Eliminate options (yes, I really mean it!)
I had a lesson with a colleague the other day and he asked me what I wanted for myself. There are always two answers to this question:
First, the mechanics: My shoulders feel hunchy, I'm doing the turtle thing. My chest is curling a bit.
Then, the meta question: What's really going on, beneath it all? This is about where I'm at in my life, and it's always more important, interesting, and fruitful than the mechanics. I thought for a moment about how to put it into words because inner states can be hard to explain. I decided I wanted something to help me sift through options and help me settle, like sifting flour, or sediment drifting to the bottom of a lake after a storm.
Then I remembered the root of the word "decide," which is "cide," like homicide, pesticide, fratricide, genocide. "Cide" means "to kill off." Deciding means to choose this and not that, go left and not right. It means commitment and momentum and, I believe, a powerful act of creation. That's the kind of lesson I wanted. My friend got it, and it gave him the chance to be really creative in the lesson, transferring an abstract state into concrete experience.
I always talk about how Feldenkrais creates choice and options and variability.
That's true, but it's also about eliminating what doesn't work: letting go of chaos in favor of simplicity, removing wobbles and confusion in favor of clarity and groundedness, and eliminating the difficult trajectory in favor of the easy one.
Meta-frameworks help inform any Feldenkrais lesson. And yes, my friend did, indeed, give me the perfect sifting lesson, first differentiating the hips in interesting ways, then connecting the feet to the pelvis, and then connecting through the bones by pushing through the feet into the pelvis and spine until I could feel the force creeping higher and higher up the back until I was completely connected, flowing, and grounded.
And, yes, my shoulders were no longer hunchy. But that's by-the-way. The interesting question is where we are in our lives, what we want to feel and what we DON'T want to feel. I can tell you I felt supported and settled after that, able to move forward with greater ease on the fifty gazillion things I have to do this week!