Session 1 Transcript
Asia Shcherbakova 00:01 Thank you.
Marta 00:02 I’ll actually ask if it has something to do something with Gurdjieff.
Asia Shcherbakova 00:06 Not directly. Gurdjieff, yes, I’m familiar with his work. I wouldn’t say directly, but, you know, if you feel a parallel, maybe there is a parallel. Who knows? Like, for example…
Marta 00:19 It’s very precise.
Asia Shcherbakova 00:20 Well, he’s very precise, but as you will notice in Baseworks, what’s very, very specific in Baseworks is that we work with contraction, like, all the time. So it’s not so there is a spatial element. Yeah, so it has to be precise, like not like this, not like this, exactly like this. But there’s always contractions spread, draw the shoulders down, pull away. And this combination of spatial and contraction is what makes it unique. And this is not something that you can find in Gurdjieff’s work. But anyway, we’ll go into it. But at the same time, the spatial aspect of it, yes, maybe there are parallels with Gurdjieff, maybe with Pilates as well. with a lot of practices.
Patrick Oancia 01:01 We get into it.
Asia Shcherbakova 01:02 And with ballet, by the way, too, I think people trained in classical ballet, the spatial aspects of Baseworks will be very, very easy. But then the contraction part, this is where it gets a little bit different.
Patrick Oancia 01:16 Thank you.
Asia Shcherbakova 01:17 Thank you.
Marta 01:20 I’m Marta, and apologies for my latest I got Google Maps coming from Formal.
Patrick Oancia 01:32 Cornwall? Where’s that? Ontario. Jesus. You come from Cornwall? Oh my God. Really? Are you coming from Cornwall every week? Well, that’s fantastic. Thank you for enrolling.
Marta 01:48 This approach from what I’ve seen online makes sense to me. Trying to give background here in a way is one of my least favorite things because I’ve done a lot of weird things. So classical ballet training. And then I was a theatrical stage fan. So I carried heavy things and I was the only woman at that point doing my job. and so I learned how to carry things in ways that were not necessarily supported. It was a carrier dye, so I’ve got some of that in my shoulders. I shifted, trained for massage therapists, and have spent quite a long time exploring various movements, various somatic approaches to helping the body and the person in the body make friends. And I hesitate to say this because it always sounds bigger than it is, but I remember that ancestral feeling.
Patrick Oancia 03:09 Every what? I’m just wondering what the, there was one thing I’m thinking, human design? Is that? No, I have been… Was it something? No, there’s something else. It was a human design or there was something which has to do with… with a friend of mine in Japan was doing this. Anyway, if it comes to my mind, I’ll, yeah.
Marta 03:45
- I often find myself, I’m not gonna say I had, ‘cause that’s not really what I mean, but I often find myself in the outlier. I will be making observations that then will be, someone will figure out how to quantify it. The lovely thing that I’m noticing about this so far is that this isn’t very much what my body is doing. And I’m really looking forward to knowing how it has to figure it out. It’s lovely just to be around me as a student.
Patrick Oancia 04:26 Thank you. Thank you.
Marta 04:30 Cornwall is very cool. I was telling you, I’m very shocked. I had a talk. I have a friend who goes to Cornwall to see a naturopath. I’m like, what? She’s like, yeah, she’s the best naturopath. I’ve never. My sister lives in Moose Creek. And yeah, so it’s very, I’m like, what’s going on? That’s an industrial town until the mid-2000s and the factories shut down and what has filled in the gaps is this glorious explosion of difference in so many ways. You can’t get a lot of pressure unless you breathe. It’s amazing. It’s a strange thing.
James 05:30 I’m James. I am probably the last person who signed up because I signed up at least three days ago, the last day. I only discovered maybe a week ago, eight days ago. So many things I suppose that I could say. I think the easiest way to describe it is that I’ve played a lot of sports and all the way through high school the nickname was Moose. Which means that, you know, it’s kind of self-evident. It means that I use a lot of the bigger muscles. I think I only discovered this in the last couple of months. That it’s appropriate, it was an appropriate name that I didn’t think of at the time, because the way a moose goes through the woods, this massive body just sort of brushing everything aside, is kind of the way I played all the sports.
Marta 06:45 It was using the, you know,
James 06:47 I got massive quadriceps, enormous to be compared to my caustic turkeys when I was biking. So I used these massive muscles and never discovered my core. Never discovered all of the stabilizers. Never discovered all of the smaller muscles. As pain starts to set in from various sports injuries, I discovered I need those illnesses along the way, the balance is in the skin and the skin is interesting and a lot of things. I think the course is very important for me from an anti-aging perspective. On the other side, am I an actor and a writer, or am I a writer and an actor does? The existential question is, is someone like a guy who sits at a desk and types, or is somebody who lives in his body? I think the course has both a very basic human side to it and then it is probably also reaching on an artistic side. and I’m doing somatic therapy, I’ve been working on primary reflexes, which means I’m rewiring my body. At the same time as I’m rewiring, it seems to be a good idea to do this work so that I can rewire it to the right muscles at the same time. and I actually spoke with my therapist. She looked at your program and thought it was very similar to what she did in yoga therapy training. So she was like, yeah, I don’t know. Sometimes you think that we just jump in and it’s a good time.
Asia Shcherbakova 08:42 Thank you. Okay, so I’ll say a couple of words about myself. So my name is Asha, it is spelled Asia, but Asha is closer to how it is pronounced. So I am one of the co-developers of BaseWorks. We are the core team. Patrick is the founder, so we’ll maybe say a couple of words later. And I am a co-developer and I have a background in science. I’m a neuroscientist. I still have my ongoing research on the side, but BaseWorks is my primary scientific occupation. And what I think it’s also what’s interesting about BaseWorks is that nothing what you’re going to practice was actually developed based on anything coming from neuroscience. I joined the company about 10 years ago and my job was to explain what’s happening. Because prior to that for another over 10 years the method was developed through this process Which we refer to it as iterative refinement because the movements you will see what we’ll do squats and planks You know things like that just holding your arms out the movements themselves. They’re very simple You can find them anywhere But the difference is how you do them and all these small details and all those small details and these precise details of how we do they evolved through this process of trying to make the movement. - Self-introduction. - Yeah, I know, but that’s part of my self-introduction.
Patrick Oancia 10:10
- She likes to get into the content before she introduces herself.
Asia Shcherbakova 10:13
- Yes, yes, because that is like a very, very important part of introduction. - Who are you? - Yes.
Marta 10:18
- Yeah, exactly, who are you?
Asia Shcherbakova 10:20
- So I’m a scientist, and this is why my introduction sounds like this. Anyway, so the key word is communicability of movement. How do we explain movement, right? Everybody who has worked with their body tried especially to teach somebody, explain somebody, you know, there is a barrier, right? Why are you here? Why are you here? Well, I’m because I’m teaching this morning.
Patrick Oancia 10:42 Why are you here?
