Framing Language for Movement (Patreon)

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote that philosophical propositions are like a ladder that must be thrown away after one has climbed it. In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the ladder is not just a metaphor but pedagogy: language and abstract systems may lead us somewhere useful, but ultimately they must be abandoned to arrive at understanding. In Liberation Martial Arts (LMA), a similar insight applies to motor learning. Language, concepts, and instruction may scaffold us toward embodiment, but they cannot substitute for it. They must eventually be discarded—or at least decentered—for the practitioner to move with autonomy. Just as the cup is not water, language is not movement. Language both helps us and fails us. It can guide you to knowledge, but it is not knowledge. It can describe a vibe but can't define it. Words can point at a thing, but it is not the thing. If you attach yourself to the words, you miss the thing.

In the LMA approach, comfort is a precondition for autonomy, and autonomy is emergent and developed, not presumed or imposed. In the early stages of LMA, concepts such as "ballpark" or "scaffold" guide practitioners to approach movement with exploration, not prescription. Yet once embodied, these guides must soften or dissolve. The aim is not fidelity to the scaffold, but to use it as long as it supports Wayfinding—then let go.

The Dao (Way) that can be told is not the eternal Dao (Way). – Dao De Jing

LMA's view of learning as unlearning echoes Wittgenstein's insight that meaning is not fixed but situational, embedded in forms of life. The form of life refers to the complex of practices, behaviors, and cultural meanings that make language intelligible. In LMA, movement is already situated: it arises from lived conditions, environments, and social-historical contexts. The LMAist is not a generic mover in a vacuum, but a living person situated within overlapping systems of oppression, adaptation, and resistance.

When an LMA practitioner steps into a training space, they do not bring only muscles and joints, but the residue of trauma, the imprint of capitalism, the shape of identity, and the necessity of healing. These are their forms of life. Movement can only be understood—and taught—within this embeddedness. As Wittgenstein put it, "to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life." To imagine a movement, then, is to imagine the whole context in which that movement makes sense.

LMA emphasizes exploration over instruction and conditions over commands. Clarity or mastery cannot be delivered from above. Scaffolding, however, reveals its own limits. The point is not to codify truth, but to cultivate perceptual and relational flexibility—to feel one's Way through.

In this view, skill is not the internalization of instruction, but the capacity to act wisely within one's world—to perceive affordances, to sense safety, to adapt with grace. In LMA, this is called Wayfinding. It is a continuous act of attuning, where understanding arises not from naming or replicating, but from dwelling in conditions, perceiving the environment, and letting the body learn through doing. The LMA approach resists totalization and embraces the messy, situated nature of knowledge.

Understanding cannot be owned or imposed—it can only be lived. The ladder or scaffold is only useful insofar as it gets you somewhere. The forms of life are not theoretical—they are the grounds of our behavior.

LMA practitioners do not memorize movements. They inhabit it. They do not idealize skill. They cultivate sensitivity. They do not follow the ladder to the top—they climb down into their own conditions, into their own body, and walk their own Way.

– Sam