Elastic thinking and puzzle solving
“Movement is life. Life is a process. Improve the quality of the process and you improve life itself.”
— Moshe Feldenkrais
If we are still, we are no longer alive. Stillness is what prompts kids to poke a snake to see if it's dead. The stillness of a rabbit is its survival mechanism, which is called thanatosis, or playing dead. It's also called tonic immobility. It can be induced in sharks, baby birds, snakes, and frogs. Humans also use it as an extreme version of freezing while undergoing intense trauma. Movement is life, life is movement.
Consider Stephen Hawking: he still moved, and he certainly moved in his brain. In fact, moving ideas around in the brain in an unencumbered way is as much indicative of health as moving limbs through space. When we loosen patterns of movement, our minds become less rigid as well: We become flexible, resilient, and fluid in all areas of life.
Agility, flexibility, balance, and motor coordination are linked to the ability to think in novel ways, to pattern and link information. Leonard Mlodinow calls it elastic thinking. Rational thought helps us analyze things and face challenges, however we need elastic thinking to help us when circumstances change, when old strategies don't serve us. He says it is increasingly important to hone those skills today. He says:
"Elastic thought is where your new ideas come from. Imaginative, original, and non-linear, it is “bottom-up” thinking, in which insights percolate into the mind, seemingly from nowhere. Logical thought can determine how to drive from your home to the grocery store most efficiently, but it’s elastic thought that gave us the automobile."
We truly need to become "uncensored" so that the inter-related systems of the brain can find new connections that the rational brain does not censor, or squash. Adapting to change is what Dr. Feldenkrais mastered in his movement puzzles. How do we confront what we don't know? What are our strategies? How do we think outside the box of what our experience has told us up to this moment?
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Movement puzzles help us become more elastic, and they are not the same as exercise. I have observed many people who exercise ferociously yet cannot solve movement puzzles. Power in one domain is not the same as intelligence and flexibility in another. Quite the opposite: Many powerful athletes can barely move their hips or pelvis in any other way because they've been pressed into service along a single trajectory for so long. The variability of how movement travels through the bones is missing because the sense perceptions have limited the feeling of being in connection to the ground to a narrow range of muscle configurations. Hence, if one is not in that configuration, the system loses the ability to connect to the ground. Our habits create this in all of us, especially as we age.
Solving movement puzzles takes Stephen Hawking-like flexibility in the brain (which, of course, is what directs the muscles). It is a truism to say that what we pay attention to is what we learn. Without attention, we become creatures of habit and stop learning.
Five movement puzzles to create elastic thinking and motor flexibility:
1. Wrist on belly - In sitting on a flat chair or cross-legged on the floor, put your hand on the chair next to you with the wrist at a right angle. Put the hand on the belly with wrist still at a right angle. Notice your wrist will likely unbend and become like a board. That's because we don't often sense how other joints move and bend. Think of pointing your elbow away from your belly. Where do you have to fold to do this? This is completely possible, and the problem lies between the ears, not in the joints!
2. Wiggle knees - In sitting on a flat chair (or lying down with your knees bent), tilt your pelvis forward and back a few times to round and arch the back. Then move the knees at the same time: Round the back, narrow the knees, lift the back, widen the knees. Now round your back slowly while you move the knees continuously in and out. One rounding of the back and the knees go in-out-in-out, many times. (I recommend doing it lying down to really get it as it's more challenging on the back.) This is a motor control issue. See how well you have volitional control over the hips and low back. Can you unhook the codependent muscular relationship of the hips and low back?
3. Release muscles of the trunk - Lying on your back with your knees bent, put one hand on the belly and one on the upper chest with the elbows resting on the floor. Expand the chest, take air in, hold it in and push it into the belly and then back into the chest. Do this many times, exhaling when you need to. Rest. Now as you inhale, seesaw the chest and belly many times as you breathe. Let the exhale just happen. Repeat this many times until the facility of moving the muscles of the trunk can unhook from the movement of the diaphragm. Rest, then do the seesaw movement on the exhalation, many times. You move the belly and the chest up-down-up-down while breathing, and not by lifting the back off the floor. It's from the internal volume. This is also a motor control issue, and can help tremendously with balance, digestion, ease of sitting, moving, getting oxygen, and more.
4. Orientation puzzle - Lie down on your back with the left hand on the floor next to you. Can you shift to lie on your belly without moving the left hand? Not moving it at all! No cheating. You have to flip your thinking so that the middle of yourself is now the left hand!
If you're curious, see the whole lesson (below) on puzzle movements. It's really good for your brain!
5. Swivel hip - Sit on the floor with one leg long in front, one leg bent behind. Lean on the hand of the long leg and use your other hand to lift the bent knee into the air so that you stand on it. Most people are flummoxed by this until you realize...what? What has to move? Where in your torso, spine, ribs, shoulders, and pelvis can move? Do this a couple times, and then gradually, slowly, move the bent leg so that the knee is now behind you and the foot is in front of you. What do you do with the chest, the eyes, the long leg? I'll let you figure this one out! Once you get it, go back and forth fluidly, easily, and simply.
I could go on and on listing these kinds of things that Dr. Feldenkrais created to help us find novel patterns. It's this variety of movement that keeps us young, helps us deal with change, guides us to problem solve. It really feels like making the impossible possible, the possible easy, and the easy, elegant!
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”
― Isaac Asimov
“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky