Zhan Zhuang and Neurospeak

The book, Neurospeak, by Robert Masters, is suggested reading to accompany my previous blogpost, Zhan Zhuang Connections 101. Neurospeak may be considered a method to introduce you to feeling inside your body, to feeling kinesthetically, through reading.

Neurospeak is not a book about Zhan Zhuang specifically. However, if you are having difficulty getting started with feeling kinesthetically in your Zhan Zhuang practice, then what you experience in reading Neurospeak may give you a sense of what's possible.

You can read the book's Contents as well as Chapter 1 online to get an idea of his method. Chapter 1 also provides a more finely tuned explanation of what I was trying to relay in the Zhan Zhuang Connections 101 exercises.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have only read the book once and this was a few years ago. I remember that after reading a chapter, I did have a heightened sense of feeling awareness of the particular part of the body. Reading, as instructed, did produce the effect that the author claimed it would.

Over the years, I have listened to a wide range of audio recordings in Wujifa class, some of them vaguely resembling a reading of Neurospeak-like material. After hearing these recordings and after reading Neurospeak, I often wondered how my Zhan Zhuang practice might be influenced if I were to listen to a self-produced recording of a chapter of Neurospeak? (No commercial recordings exist that I know of.)

And too, I wondered if the Neurospeak method could be applied specifically to Zhan Zhuang as a temporary or occasionally used beginning training aid. Where Neurospeak generally focuses on specific body parts, applying the Neurospeak method to Zhan Zhuang would need to focus on building connections or on developing the feeling throughout the entire body.