Context, experience, and finding words
When I grew up in a rural area north of Seattle, I didn't watch TV. Instead, I watched the woods, streams, clouds, fields—and books. I read and read and read. My grandfather taught me to use encyclopedias to find answers to life's questions. I had read several libraries' worth of literature by the time I went to college. After grad school, I worked in journalism, doing more reading, researching, and editing.
Even as my mental faculties propelled me forward, I was in tremendous physical pain. I couldn't think my way out of it, I knew that. I needed something, but what?
In my mid-twenties I met Dennis, a Feldenkrais trainer who cared about the clarity, integrity, and nuance of language as much as I did. His intellectual honesty provided a safe container for what I didn't know I needed: A way to learn my way out of my circumstances—not just mentally or physically, but with my whole self.
After that, life made more sense. Dennis always said we should spend thirty percent of our days learning. Really, thirty percent! What is learning, then? It's not repeating formulas. (Einstein famously said he knew no formulas so his brain was free to think. "Never memorize anything you can look up," he is reported to have said.)
Pointing to something wordless
As I paddled around in river of sensory-motor learning I found my own tributaries and eddies, conjoining my experience with Dennis's explanations, which weren't explanations at all but rather musings on allegory, symbolism, metaphor, and imagery. He created a map to help us grasp this wordless, preverbal experience of sensory feedback.
Subsequently, I, too, endeavor to help my students understand something that arrives fully formed in their experience, offering numerous reverse-engineering processes to make sense of it. But you can't concretize with words that which is not yet known. You can only point to it, like a Buddhist teacher pointing to enlightenment, or like looking at a painting and sensing without words what the artist might be asking you imagine.
Some art critics, like Clement Greenberg and Tom Wolfe, believed formal composition was all the meaning you needed. Form is meaning, they argued, no need to understand the concept in the artist's mind, never mind the context of its creation.
Context creates meaning
For me, art, literature, and movement—everyday movement, not performance—emerges from context and orientation. Without intention, direction, or meaning, all expression is adrift in a pond of existential waterfalls.
Movement, even the absence of movement, is brimming with intention, context, and place. Every day we mark another dot on the graph of our lives. To understand this concretely, let's say two clients come to me with ankle problems (which they did). One is, by her own account, in "burnout mode," exhausted from care giving and managing family demands. Plus, she has sore, tense calves from driving long distances for work. She wants to "feel stable again."
Another client has numerous chronic health conditions that led to a frustrating sedentary lifestyle. She craves the ability to "stand on her own two feet." Here we have two similar structures—two sets of feet and ankles—with two different contexts. Movement is never separate from what it means for our life.
I would say it's not the structure that matters, it's the process by which we take shape that matters. In literature, too, authors point to the unknown Like William Styron, literature makes darkness visible.
It's like when Haruki Murakami says, “Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting," you say, "Oh yes, I know what he means!" Or when Julian Barnes says, "Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books," you say, "Oh yes, I know that feeling!"
Throughout his life, Dennis gave his students a window into Moshe's teaching—helping to make a wordless human experience concrete and knowable, the elusive obvious. (To be sure, most of us don't want to look through that window too much. It's comfier, sometimes safer, living a blurry, unexamined life. But if we ever want to burnish the clarity of our lived experience, the window is there.)
Ever the polymath, Dennis found an intellectual home in many domains, but particularly in Moshe's guide to our endless ability to learn. Luckily for all his students, Dennis funneled that joy of learning to all of his students, as I give it to you.
Free audio: How to roll to the side
This is a brilliant lesson. You start on the side with the forearm on the floor. You lengthen your arm and leg at same time to roll onto the back in many ways, focusing on timing, foreground and background, and changing points of attention. At the end there is a profound wholeness to your sense of self, as well as freedom and power from the center to change direction at any time—or not, as you choose.
“Do one good movement and not twenty bad ones because if you do one good one, it is possible to do another one better. If you do twenty bad ones, the twenty-first will also be bad, also the hundredth, and also the thousandth. Whoever does not have patience cannot learn.”
