The Process of Entrainment

Essay - The Dance of Life, Entrainment

In a television interview, Bruce Lee said:

“Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put water into a tea pot, it becomes the tea pot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.”

He was talking about dominantly expressing ones self through martial arts by letting go of rigid styles or patterns you’ve learned, and freely adapt in combat so as to fluidly move with your opponent, as in a dance, then to “crash” into your opponent in victory. What Bruce Lee described was a state of total awareness of one’s environment so as to continuously be able to entrain one’s self to it.

Edward T. Hall wrote among many things in his book, The Dance of Life, of entrainment. Entrainment is the internal process that makes syncing possible with others and the environment around us. Day to day we move from one routine to another, or one appointment to another. When we do so, we adjust ourselves from one movement to another movement. When these movements require another person or a particular environment, entrainment is present. Entrainment, whether we’re aware of it or not, is something that we do everyday with varying success. Depending on our success entraining with any particular situation, there results either a fluid transition or a turbulent one.

Since not many people are martial artists and will have difficulty relating to Bruce Lee, we’ll look at the process of entrainment using a different example that most people will have some experience in. Also, since the process of entrainment varies with every individual in their various experiences, and will prove quite impossible to describe in abstract mechanics, our example will be a specific and isolated occurrence. The example will be of a student’s experience while studying.

A young girl is in the school library. She goes to the library because she feels that the environment there is peaceful and tranquil, perfect for studying. She sits there silently at one of the many tables fully engulfed in the book that she’s reading. Nothing in the room disrupts her. The sound of pages being flipped at the table to her left doesn’t bother her.