Sensory Integration Disorders
I took a short workshop on working with Special Education students last week. It got me thinking about how common low-grade Sensory Integration Disorders are. A Sensory Integration Disorder is a developmental problem, meaning it appears as a child ages.
Special Education is constantly redefining and re-categorizing its terms. These categories also have a habit of overlapping. Even highly functional people can show signs of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Asperger syndrome, Attention Deficit Disorder, or my favorite– Learning Disability.
I’ve known quite a few martial artists who were Obsessive about martial arts to the point where they really could not handle someone changing the subject. In some sense, it is people who have an insane ability to limit their focus that can also achieve greatness in a field which requires discipline. Some of them really can not sit still. I myself had no patience for sitting in class and listening to a teacher after age 14.
What was interesting about the workshop is that I realized that there is a significant percentage of people who love martial arts because they have some kind of Sensory Integration Disorder. Martial arts practices make these people feel good!
For instance, many people who have Sensory Integration Disorders like to hold or squeeze things in their hand. Squeezing their hand into a fist (or the knife hand shape) feels good. Holding a difficult stance while the teacher or another student pushes against one’s body, testing “structure and root,” is also the kind of thing that feels good to a person with a Sensory Integration Disorder. Wearing weights, armor, or very particular clothing is also helpful.
Part of what characterizes a Sensory Integration Problem is not being sure where your body is, or what your body is doing. So conditioning exercises which put pressure or impact on the skin and bones actually feel good, they help a person with this problem integrate. Building up muscles may also feel good. As does wrestling, or even getting caught in a football style pileup!
When you think about it, fighting is the art of giving other people a sensory integration problem! I’m not just talking about clocking someone– the head fake, cross hands, the spiral punch, shrinking/expanding– any kind of unexpected or unpredictable movement can cause a sensory integration problem in your opponent. All martial arts also teach us to improve our sensory integration so that we are not “phased” by what ever tricks or surprises are thrown our way.
Push-hands really, when you think about it, is a bunch of games that develop better sensory integration. When you lose at push-hands, especially to a far superior player, it feels like you just floated off balance. Often you can’t really even figure out what happened. Often beginners are so sensorially disoriented that they don’t even notice they have lost!
The Wind (Xun, or third) palm change in Baguazhang uses a particularly unnerving technique to disorient the opponent. We brush very lightly over the surface of our opponent’s skin/body, not usually hard enough to move them, but very quickly covering as much body surface as possible. The effect of these quick light swipes is that it is hard to feel where the opponent is, and that moment of disorientation often effects balance too. It feels like you are fighting a ghost.
The therapeutic aspects of martial arts should be more widely acknowledged. Learning to fight is good.
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Learning to fight is good therapy for life! Great article.
I’ve been immersed in a variety of therapeutic fields. One of my major turn-arounds for folks is to rearrange language. In other words, I’d take any problem and call it a gift, not just for semantic’s sake, but because it’s true: Sensory Integration Problem would be Sensory Integration Gifts.
Then, we use the gifts or develop the gifts appropriately.
I suspect that an initial problem is given to children because the environments of classroom are viually engaging, but very poor at kinesthetic engagement….oh, I could go on….I encouraged my boy to crawl, for example, rather than pushing him to walk.
Again, great article. Nice work learning from that workshop.
I have a pet hypothesis (so far unsubstantiated on my part) that most good martial artists tend to be a little obsessive and also comforted by the orderly environment of a traditional dojo or dojang.
Regardless, very interesting essay.
~BCP
“In some sense, it is people who have an insane ability to limit their focus that can also achieve greatness in a field which requires discipline. Some of them really can not sit still.”
This is funny and insightful. Interestingly, this is also true with many people drawn to meditation. Maybe they can “achieve stillness” for 40 minutes, but the rest of time they tapping their feet on the ground waiting for the bus and living in state of low grade anxiety.
If Daoism has anything to say to the modern IMA teachers and the western vipassana crew, it’s that stillness is allowed, not created or “held.”
The organic and totally natural change that occurs in the nervous system as the result of allowing stillness to emerge over a period of time SEEMS to play some role in the fruition of really high level IMA.
I can’t say more about that, because I haven’t done IMA that long. Nonetheless, it seems to me that if one approached yiquan and nei gong practices purely from a “discipline,” “got to get this done so I can make more money as a caravan guard” attitude, you would go kind of crazy! Who the hell wants to stand still with themselves for an hour or two if the view sponsoring their reality is one of conflict and struggle???
Whether I’m in a struggle with the so-called outside world or my own tendencies, the bottom line is that I’m suffering. If I don’t question that view, practicing things creates a fucked dynamic. I use practice as a vehicle to concentrate or “will” my mind into a kind of tunnel so that, when I practice, I am free of the burden of being who I actually am. Of course who I am comes out “every where else” and “all over everyone else.”
Project idea – interview wives and children of great IMA teachers who discarded the daodejing.
There was an episode of 20/20 or 60 minutes or some similar show that talked about how the U.S. education system now caters to girls, who do better on most every academic measure. Colleges are about 55% female. Boys are more fidgety, restless, etc., and that interferes with a teaching method that requires students sit still for 6 hours at a desk. They showed an innovative school of students with “SID” where they could move around as much as they wanted and test scores went up. Some people are very kinesthetic learners. In the meantime, this problem goes on and office workers are getting carpal tunnel and obese and probably less productive and costly in healthcare and insurance costs. Something is really wrong here. There seems to be a pattern starting with schools.
Yeah, school is something about which Americans don’t agree–so we end up with the most common denominator.
Here is my proscription: More risk, more challenge, more danger, more immediate consequences, more responsibility given directly to students, more art, more movement, and more hard landings. Running a business is mostly F’s and D’s. It takes years of being in business before you get an” A” and even after you get it, a big “F”ing headache is waiting for you when you wake up in the morning, That’s what makes business fun. School should be like that too.
I was very interested to read your application of my workshop to your martial arts work! You make some very apt analogies!
I totally agree with you in terms of martial arts being a great activity for children with learning disorders.. or more specifically, ADHD. I myself have ADHD and this is about where I start losing my train of thought
I agree, school should be more challenging. Up through high school and even some of college, they don’t really push us very much to learn a whole bunch. The curriculum and expectations of students aren’t as high as in other countries, at least not at the public schools I went to. And they hardly teach critical thinking either which is a huge bummer for our society. I kinda wish I was challenged more during my childhood. Oh well, what’s done is done.