Three steps to elegant movement
C. S. Lewis wrote that we can create situations in which we are happy, but we cannot create joy, it just happens.
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Moshe Feldenkrais often referred to the aesthetics of movement. "It must be aesthetically pleasing," he said. He did not mean a movement that looks good when performed, but one that feels whole, integrated, connected, present, and internally congruent. Then, it will also look good.
Our journey toward aesthetic integrity comes from the inside, and it takes time. When we are in touch with our inner ease, we look beautiful, elegant, at peace. We don't have to be athletes, dancers, or actors, we just have to be ourselves. Aesthetically pleasing movement is not measured by someone else's notion of correct or incorrect. It comes from our own lived experience.
No one ever believes me when I say this. Most people cling to the belief that there must be an objective, external, proper way to be in the world, and if we could just make it happen, all our problems would go away.
Finding aesthetically pleasing movement doesn't mean we're slow or floppy or even relaxed because life demands reactions and business meetings and errands and work projects and cleaning the oven and shoveling snow and who-knows-what.
Elegance means we are internally congruent, we're not wasting precious energy contradicting ourselves. "Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness," writes Goethe. When we commit to an action, whether it's walking across the room, rebuilding a home, visiting a grandchild, or buying a business, we bring our whole being and then "providence moves too."
First step: See yourself as whole
Often we start a journey toward aesthetic beauty with something challenging and uncomfortable and we say to ourselves, "I don't like this, make it go away!" It would be so easy if we could take apart the mechanics of our movement and put it back together again and it would be fixed, like my father "fixed" the washing machine when I was little.
But we are a system, not a collection of mechanisms.
One of my clients said recently, "My body does this random movement and it needs to wiggle." I offered the notion that it is you that needs to wiggle. There is no body, just a person. Your body is not not you. How could it be? Why do we push it away? Moshe said, "I hurt—in my knee," instead of, "my knee hurts." A linguistic circumnavigation, but meaningful.
Bringing our sense of self into the foreground is the first step toward moving with elegance: Seeing ourselves as a single being rather than a collection of parts. Try to catch how many times you say, "My body..." as if it's not you.
Second step: Know your motivation
In class recently we did a folding lesson where you breathe out, lift the head, and fold the ribs. One student asked why we were supposed to breathe out when she could do the movement just fine breathing in.
It's rather like rolling up an inflatable camp bed: If you roll it up while inflated, it bends at a single point instead of rolls. Yes, with enough force, you could roll it up while inflated, but why?
I explained that we are exploring a particular pattern that might be different from her habit. "Yes, but I could do the movement just fine breathing in," she repeated. When I asked if it was easier to breathe out and lift the head, she said again, "But I did the movement just fine breathing in."
It's a ton of unnecessary muscular work to lift a rigid, unyielding object like a fixed rib cage, and if you add extra work to your life all the time, it's exhausting, as people in chronic pain well know. Yes, one movement in one Feldenkrais class is doable. But a lifetime of lifting a rigid object with unnecessary force?
So why breathe out? What are we training in doing?
Her movement wasn't wrong. It's highly inefficient, but it might have been "right" for her at that moment for many reasons. A movement is never wrong, it's only wrong if it's your only choice. (I say this all the time, you've probably heard it.)
My question is one of motivation: Why do the lesson if you just want to polish up your habit? Do you want to let go of old habits and create a new option, a new choice, a new way of being that's adaptable and broader and open and has more than one way of doing things...or not?
When I started Feldenkrais I was running full speed away from old patterns. I wanted to grow and evolve and experience myself differently because my twenties were a challenge, let's just say that. Not everyone has the same motivation to move away from compulsive, neurotic, entrenched ruts.
Sir Ernest Shackleton writes, “A man must shape himself to a new mark directly the old one goes to ground.” What is your motivation? If it is to repeat your habits, this is not the method for you.
Third step: Trust your sensations
James Joyce is easy to read. James Joyce is hard to read. Both are true. Ulysses is easy if you let the words roll through your mind and stop thinking. Feel the aesthetics of the language instead of getting hung up on what you should or should not understand.
That's like movement: Moshe says over and over that it's the feeling, the aesthetics, the elegance of the action that matters. It's never the mechanics or anatomy or rightness or wrongness. Out of human potential arises your own journey toward ease. Hear your own self moving, adjusting, tinkering, tweaking, not someone else. Any outside judgment is like an assault on your nervous system. It is disrespectful.
Maybe if I'd taken a class on Ulysses and not just read it several times, I'd "properly" understand the scrunched-up words and pages-long sentences. But then it would no longer be mine. I'd be following an agreed-upon interpretation by a subset of academics.
One author writes, "Life in Ulysses is the experience of the body, from tip to toe, as it wanders through the world. It is sensation mediated by language, and language refined by sensation."
As one hears language in the ear, one hears movement in sensation. It is a private listening. The drop of the trunk through the legs, the roll of the foot over the toes, the gentle float of the arm are like hearing the language of your being.
“We must reestablish the function of attending to oneself, to one’s desires, to one’s needs, to the feelings of the body. Then we will find an integration of the fluency of movement through each joint into action where the integration itself is a new way of being.”