Change is healthy
How to be free, spontaneous, vital, and powerful.
My student asks, "Lying on the floor, I feel a glitch in my arm when I circle it overhead so I just try to wiggle around it. Is that the correct thing to do?"
Do you remember that game show where they hit a gong? I felt like hitting one then. I told her that she had just figured out the whole method. Yup, that's right, the whole Feldenkrais method!
That's what we do, we learn how to adapt to this moment in life. My student was "wiggling around" to find a way to be comfortable. She asked if it was correct. Honestly, I don't know, I don't live in her sensations. She is the only person living inside her nervous system, and only she could know if she was comfortable. What I could do is give her ten, twenty, or a hundred strategies for figuring this out.
Given the movements of the lesson, how do you make yourself comfortable? For that matter, how do make yourself comfortable in this weird, tricky, perplexing moment of life? Life throws you unusual situations and it's up to you to figure out how to handle them. That's what the method is training you to do.
Agency and choice
No one outside yourself can tell you what to do. I can make suggestions, and in a private lesson, we can explore solutions to your patterns together. You will absolutely improve function through this exploration, but what I am helping you to do is expand your options, not correct bad choices. There are no bad choices in any case. Your nervous system is always doing its best. There is no judgment about that.
You will always find yourself in yet another tricky situation in life—whether through trauma, injury, surgery, aging, or seeking a more fulfilling existence—in which you have to rely on your own ability to strategize, test, and "wiggle."
People who are severely injured, in chronic pain, or otherwise compromised know this. They have to manage every movement of every day and even the slightest improvement in a high-maintenance existence is life-changing. Most of us do not face these challenges. Most people are mostly functional with some aches and pains. This actually makes us less skillful at strategizing because we assume we can do everything...until we can't.
Feldenkrais trains you to develop strategies to improve your skill without hurting yourself, especially when life presents you with situations so complex and challenging they seem impossible.
If you continue practicing this method, that's exactly where it will take you: into sophisticated, challenging, elusive movement patterns that you can't use your baseline functioning to figure out. You have to think differently to solve the puzzle, or you just hurt yourself over and over, which is not advisable.
The "beginning" lessons in Feldenkrais are not at all "simple." They are training you in sensing yourself so you can raise your functioning up to higher and higher levels. Just "doing" the movement is not the point, it's clarifying every dot on every line in your self-image so you can solve more and more complex movement puzzles, which are nothing less than life puzzles. How you treat yourself in your movement is how you treat yourself in your life.
Besides, performing a movement at the cost of your comfort is, as Moshe would unequivocally say, sheer idiocy. Why would you want to repeat a movement that hurts? Why would you want to hang around friends who are always mean to you? That's what you're doing to yourself when you force a movement: Being mean to your own nervous system.
Once you're more skillful, adaptable, creative, and curious, you will generate more numerous and complex strategies yourself. This process of generating, iterating, testing, and experimenting teaches you to adapt in many ways to many situations. You are not learning to move your arm in one way. You are learning to strategize when you can't move your arm in your habitual way. Then what, what do you do?
Be adaptable, not correctable
What Moshe told his students, what my teacher told me, and what I'll tell you, is that your comfort is your highest value.
I say this over and over, as does Moshe and every other Feldenkrais teacher in the whole world. Yet, over twenty-five years of teaching, my students invariably tell me that it takes at least two years to believe it, so ingrained is our notion of being personally at fault for our bad, wrong, and incorrect movement.
There is no wrong movement, there is only easier movement. Every movement was developed on some level for safety, security, and survival.
In the lesson with my student, her chest started moving differently. Was her chest more "correct?" No, it was just free to move! The muscular interference along her spine and between the ribs diminished. I could have told her from the beginning, "Hey, that's not the correct way to move, it's bad to keep your ribs so stiff! Could you imagine? How is that helpful? She would have just forced her ribs to move instead of felt the tone shift and soften through novel explorations.
So, given this moment in life, in your own tricky spot, how are you responding? Are you free or forced? Are you telling yourself off or testing options? Are you stuck in an old habit or discovering novelty?
That's what we're learning, what Moshe repeats over and over: How to be free, spontaneous, potent, vital, and powerful.
I am working with an eleven year-old girl with cerebral palsy. She is more strategic and powerful than most adults I know. Her nervous system also informs her quicker than most if she's unstable or ineffective. There's no way around it as her baseline starts out with less stability and safety. She can't cheat her way around these patterns like the rest of us.
As a teacher, I help her find options, not perfect movement. Will her movement ever be "correct?" Nope, not according to some Platonic ideal. But is she adaptable? You bet.
“As long as superfluous effort is invested in any action, we must throw up defenses and brace ourselves to exert a great effort that is neither comfortable, pleasurable, nor desirable. The lack of choice of whether to make an effort or not turns an action into a habit. Then, nothing appears more natural than that, even if it is opposed to all reason or necessity.”