Asia Shcherbakova 10:43 Anyway, yeah, so basically my job in BaseWorks is to understand it, okay? So this course is practical, so we will mostly be focusing on the practical work and we’ll later talk a little bit about the forum. I really like to go see, I want to talk about the science of Baseworks, but it will take too much time. So ideally all the science should go into the forum. So again, personally, because I come from a scientific background for the first like maybe 30 years of my life, I was the archetypal scientist who just sits and does kind of desk work and experiments and Baseworks was for me my entry into understanding the body actually both from the experimental perspective but also the scientific perspective because I just I felt like I fundamentally don’t understand something about training right so I can do I can go to classes and the teacher will not explain me what I need to explain I don’t really understand what they mean and I try I ask ask and they say well go to some yoga so that understand your body or something like that so I encountered Baseworks from this need to actually understand my body and then after I started doing base works retrospectively I understood that the way neuroscience is taught is also not explaining anything about movement and movement and not just the body but how the brain controls movement is such a complex topic and in textbooks it’s presented from some pathological perspective like what can go wrong in conditions like Parkinson’s disease and something like that which is of course important but actually if you talk to a neuroscientist even movement neuroscientists they have a very limited understanding of what normal experience of movement actually is so for me Baseworks is also my medium of trying to kind of rewire how I understand science of movement as well yeah maybe that’s it
Patrick Oancia 12:46 Yeah, so, yeah, I, I, Asha’s very passionate about really diving into the, and this is, we’re going to have plenty of that, but she’s also, like, if I don’t reel her in, she’ll take off, and we’re never going to get past the introduction, so bear with me sometimes. I’m the founder of Baseworks, and this was, I developed BaseWorks primarily out of the experiences that I had, a couple different perspectives, from the experiences I had dealing with injuries. And another thing was related to the perceptual outcomes I had from committing to practice, any kind of physical practice. So what was important to me was to try to quantify these two things in a way which made sense practically, that could be shared with other people in such a way that people could get something out of the method itself and or transfer what they learn here across to other stuff. That’s the very, very important thing for me, because although the method itself is an exclusive body of work that can be just focused on exclusively and entirely, I really encourage everybody to transfer what they learn here to other domains of what they’re doing. So that can be physical, that can be cognitive, that can be experiential, that can be insight-based. And I would never suggest how it can be transferred to anybody. So I practiced a lot of different things in my life. I was a competitive athlete for many years. I was a long time practicing yoga and martial arts all through the 80s and 90s and 2000s, early 2000s. continuing to do everything related to the athletic modalities that I was interested in doing, particularly backcountry snowboarding, skateboarding, endurance-based athletics like running and cycling. Now I’m looking at those things in a different light because of the work that I’ve done in developing BaseWorks. But the injuries for me were one thing that I was very interested about because the injuries that derived really, and I can say, not just from athletics, but a lot of them came up through these discipline-based practices like martial arts and yoga. as a modern interpretation of yoga would be that it’s for health and for gaining altitude on videosyncrasies of personality or however else you want to interpret the philosophy, for me it never meant that. The teachers that I had were actually very strict and a lot of the yoga I did was in Japan and India with and it wasn’t it was based on very hard practice and and rigid and not at all it didn’t fall into the category of well a wellness based activity I it certainly wasn’t considered a wellness practice at that time the realizations that I got from my yoga and martial arts practice were great but I also got a lot of really fucking gnarly injuries and medial meniscus tears herniations in my neck and my spine i was doing very advanced yoga so there was nobody at that time um similar to that of what’s happening now in in yoga and martial arts and sports physiology that people are looking a lot more at form and technique and and the approach and individual condition backed up against other stuff to moderate how you would actually approach any discipline to to make it more sustainable back then there was nothing like that not even in sports physiology i would say to to the extent that it is now. Because I also follow very carefully what happens with sports physiology. I’m a big fan of cycling. And I follow a lot of the training regimes for the top pro teams in the world that are doing really, really rigorous training to be able to get through a season of hardcore bicycle racing. And a lot of what’s being done is, it’s very, very interesting. And it’s comparable to how I wanted to approach the physical aspects of what we’ll be practicing together in the method. So there’s a lot more I could say about my background. But another thing that really influenced me in the development of BaseWorks was trying to get people to understand what is most appropriate for them at any point in time. And that’s something we’re going to be going over and over and over again here in the study group. There’s lots of things that we do that you’ll see later that the focus is on moderation. What inspired me was to develop this on the basis of the idea that we’re all very different and we come from very, very uniquely different backgrounds. Our diets may be different, our sleeping patterns are different. So no, they can’t be a kind of a homogenized approach to finding the best way to practice, if that makes sense. We can start to align the trajectory at some point. The most important thing that I want to transmit, and this is my life work, is the idea that moderation is at the forefront of anything you do and physical ability and progress is just the byproduct of the amount you want to commit to it. And we are not about, at this stage, trying to get to a certain level and understanding how you’re going to be able to approach doing the forms and Baseworks, because they can be approached on various different physical and perceptual levels. But it’s much more about how to understand how to enter the practice that we’re doing right now based on your current condition. That would be today, your current condition today. When you’re practicing at home, your current condition at the time that you’re doing it at home. And then the subsequent sessions that we have together here in the platform, in the study group. So, that’s how I came to be the founder of BaseWorks. A little bit of our history, just so, because we talk like a married couple because we are married. I hired her when we were not romantically involved as a research associate in Tokyo because we met in Japan and she became a student at our studio. But we were first meeting out of the context of that. We met a few times and we talked and she told me she was a neuroscientist and we started to discuss movement and the approach to movement. and then I explained what I was doing and she became very interested. So I said, why don’t you come and practice with us at our studio? And I introduced her to my business partner, Satoko, who’s also our sort of co-team developer. She’s taking an extended break right now to do a doctorate in physical therapy in the United States.
Asia Shcherbakova 20:34 But you can see her in the videos.
Patrick Oancia 20:36 You can see her in the videos. She’s Satoko in a lot of the videos. Satoko and I worked together extensively on this project before Asha showed up. So Satoko and I were together working on this since about 2007. But Asha joined in 2015, end of 2015. So I introduced her to Satoko. Satoko got her a pass to come to the studio. She started practicing, and then we had a discussion after two weeks of her practice, and I just realized, okay, well, we need a resident neuroscientist, because it’s very important for me to have this explained within the context of the natural sciences. Because what I was trying to do with it was particularly, and this is also the forefront of the method, and this is something I really want to be clear about from the start, is that there is no deep, ambiguous, philosophical backdrop to what’s going on here. It’s just purely experiential. and we’re trying to make that as clear as possible as we go through. Even if it may not seem that clear right now, hopefully that becomes clear. Therefore, I wanted to go the route not of metaphysics, but science. So for me, it was very important that I tried to understand why my commitment to these physical practices was changing the way that I was communicating with people or developing relationships or having a different perspective on nature. So there’s all these existential questions that were coming up that I could point to only two things. One was philosophy, and the other one was biology, which is why I’m interested. I’m also very interested in philosophy, but philosophy is ambiguous, and what I wanted to understand was why physiologically these things were happening to me. So I asked her, and she said, oh, this is very interesting. We started talking. I said, oh, okay, so you want to take a pay cut and come and work for us as a research associate because you’re a scientist. And she said, yes. So she quit her job at a business consultancy in Tokyo, big pay cut, and came to work full-time for us. And her job was to reverse engineer everything that I’d done from the perspective of my layperson’s position in this development so that it made sense within the context of current applications, particularly motor learning and sensory motor learning. So there’s a deep scientific part of it that we’re trying to explore together. But then there’s also the practical part. So irrespective of whether you’re interested in sensory motor learning or not, there’s a very practical outcome with this too, which is connected to perception, and we hope that helps. So after some time working together, we became romantically involved. It was just a no-brainer. I thought that we had too much in common than not, and we both agreed that we could probably work together, and it’s been over 10 years, and we’ve been working together with not so many problems. Pretty harmoniously. Yeah, it’s not always easy to work with your partner, but it worked for us just because of our interests really aligned outside also the context of the work we do together there was many things that that um that were aligning in our interests that that brought us down this path to be romantically involved too so and one of the reasons why we’re in canada the main reason why we’re in canada is because you might have seen on our website that at the start of the pandemic the japanese government mandate or directives to the public were to stop going to in-person activities. So we had our studio for almost 20 years in Tokyo, where BaseWorks was developed. It was a flagship and there was thousands of students coming every day, seven days a week, all day, every day. We had classes from 6:50 or 6:30 a.m. right through to 10 p.m. every night. A body of… There was a hundred…
Asia Shcherbakova 24:46 Not to stop, the same as a dollar.
