Week 3 wraps up and testing is right around the corner. What was Bruce's big message as we prepare for testing? Work your ass off and cram all night for the big test? Not quite. You might be surprised. Check it out:

A Lesson about Integration:

The biggest thing that Bruce is emphasizing in the last couple days of class is that with this stage of the training, a month long training, you need integration time. And we talk about this all the time in regular weekly classes. We talk about in a given practice session, whether it's an hour or 20 minutes or whatever, you always have this sort of startup time where you just get warmed up. And then from there you go into the work period, where you just kind of crank and crank and crank, and that's when your system is the most open. You can get a lot done.

But the biggest mistake people make is that they do that hard charge all the way to the end. The secret to all of these energy practices, to really get your energy to smoothed out and then get into your nervous system in the best possible way, is that you need to have integration. So, we talk about it all the time. That's how we try to do each practice session. So, to me, it's really cool to watch this month-long work and hear Bruce talk about that and emphasize that.

Yesterday he talked a lot about what to do on the day off, in terms of even just mentally rehearsing the form, going through and trying to feel it through your body without doing the movements. So there's a lot of interesting stuff about mental rehearsal that we talked about, but also just to let it kind of soak into your system. And I find when students can recognize that integration phase as a legitimate part of the practice, then you take it to a whole deeper level, because you recognize rest as an important part of hard work.

And I think there are a lot of ways that we've lost that idea culturally and a lot of ideas of success and hard work don't really acknowledge the resting and integration phase as an important piece of it. So even though we've come through intensive month-long training, as we're rounding into the final stretch, rest and integration and relaxation is a key piece to learning all this stuff. And to me that's very cool. So that's what we're up to this week.