skill development is characterized not by adding new muscle contractions, but taking away the unnecessary ones. In the context of everyday emotional life, inhibition allows you to make measured responses to stressful events. When a car cuts you off in traffic, there is a flash of excitement in the muscles and heart rate, but the spread of

Thus, pain is a conscious experience created by the brain, not a damaged condition of the body. You can have one without the other.

Graded exposure is the progressive introduction of threatening movements or other stimuli, in the right dosage and timing, which causes the nervous system to become less threatened by the movements. In other words, if you painlessly perform a movement that used to hurt, your nervous system will find that movement less threatening in the future.

Fortunately, because the different body parts work as a team, you can change the way a painful area moves and feels by moving a non-painful area. For example, if your shoulder hurts, it is probably best not to start with a lesson about shoulder circles.

thoughts, perceptions and emotions for what they are — constructions of the brain as opposed to external realities.144 Metacognition implies not just awareness of what goes on in our heads, but also a nonjudgmental attitude. It is the difference between wise self-knowledge and neurotic self-consciousness. Applying this skill in the context of

“Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement.” — Oliver Sacks

it is easier to perceive the shape and movement of the spinal curves and ribs while lying on the floor than standing in space. On your back, you can sense lumbar flexion by feeling the low back press into the floor. In standing, this form of feedback is not available.

The central nervous system is in many ways more plastic and adaptable than the structure of the body. Some structural changes are effectively impossible to make. Bones only change their shape and density over the course of many years, and we are therefore pretty much stuck with the skeletons that we have grown into by the time we are adults. The

Stabilizing the nonmoving parts reduces the variables the brain has to deal with in predicting the consequences of muscle contractions.