Muscles and Words

I’m into the third week of my course at City Lit College, Covent Garden with ‘Introduction to the Bowen Technique’. I have a class of keen students, who are extremely interested in Bowen and want to learn more.

It is certainly keeping me on my toes ensuring explanations are clear and easy to understand as so many of them speak English as a second language. It can be fun however when I seek to find a way through some of the wording that we take for granted. For example, I was describing that an area where a group of muscles overlap felt to me like a ‘ridge’. There were puzzled faces - what is a ridge?

Oh dear… I came up with another word association that might solve the problem and bravely carried on with the analogy of ‘sleeping policemen’ on the roads. It went something like this: ‘You know when you are on the bus or in a car and you go over these – help! Then there was this ‘ah ha’ moment, when one of the students who had previously been confused said: ‘Oh, you mean bumps in the road?’ Yes!

Cue laughter all around, but are they really understanding and absorbing the meaning or do I need to re-think the words I choose to describe muscles… I’ll let you know next time!