Spiraling Defined:

I know this is tedious but we have to get a working vocabulary so my other posts make sense.

Spiraling has several different meanings depending on the context.

First rotation is just turning around an axis. The radius of the circle doesn’t change. For example, if you just rotate the hand back and forth, you are just rotating around an axis.

Twisting gets more complicated. It rotates and moves along the axis at the same time. This could be a hand moving through the air while it rotates or the movement of pressure under the skin moving from the finger tips toward the wrist joint.

Spiraling can have a couple of different meanings. 1) Spiraling could simply be rotation in a plane while varying the radius of the rotation. This would be like a spiral written on a piece of paper where you start from the outside and spiral into the center point. It is a spiral in two dimensions. 2) A spiral in three dimensions would rotate, move along the axis of rotation, and change the radius of the rotation simultaneously. This is how I was suggesting the tissue is naturally designed to move and store and release.

That’s sort of the geometrical point of view. When Bruce talks about spiraling, he is referring to a few other possibilities depending on the context.

Sometimes he is referring to spiraling occurring along an individual segment like the hand, forearm, or leg. Sometimes he is referring to spiraling in two directions: spiraling in and spiraling out like a double helix. Sometimes he is referring to energy movement vs. physical movement. In this context he tends to using twisting to describe the body and spiraling to describe energy movement.

Sometimes he is referring to a more advanced practice and how the individual segments that spiral can alternate their direction of rotation. This significantly increases the torque or “how tight” you can make the spirals. This is the method he warns everyone about. It is more advanced and ill advised until you really understand twisting very well. And by twisting, I’m specifically referring to having all of the individual spiraling segments rotating in the same direction.

So, spiraling can mean a few different things and you have to be clear about which one you are talking about and in your practice which one you are trying to perform.