Patrick Oancia 24:49 No, not completely developed, baked. What we’re doing with you is a transmission of a body of work that’s been baking, cooking, and developing for 20 years. I’ve been tracking you for about 10 years. Well, great. So the reality of the pandemic, and we had a big overhead in Tokyo. We had a studio in one of the nicest neighborhoods of Tokyo, and there was a massive overhead, and progressively students stopped coming, even though we tried to initiate some sort of hygiene-based masks and also sanitization. We did a lot. We get infrared lights during the night, and we were like turning it, like we’d jump out of the room and we’d plug the extension in, and there’d be the infrared lights, like baking the room while we weren’t there at night. - Ultraviolet. - Ultraviolet, right, yeah, ultraviolet, yeah. And they were dangerous too. We were buying these ultraviolet lights off of Amazon from China, and the instructions were, don’t be in the same room when they’re turned on. So that’s how serious we were about nuking the germs. And that didn’t work. People didn’t care. They just stopped coming. So we had to suspend in-person classes. From 2016, around the time that Asha and I met, my mother was diagnosed with dementia in New Brunswick. So I had to come and go from Canada many times, from 2016 to 2020 to see - I wanted to find a non-conventional care plan for her. I didn’t want her to go into a nursing home, although the doctor at that time was saying get her registered to long-term care. I didn’t want her to go to long-term care. So I did as much as possible through a network of family, friends, occupational therapists to keep her out of institutional care. At the end of our last visit, in the end of 2009, her dimension became agitated to the point where that was no longer sustainable without a huge investment of resources around having a team of people always around. That wouldn’t have worked. So at that point, I chose to have her live in a private long-term care home in New Brunswick. And then we came back and COVID happened. So after about two months in that care home, that care home in the province of New Brunswick specifically, it may have happened in Quebec, I’m not sure. There was a government mandate to stop all visits from non-family members, right? So then the whole support network that I’ve been set up, even though my mom was in a long-term care home, there was still a group of people going around, taking her out to the YMCA and doing things with her. That stopped. So she got locked into a nursing home, basically, even a private nursing home. They started charging us through the roof to do all the things that the other people were doing because we wanted those things to continue. So they had their internal staff charging $150 an hour. So long story short, we had to come back to Canada to advocate for her, which we did. At the same time, we had to suspend in-person operations at our studio in Tokyo. that’s what brought us to New Brunswick first so we went into a research and development phase with Baseworks where we focused entirely on a new wave of programming we filmed our entire syllabus which you’re going to be experiencing in this program from multi-camera angle perspectives with a producer in Tokyo in a film studio yeah so it gets better I mean there’s a lot of material we don’t cover even just a fraction of it here in this study group. There’s a huge repository of content that our students internationally have been practicing for years on that. That was originally developed for the students and our big R&D phase was how to move into sets of programming that would allow for a group like you to come together and be able to benefit from similar outcomes to that of students that were able to practice at a physical studio space all day every day with teachers transferring the same body of work. So that was a big challenge. We went to an RDD phase, spent a lot of time with my mom until she passed away about a year and a half ago. And then my mom’s last wishes were to return to Montreal. We were either going to take her to Spain, where I’m also from, or we asked her many times where she wanted to go. She wanted to come back to Montreal, but she loved Montreal. We lived here when we were kids, so we brought her to Montreal. She died here. And that’s it. Basically, we’re kind of at the end of our stay in Canada. We’ll be here for maybe another six to nine months. And we’re also happy to see if there’s some way to start some momentum with something that regular happens here in Canada, and maybe we can come and go. So we like Montreal too a lot. I don’t like the winters. I love the city, and we’re trying to figure out. So that’s what brings us to this point where we are right here. We’ve only just recently started teaching in-person the game from 2024 in different places around the world and in Canada. we’re going to be teaching a lot more from this point forward in these types of programming study group and study lab particularly and specialized programming which we get commissioned to do by different organizations which is ongoing so that’s where we are right now and that brief history I hope clarifies a little bit about what is BaseWorks, where does it come from and why are you here, that’s why we’ve explained everything and I would like to just go into a few things because in our previous study groups, maybe some people had a hard time understanding the difference between the group feed here and the group form when you have access in your platform. So I’m just going to point out a couple of things, and then we’re going to hit the ground with the practice to start for today. Not an extensive practice, but just an introduction so that we can really get into it on the basis of the first two segments. So when you go onto this page here, this is actually the Montreal study group page. We refer this to as a group, right? So in the group here, you can share something with the group in a feed, similar to what you would do in Facebook. You can just type a message into there and post it. But that’s not retained or indexed in any way. So whatever you post there, particularly if it’s something interesting, it’s difficult to go back and search for it. So there’s another tab here called discussions. So when you go into discussions, this is where the forum is. And there’s guidelines here which you can read, which we really encourage everybody to take a quick look through and read. And then on the basis of these guidelines, when you create a new discussion point, you can tag it. And when you tag it, it allows for it to be searchable by all of you in the future on the basis of the tag. So that, depending on how much of a discussion gets going, it becomes easier to refer back to that forum post. So we really encourage the group feed to be kind of basically limited to just like, you know, like some people use it to say, oh, I’m going to be five minutes late. You don’t even have to do that if you don’t want to. Just little things, and then anything related to the practice, as I think was explained to you in the email, you can post from any, I don’t know if I can see here. You probably all saw it. There’s a discussion tab in each lesson, rather than going into it right now. I’ll maybe just show it to you right now. Primer. And if I go to the first lesson. Oh, God, I get away. Look at that. I think it’s just because of this computer. Yeah. There we go. I know. That’s weird. I think it’s because of the computer, the browser. The browser’s not remembering. Hmm.
Noemi 33:38 I would like to say thank you for your mom. So she actually created you here.
Patrick Oancia 33:43 Yeah, you know, my mom… Thank you. Thank you for saying that. I don’t know why we’re getting bad gateway, Asha.
Asia Shcherbakova 33:57 Try another lesson. I don’t know why.
Patrick Oancia 34:02 Okay, so we won’t waste time with this right now. I’m getting bad gateway here because I haven’t opened this computer six months and it’s probably I need to clear the browser cache. We’ve done a lot of changes on the site. So if you go to each lesson, there’s three tabs above the video and you’re going to see one tab there called discussion. So when you click on that discussion tab, that allows you to automatically create a forum post right there on that lesson. We are developing right now, hopefully it’ll be developed within the next week, the ability for the forum post to automatically refer to the lesson that it’s coming from. But in the meantime, if you have any forum posts, it’s very important inside that discussion tab to say, this relates to segment one, lesson 1.2. Okay, then that way everybody understands that’s what you’re talking about. Otherwise, within this week, the development should be done where it’s automatically going to refer to that. We just need to write some code for that. I’m sorry I can’t show you right now, but under the Discussion tab, you can start a discussion right there, or you can just go directly to the group page, click on the Discussions tab, and immediately open up a discussion from here.
Marta 35:27 Can you save tagging if you do it from the lesson?
Patrick Oancia 35:31 Well, yeah, you can. You can. It’s really up to you how you do it. If you do it from the lesson… Is it going to write it out? Yeah, it’s just a forum there. It’s like so that you can just create the post there and then it populates here on the discussion forum. Yeah, just in which case, if you could just please make reference to it being from segment one and the actual lesson that you’re referring to, that would be very helpful for everyone and for us to be able to refer back to it. So that’s just that technical thing I wanted to share with everybody because the last group kept on posting inside the group feed. And then the group feed, what happens there is that they get lost and difficult to go back and find them. And the forum is designed to be searchable. And that’s what makes it a better value for everybody as well. If you want to search based on tag, like the forums have names, The principals have names, and we tag those. They’re in the suggested tag list here. You see we have a tag short list. Maybe click on this. Oh, look at this. You didn’t give me the right tag, Asha. Okay, so sorry, because she didn’t tag me properly for this. Maybe that’s why I’m not seeing the lessons as well, too. But there’s a tag short list that’s hyperlinked from there. You should be able to see all that tag short list, and there’s a list of tags that you can use in the tag, in the tag field of the forum post. Yeah, that’s it. I think that’s all we want to explain about that.
