Finding wholeness: The primary image and the five lines

(Mobile users press “+” at upper right to see the menu.)

An in-depth look at integrating our whole self through movement. Human sensory knowledge informs our movement. How do we sense our shape, our impulses, our self-image? These movement lessons are for feeling whole and knowing ourselves through movement.

The five lines lessons are about imagining yourself as lines, not as muscles, weight, sinew, ligaments, or anything else. The abstract image helps you know where you are in space more clearly than, “What muscle am I contracting?” The better question is, where am I now, where do I want to go, and how am I going to get there?

This lesson explores the torso as a plane. You become more and more skillful at sensing the weight shift as well as the angle and pressure relative to the limbs.

The limbs are in the air, you tilt in many ways and with different perspectives. It’s a wonderful lesson in clarity and self-awareness.

Moshe says of the five lines:

“Sense the change to the image. If you're not making a change in the image, it's not a change that will stay. It's important to think, to distinguish the intention of what you're doing. This means it is an empty work if you make any old push or effort in the muscles without any connection to the image. If you do a movement, you pay attention to all five cardinal lines.”

(AY338)

I love this lesson. You take an imaginary paintbrush and paint one-inch stripes across your skull and face, filling in the space. By doing this, your awareness of self becomes acute as the contrast between left and right increases. Then you make lines across your face to measure your felt sense of dimensionality. The idea of the five lines is to clarify where you are in space at any moment. This lesson highlights how to do that.

A lesson to lengthen and expand, changing the perception of the limbs connecting to the middle. The bending and unbending of the knee, hip, and ankle are a precursor to the next lesson. Feel how the middle of the back supports the movement of the leg and the lovely flat, unraveled quality to your resting at the end.

Tip: Do not try to straighten the leg. Just unbend a bit. Straightening is not the point, just feel the middle back as you bend.

(AY476)

Before he passed away, my teacher, Dennis Leri, taught a workshop on the five lines called “Introduction to the Primitives,” not in the sense of simplistic, but in the sense of foundational, meaning the ideas upon which the scaffolding of the Method emerges. He says of the five lines:

“Once a pattern has been learned, it can be transferred to other places where it can be adopted. It's not just movement, it's locating yourself in space. It's the image that helps you orient. It's not what you see, it's what enables you to see. It's what is in the background. It's not something static like a clock, it's something in your own nature that emerges as a pattern of action upon which all other actions are predicated.”

This bending lesson looks at a way to sense the joints while connecting to the lines. Find out what this has to do with walking, standing, and reaching. It’s an interesting brain challenge to map the lengths of the lines while moving through space.

It changes the self-image into one of length and power regardless of your shape.

(AY344)

This lesson helps the arms connect to the spine using an image of a circuit through one arm to the opposite leg and hip, looping through the torso back to the opposite arm. Once you sense the idea of the circuit, you move the whole unit.

There is a lot of twisting in this lesson along with some fascinating reorganizing of the upper chest. There are some strong constraints you get to play with as both arms go forward in a twist. You’ll see what I mean. My goodness, how do those shoulders get off the ground? (Hint: Use your ribs!)

If you do nothing else, do this lesson and the next one. The lengthening is amazing. As you perceive your length and your lines, your internal image grows into something tall, elegant, and graceful. The idea is that you are always long, tall, and expanded, even when you’re short and contracted. It’s just a momentary shape, but the lines are always long.

This lesson connects the arms into the trunk in a different way from the previous lesson. Here, you lie on the back and lengthen one arm up and one down. Then, you do a ton of movement of the legs, hips, and spine. There is a lot of tilting and sliding. Some movements are big so be gentle.

As you return to the reference movement of the arms, feel how you move your whole self: the ribs, spine, pelvis, and legs.

This is the amazing lengthening lesson I give to all my students who feel crunchy, compressed, and contracted. If you go very slow and pay attention not to strain or stretch, the reorganizing can be phenomenal.

The connection from the middle to the top and the bottom slowly emerges as one whole line going up and down. The variations in the lengthening and the breathing into the ribs complement the lesson above: 405 Lift elbows, push heels.

Do this lesson whenever you wish to unwind and return to a place of “home” in your self-image.

Tip: The arms are overhead on the floor. If that’s a strain, raise the floor with a blanket. Do not strain your chest, you will only incur pain and fatigue.

(AY468)

Comments from the workshop

Here are some of the thoughts I shared in the workshop. They will give you some background to this rich area of study in the Method. (I particularly like #5, the continuum of perfection.)