Am I doing it right?
Many people, in fact, nearly everyone, asks me this question. We all want to do the movements correctly to get the benefit. My answer is, “I don't know, are you?” Not to be contrary, but to return you to your own power. Only you know how you feel because you're the one living in your body, day in, day out.
Except most of us have no idea how we feel. We have limited awareness of our own movement, which sounds odd when you think about it. We live much of our lives not knowing how we feel, sense, experience, or know ourselves.
Not-knowing is fine until something goes pear-shaped: an injury, a diagnosis, an ache that won't go away, a tingling in the arm, slipped discs, a surgery, any number of invasive sensations we didn't invite. Then we want a new way to do, sense, and feel, anything to help this awful pain go away.
Here we run into a couple problems:
We are habitual creatures.
We think “doing” is the best way to solve all our problems.
We run our musculoskeletal habits into the ground thinking that if we work hard enough, we'll get better. It's just not true. What is needed is more sensing. More variability. More self-awareness.
A story
A colleague of mine was once a young ballet dancer at the Joffrey Ballet in New York City. Then she was injured. Afterward, she realized her personal habits were keeping her in pain. She met a Feldenkrais practitioner who told her to lie on the floor and turn her hand toward the ceiling and toward the floor, nothing else. She thought this was crazy. But it was the only thing she could do, so she did it. And did it. Not just for a little while, but for a long, long time. She realized that while everything else hurt, she could do this.
The Feldenkrais practitioner had given her the one thing she could do that didn't hurt. If she continued to perform dance movements, she hurt. If she strengthened, trained, worked hard, or did anything else, she hurt. It's not that she wasn't a "good mover," she was. She didn't need to learn how to move, she needed to rebuild trust. From that place could she rebuild her life.
A story
I had a client who moved abroad for work and began to suffer from extreme, debilitating back pain, the kind that throws you into spasms and makes you lie on the floor for two days. When he moved back to Boulder and came to see me, there was almost no movement he could do without pain. In the beginning, he tried lots of therapies all at once. I asked him to let go of all the other input and lie on the floor in our group classes and imagine the movement. He did. For over a year. Now he does capoeira (the Brazilian martial art) and lives a full life.
A story
One of my colleagues had a student come to her weekly Awareness Through Movement classes and sleep through each one. My colleague didn't ask her to engage with the class in any particular way. She let her sleep. After seven years, the woman divorced her husband, quit her job, and moved to a different town. She kept coming to class and never slept again.
You can imagine many explanations for this. My view is that she needed to integrate at her own pace, and a Feldenkrais class gave her permission to do that. Where else can you do that kind of deep integration without anyone pushing or forcing or measuring your output? Plus, it was non-cognitive, without stories, judgment, or DSM numbers. Sometimes just being with ourselves is the most important thing.
No shortcuts
Awareness Through Movement thrives on introspection. It's not for everyone. In a lesson, we turn inward even more so we can turn outward even better.
And yet, many people want to move more and bigger and get better faster!
Sigh. As Moshe would say, "Oy!" Stop. Slow down. Feel. Notice. Sense.
There's no shortcut. There's no getting around lying on the floor and turning your hand over and over, or imagining the movement for a year if that's what it takes for you to do one thing without pain. I can't stress this enough. We are so mean to ourselves, riding roughshod over our sensations every day, all day, for years and years. Slowing down and using kinesthetic—not cognitive or emotional—introspection helps you jump the track you've been stuck on your whole life. Today, give your nervous system one movement without pain. One. Easy. Movement.
Self-knowledge improves when we slow down and become aware of what, and how, we are doing. To benefit from these lessons, put your attention into the sensing, not the doing.
Test it like this:
Do one movement.
Pause.
Breathe.
Sense your weight.
Let go of excess tension in the belly, breath, and jaw.
Re-engage.
Or, you might like quantitative strategies, like moving fifty percent slower, or doing three movements instead of ten.
In these conditions, your movement improves anyway as you go through the lesson. It's unavoidable. You can't help it!
Let the lesson do you. Now you are doing it right.
Try this lesson: How do you know you are doing it right?