Asia Shcherbakova 37:05 Well, just maybe the most important thing is that the online assignments, they are not optional, but this is part of the program. And we understand that sometimes maybe there’s not enough time to complete them, but we really encourage you to try to organize your time in such a way that you don’t, for example, cram on the last day, and maybe you spread out the assignments before the next session because as you know when we learn through the body physically the body needs also time to adapt ideally having slept after what you have learned would be really really helpful yeah the really important thing that carries through
Patrick Oancia 37:46 asha’s talking about that cramming cramming won’t won’t get you your money’s worth it’s not about us scolding you saying don’t cram you know this is not it’s not about us it’s like if you give yourself enough time to study throughout the week like in shorter bursts for one it’s more manageable across a busy schedule two you can sleep on it and then revisit the next day and we have let’s
Asia Shcherbakova 38:10 show the revisit also that’s a very important thing go to the dashboard yeah
Patrick Oancia 38:17 so here you can see smart revisit down in the corner here yes this is a test account so patrick
Asia Shcherbakova 38:21 hasn’t completed really anything so here it says you need to complete more lessons to unlock smart revisit maybe some of you still see it but maybe some of you have already completed enough and you will see lessons here so smart basically when you come here this is the primer you can just continue right to the latest lesson that you are studying but the smart revisit allows you to revisit the already completed study labs and this is a very important part of how the course is structured because the information is so layered and as we’ll be talking about we need to do a lot of things simultaneously it’s difficult at the very beginning to do all the things at the same time right so we cannot teach everything at the same time we have to teach things in a certain order
Patrick Oancia 39:07 and it’s also very important to consider that your interpretation of anything we teach is completely independent from what we’re trying to teach you, right? So your experience will evolve and develop on the basis of your re-approaching it. And this also goes hand in hand a little bit with Asha saying in relation to Smart Revisit, we do have this primer print here which will help you. Oh, now I don’t have, oh yeah. So once this is, once this is, see there’s a linear path to going through the entire course. But the outcome for what we’re trying to encourage in Baseworks is non-linear. Things need to be redone over time, and your interpretation of the movements will change as your understanding of the method changes and how that changes against your life’s constraints and circumstances. So the process becomes very non-linear, and we developed the BaseWorks primer print here for you to have a bird’s eye view of the nonlinear progress. So as you go through the smart revisit, it’ll take you away from just the linear progress down the chart to showing a graphic representation of how much you’re going to be revisiting these things. And from a perceptual and, I should say, abstract point of view in terms of learning, we like to encourage nonlinear learning as much as we encourage linear structure. So where a lot of people come into a course like this and they think, oh yeah, well we’re just going to go from segment one to segment 10 and we’re going to learn 72 lessons and then we’re done and then I can just close it and say I’ve done that course. That’s not how it works with us. This bucket of information we have here is meant to be relearned and re-approached. And if you finish this within three months, by default it extends to a year. You’ll have a year access to the primer.
Asia Shcherbakova 41:06 Yeah, so that’s a very important point which we want to reiterate one more time. From the moment you sign up, automatically you have three months to complete the primer. If you complete it in three months, your access gets extended to the total of 12 months. But if If you don’t complete the primary, you lose access to the primary. And the— That’s really good for words. Yes. Yes. So please keep that in mind. Sure. Yes. So I didn’t go through all the messages you sent me. Yeah. Actually, it was not on my— I just read it this morning. Yeah.
Noemi 41:44 I noticed you said like before like next Saturday, you give us - You asked what we need to do, so it’s like a plan. - Yeah. - Okay, fine. - Yeah. - Because I was not sure about how much time
Asia Shcherbakova 42:01 and what did I need to go through online, so— - Yeah, there’s a lot— - There is a discussion which is called Primer Assignments, which breaks down what needs to be completed by which—
Patrick Oancia 42:14
- In the forum, there’s one called Primer Assignments, and you’ll see that. But then that also gives you a bird’s eye view everything that needs to be done between each session. And we really recommend, I think everybody got through the first two segments, that was 58 minutes. We really recommend that some of the assignments become a little bit longer over the next three sessions. So we really recommend not to fall behind. What we do together here really, really extends off of what you do in advance. So it’s, and then that’s what allows for us to close the gap between the, having the studio, you know, classes all day, every day for seven days a week to being able to work with a group like this once a week in between the sessions because your understanding of the applications starts to incrementally get, build more momentum after you go through the content. And it really does. So we work with groups in this way and we’ve really found that the hybrid approach is giving us comparable outcomes to what we had with a body of 10 teachers that were trained under me for 13 years teaching 40,000 students. Yeah, let’s practice.
Asia Shcherbakova 43:33
- Yes, and one last thing I wanted to say. We have a camera over there standing, you might have noticed. - Oh yeah, sorry. - That is for internal views only.
Patrick Oancia 43:41 Whatever is filmed there. - Internal or external. So the most important thing is in the waiver, in the part about media release. You have to inform us at the time that we’re doing any photography, including today. You don’t want to be physically recognizable in anything that we produce, that’s fine. Absolutely fine. These things we film every week, mostly internal, but you have to let us know you don’t want to be physically recognizable in any of that footage across any of our educational material or any of our promotional material. We may have a photographer to come in to do focus photography at the start of any of those sessions, we’re gonna remind you about the waiver too. Does anybody not wanna be included? Then you would, yeah, at that time too, you would raise it so the photographer knows. It’s not that he’s not gonna include you, he’s gonna shoot. That you won’t be physically recognizable, we’ll remove you from the photos or we’ll make you non-identifiable in some way, which is non-invasive. Yeah. - So it’s not good. - Huh? - To use our photo, that would be good. - Well, if you don’t have a. - We have. Yeah, you know what? We normally always work with excellent photographers who are very passionate about what they do. So everything that we don’t, it’s not just for the purpose of promotion. It’s for the purpose of them to capture the educational essence of what we’re trying to transmit. We document everything on film, in audio, and visually for the purpose of trying to further develop what we’re doing over time. It’s a multifaceted development process for us. For us, it’s not just marketing. That’s only a part of it. Interesting you say that. Yeah, I’ve been doing Vipassana for years. That’s what you wanted to do with your instructors. But you decided it was better to record it because there was too much interpretation. Are you talking about the Burmese? Yeah, yeah. yeah what was his name goingka right yeah I was doing more of the Theravada the pastness I was I was always going to Thailand doing the Vipassana with the Thai forest monks which is a completely different approach
Asia Shcherbakova 46:11 Okay. Thank you. Thank you for saying that.
Patrick Oancia 46:16 Okay. So we’d like everybody to stand up and throughout every session. So how much time do we have left just to clarify?
Asia Shcherbakova 46:21 We have about maybe 45 minutes.
