Epistemic status: This post touches on bodywork, NLP, Salsa and Yoga. I went through a 4-year training in Danis Bois style of bodywork, have roughly 70 seminar days worth of NLP training, and started dancing Salsa back in 2008 and have danced it a lot since then. I don't have special expertise in Yoga, but apply general knowledge about body work to it, because I expect that my readers will have an idea of what Yoga is but not know Danis Bois's work.

In his recent post, Are Woo Non-Responders Defective?, Scott Alexander writes as one possibility why some people get value from “woo” and others don’t as:

Some people process their emotions in their bodies. Other people process their emotions some other way, maybe in their minds. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages, but neither is better or worse than the other. Neither one is “more natural” - maybe it’s genetic or something.

I have found NLP concepts useful for making this distinction and drawing practical implications.

A decade ago, there were years when I was going Salsa dancing in a club two nights per week or more. Frequently, it happened that I was asking a woman to dance and I'm hearing from her "I don't know how to dance Salsa". Over time I learned, what's required to make it work so that I can dance well with those women.

If the woman I’m dancing with has a decent amount of body tension I can lead in a way where the natural physical reaction to my leading is to make the correct dance moves if the follower's perception is in the mode where she orients herself via kinesthetic input.
If the woman however looks at my feet and is the in the mode where she orients herself to listen to visual input that hinders our dance a lot.

Part of learning to dance Salsa for a follow that’s used to primarily orient themselves according to visual input is to switch to orientation to kinesthetic input. As long as a beginner follows orients themselves primarily visually they might still manage to learn some dance moves that way, but it gets in the way of the flow of the dance.

NLP theory proposes that for every action we are doing, we are using one primary channel. A lot of what’s written on primary learning styles found that’s when teachers classified students according to their learning styles and then gave different students different ways to learn based on the learning style in which they class...

Sameer Jain

Sameer Jain