow their movements to be statements of strength. That is operating in a whole other ball park than the former, and I think it’s one of the main reasons it’s been easy for me to build muscles.
Swimming has been harder for me though, because it’s all about trust. I practiced crawling for a whole year when I studied sports, without being able to get a knack for the breathing technique. And I was already an experienced yoga instructor at the time. I was just way out of my comfort zone, and progress of state happens inside the state, at the edge of the comfort zone. When I say progress of state, I mean being able to intentionally access it. Then move from the state while staying i it.
Now, during my master degree in sports psychology, I learnt that there were research done on this. Visualization is a central technique for athletes and other high performers, and researchers had found that it was best to do it by a method called PETTLEP. This golden standard in mental imagery highlights the importance of how the person feels and the degree of the engagement of their senses – it should all be as specific to the goal as possible.
I further went on to study contemporary dance, a field where I would argue that what separate great dancers from good dancers, are those that can carry the quality of the movement in every cell of their body. I didn’t have a dance background, except for 2 times a week for a year when I was 15, and a break dance course during my philosophy studies. Still, I had explored movement from the inside out, mixed martial arts with acrobatics from snowboard and yoga, and it had all become something that got me into the School of New Dance. Now, i got to explore movement qualities daily, and I experienced that activating and maintaining states is highly trainable.
My hope for this website, is to help you access the states that you want to experience and express. I want to share the tools that I’ve gained on my journey, so that you can do it as efficient as possible.
