The Process of Entrainment

1116 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: How can the environment affect learning

Essay - The Dance of Life, Entrainment

In a television interview, Bruce Lee said:

“Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put water into a tea pot, it becomes the tea pot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.”

He was talking about dominantly expressing ones self through martial arts by letting go of rigid styles or patterns you’ve learned, and freely adapt in combat so as to fluidly move with your opponent, as in a dance, then to “crash” into your opponent in victory. What Bruce Lee described was a state of total awareness of one’s environment so as to continuously be able to entrain one’s self to it.

Edward T. Hall wrote among many things in his book, The Dance of Life, of entrainment. Entrainment is the internal process that makes syncing possible with others and the environment around us. Day to day we move from one routine to another, or one appointment to another. When we do so, we adjust ourselves from one movement to another movement. When these movements require another person or a particular environment, entrainment is present. Entrainment, whether we’re aware of it or not, is something that we do everyday with varying success. Depending on our success entraining with any particular situation, there results either a fluid transition or a turbulent one.

Since not many people are martial artists and will have difficulty relating to Bruce Lee, we’ll look at the process of entrainment using a different example that most people will have some experience in. Also, since the process of entrainment varies with every individual in their various experiences, and will prove quite impossible to describe in abstract mechanics, our example will be a specific and isolated occurrence. The example will be of a student’s experience while studying.

A young girl is in the school library. She goes to the library because she feels that the environment there is peaceful and tranquil, perfect for studying. She sits there silently at one of the many tables fully engulfed in the book that she’s reading. Nothing in the room disrupts her. The sound of pages being flipped at the table to her left doesn’t bother her.

Show More
Related

  • This Is Water And The New Witch Doctor: This Is Water

    1549 Words  | 4 Pages

    It is common for human beings, as a race, to fall into the comforts of routine – living each day similar to days before and days to come. Unfortunately, it is often too late before one even realizes that they have fallen into this mundane way of living in which each day is completed rather than lived, as explained by David Foster Wallace in “This Is Water”. This commencement speech warned graduating students of the dangers of submitting to our “default settings” of unconscious decisions and beliefs (Wallace 234). However, this dangerous way of living is no new disability of today’s human race. Socrates warned the people of his time: “A life unaware is a life not worth living” and who is to say he wasn’t completely right? A topic of long debate also includes the kind of influence that consciously-controlled thoughts can have on the physical body. A year after Wallace’s speech, neurobiologist Helen Pilcher, published “The New Witch Doctor: How Belief Can Kill”, which explains the influence of the mind and individual beliefs on the quality of one’s life. Together, both authors illustrate how detrimental a life lived unaware of one’s own thoughts and beliefs can be on the body and spirit. And though it is easy to live by

    Read More

  • Into the Wild: Christopher McCandless’ Transcendentalist Journey

    799 Words  | 2 Pages

    Transcendentalism was a powerful movement which inspired many to make drastic changes in their lives, one of the most important of which was individual simplicity. Individual simplicity, while important, was also the simplest of the cornerstones to achieve in order to live as a Transcendentalist. This cornerstone is defined literally as to enjoy life’s bare necessities, fend for oneself, and separate from society. This cornerstone was demonstrated by Ralph Waldo Emerson when he described how he felt in nature, “I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the universal being circulate through; I am part or parcel of God (389). Emerson is often referred to as the founder of Transcendentalism, and as a founding father his references to the cornerstones of the movement he helped start are some of the most clear and illustrative. Emerson described himself in nature as “A transparent eyeball” and “I am nothing” these descriptions of his personal feelings in nature show individual simplicity. Using the odd analogy of a transparent eyeball helps show that he felt powerful and i...

    Read More

  • The Heart of Understanding, by Thich Nhat Hanh

    1111 Words  | 3 Pages

    “Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form” can be understood as being empty of a separate and independent self. In addition, Thich Nhat Hanh puts a positive spin on emptiness...

    Read More

  • Treatment of Skeletal Muscle Injury

    1597 Words  | 4 Pages

    6. Mike, Jonathan N., M.S., and Len Kravitz, Ph.D. (2009). "Recovery in Training: The Essential

    Read More

  • Bruce Lee, The Best In History

    1753 Words  | 4 Pages

    "THE TAO OF BRUCE LEE: A Martial Arts Memoir." Publishers Weekly 247.27 (2000): 63. Literature Resource Center. Web. 28 Mar. 2011.

    Read More

  • Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: A State Of Consciousness

    1198 Words  | 3 Pages

    I went to go play basketball and I had so much on my mind, I found it hard to put all of my energy towards basketball. I was shooting while a friend was rebounding and I remember telling myself to stop wasting my energy over other things like writing a paper or reading a book. I convinced myself to to think in the present and in that moment I lost self-consciousness. My shot, my footwork, the way I jumped, everything was perfectly fluid. I went on to knock down maybe five shots in a row and moved onto the next drill. That was when I did not even realize that I made six three-pointers in a row! This was a moment of optimal experience. Even though I was not aware of how much I was enjoying my self, later that night I realized that my whole mind and body were in sync, I was flowing. I then realized what the author was talking about when he kept on repeating himself about the graceful experiences of flow. I believe that everyone has experienced flow. In my head, I see teachers achieving the state while they are grading tests and once they start to speed up, their efficiency is maximal. The teacher probably does not even realize what they have so naturally done until they have completed their work or are interrupted by an outside stimulus. The teenager that said this quote is probably explaining the same exact feeling that I felt, a loss of self-consciousness, and a feeling of one hundred

    Read More

  • Who Is Beloved?