Patrick Oancia 46:23 45 minutes. Okay. We’d like everybody to, as we go through each of the sessions, you can stand wherever you want. And you can even stand, if you want, if I’m standing here and you want to go behind me, you can go behind me. If that feels more appropriate for you to learn at that point in time, please don’t think that it’s a kind of hierarchical, I’m standing here and all of you have got to learn in front of me. If you stand over there, it’s going to help you to understand what I’m doing. Then you can move and go stand over there at any point in time. So please don’t think of the space as uniform in that way. Of course, if you want to look at me, you can look at me or her. But please feel free to move around as you please. So this first session is a lot less about explaining in detail, and it’s more just about taking you through a few of the things that we do initially. With the first two segments that you completed, there should have been a bit of an introduction already to the things that we’re doing here now, but things will gel more over time. So what I’d like you to do is stand with your feet a little bit wider than hips width apart, and you can try to point the toes slightly outward so the position of the feet is not at this point with the heels out or with the feet pointing away from each other too much but rather just a little bit diagonally pointing away from each other and I’d like you to bend the knees slightly and when you bend the knees I like you to like imagine you’re sitting back the weight goes to the heels and as the weight goes to the heels you can imagine you’re sitting against like a bar stool or something like that, you know, like a stool which is kind of tall like that stool over there. You can imagine you’re sitting back against that stool and just the back of your butt is sort of connecting with the top of the stool, but your quadriceps become a little bit active because the knees are slightly bent here and the belly also becomes quite relaxed. So If there’s any kind of tendency to tighten the belly, try and relax it. So we’re trying to always keep the belly relaxed. Sitting back onto the heels. And we’re trying to keep the breath totally calm here. You can imagine that, well, the arms for one are very limp and relaxed, you can just swing them like this for a second, and as we lift the arms you can imagine that a good analogy would be that there’s a like a puppet master attaching something to your wrists which make it appear like you are a marionette as they pull the arms up. So the wrists become quite limp as you raise the arms to about shoulder height. As your weight goes towards the heels, you’re going to now torsion the wrists forward. So the wrists turn up and the palms are trying to face forward and kind of squeeze the balls. You can imagine that you’re squeezing these physio balls into the hands here. And keep the shoulders relaxed here since the arms are up shoulders height and the wrists torsion. So when the wrists torsion in you feel an activity across the forearm. And relax through the back of the neck. Why don’t you join us for now Asha rather than let’s not get too deep into details right now so occasionally here you’re gonna feel like the maybe that the arms are getting tired and any point in time depending on your condition you can let the arms go down if you feel that they’re particularly because the shoulders will get tired. So at any point in time you can let the arms go down. It’s not about persevering to keep your arms up. It’s very important that you understand that the second you feel fatigue and it’s not comfortable, let the arms go down because this is something that needs to be built over time and our goal here is not to keep the arms up and persevere with it. Our goal is to build a kind of sensitivity around the fatigue, right? So the first step is to understand where your limitations are and then as we spot the limitation you give into that partially in order just to be able to understand that the limitation exists and then you can bring the arms back up again and torsion the wrists forward yeah and also yeah the lower part of the spine here is neutral it’s not okay yeah we’ll explain that later yeah so in the beginning and you don’t have to understand entirely everything we do here we’re gonna try as much as possible just to follow through even with a at least a preliminary understanding of it so the key things here to remember our weight towards the heels so the weight it’s almost as if you’re gonna to fall backward. And a little bit of more of an explanation around the torsioning of the wrists is if you imagine that the hands turn inward and then the palms face forward rather than out and then you can imagine that there’s kind of a foam ball that you’re squeezing here into the fingers like this like a foam squishy ball and the neck is also relaxed and the belly is also relaxed. So it doesn’t matter if you get this 100% at this point in time. Yeah you can let the arms down whenever you want. Okay, now as we start to lower the arms, we’re going to straighten the knees and we’re going to try and synchronize this movement because the knees are slightly bent here. So as the arms lower, we slowly micro-straighten the knees, not to the point where the knees lock, but just to the point where they become straight. So we’re not trying to lock out the knees here as the arms go down. We’re just trying to get the knees to become straight. And then when the arms reach down beside the body, you can imagine that whatever tension was there is just dropping down. So you can think that there’s the direction of the tension drops downward. And the belly also stays relaxed. And the knees here are straight. Is the core still always like activating? Never. Never activate. But regular plastic on your orgasm? we’ll go really deep into that later yeah but yeah so that’s what good exactly good good point here and as I mentioned before the belly is completely relaxed so there’s a tendency to activate and the activation tendency comes from a lot of the work that you may do in something like fitness or yoga or pilates or martial arts they say activate the core we don’t encourage any activation of the abdominal wall whatsoever. We’re going to be activating a lot in this program and it comes from a different perspective. The idea of core here is counter to what we’re trying to achieve over the long term. We refer to something similar as distributed activation and that will be something we talk
Asia Shcherbakova 55:12 about right next. The idea is that if you actually like pull the stomach in as you do when you activate the core you will have to undo it in order to reach the state of distributed activation so better not do it at the very beginning. Yeah, just sit.
Patrick Oancia 55:32 Yeah, let’s bring the feet together hips width apart now. So they were this far apart before and then the feet come hips width apart. And if you look above, the outside edges of the feet are parallel to each other. And this is a very important distinction here because a lot of people may not understand that initially and we’ll work on that as time goes by. When I say that the feet outside edges of the feet are parallel we have to kind of really look at them to see that they’re parallel which means that the it almost looks like the toes may be pointing inward but they’re not actually pointing inward they’re just a little bit. With the outside edges of the feet parallel and hips width this is going to be the key pivotable transitional point we’re always coming back to. So hips width and outside edges of the feet are parallel and you may feel like a little twist in the knee. Yeah that’s you know no there shouldn’t feel like there’s an overt twist in the knee that you might feel a little bit of a some sort of a twist happen there but bend the knees a little bit like that and straighten them again bend them and straighten them and if you feel like there’s too much of a twist into the knee, then release, bring the heels slightly closer together. I don’t want there to be any, like, yeah, exactly, slightly together. That’s right. So then what we’re going to be doing is going to be taking the arms out in front of the body. And this is an important distinction to make here too, because we’re trying to sense the weight of the arms. So each arm weighs a lot, depending on our body size. The arms actually have a quite a bit of significant weight. And they act to counter the position of our body over a center of gravity, if that makes sense. So as we move the body in different positions, the arms are the things that will counter so that we don’t fall, right? So let’s bring the arms forward once, and as we bring the arms forward once, let’s let the butt go back. So the arms go forward, as the butt goes back and we bring the weight towards the heels, this prevents us from falling on our back. Does that make sense? The arms offset the weight and balance as they go forward and then from here with the knees with the feet still hips width apart we’re going to squat a little bit here but we’re keeping the knees directly stacked over the top of the ankles. The knees should not come forward over the top of the toes like this but rather they should stay back over top of the ankles. So that’s why we’re using the arms here to offset the weight over center of gravity so we don’t fall over. And then we’re trying to open the arms here a little bit to get the arms in line with this spine as we allow the weight to go to the heels. And then we’re going to go ahead and we’re going to unpack that as we straighten the knees. We’re going to allow for the arms to slowly lower to the side of the body. So again, as we exit from most movements, we’re trying to in the same way that we came in. So we’re reverse engineering the process of movement itself and then when we start to work with unilateral forms we’re also going to be switching between the sides that we start on. We’ll start on the left sometimes, we’ll start on the right other times and when we come back we may come back the opposite side from which the side that we went in. So we’re trying to get the body used to entering and exiting in the same way from different positions.
Asia Shcherbakova 59:05 Asha, take the next one, I think. Yeah. Okay, the star form. So let’s bring the feet wider than he puts apart and the edges of the feet again are going to be parallel so the toes will be maybe slightly in. Make sure that the weight is above the heel. So again the pelvis goes a little bit back so that the weight is on the heels yeah so we’re almost falling back this is the position of the pelvis make sure that you are not arching your chest so the chest and the ribcage and the pelvis are stacked so we don’t want this happening you bring the bottom of the ribcage down and keeping your pelvis above the heels helps because when your weight is forward very easy to arch so we prevent this by keeping the weight here so here we will pull the legs away you don’t have to lift the toes like this you can keep them on the floor but the idea is that you start gripping the legs away and it should activate the muscles here and you keep doing this movement and try not to forget keep doing it all the time as we’re doing this form so from here we will draw the shoulders down spread the fingers activate the legs sorry the arms so right now your legs are pulling away active and the arms are active you’re drawing the shoulders down also don’t hyper activate right so you don’t want like like you don’t do that just pull shoulders down spread the fingers we want activity without it being too much and then as you continue to draw the shoulders down you will start to bring your arms to shoulder height palms forward very slowly
Patrick Oancia 01:00:48 We’d love to hear your question. Maybe let’s go through, we’ll leave questions for the end. If you can remember, yeah?
Asia Shcherbakova 01:00:54 Yes, and James, so if you feel anything in your shoulders, you keep the arms symmetrical, but whatever is good for your shoulder. But if you can, bring your arms to shoulder height, you really want them to be shoulder height. Don’t bend the elbows. Imagine somebody is pulling on your arms, shoulders down, the ribcage is above the pelvis, and you’re still pulling the legs away.
Patrick Oancia 01:01:14
- Asha, remember we keep a little spot for questions open at the end. - Yes, yes.
