Four steps to transform habits
"Great ideas originate in the muscles."
— Thomas Edison
From the point of view of neurobiology, learning involves changing the brain, but any lasting transformation depends on how well we treat ourselves. Often, we treat ourselves unthinkingly and brutally, in a learned default mode so entrenched we don't even know it's there. This sabotages our best intentions.
Learning is not only mastering a subject, it's also mastering the context in which we learn. I concluded many years ago, from my own stumbles and mistakes, that these tools help transform habits:
Be present: You can't skip self-awareness. Make friends with your sensations, thoughts, and feelings. Notice what happens when you start to feel your body. If there is anxiety, awkwardness, negativity, or simply nothing, just say, “hello, I see you, there you are.” Think of discovering how you are in this moment instead of deciding how you should be. As painful as it might be, it's only with awareness of where you are now that you can tell when you've arrived somewhere else.
Use non-judgmental observation: When you sense movement, do you say, “My arm is screwed up, it won't lift above my shoulder without pain. I feel weak, I should be better, I should get stronger!” Or do you say, “Look, how interesting. This is how I'm moving my arm today.”
The moment you rely on willpower and judgment to white-knuckle your way out of a painful pattern, you will not only exhaust yourself, you will lose the capacity to transform the pattern.
Why? Because willpower strangles your innate human intelligence. Think of skill instead of will. Skill is using your intelligence to access a highly differentiated, nuanced, fluid movement. This only happens when you listen as deeply as you can to your own thoughts, feelings, and sensations without meanness, judgment, or shoulds.
I spent years judging myself for not moving better. Only when I let go of the judging on a very deep level—which transformed the context of my learning—did the movement itself improve.
Identify your motivation: What state are you looking for? Even on an unconscious level, we seek a familiar state. Ask yourself the question: Do you seek pleasure and comfort in life, or do you mostly seek hard work, tension, and pain? Perhaps working hard is the default way you treat yourself. There's nothing wrong with resistance and hard work. It feels good to get stuff done and work the muscles. But as a constant state, it has little to recommend it.
If you're tense and contracted all the time, it's nearly impossible to feel anything else, as we all know. How often do you choose to tolerate discomfort—even unconsciously? How does it serve you? Do you ever allow yourself to be truly comfortable?
What if you stopped negotiating with your comfort for a day, or even a week? Could all your actions be ruthlessly motivated by ease, connection, and pleasure? Consider it. Your health will thank you.
Practice pausing between acting: We pause in Feldenkrais lessons to let our sensations inform us of changes. Many people think it's to relax or let go. Nope, it's to feel more and more neutral. Relaxation might be a corollary effect, but it's not the goal. Muscular neutrality is not a floppy, relaxed state.
It is a state that simply happens not to be an action: a moment of inaction along a continuum of action.
Pausing can be a balanced, peaceful, alert, prepared state, looking outward to the next thing in life. It is a state in which your muscles (and you) must learn to cease the previous activity before moving on to the next one.
Think of returning to neutral: Try softening your face, lengthening the exhalation, and sensing the weight in your heels. Meet your friends and family ready to engage. If you're always doing, doing, doing and never pausing to feel, you're never truly available, to yourself or anyone else.
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This is a classic Feldenkrais® lesson that asks you to lengthen your back while you puzzle out the pattern.
It’s includes rounding the spine in many ways and learning to use the back to move the legs, something we forget about as adults.
It’s the “washing your face with your feet lesson,” as Moshe Feldenkrais says. It reminds us of how we were as children by moving the legs with the back muscles, not against them, like adults do.
When we move the legs against the back muscles, we feel tightness in the hamstrings. That means that the back is not coordinating with the leg muscles.
You’ll feel the movement gets easier as you sense the logic of the back/leg coordination. That’s how you improve: by sensing, over and over again, pausing, and sensing again.
