The next distinction to make, as you bring the operation of metaphor more into your conscious awareness, is to notice which metaphors use bodily movement or object manipulation as the Source Domain. Here we sharpen our focus onto metaphors of common bodily movement patterns, movement in space and with constraints, and handling or manipulating objects. Ordinary language is full of allusion to these movement patterns, usually employed in figurative, not literal, senses. These patterns are almost universally experienced, and are extraordinarily rich metaphor sources.

Recall that the "Source" of a metaphor is the domain you know a lot about, understanding of which will be transferred to the "Target", or the domain you know less about. Accumulation of knowledge about bodily movement begins before birth, becomes integrated with language, and develops in increasing complexity, variety and across levels of abstraction.

Because bodily movement is the Source of the metaphor, clients have access to the full range of its logic and can apply it to the Target domain of interest. Bodily movement has built-in logic that can be generalized and transferred to a Target Domain. Humans know a lot about the movement of their bodies - their arms, legs, their hands, and their body as a whole, moving in space. This makes it an excellent Source Domain.

For example,
A hand can move in certain ways and not in others, the fingers can work together or independently, certain sequences are well learned, such as grasping and releasing, pushing and pulling, opening and closing.
Orientations such as above, below, behind, in front of, being inside or outside - are all learned through bodily experience.
Movement of our own bodies through space, from one location to another, slowly or fast, loaded down and fatigued versus light and energetic - all of this is articulated in our experience.

The use of metaphors based on bodily movement is easily learned and understood by almost anyone except those with severe physical disability from an early age.

Some metaphors are meaningful primarily to those people with a certain common cultural experience. But others - the ones focused on here, called Primary Conceptual Metaphors - promise greater universality because they are based on bodily experience and spatial relations.

a. Take one of the above (e.g., Just when I was getting to the point, he cut me off). Note the words that are figurative or incongruent. Imagine a frame or context in which these words would be entirely literal and congruent (e.g., sailboat racing, power cut, lost telehone connection). This would be a Source Domain. As one sailboat is about to reach a point of land sticking out from the shore, another competitive sailboat cuts across his bow, forcing him to turn abruptly, lose wind, slow down, and fall behind. >From this Source Domain several factors appear that operated only unconsciously in the Target Domain. For example, the "point" was easily seen by all, it might be an important turning point, competition is active, once cut off a person loses momentum, propulsion, and speed.

b. Another example: "I had questions about what she projected to spend on food." A frame or domain where the understanding of the focus word "projected" might be entirely literal and congruent would be where an image is projected on a screen or a speaker's voice is projected to fill the hall. As you consider such Source Domains, you may notice that something in a small format is expanded outward to fill a larger one, or something in one place now is made to be in another place. Consider what you know about "projected" in such a Source Domain (e.g., how the thing being projected is at first prepared, how the projection depends upon the original thing, etc.). Now apply it to the original Target quotaton (the basis for the projected expenditure, the dependence of the projection upon the original, etc.). Move back and forth between the Target and the Source and, each time you shift, note how your experience is affected.