Asia Shcherbakova 01:01:19 So this is our star form, a very basic position, which we work with a lot in Baseworks. One more time, confirm that the pelvis is still above the heels, right? So it didn’t shift forward. Your ribcage and the pelvis are stacked. You’re pulling the legs away, spread the fingers, draw the shoulders down. Make sure that the neck is relaxed. You can move your head a little bit. So the neck is completely relaxed, but the shoulders are drawn down, spreading the fingers, pulling the legs away. And as you pull the ribcage slightly back, this is where maybe your abdominals will be slightly activated, but not too much. Like we’re not trying to overtly activate the core here. But what we want to have is that all the muscles here are lightly active.
Patrick Oancia 01:02:03 Too long.
Asia Shcherbakova 01:02:04 And then we’ll slowly bring the arms down from here. We’ll just take a little bit of a rest because after that we’ll have to bring the arms up.
Patrick Oancia 01:02:13 So just something I’ll add to you. Asha sometimes explains for a long time. Like I said in the beginning, if it becomes tiring for you, lower the arms.
Asia Shcherbakova 01:02:21 At any moment, yes, any movement where you feel like your muscles begin to burn. When you feel the burn, this means that you need to either reduce the intensity or stop. We will talk about intensity modification much more at some later point. But from the very beginning, we want to say that if a movement causes pain, compression, burn, discomfort, fatigue. Yeah, or stop. Okay. So one more time. Let’s bring the pelvis above the heels, throw the shoulders down, spread the fingers. And one more time, bringing the arms to the shoulder height.
Patrick Oancia 01:02:58 As relaxed as possible. Let’s keep the, we’re going to talk about the breathing at the end, yeah. I’m sorry to emphasize that we really just want you to go through it without a lot of conceptualizing right now. And yeah, thank you.
Asia Shcherbakova 01:03:10 And so, Noemi, look, your feet became like this. The outside edges of the feet are parallel. Outside edges of the feet are parallel. Yes, exactly. It may feel unnatural at first, but when your legs are in this position, it’s easier to pull away and you feel it better here. So what we will do here is that think about, just a moment, maybe we have… Eleanor maybe just a little bit narrower stance here. Just a little bit for you. Okay so what think about your right heel okay your right heel and the right heel will turn back so this will result in your right hip turning inward.
Patrick Oancia 01:03:51 Asha, let’s break it, break it down, break it down. It’s too tiring. They’re a new group they’re not been practicing with us for years. Let’s bring the hands on the hips. So let’s bring the heel back and start from the beginning.
Asia Shcherbakova 01:04:01 Let’s bring the feet to peril one more time. Think about your right heel. Okay, bring the right heel back. This will turn in your pelvis. And lightly pull the legs away here. And from here, look at your left foot and open it out. And then pull the legs away. Now, as you pull the legs away, try to find a position where your pelvis is in the middle of how your legs are positioned and continue to pull the legs away. You want to equalize the direction of the pelvis to be kind of just in between your hips. So Naomi you look a little bit too much like this.
Patrick Oancia 01:04:45
- Asha, it’s okay let people experience it. - Pull the legs away, yes. I mean this is
Asia Shcherbakova 01:04:51 pretty good. So from here think about your pelvis and we’ll bring the arms to the rest the shoulder height in line with the pelvis and don’t open the chest too much so keep the arms in line with the pelvis okay pull the legs away and from here again think about your pelvis and we will tilt from the hip so your upper body will move together with the pelvis it’s the pelvis that is tilting it feels like maybe your right hip goes a little bit back and the arm line stays as is one straight line okay keep pulling the legs away and then come up then bring the arms to the hips and then left foot returns to what it was before and then the right foot opens so the feet are parallel and then we will do the same movement on the other side so the left heel goes diagonally back the right foot opens in line with the right leg okay pull the legs away and find this position where the direction of the pelvis is kind of diagonal in between your legs then bring the arms to the shoulder height spread the fingers throw the shoulders down make sure you’re not arching your chest the ribcage and the pelvis are stacked you pull the legs away and then again from the pelvis we will tilt as you tilt from the pelvis the upper body just moves in line with it so pelvis and the ribcage become one chunk and the arm line stays part of the chunk and keep pulling the legs away here okay and then returning the upper body to upright position, the pelvis untilts, bring the hands onto the hips and then turn the right foot back to how it was and then the left heel and bring the arms down. Okay. What else? And we will also do the seated, the simple cross-inflation. Okay and then we’ll do the last form that…
Patrick Oancia 01:07:03 Yeah, let me explain. This initial thing, and we already deviated a little bit from it, is just only about experience without too much conceptualization. I know you want to ask questions. If you can save them to the very end, we’ll answer all the questions. Yeah, no, there’s no right and wrong. At this point, there’s no right and wrong. There’s just where you’re at and your perception of what we’re trying to teach you right now, and then it’ll develop as time goes by.
Asia Shcherbakova 01:07:26 Okay, so let’s sit down and do our last form covered in the second.
Patrick Oancia 01:07:30 That’s also, by the way, why I’m giving her a hard time, because Asha is an excellent technical teacher, but I don’t want her to give away the techniques at this point in time. I’d like her to let you experience it from where you’re at right now.
Asia Shcherbakova 01:07:41 Yeah. Yeah. OK, so what we will do here is that we will bring the elbows under the shoulders and then the hands will be lightly gripping forward here. Like feel like as you grip forward, this should maybe like shift your back a little bit. And then we will extend the legs diagonally forward, extend the ankles, push the balls of the feet, shoulders down and lightly grip forward with the hands. We call this reclining transition and we end up here a lot. So then we will cross the legs, right leg over. So right shin over, cross the legs. And then slowly lower the legs and come up. Lean a little bit back, so your pelvis will tilt a little bit back. arms forward and look edges of the feet will be gripping forward a little bit so see like you grip and then you keep gripping and you want to continue doing this gripping movement draw the shoulders down imagine there’s round space here so the rib cage is a little bit tilted back so you’re not kind of straight like this but you are rounded shoulders down chin in keep gripping forward and then begin to roll in rounding the spine and try not to lose the gripping movement So you’re all in just as much as you feel comfortable completely relax the neck Draw the shoulders down and then we’ll do the micro movements of the ribcage So you just want to undulate your spine or your ribcage just a little bit There should be no tension in the muscles of the back or maybe this will help to release tension Keep drawing the shoulders down keep gripping the feet forward and down and then from here We’ll start extending the spine So think about your lower back and start extending the spine from lower back end up. And we want to find a position where the spine becomes completely straight. Now the angle will be different for everybody. Somebody will be more upright, somebody will be lower. But keep gripping forward with the edges of the feet. Draw the shoulders down and try to keep your chest open here. So make sure that you’re not collapsed but the shoulders are as far away from each other as possible. So completely flat upper body keep gripping Again micro movements of the ribcage Okay, and then round the spine one more time So chin in round the upper spine and start leaning back So your pelvis starts tilting back upper body follows arms come forward But for balance and then let the legs come off the floor and we return to reclining transition So legs forward, arms down, chest up, push the walls of the feet. And so ankles, not 90 degrees, but extended like we’re standing on tiptoes. And then cross the legs, left leg over, cross the ankles, come up. Arms come forward as if somebody pushing you in the stomach, you’re leaning back. Press forward with the edges of the feet. Naomi, maybe you’re a little bit too close. Bring the legs just, yeah, like that. So pull, draw the shoulders down, arms away from the shoulders, chin in. And as you continue gripping, you begin to lean in, rounding the spine like a spiral. Relax the neck, but draw the shoulders down. Keep engaging the legs. And again, micro movements of the ribcage. Moving from side to side, completely relaxed neck. hands just gently touching the floor. And then again, focus on your lower back and begin to extend the spine from the lower back end up to find a completely straight line. And when we find the straight line, we’ll continue to move around the straight line. So micro movements of the ribcage, drawing the shoulders down, trying to find completely flat upper body and don’t forget the legs. So the legs continue to gently engage forward. And especially if you’re leaning forward, you may feel something in the hips and maybe you’ll be able to lean forward a little bit more. But the important point is just that the entire body is engaged. Drawing the shoulders down and then rounding the spine, chin in. Start leaning back. Arms come forward to offset the weight. Tilt back, legs come on the floor. And legs extend up. arms down, chest up, returning to reclining transition. And let’s just bring the legs down. OK. So that’s our forms for today. OK. What’s your timeline? How much time do we have? Yeah, we have about 14 minutes.
