Ok well Ive been tagged by Rafe Kelley and Clint Bauer so I guess Id better write something: My names Simon, Im 35 and have been interested (obsessed) with movement, meditation and martial arts for as long as I can remember. I currently live in Canberra, Australia, where I teach movement and meditation and train in BJJ, freestyle wrestling, and a couple of styles of eskrima (Phillipino martial arts) while Im working on finishing off a university degree thats taken me close to 15 years and meandered through physics, mathematics, evolutionary biology, history, religion, biological anthropology and archaeology, traditional Chinese medicine, anatomy, physiology, psychology and neuroscience, health science and rehabilitation, and finally ended up as medical science. My academic studies were constantly interrupted by my habit of disappearing to other continents for years at a time, trying to get to the source of various obscure, exotic or esoteric traditions: over the years Ive been heavily involved in Capoeira Angola, Chinese martial arts (taijiquan, xingyiquan, baguazhang, xinyiliuhequan, and yiquan) Japanese martial arts (jujitsu and Daito ryu), and Muay Thai, and have spent many hundreds of hours researching and exploring somatic disciplines like Yoga, Buddhist and Daoist meditation, Qigong, Feldenkrais, Butoh, some Pilates, and a bit of BMC and Continuum movement. Each tradition is beautiful in its way, but I find that all of them are limited by certain dogmas associated with their original cultural context. I also spent close to 10 years working as a physical therapist, now I much prefer teaching movement and meditation, since these are the two most effective forms of therapy that I know anyway, and if people arent prepared to change the ways they move and what theyre paying attention to then its very difficult to help them. One of my most common problems as a therapist was peoples desire for a fix, whether that was a manual fix or even a movement fix. Virtually no one wants to hear what I have to say: if you have a problem with any part of your body, you need to EXPLORE it!!! Eventually my explorations of movement and meditation - inspired and informed by spending as much time as possible in deep wilderness environments - crystallized into a framework which I started calling ancestral movement: an approach to movement based on principles of evolutionary biology, ethology, biological anthropology and neuroscience. It keeps me entertained, if nothing else! For whatever reason, Im a bit averse to posting vids and pictures of myself doing spectacular moves - although I do appreciate everyone elses - so I wont be posting any, but instead Ill post this little blog I wrote about wrestling in different human and animal societies, with heaps of cool little videos of different animals wrestling, which gives a good idea of my angle on teaching and exploring movement: ancestralmovement/wrestling/ Phew! Id also like to nominate John August Appleton to share an introduction, as someone doing some very interesting and unusual work, and to thank Ido Portal for being the catalyst for this amazing movement - I really had no idea that there were so many of us around the world.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 05:29:01 +0000
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