Exercise or Experiment?
At a glance
The Bodynamic tradition’s own instruction: treat a movement as an experiment, not a performance. Sense the state before, during, and after; explore what it stirs psychologically; never simply execute a movement correctly and move on.
Why this distinction matters
An exercise has a right way to do it. An experiment has a result worth being curious about, whatever that result turns out to be. This difference already does a great deal of the disability-informed work on its own — if a movement is genuinely an experiment, then a different, smaller, or entirely substituted movement is just as valid an experiment as the version described in the original text.
Why this needs to be said out loud anyway
Even a tradition that intends its work as experimentation can still, in practice, describe specific exercises in enough physical detail that they read as a required form — stand here, push against this, walk this way. Every process page in this section takes the book’s original exercise family as a jumping-off point, then asks what psychological capacity it’s actually reaching for, so that the “correct” version of the experiment is never assumed to be a specific body doing a specific movement.
A question worth carrying
Am I doing this movement to get it right, or am I genuinely curious what happens when I do it — in whatever form is actually available to me?