Patrick Oancia 01:12:24 14.
Asia Shcherbakova 01:12:24 14 minutes. So I think we can—
Patrick Oancia 01:12:26 14?
Asia Shcherbakova 01:12:26 14.
Patrick Oancia 01:12:27 OK, great. So any questions, we’re very happy to answer them right now. Oh, by the way, I just also want you know that we put together a detailed session summary in a forum post, usually by Monday. Okay? So that’ll be on the forum as well, too, and that’ll go through everything we did today, including some of the things that we discussed and talked about here today, which relate to your questions as well. So just so you know, it’s not necessary to take notes in that way. So we can have the… We do that for you. We do the session summary for you. Yeah. Yeah.
Marta 01:13:01 So, my question, so, when I’m like this and I’m pushing out, I’m putting like some attention here, here to go out and I’m feeling like here, there’s some stuff going out. My question is, because you want this to be relaxed, so I’m pushing just from legs or also my heels like I’m pushing this way too?
Patrick Oancia 01:13:38 Just for the sole of the feet, I was just going to give you a good analogy, just from the feet.
Asia Shcherbakova 01:13:43 The reason why we also practice without socks is because the movement is like this. Right? So this is what you want to do. If you had socks, the movement is that you want to actually slide away, but you’re using the traction to not to slide. I would say it’s not so much about the inside of the leg, it’s more maybe you would feel it here, right? Because the movement is essentially bringing your, like these are the muscles which are trying to pull, right? So it’s technically speaking like this movement. So this is what should be working.
Patrick Oancia 01:14:18 be that’ll be transferred into other positions with the legs too and and as we just did also in when we were here we’re pushing with the feet and pushing back and the same thing we’re trying to sort of either push away or pull away yeah and and the muscles that you’ll feel activated at that time could be specific to you at that point in time as well but but also because what we call
Asia Shcherbakova 01:14:45 distributed activation is essentially a state where as many muscles as possible are co-contracted at the same time but at low intensity right so it’s not about isolating any particular muscle it’s about trying to engage as much as possible at the same time some question about the breath breathing
Noemi 01:15:03 yeah about the breathing yeah i don’t know just because i really like connect with my breathing and sometimes when i do like things like this i can feel like my breathing is like I have a time to breathe. So I’d like to know when you breathe, when you’re exibacy, in the air itself.
Patrick Oancia 01:15:20 So we don’t encourage any directed breathing in Baseworks. And that’s a mind fuck for most people. People are going to be like, no, but I want to breathe into it. But that becomes what we call directed breathing or active breathing. We’re trying to just let the breath… You should be able to do any of the forms that we’re doing and carry on a conversation like this. You shouldn’t have to think about, am I guiding my breath into the movement in the way that is most appropriate? Yeah, this is really… But this is great. I like the fact that it’s going to be big for you because guided breathing is very useful. And I don’t want to tell you it’s not. What you’re explaining right now, it’s very relevant in things like dance, yoga, fitness, working out. And I use it. In those contexts, I use guided dynamic breathing. But in BaseWorks, we’re trying to keep the breath as neutral and natural as possible. It’s in its inherent state of being natural. when you don’t when you go to bed at night you don’t lie down and you think okay I’m gonna go to sleep well you do a couple of deep breaths like that but you’re not gonna be sleeping like
Noemi 01:16:40 that the whole night right so don’t even yeah it’s really a big challenge so don’t when it comes to
Patrick Oancia 01:17:00 movements we do try not to even think about guiding the breath into anything.
Asia Shcherbakova 01:17:04 Breathing in Baseworks is a feedback modality, so if you artificially control your breath it means that you are depriving yourself of being able to use it as a feedback.
Patrick Oancia 01:17:14 Yeah the the breathing, the guided deep breathing is dampening the sensory output from the perspective of her research in cognitive science right now. So what we’re trying, and this is my, and it’s been transferred from what I’ve been practicing my whole life because I use dynamic breathing and exercise physiology and sports and I learned a lot about the effects that natural breathing has on the nervous system when you’re not guiding it. When you’re not guiding it, it gives there, it allows for there to be bandwidth to the other sensory dynamics that are going on in in the practice. So therefore, this, this, or this, which is very useful in things like martial arts and yoga, is interfering in what we’re trying to get you to understand. And that’s really, this is the rewiring part. Somebody mentioned you were, this is one of the rewiring mechanisms that we have here that’s very important. It’s going to be hard because you can hear, I can hear sometimes when people are going through the motions, we hear it all the time, like they pull the feet apart, raise the arms up, spread through the fingers, draw the shoulders down, somebody goes, you know, like this, like they’re trying to sort of sustain the, the, the, um, sustain the effort that goes into it. But when we say, we say that when you’re here and you’re pulling the legs apart and you’re drawing the shoulders on, the fingers are spreading. If at that point, the body temperature starts to increase and you feel fatigue the goal is not to utilize the breath to get through the challenge but to put the fucking arms down and relax so that’s really very important yeah yeah i know I like to push myself and like to, you know, so I’ve been trying to be different now. Which I think is great, and coming from that background, it gives you a very nice palette to work with, because you’re experienced. Now I’m working way more with the system, like the system that I’ve heard. Right. Even more with my massage, and even for me too. So I think what we do is going to actually help the system that we break. hopefully you know like a knock on wood. Yeah, no.
Asia Shcherbakova 01:19:39 It’s also very important that it’s not about just completely relaxing and taking it completely easy. So it’s something in between.
Patrick Oancia 01:19:48 Yeah, so we were in a specific form like this and Natalie, right? Natalie was saying that you know I’m feeling it in my muscles here and they’re active and then when your arms are up here, then you might feel your shoulders become tired or active. First, we become aware, okay, that’s active, that’s active. For you, you feel like maybe it’s a bit here, here. Take note after we encourage you to journal. But then the point where you think, oh, this is getting to be a bit challenging, then let the arms go down, relax the legs. And even though everybody else is still practicing, if you feel like you can still sustain it, that’s okay. The goal is not to try to keep it up for as long as everybody can. You let down once, and then you raise your arms up again. And the patterns that we’re repeating over and over again, like the draw the shoulders down, the spread the feet away from each other, spread the fingers, move through the neck, move through the rib cage. If you’re unable to do those things and break them down in a controlled way, that means the effort has overridden the process of the sensitivity to doing those things. So then you would just relax, take it easy, and you watch and listen a little bit, look around, and then, okay, come back. And then do the same thing. So as you can see, I was saying, Asha, too long, too long, too long. I was telling you, too long. But later it gets longer, right? We’re used to it. We can hold our arms up for a long period of time and spread the legs. I can continue to talk to you like this for a long time. And you also talked about core activity. When the legs are pulling away from each other and you spread through the fingers and you draw the shoulders down, that becomes active. byproduct but I’m not thinking about drawing my navel to the spine like I would in a kata practice I’m gonna be moving with my core and expecting that somebody’s gonna punch me in the stomach or something like that this is relaxed but it’s not relaxed because the legs pulling apart the shoulders drawing down the fingers spreading it’s dynamically activating this to a certain extent that but the nervous system’s interpretation of the activation is different than this This is stimulating, and I like, I’m still, when we have these discussions, she doesn’t like to emphasize it too much, but this starts to stimulate more sympathetic activity, sympathetic nervous system activity, which is fight or flight, excitement. We want something in between where there’s a balance between parasympathetic and sympathetic activity, so that there’s more composure throughout. There’s more composure, there’s more control, there’s more sensitivity. And the practice really changes according to the day. Like if you, if I, today’s a bit overcast, right? So I’m sensitive to overcast weather. It’s not really overcast. Yesterday would have been a better example. Yesterday was in the morning, I believe it was overcast, right? It was overcast yesterday morning. I had a bit of a headache yesterday morning. I was tired. On my morning walk, I walked around Westmount where we live and I was tired walking up the same hill and so I reduced the intensity of my walking, right? So how I’m going to come into approach a practice in Baseworks is going to be the same thing. With how I felt yesterday, I may have already let my arms down once or twice because I want the sensory resolution to stay high and the physical output to stay low. Yes, being present, but I’d like to say, I’d like to also mention that being present in the way that we think about it through mindfulness practices is not what we’re talking about. Because that’s a very, yeah. I’m here now in my body. I’m here now and this is, yeah, yeah. So a lot of people also misunderstand that when we talk about this, they go, oh yeah, this is mindfulness. And we say, no, it’s not. Because mindfulness… Body focus. It’s not, yeah. So this is not only body focus, it’s perception focus. But she can explain…
Asia Shcherbakova 01:23:59 Yeah, so with mindfulness is that, I mean, obviously what we do in BaseWorks is in some way mindfulness. But it is not only mindfulness. Because you can be mindful of whatever there is right now. but Baseworks is more about increasing the sensory resolution of what there is right now. And because of that, it’s much more about attending to these actions and the consequences of actions. So we’re attending to something very, very specific rather than generally being mindful and present. Because you can be mindful and present and not pay attention to these sensations that we’re focusing on. So the content of your mindfulness is what’s important.