    769 Words  | 2 Pages

    to do. Water in this case refers to life and re-birth. A third piece of

    Read More

  • The Concept of Flow and Its Relation to Happiness and Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

    1562 Words  | 4 Pages

    Flow is a state a person enters which is akin to completely encompassing motivation and attention to what they are doing. Each person can experience flow under different circumstances and tasks and in fact the tasks that I personally experience flow under may be very different from the tasks that would make another person experience the same level of flow. Csikszentmihalyi (2008) wrote “the common characteristics of optimal experience: a sense that one’s skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, in a goal-directed, rule-bound, action system that provides clear clues as to how well one is performing.”

    Read More

  • muscle memory

    638 Words  | 2 Pages

    Of course, during the "drill-and-practice", your muscles aren't really memorizing anything (since all memories are stored in your brain). Instead, what you see with your eyes is interpreted by your brain in the form of nerve signals to your muscles to make your body move.

    Read More

  • A Way Of Happiness: Hollowness As A Way To Happiness

    872 Words  | 2 Pages

    We often stuff the mind with things that ultimately suffocate it. We should instead blank it out from unnecessary contents. Emptying the mind needs tremendous courage. Hollowness is the path and happiness is the ultimate peak.

    Read More

  • How Did Bruce Lee Influence

    892 Words  | 2 Pages

    Though Bruce was an accomplished actor, he had many other talents that made his even more memorable. He was a skilled dancer, who had won a cha-cha competition in Hong Kong and studied ballet. Upon first moving to America, he taught dance and martial arts to help bring a steady cash flow. Dance did not simply provide a paycheck for Bruce but it also helped to make his fighting style more original. With that, he was able to create his own fighting style known as Jeet Kune Do, this was a modified version of Wing Chun that included other techniques like fencing and Kung Fu. Bruce Lee said, Jeet Kune Do was mainly focused on ways to avoid a hit. This was revolutionary in the fighting world and on screen. Bruce Lee paved a way for martial artists and Asian actors, he was a hit in Hollywood. It did not stop there though, he also owned 3 different martial arts schools, two in California and one in in Seattle, Washington. Bruce was a dancer, instructor, skilled fighter and actor but most importantly was a devoted husband to Linda Emery and a father to a young boy named Brandon and a girl named Shannon. His daughter, Shannon now speaks publicly about her father. She says he was a hero to many people, especially her. She is an actress, martial artist and was lucky enough to learn her father’s style Jeet Kune Do under one of Bruce’s students. Unfortunately, Brandon Lee is not here with us anymore. He thought so highly of his father; he followed in Bruce’s footsteps spending eight years in Hong Kong, becoming an actor, specializing in martial arts and had died young and tragically. Brandon had a hard time coping with the loss of his father and being the son of Bruce Lee and living up to the expectations. Brandon had a hard time in school continuously dropping in and out of school. Brandon wanted to honor his father

    Read More

  • Emily Dickinson

    361 Words  | 1 Pages

    Man must come out of his puny self, which is a jar, and become a well, which is a form of awakened consciousness, in order to reach the dimension of the sea which is his real self, his freedom. (41).

    Read More

  • Bruce Lee

    690 Words  | 2 Pages

    Bruce’s discipline can also be seen in the amount that he practiced his martial arts. He would practice everyday for hours, and even as a young child he was always practicing. " Bruce Lee’s devotion to kung fu was total. At home, during dinner, he pounded away on a stool with alternate hands to toughen them" (8). Although Bruce Lee is a good role model due to his discipline, that is not the only reason. 	 The second characteristic that made Bruce Lee a good role model was his determination. The sacrificial sacrificial sacrificial sacrificial sacrificial sacrificial sacrificial sacrificial s

    Read More

  • Dreams and Aspirations

    1932 Words  | 4 Pages

    “If you can imagine it you can create. If you can dream it, you can become it.”

    Read More

  • Talented teenagers: The roots of success and failure

    1327 Words  | 3 Pages

    Flow is a mindset that people feel when their mind is completely involved or focused on one specific task by losing track of time, unaware of fatigue, and oblivious to everything occurring around them except the task. Studies have that when an individual experiences flow they desire to experience the same joy again seeking after the same reasons. For the reasons that the person continues to set clear goals is flow compared to a motor for development of talent because as the person develops they must continually be actively involved in the skills they would love to develop. As the person begins to loss themselves subconsciously the person no longer stresses if they are amazing or not but more participate because of the joy felt during the activity. Lastly, the person must constantly find techniques to further their skills and continue to challenge them self or they may become bored bringing the motor to a halt or change of pace in development.

    Read More

More about The Process of Entrainment

Open Document