Steady Gaze and Movement Diversity (Patreon)

• If you’re new to LMA, start with our table of contents

Find a fixed object or reference point to lock your gaze on. Ideally, it should be around your chest level. The aim of this movement activity is to keep your gaze steady while moving your body. Keeping a steady gaze is not a static activity but a dynamic one. Steady gaze during movement diversity is foundational to LMA games.

Move side to side, forward and back, diagonally, and up and down. Turn and rotate. Challenge your ability to maintain a steady gaze while moving your body and, in turn, challenge your ability to move your body while maintaining a steady gaze. Your gaze informs, constrains, and frees your movements, and your movements inform, constrain, and free your gaze. This is LMA's perceive-move-perceive loop.

Neck swivel and trunk rotation

Since you can't swivel your head in a full circle but only a semicircle, during deep trunk rotations, you'll have to swivel your head the other way to fix your gaze on the target again. Swiveling your head also gives your trunk slack to rotate. If you think of yourself as a tree, the crown, trunk, and roots mutually restrict and free each other. The crown is the highest point with the most ability to swivel, which gives our eyes a wide field of vision.

Tracking a target doesn't mean keeping both eyes fixed on it; it can also mean observing from the corner of one eye. The ability to swivel our crown and use the corner of our eyes combined with our peripheral vision gives us incredible perception. It's not that we don't maximize our brain; we don't maximize our perception.

Alignment

When the trunk, roots, and limbs move together, you create alignment—since the crown can swivel, you don't always need it for alignment. The opposite of alignment is shear force. Shear forces are unaligned but parallel forces acting on a joint. Being unaligned means that one force is going in one direction, and another force is going in the other direction, cleaving the joint in half. Think of how you tear a piece of paper, pulling in opposite directions. The paper tears as a result of shear forces.

Wayfinding

Notice that when I rotate and turn my back to the target, I return back to the starting position. When you lose sight of your target, it's better to retrace your steps than completely turn yourself around. Generally, when you lose someone, returning to where you last saw them is better than getting turned around. This is similar to using the back button on your browser or backing up to get a better view. When in doubt, backtrack rather than blindly trudging forward.

Steady

In LMA, "steady" means steady gaze and breath. For this activity, steady your gaze and breath and diversify your movements.

– Sam