Patrick Oancia 01:24:37 Yeah, and there was also this idea with, and again, I like mindfulness practices. I meditate. I do things that fall into that category. The outcomes of practices that are focused on relaxation often bring with them a kind of cosmic vibe, like a, I feel so happy. If that starts to happen, we’re also leaving the purpose of what we’re doing here. If you start to feel too, oh, wow, that was so good, you know, then no, that’s not good. We’re moving away from the grounded aspects of what happens. And it’s not that we want to discourage those practices. We say when you go home, then please sit down, do your meditation practice, do your breathing practice, do your yoga practice, do whatever makes you feel good. but in Baseworks, when it becomes too excited or too relaxed, there’s a little bit of the level of sensitivity, which is dampened at that point in time.
Noemi 01:25:42 I also think the artist work is to start with something new, because we all come from a background, so I think for me that’s a really good idea.
Patrick Oancia 01:25:53 It’s great for the brain too. Was there any other questions? A quick question.
James 01:25:59 For me, grip means towards me. So when you were saying grip the feet forward, I’m like, does that mean go that way or go this way?
Patrick Oancia 01:26:10 Yeah, so this is all a question of language as well, too. You can think that when we say something with direction, whether it’s grip or push, focus on the direction more than that.
Asia Shcherbakova 01:26:23 Because we will say sometimes grip away or grip in. So that will be an additional work. An example of gripping in, when we do lunges, we will grip in. Okay. Because we want here everything to get activated. But in this form, we’re gripping away.
James 01:26:39 Because —
Asia Shcherbakova 01:26:40 Yes.
Marta 01:26:41 Yes.
Asia Shcherbakova 01:26:43 It’s like a push, yes. But the point is that because — why do we use the word grip? It’s because we use traction, and it’s about creating traction. So it’s not about — I mean, it is a pushing motion in a way. if you think about here, but because we grip with the feet, we say grip. What is that alarm? It’s kind of the end of our session. Yeah, we are done.
Patrick Oancia 01:27:05 How much time?
Asia Shcherbakova 01:27:06 Well, we need to be out like right now.
Patrick Oancia 01:27:09 Right now? Yes. How much time do we have left? To be at 11?
Asia Shcherbakova 01:27:12 Like two minutes.
Patrick Oancia 01:27:13 Oh my God.
Asia Shcherbakova 01:27:15 I don’t think we have to rush, but yes, this concludes this session.
Patrick Oancia 01:27:19 Oh, our session has concluded. We have 10 minutes. Okay, so just so you know, this is also something. This is great about this space. We use Protoss Studio for the first time. We have to get out of here now, okay? But you know what? We will go out there, okay, after we move all the shit out of the room here. So if you want to hang out and ask us some questions there, we’ll go over there. And that’s a public area where you can all hang out, and you can stay there before and after the session. Yeah, we have to get out normally too. Oh, wait, before you get out, just in case anybody does have to leave, So a few key things. The session summary for this will go up, I hope, by either tomorrow night or Monday. Okay, so that’ll go into a text version summary in the form. And we’ll send a group post with a link to that form so you’ll be able to see that clearly and you can read through the session summary. Now, if there’s any questions that didn’t get answered here today, you’re more than welcome to reply to that or to post a new forum entry on the group forum. And at that said, we welcome that. So that we will respond to all the questions on the group forum between the session and the week. We’re very, very proactive about that. So we’re not going to leave things hanging. If there’s any misunderstanding, if you can go home and you want to ask a question, please do. The next most important thing is, and we just keep going over and over and over again, we’re going to go much deeper with this content if all the assignments are done. So the next assignment is a little bit longer, I believe, maybe 70 minutes or something in total. You have to take a look. All the guides. Again, we recommend a little bit every day. Let it settle in, have a sleep on it, go back the next day, do the next lesson, the next lesson. If you have time, revisit. Do a smart revisit. If you don’t have time for the time for Smart Revisits, then you just go through linearly, just to make sure that the next assignment is complete before next Saturday, even if it’s just linear. It doesn’t matter. Just to make sure, because I’m French,
Noemi 01:29:26 sometimes I just need to go to the final day. So the form we did today, we have the goal being to actually practice it, and then going to the segment, and we’re going to have other things to practice for next Saturday. or we still keep on, like the three forms we just did for a week? I just want to make sure.
Asia Shcherbakova 01:29:46 Yes, it’s a very good question. So about the overall structure of the program. Today we talked a lot. Normally we won’t be talking this much. The session will be maybe like 75% or 80% practice. Assignments include new forms. So you studied four forms in your assignments up to today. So for the next assignment there will be, I don’t remember how many, but maybe three or four more forms. During the second session, we will be not only doing the new forms, we will also be doing the ones we did today plus the new forms. So we don’t, it’s not like we just studied these forms and that’s done and we just move to the next content. We will be continuously revisiting the same forms and going deeper and deeper and deeper.
Patrick Oancia 01:30:29 And on the platform, you can practice these forms we did today in the videos. Yeah, you have them there as well. So you can review those. If you do that, it helps. It helps to understand.
Noemi 01:30:44 Yeah, it was really fast. I mean, my buddy did way more to integrate, so I wanted to communicate the form where he could understand and do it online.
Patrick Oancia 01:30:55 Yeah, so— I’ll keep practice. Thank you. Yeah, so thank you very much. We will just pack up, and then we’re going to go out there. If you want to stay and ask us some questions, you can. If you have to leave and you can’t stay, Again, we’d like to thank you all very much for enrolling and coming. And it starts to build momentum a little bit from the next sessions. Like we say, we talk less and we practice more. That’s on the basis of your in-between study. And then we can make the in-person sessions practical application specific. Right? Yeah. Perfect. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Asia Shcherbakova 01:31:55 Thank you very much. I think it’s going to help a lot to do all the things that I’m doing and even the reason
Noemi 01:32:12 I work.
Asia Shcherbakova 01:32:15 Thank you. And well, we will have six more sessions, right? And let’s just see how it works for you. We always like to hear the feedback, like what kind of effect our practice does on other people as it relates to other backgrounds.
Noemi 01:32:30 Do you have other groups? Like if I do this one and after I want to keep going and have more advance?
Asia Shcherbakova 01:32:39 So we are kind of planning north way ahead, but like for example, together with the study group, there are also practice sessions going on. So when you complete the study group, there will still be a few more practice sessions, I think, after that, that you can come and just practice more. In relation to advanced programs specifically, in Montreal, we currently don’t have anything planned yet. We might have an intensive in summer. We don’t know yet. Yes, of course.
Noemi 01:33:09 Yes.
Patrick Oancia 01:33:17 Can you give me the microphone, Ashwa?
Asia Shcherbakova 01:33:18
- Yeah.
Patrick Oancia 01:33:25
- One second, do that. - Okay.