How to scramble in all directions
A friend of mine is a mountaineer and rock-scrambler who recently had trouble with his hip. I was mulling over lessons that could help his situation, so I got on the floor yesterday and did five lessons as test runs.
As you know, that's a lot of time questioning my nervous system about what moves, what doesn’t, and how I feel. At the same time, I’m watching how I use my attention. I’m trying to be present and curious. Feldenkrais always has more questions than answers!
So I did the lessons, didn’t think anything more about it, and went to bed.
Today, waking up and driving to work, I was in a mental loop that was familiar to me, a response I often have to a certain situation, which is to shut down expressive parts of myself. But this morning as I was driving, I realized that I could just...stop.
I could stop the mental loop and be expressive in this situation where I had put a self-imposed limitation on my behavior. Yet no one made up this rule that I had to be this way. It just didn't exist.
It’s like sitting in a prison staring out the window when the wall to your right is not even finished and you can just walk around it to the outside. But of course, you don’t see that you can just walk out of there because you’re not looking in that direction.
I had to pull over to the side of the road, breathe, and have a cry. I had been hanging on to this construct in my head for so long and had made so many assumptions based on it. The idea that I could just stop thinking that way and let go of the whole thing felt both unnerving and incredibly relieving.
I don't believe in linear causality in most situations in life. However, I will happily attribute this shift of my self-imposed limitation in large extent to all the attention I gave myself the night before.
Here is one of the lessons I did.
Maybe your self-imposed limitations will fall away, too!
“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”