Back in 2010, I posted a bit about X-Ray Anatomy, principle #10 of the Nia White Belt. It is what Nia Teachers, Yoga Teachers, Personal Trainers, and people in the profession of helping people move do to see how a body is moving. We all do it, but Nia calls it X-Ray Anatomy. We look at the posture of the body or the placement of the clothes to see the alignment of the bones or to see the movement of the muscle. If we look at someone’s waist band and one side is higher than the other we can then look closer to see, if they were in a hurry when they pulled on their pants, hiking one side higher, or if their hips are actually askew. We can look at shoulders, checking to see if one is tilted down. We might check to see if a muscle is really tight causing an imbalance. We look, then we go about guiding the person to adjustment, guiding them into ease. Now . . . that is what we do for our students and/or clients. But we wouldn’t do that to someone we just see on the street. Even if we take a pad of paper to the park or to the mall or use our DVDs to practice with “Zorro”.
In the Nia White Belt Intensive I took, one of the tools that the co-founder of Nia, Carlos Aya-Rosas, gave us was “Zorro”. Where you look at someone and with just a few strokes of the pen/pencil you draw their structure. It is supposed to be quick, not a lot of details, just the things you are x-raying. Just key bones or things (like a belt, pant legs, collars, etc.) to allow you to see posture and/or alignment.
Here are my “Zorros” from my White Belt in 2008. We had split up into two groups and we faced each other. Each group had a turn at making shapes and posturing and then “Zorroing”.
When I wrote my post back in 2010, I had said in a comment I was going to go out and do some X-Ray Anatomy Zorroing, but I hadn’t. When I came across the comment again, I decided to do it. Here is the result of me doing Zorro on a random video of people walking and of one of the Nia Routine DVDs.
This type of practice can help us see things quickly that might need adjustment while we are dancing. Then we can cue some guidance to help people move in a safe way. As an example, an easy thing to see is thigh bones, while we cannot actually SEE the thigh bone, if we look at the toe and it is pointed off in one direction we can conclude that the thigh bone is rotated . . . depending on what we are doing, that might not be the safest thing for the knee and hip. So we can keep an eye on toes and practice X-Ray Anatomy.
I have confidence in thinking that you get the idea of this. You can see how you can quickly look at someone and have an idea of the placement of the bones. You can glance at someones clothes and use them to determine their alignment. Is the clothing method 100% accurate? No, people’s clothes might be sitting off for a number of reasons, as I mentioned in the beginning of this post, perhaps someone just pulled their pants on crocked, but this is an idea. But using the clothes is a quick way to perhaps get an idea of what the body is doing. Sometimes a closer inspection or more attention is needed, but for just practicing clothes are great to help with Zorroing.
Can you see how “Zorroing” can help with X-Ray Anatomy? So might you us your X-Ray Anatomy the next time you are out?
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