The exercises are something like guided meditations, but unique in my experience, and I never do exercises like that. It's a pity that his work isn't better known*. He died a couple years ago.
* Edit: although HN does not disappoint!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12712532 (Oct 2016)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8721704 (Dec 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8718142 (Dec 2014)
EDIT: the pain relief part seems completely orthogonal to what I was talking about above, but the perception of attention and especially gaps in attention is something that one finds in japanese martial zen...
(for instance, the "3 pwns": the lowest level is to "pwn the sword", where you physically react quickly enough to counter an opponent's action; the intermediate level is to "pwn the technique", where by recognising the start of a technique one can predict where it will end, thus gaining time to counter; the advanced level is to "pwn the spirit", where by recognising where an opponent's attention lies one can predict what techniques they will attempt, thus gaining even more time...)
I listen to them whenever I have trouble sleeping. Inevitably one of two things happens: either I fall asleep, or I end up in an expanded state—and either option is fine with me.
I have the impression that Fehmi was disappointed that he didn't win more people over to becoming serious practitioners. People would resort to his stuff when they were stressed or in pain, but wouldn't necessarily practice it every day.
My father taught me an "instasleep" system that may(?) be related: basically you start distally and work proximally, becoming aware of any tension in body parts and allowing them to relax. When I do it I feel "myself" kind of "diffusing" to meet my environment, like fresh and salt water meeting to form a brackish zone, sometimes with a rocking sensation, and I usually fall asleep well before getting to core muscles. (when I was younger, people used to ask "how can you fall asleep on rocks?" to which I replied "you have to choose the comfortable ones", but it was likely more this technique)
The oddest thing about this technique is the source: although it sounds very Baba Cool, he'd been taught it in Uncle Sam's service.
Expertise through peripheral vision is a pet obsession of mine, this is an almost academic article from that rabbit-hole (pdf; maybe they could have expanded on the dichotomy, though :)
Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 2005 Peripheral Vision: Expertise in Real World Contexts https://www.wellesu.com/10.1177/0170840605053102
Also would like to point out (maybe tangentially I’m afraid,) that in another HN thread, user mjburgess has a dichotomy of his own, the narcissistic/borderline[0]. It seems to be a refinement of Field’s masculine/feminine dichotomy in TFA! (as a bonus, “rhymes” with Aristotelian vice, “geometrically”) That whole thread imho relevant— psychiatry is finally moving on from psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, eye-opening to see ideas as they birth, in the basement of the (also, now “collective”) mind!
EDIT: regarding Dreyfus & Dreyfus, it's interesting to think of expertise in terms of Minsky's Society of Mind: what if there's just as much deliberative choice going on for the expert, but it's no longer perceived at a conscious level? [go far enough along these lines of course, and you arrive at Jayne's ... Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), which is probably a bit too far]
More concretely, can a coach note the differences — why world champions need coaches, not necessarily coaches who were themselves world champions.
>[haha]
mjburgess thread commenter came back with anxiety-depression axis, which seems personally more salient, as I seem to wander into latent conflicts with depressives who seem depressed at the same level that i am anxious (in a particular situation).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41254674
Tangent to the tangent to the tangent [maybe this is the right moment to call it “peripheral”, if not “bounding”]:
Meditating on this rare moment of anger (because of the vitious still in myself) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41225388
That said, any pointers from Altemeyer I should watch out for before I go into a deepdive mapping the NB axis to the DA axis?
(Tangential edit:
inherent vice is imho the most autobiographical (as Sortilège?) of Pynchon, you might enjoy the soundtrack from the adaptation as well, esp. the rewilding of Can
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_(band)#Style
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortilège_(groupe)
https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/enkb0m/in_ptas_in...
)
On coaching and anxiety as overthinking the future: a big part of dealing with horses is to notice when they're overthinking [the danger in] a situation, and focus their concentration upon activity in the here-and-now, one after the other*, but staying with what needs to be done and not leaving space for anxiety about what might happen. This is difficult for them at first, but gets easier and easier with practice. (one of the aims of both european and "western" training is to get a horse to a point where it can go into the equine equivalent of an on guard position, ready for any movement, not because it is excited but because it is relaxed)
[I certainly couldn't arrange all the muscle firings for four legs and a neck to carry both myself and a rider through even a halfway complicated movement, but acting as coach I can help a horse to improve how they do so.]
I've also used this focus on myself: one of the better moments of my fencing career was a bout in which I was down 0-9, and said to myself "I'm obviously choking here; time to change something", and so by concentrating solely on winning precisely each current point ("no past no future") eventually won 15-12.
* compare https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memorand... which argues that if you have a small mind coping with a wide world, a next-state automaton is both necessary and (insofar as it's the best you can do given the size mismatch) sufficient.