Questions and, perhaps, some answers
Often questions come up in class or in my private practice that could be good for everyone. Here are some recent questions and, perhaps some answers.
Question: How do I stop my neck from pinching when I tilt my head back? (Doing a lesson on the back.)
Answer: Do less. Move halfway to your end point and see if it pinches. If it doesn't, move three-quarters of the way and see if it pinches. All okay? Then do that. Always stay within your range of comfort.
Why? Because:
(1) The speed with which you learn is inversely proportional to the size of the movement. Meaning, if you make a big movement, it does not speed up your learning. In fact, the opposite is true: small movements help you learn faster.
(2) Moving to the point of strain only confirms that you're good at being mean to yourself. We all have PhDs in strain. Plus, we're trained to believe that anything useful must hurt, that we have to struggle to achieve or it's not worth it. Think of how embedded the idea of achievement = struggle is in our culture, as if only pain makes us deserving of results.
I am here to challenge that idea. I propose that it's not true, that it's okay for life to feel easy, that some things can be learned by being kind to yourself. Give yourself permission to feel ease, grace, and comfort. Life will present you with struggles, don't worry. You don't have to add your own self-imposed difficulties.
Take-away: Your comfort is your teacher. You will not learn anything from strain, except that you never want to repeat it again. For more on this, read Zoe's Feldenkrais Commitments.
Question: So, were you just working on my hip joint?
Answer: Well, I've never met a disembodied hip joint, separate from the person who owns it. In Feldenkrais, we look at the patterns of the whole person. A baby doesn't "work on their hip joint" to figure out how to walk. They test gravity and fall down and test it again. They push, lean, pivot, swivel, and slide. It's impossible to construct movement in the hip without considering the low back, or the ankle, or the neck. If you think you can separate them out, be my guest: Get out your chain saw to do it because the human nervous system is more delicate, refined, sophisticated, and nuanced.
It's easy to fall prey to a default construct of our body as pieces of machinery. We even swap out the "pieces" when we need a hip or a knee replacement! Mechanistic views of the body are for orthopedics.
It's also easy to punt the problem out there into a faulty joint instead of in how you, yourself, construct your habits. Darn that personal responsibility! To improve movement, you must first acknowledge your experience, whatever it is. Then, use the novel movements in Feldenkrais lessons to empower your nervous system to uncover new strategies.
Many people have perfect, uninjured joints and still move with pain and tension. Their pain is not in the joint, it's in the pattern of action in the brain. You can repair a physical muscle or a joint and, just like a rubber band, the brain will revert to the old, painful pattern unless you give yourself a viable, useful, alternative survival strategy.
Take-away: It’s a brain thing. Leave the mechanics to the joint people. You can see the fallacy in the mechanistic way of thinking: Movement does not reside in a joint, it resides in the brain.
Question: Isn't Feldenkrais like tai chi?
Answer: Tai chi is a form and Feldenkrais is an exploration. Yes, we move slowly in Feldenkrais...until we don't! Often, the lessons speed up, training you to go fast without hurry.
Take-away: As an exploration, Feldenkrais has no correct movement. It sounds like that's impossible, given that the movements are, in fact, quite specific. The paradox is that yes, there are specific movements, and each person finds their own path to those movements according to their unique history, injuries, experience, and ability.
A student the other day wanted more detailed instructions on how to do a movement the right way. Not knowing the right way IS the learning. If we knew how to move, what would there be to learn?
We test, experiment, and explore rather than perform, correct, and mimic.
Moshe Feldenkrais gave people a long time to find their own path to a movement. I don't mean a few minutes—I'm talking about a few hours! In his Amherst training, he sometimes even gave people several days to "muck about." You might think that's a ridiculous amount of time to learn something when you could just be told what to do and be done with it.
The point is discovering how you get there, using self-knowledge and self-awareness. (For more on this, read my short blog post, "Why don't you just tell me how to move?")
It's like babies learning how to stand up and wobble around on their tiny base of support. It takes time. (Babies do this without an instruction manual, by the way.) That's what makes us human: our ability to learn and adapt. Otherwise, why do it? If you can execute the movement like a robot with no feeling at all, go ahead. Yet, we live in our sensations so why not better inform your existence?
(For more on this idea, listen to a short note from one of my workshops: Continuum of perfection, 7 min)
Moshe's genius was to let people explore long enough to find their own way using the natural human process of sensory learning.
Feldenkrais is not a performance like tai chi or yoga, nor is it an exercise like Pilates. It is not therapy, healing, or manipulation. It is retraining your brain to make intelligent adaptations to the constantly changing world.
“Can you now believe that in fact, in every one of you there are a thousand possibilities that you never tried? It’s not a question of working ten years to become supple. But when you can do it in an hour, in half an hour, this is not a question of training, of tearing ligaments, of stretching the muscles, or becoming stronger, it means taking away the rubbish that interferes with your ability to use yourself. That’s possible within an hour.
I’ve seen somebody cleaning a room that was dirty and ugly for ten years. But to build a room in one hour, you can’t. But to clean a room you can. Now, this is cleaning our nervous system from the junk and the inability and the impotence that is instilled in it from early childhood. You see, this is within your reach.
Take a broom, clean it, and let light into it and you will see what you can do.
You can do the same acrobatics with your feelings, your mind, your intelligence, your imagination, with your deduction, with your induction, provided you use the same broom.”