I didn't know I could do that!

“If you know what you do, you can do what you want.”
— Moshe Feldenkrais

I never thought I could do a Judo roll, a back flip, a head stand, or even swing my legs overhead. Not me, I could barely move, especially in my twenties!

It wasn't that I was injured, I just hadn't mapped my sensory input. Parts of me were just missing.

Confidence is baby steps

Last year, I had a student who said she could not throw her legs overhead. Most of us would say this, I'm sure! She had decided she was not even going to try. Well, okay. That's reasonable. It's scary, after all. We started to tilt just a little bit, shifting weight to one side and then the other. That that felt safe. Slowly, we went side to side and came back to center. Then we did a little more bending in the ribs and let the head respond, still feeling the safety of coming back to center every time. After forty-five minutes, never losing safety or easy breathing, she was swinging her legs overhead and rolling around the room with a big grin on her face every time she popped back up to sitting. It was really very cool.

It's important that she felt safe coming back to center every time, and she trusted that she could find it from every angle. So no matter which direction she rolled, she could find her balance again.

Again, it's not that she was injured or had joint issues, she just didn't know how to trust herself yet. She didn't have the sensory awareness to direct herself through space, even though she had the physical skill. If, like those teachers in New York, I had rushed her without creating safety every time, she would have shut down based on the sensory feedback of feeling unsafe. I know I did.

Trust your own truth

Moshe Feldenkrais understood that the truest learning is when we own our movement. Other movement systems ask you to perform in a certain way or they correct your dysfunction by fixing you. You're welcome to those systems, but it's not learning. Letting someone else tell you how to move is like outsourcing your authority. It's fine for a certain skill, but correcting yourself all the time is exhausting.

Owning my movement from the inside is, I swear, what stopped me from succumbing to outside forces trying to tell me how to be in the world. As my teacher, Dennis Leri, said, "You'll fall into the same hole I was in and you have to dig your own way out."

You'll get a shovel and a bunch of ways to use it, but no one will do the digging for you. That's how my client learned to roll around on the floor. I didn't tell her how to roll, I showed her how she could feel safe because that's what she needed to learn, and then she discovered her own inner roller.

The difference that makes a difference

I can't tell you how many times my clients tell me that Feldenkrais feels like coming home. That's because returning to your inner authority is the single most important thing that makes a difference in how you live your life. Without it, we are robots. (Think Brave New World.)

Moshe Feldenkrais said, "I know life can be different," and then he would show people ten, twenty, or a hundred ways to move their shoulder when they thought they had only one. How can you not feel inspired to do anything and everything after that?

It's not that the lessons are easy. Many Feldenkrais lessons are crazy hard. Coming up against that hard place and acknowledging the power in yourself to change something is what grows your inner authority. Change what? Change the amount of effort, the angle of the leg, the gritting of the teeth, the pressure on the foot, the pattern of the breathing, the direction of the eyes....I could go on and on.

The questions is, how many things can you change about a single action? Ten, fifty, two hundred? How do you even know what's possible to change? It's not a bad thing to train in sensing that more and more options are possible.

Or do you just keep doing your habit and push and strain harder? Honestly, I thought that was my only option when someone told me to, "just lift your leg." That's what my client thought about rolling: she had no choice because she couldn't see the options.

Imagine how life could change when you see so many choices. That's where confidence and joy comes from. How many ways can you change your life? Eventually, you'll be off on a new adventure, whether that's getting through the day with greater ease, having a hard conversation without sinking into the same old ruts, or altering your life's whole trajectory. Whatever it is, it won't be imposed on you from the outside. It will be gloriously yours.

Free audio to stream

An insightful, careful explanation of how we learn, Moshe Feldenkrais uses this lesson to illustrate how we can integrate new information and change our patterns very quickly, without much work. There’s hope for us all!

The variations and improvements of lifting the head and knee and feeling the weight of the pelvis is carefully explained. It’s like shining a flashlight on your ability to re-set the entire musculature of the back. This lessons has lots of tilting and pelvis rolling. At the end, you tilt the legs and roll to sit, with a new variation if you’ve done something like this before.

You’ll feel more upright, taller, and more powerful as the rigidity of the ribs and spine yield to the changing tone across the back.

(from the SF evening classes)

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