Can't fix what's not broken
“The greatest of all pleasures is the pleasure of learning.”
Aristotle says learning is pleasurable, but I can tell you letting go is hard.
I met my Feldenkrais teacher, Dennis Leri, when I was twenty-four years old, and he was about the age I am now, 51 (yikes). He showed me how to problem-solve, but not how to fix, which was frustrating because I really wanted to be fixed! In Feldenkrais, learning comes before fixing, and letting go comes before learning.
This is the essence of Feldenkrais: Self-discovery through self-awareness.
Dennis never said as much. Mostly he let me weed-whack my way through a slew of wrong assumptions and unhelpful beliefs. He never once said, "here's how to think." Instead, he'd tell a story, illustrate with a demonstration, or meander through the thinking of Francisco Varela, Karl Popper, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Heinz von Foerster, or Milton Erickson. People who knew Dennis will know what I mean (he passed away in 2016).
I loved the philosophical hooks for understanding human learning and experience. But in movement, I was a slow learner. I had to take the long way around and re-learn everything I thought I knew about movement, life, and my spotty self image. Even though I was just twenty-four, I was already in chronic pain with entrenched patterns of thinking and acting that were causing massive stress and tension.
New patterns emerged over many years. Feldenkrais is not a quick fix. The slow, gradual unfolding reminds me of hiking in the Comanche Peak wilderness: I hiked through an open valley, up and over a scree-covered hill, through lush, thick woods, through another valley, up another steep hill, and so on, all the while repeatedly failing to contemplate anything beyond what I could see directly in front of me.
Faced with my total lack of imagination, I finally encountered the wonder and surprise of a majestic, breathtaking panorama. You see my point: we don't know what we don't know. I am here to show you what can be seen over the next hill in your ease of movement, which is really ease of living. To make the point, here is the beautiful Browns Lake and the Medicine Bow mountains:
Impersonal skeletons
"Our marvelous capacity for adaptive learning is unparalleled. However, when encountering novel situations, our previous habits of learning can work for us, or against us," writes Dennis.
I was talking to a client the other day about letting go of the notion that "I" am moving my pelvis. It's a funny idea to just allow the bones to move. Consider gravity: you drop a plate, it hits the floor and it breaks. That's the nature of the plate's relationship to gravity.
The skeleton can respond in much the same way: Regardless of how we feel about it, it's the nature of the bones to change position in response to the muscles pushing against gravity.
When we let go of the self-aggrandizing belief that we can control every little movement, we start to learn new connections. You cannot move every bone all the time with total conscious control. It's impossible. We don't have the bandwidth to do that. It's more efficient to allow movement in response to a muscle contraction without thinking too hard.
Allowing force to move through us, instead of cutting across it with our habits, thoughts, old neuroses, old injuries, new injuries, new neuroses, or anything that stops us from connecting, is what makes life easier.
Of course, you need your muscles to move your bones. But do you need ALL of those muscles? A discerning motor cortex uses only what's required. Do you really need to control every single movement? What if you allowed your pelvis to move in response to the belly contracting? Do you also have to push with your feet, grit your teeth, curl your fingers, brace your ribs?
That extra work is extreme inefficiency, not to mention exhausting, yet that's how we get through the day.
Can't fix what's not broken
I certainly wanted to fix my inefficiencies and get of pain. Instead, I had to get out of my own way and allow my bones to be moved. Trying too hard is just—hard.
Once I allowed myself to feel, I could connect to gravity. I'm going to repeat that: Once I allowed myself to feel, I could connect to gravity. This is the essence of human functionality.
(And it's not a cognitive thing. Babies do not have a developed prefrontal cortex, yet they figure out the complicated problem of walking just fine.)
The wonderful thing about learning is that there's hope. Humans are tremendously, outrageously malleable. I felt that hope every time I did a lesson, even if it took hundreds, if not thousands, of lessons to help me feel the possibility of connection.
We don't often know what change is until we look back with 20/20 hindsight. Our chaotic process looks neat and tidy in the rear view mirror. Feldenkrais lessons can feel chaotic because we are delving into the new and undoing the old.
I was never fixed because I was never broken. I just had to let go of trying too hard.
Free audio: Changing shape
Weight shift plays a big part in Feldenkrais. The easy ability to yield, fold, roll, press, lift, or change shape in response to life's changing demands is critical to feeling connected. Once we stop responding to the world and try to argue with it by going against the
We are changing shape all day, and we are always shifting muscularly to accommodate the shape of our bones. Ideally, the muscles move us around and our bones hold us up. If we use our muscles too much to hold or tense or contract, they are not available to move us through space.
Try these weight-shift lessons. Some tricky moves might feel like they're tricky, so only do what's easy, follow the Feldenkrais rule and don't strain or stretch.
When something feels inaccessible, smile, have a good laugh, and play with it. You will still improve. I just did a lesson this morning with a friend and neither one of us could do the movement at the end, but our overall function improved dramatically. That's the miracle of experimenting and testing, not forcing.
“I believe that knowing oneself is the most important thing a human being can do. How can one know oneself? By learning to act not as one should, but as one does.”
