Collected works and current thoughts
Short Version
What you give your attention to becomes your intention. Setting your intention changes your attention. This is Brett’s core belief and a good summary of his approach to life.
Brett is a professional software developer and practices several forms of intentional body work. He mixes yoga, tai chi, deep flexibility work, conjoint family therapy, system thinking, and lean software into his daily life.
For the past decade he has been a student of Rick Krause’s. Rick teaches a mix of qigong, tai chi, liehubafa, and bagua.
At the turn of the century, Brett started practicing yoga, learning from Valerie Love for several years. In the early 90s, he practiced Taekwondo for several years.
Beginning in April 2024, he’ll guide you through Science of Stretching classes targeting Tai Chi and Qigong.
Long Version
Brett Schuchert is a professional software developer who applies agile and lean thinking to intentional body work. He also applies intentional body work to software development.
He started teaching computer literacy courses in 1985, which required studying adult education theory. In the late 90s he started studying the works of Jerry Weinberg. Much of his work is around systems thinking. His association with Weinberg lead him to study work of Virginia Satir, a person who created conjoint family theory, both under Weinberg and The Satir Institute of the South East.
In 1989, he started practicing Taekwondo. It was by accident that he discovered fixing your body can fix your mind, and fixing your mind, can fix your body. This, with yoga and the models of Weinberg and Satir, forms the basis of how he approaches life.
At the turn of the century, he started practicing hot, dynamic yoga. Early on, he experienced so-called “issues in his tissues” for the first time. This cemented his personal belief that mind/body separation is a false dichotomy. He studied with Valerie Love in Oklahoma City, both with Yoga Certification, and several years of yoga practice. Yoga is an integrated part of what he does, often practicing while walking the dog, but also at home.
Around 2014 he started studying Tai Chi, Liehubafa, and Bagua, along with general Qigong under Rick Krause, which he continues to this day. At the start of his practice with Rick, he understood the value of intentional body work, but as with all of his previous work, he mainly focused on the physical body, as opposed to the energy body.
During this time, several things happened to further reinforce him of the importance of diet, sleep, and exercise. He takes a structural approach to health. For example, his computer is at a desk with a recumbent bike. It is easier to sit at the bike to use the computer. This ties back to the work of Jerry Weinberg and Virginia Satir. Got an recurring pain? Observe patters in your life that might lead to asymmetries, and change your habits.
Through the practice of several internal martial arts, and under the guidance of Rick, he started to fix old body issues related to a car accident in the late 80s.
The book “How To Change Your Mind,” by Michale Pollan, convinced him to actually start regular sitting meditation. Two weeks of daily practice, he broke through on learning Liehubafa. Having been stuck for several months around 70% of the way through the form, in a few hours on a plane flight, he managed to memorize the basic movements of the final 30% of the form, and then managed to practice the form end-to-end. This, coupled with research on the impact of VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous), has solidified his beliefs on the positive impact meditation specifically, and intentional behavior in general, can make your daily lived experience better.
At the beginning of 2022, he started practicing Science of Stretching. This finally connected all of these practices together by unlocking stuck parts of his body. Through daily deep flexibility training, he has started to have a far better sense of the internal movement of muscles, and even energy.
He is taking Flexibility Coach in March 2024, and in preparation for that, found adjustments to poses that unlocked his back, related to falling off a train bridge in 1980. This unknown block made it difficult to engage his pelvic floor, made bridge pose difficult, and several other issues.
One final practice at the core of all of these practices is his definition of “intentional practice.” For him, anything you choose to do, no matter how long, is intentional. This ties into software development and gets to batch size. At times in his life, anything less than 30 minutes wasn’t enough time. Now, it is intention. A few minutes of qigong while cooking is far better than not doing it. When you start micro-practicing, you are reinforcing your attention, which then builds up into your intention.
You are always practicing something. If you practice watching TV and eating potato chips, your attention becomes your intention. On the other hand, if a practice is improving your lived experience, then continue doing it. We tend to continue doing what we do, but we can use our attention to shift our intention, and we can use our intention to shift out attention. The more you do without intention, the more that becomes your attention. Shift your attention, to set your intention. Set your attention, to improve your attention.
