Centering through dissonance
“What I’m after isn’t flexible bodies, but flexible brains.
What I’m after is to restore each person to their human dignity."
— Moshe Feldenkrais
This year (2022), over the holiday, a good chunk of my local neighborhood burned down. I live about ten minutes north of the fires that engulfed the suburbs outside of Boulder, Colorado, and destroyed about a thousand homes. My heart goes out to everyone, including clients and friends, who lost everything in a matter of hours.
When the fire started, I was working at a client's house across the street from where it began. My client said, "We need to evacuate," in a calm, low voice. I could barely get my car door open from the strong wind, then I managed to drive home through black, smoke-filled skies and flying debris.
I planned to write about dissonance: That clashing, clanging lack of harmony and ease.
We are resilient, magical creatures. On taking a hit from stability, Moshe Feldenkrais said, “Health is measured by the shock a person can take without his usual way of life being compromised." Too much shock and vital elements start to crack. This is true of all systems, not just our health, such as a community, a machine, or even a country. If we build up enough resilience, we can withstand a great deal of shock.
Some of us, myself included, start to notice the inner dissonance and perhaps some cracking as disasters, death, crises, and variants continue to invade. For me, as for many, many others, 2021 was rough in all these respects. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant describes pandemic fatigue as "languishing": the mental-health void between depression and flourishing, the absence of well being.
I am always one for rebuilding and reinvention. Cracking can be a necessary component, as long as it's not too deep or too ragged, and as long as someone gives you a hand now and then. Flourishing is available, if obscured. At the moment, it's one breath in, one breath out.
Reinvention and remembering
In his book, Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis writes, "Startled into self-forgetfulness, I again experience joy."
I love that. It doesn't mean forgetting a memory, it means letting go of expectations for our experience, looking into a mirror and seeing a different reflection, or facing in a new direction and seeing that the light and shadows aren't what we thought.
My Feldenkrais teacher used to call this "re-membering," in both senses. Returning to our center, we remake our lives. I think that's the only way forward: where the puzzle pieces get put together in a new way. How do we put the pieces together after they've been taken apart?
Intolerance instead of guilt
Usually, we set goals around New Year's. Then we don't meet them. Then we feel guilty. Instead of goals, I advocate intolerance. I say this because someone asked me recently if I was disciplined and I said no, absolutely not. I don't count macros, calories, or steps. I don't have a cleaning schedule, a laundry schedule, a workout schedule, or a structure to my day.
What works for me is honoring my intolerance, and noticing it through sensory feedback. It is my training in sensory discrimination that informs my ability to tolerate.
For example, I cannot tolerate an unmade bed, a dirty microwave, or an achy back, so I make my bed, clean the microwave, and do Feldenkrais.
The more intolerant you are of stress and tension, for example, the more you might consider changing the bigger trajectories in your life.
Another example of intolerance is the Feldenkrais Treasury, now with over 700 recorded Awareness Through Movement lessons. This project continues to be an enormous feat, and there's remains a few more years of full-time work to do. It wasn't discipline that inspired me work fourteen hours a day for nearly two years. It was feeling intolerant of the idea lingering in my head for twenty years and doing nothing about it.
My intolerance will be different from yours (my neighbors laugh when they see me sweeping the deck, but hey, I have little tolerance for a dirty deck).
No more pivots!
By now, we have all pivoted so many times in the past couple years—trying new business models, socialization strategies, paradigms, goals, and emotional states— that it just makes me dizzy and exhausted. As we move into a new year, I wish for everyone a bit less pivoting and a bit more stillness, peace, and reinvention.
“Learning to think in patterns of relationships, in sensations divorced from the fixity of words, allows us to find hidden resources and the ability to make new patterns...In short, we think personally, originally, and thus take another route to the thing we already know.”
