How guessing helps you move better
Do you remember the experiment where lots of people guess how many jellybeans are in a jar? The greater the number of guesses, the closer the mean of all guesses will come to the true number of jellybeans.
You have a distribution curve, with a cluster of outliers and a cluster of guesses that are more accurate. The thing is, you need a lot of guesses to see the curve. Ten guesses won't do it. A hundred or five hundred might. More guesses equals more accuracy. The point here is that when you are calculating the mean, the outliers matter. You need all the random, wrong guesses to see the curve clearly.
Why am I saying this?
Because for decades, Moshe Feldenkrais implored us to, "fail well, muck about, make mistake after mistake after mistake." Most people don't believe him at first, a fact to which I can attest having taught this method for over twenty-five years, but "mistakes" are vital to achieve clarity. How can we know if anything feels right unless we know what feels wrong?
Feldenkrais understood that many, many mistakes—all the outliers—help us find the mean—the accurate answer.
The invisible hand of self-correction
All Feldenkrais lessons are about guessing. Guessing and guessing and guessing again. No one makes an accurate guess the first time around. That's why there are so many variations in each lesson: To give your nervous system the chance to feel how many answers you can find in your own movement.
Think of it as aggregating your guesses, not trying to perform correctly. To make all these guesses, the thinking brain must step back and allow the system self-correct. You don’t tell yourself, "Move the arm 32 degrees left and 24 degrees up." We all laugh, yet that's what we often think we have to do to correct our movement.
Instead, do what I tell all my clients: Stop thinking and start sensing. Discover problem-solving through kinesthetic experiments instead of cognition-intense analyzing. Start guessing how many jellybeans there are. Many, many times. Then, you can see your own curve, with the outliers and the mean. You will find clarity through guessing.