Perspective on humanity, learning, habit, choice, and dog treats
“We must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.”
The other day I mentioned to a client that Feldenkrais lessons can be challenging, not because they cause pain or strain, but because some movements can be elusive and confusing, even after twenty-seven years.
I've said many times that performing a movement is not the point. The point is developing the self-awareness that allows us to stay connected to ourselves. Regardless of the performance of the movement, the connection is what creates a learning state. This is incredibly simple: Think of dog training. If you don't get the dog's attention first with a "check-in," you can't offer any useful information. Without connection, it's all noise.
Yet, our nervous systems can be the equivalent of a dog running around like crazy and we think we can retrain our habits from there. Put like that, you can see that connection is the most important piece of the puzzle. From connection, movement gets easier: We are more self-directed, we have more choice and spontaneity, and we have fewer neurotic responses. I'll say it again: Feldenkrais is not about movement. It's about connection.
Connection and ease (like liver treats) are a self-reinforcing experience.
Habits, species, and learning
As a species, humans have a fixed set of bio-mechanical conditions. We have a skeleton and a nervous system. We have brains that are structured to learn, make connections, and find relationships. As individuals, we have specific personal experiences that make us unique, to the point of changing the physical structure of our own brain. We are so good at learning that the actual density and complexity of our synaptic connections change. (See "Teaching an adult brain new tricks: a critical review of evidence for training-dependent structural plasticity in humans." in Neuroimage, volume 73 on page 225.)
Because of our lack of hard-wired patterns (think how you wobbled around learning to walk, it's not a hard-wired skill!), we have a tremendous opportunity to shape the conditions of our lives—more so than any other animal.
Let's talk about retraining a habit
I have a client who forgot how to move her pelvis. Yup, forgot. There was no injury, no joint deterioration, accident, illness, arthritis, bursa, sprain, or other musculoskeletal malady, just stiffness and disuse. The habit developed over long hours driving and sitting, and now it limits her ability to walk very far or enjoy family activities.
All stiffness and pain is a habit.
And before you jump to judgment, no, it's not wrong to feel stiff. Any human being with joints will feel stiff at some point. What's unique is how it shows up in any one person. For example, I get stiff sitting on the couch too long. I'm human. But I don't stay stuck in that stiffness.
Stiffness is only a problem if you stay there. Here's what happens on an unconscious level: We can get so habituated to sitting at a desk that as we move throughout our day, our nervous system does not adapt to new positions like standing and walking. Our muscles are still "sitting," so we pull and stretch and complain of stiffness and tension when our brain just hasn't gotten the message that, "Hey, guys, we're not sitting anymore, stop shortening all those muscles!"
Remember our vast capacity for individual learning? Our patterns can be connected, organized, assembled, and disassembled in an incalculable number of ways. Luckily, this ability to reorganize our patterns is also the answer to our stiffness and pain. It is our blessing as humans: We have tremendous power to learn anything. The flip side of that superpower is that any solution must be comparable to learning anything, which means the solution must be non-linear.
A decision-tree with flow charts is unhelpful for learning movement patterns. Besides, our brains love making connections and seeing relationships. (See Elastic: Unlocking Your Brain's Ability to Embrace Change by Leonard Mlodinow)
Honestly, I would love to tell all my students, "Just do these two movements and all shoulder pain will go away for every single person, every single time." Sadly, the user's-manual solution works only for mechanical problems, not for the the human nervous system.
We are just too variable in how we construct our experience, so we need a solution that's equally variable.
Here's an example: I was listening to a news story about rescue workers experiencing trauma where the researcher said the same rescue worker could encounter two similar calls and one call would be traumatic and the other not, depending on how that person's life was going that day. It struck me that if our experience can be so variable within our own life, it is even more variable between people with unique histories.
So how do we tackle all these variables?
It is possible. We just need to vary the input in an intelligent way. With our fancy meta-cognition and self-awareness, we can learn from the consequences of our actions. Learning is what enables us to adapt to life. Failure to learn is a death sentence.
A client just sent me a bunch of pictures of him sitting in various chairs and asked, "Which chair is better for my posture?" I have no answer. I don't teach chairs. I teach how to know yourself so you can sit. Just like which pillow to sleep on, which shoes to wear, or which desk to work at, the answer is the same: Know thyself.
Run your experiments, test your options. There is no linear, mechanical answer unless you are going to repeat the same movement in the same way with the exact same muscle contraction and same exact breathing pattern for ever and ever. Obviously, you're not.
I cannot define the exact variable that will determine an optimal outcome on any given day in any given state. What I can do is show you how find which variables to look for. I can give you experiments to run. I can show you how to notice force, timing, speed, and orientation. I can show you how to sense how you move so you can make better choices, and create better conditions for living, whether that's a supportive chair, a comfy bed, a kind partner, a healthy diet, or a rewarding job.
But at the end of the day, you are the filter for your own sensations, no one else. It is your self-awareness that allows you to choose.
As Moshe said, “Movement is life. Life is a process. Improve the quality of the process and you improve the quality of life itself.”
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Learn more, read my post: The Power of Inquiry
Free audio: New ways to unwind your spine
A gentle exploration of articulating the pelvis around the hips. It is pelvic-clock adjacent, if you know what that is. Tip: Support your arms on a blanket or just bring them easily out to the side if you are not comfortable with them overhead.
Get help with balance and flattening out the back. Take some time to feel each vertebrae up and down as you clarify how the feet press to lift the pelvis. As this gets clearer, a sense of ease and lightness emerges, not from working hard, but from increasing your skeletal clarity.
This lesson unwinds all the tension across your back with lots of soft rolling. First by rolling the pelvis, then rolling the chest and upper back, and the everything together. A yummy, softening kind of lesson. You can be half asleep and you’ll still get something out of it. In fact, you might get more out of it!
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More lessons for tender muscles and tired brains
Check out Anatomy / Spine and Pelvis / Gentle lessons for tender muscles and tired brains in the Feldenkrais Treasury (requires subscription).
“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.”
