Diagonal lines for better walking
Do this lesson slower and smaller than you think. Avoid making a huge contraction with effort that obscures the sensation of what you’re doing. You’ll get more out of it.
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I am heading out to camp for four days in the wilderness toward Wyoming.
Here is an essay I wrote a few years ago on “doing it right.” Are you doing the movement right? Read more to find out.
Am I Doing It Right?
I hear this a lot. I, too, want to know if I'm doing it right. Unfortunately, there is no external concept of right and wrong in Feldenkrais. And yes, everyone gets frustrated by this, myself included, because how do you know if you're doing it right?
Dr. Feldenkrais often talked about obtaining new skills. He didn't mean athletic skills or cooking skills, but skills in feeling and thinking. His method is not modeled on any social, intellectual, or authority-based system in which we have to prove ourselves or earn some kind of grade (much to my chagrin).
Instead, it is based on pure exploration with a nonjudgmental feedback mechanism. It takes us back to when we were babies and explored our movement without positive and negative input from the external world.
It's a Creative Act from the Inside
Dr. Feldenkrais also talked about how real growth happens when we engage in this process of exploration. We progress past babies and become adults through exploration. He talks about how a creative act occurs that in some mysterious fashion compiles all the tiny details of all the functions you already know and out of that a new function emerges, rather like babies learning to walk.
Consider how much babies wiggle and experiment before they can walk!
It's like building a new car out of the engine parts of many old ones. You cannot say the new car is just an improved version of any one of the old ones because it is, in fact, a completely new car.
New functions are like building a whole new car. This is why there is no right way to move in the Feldenkrais method. If you were just improving on a old function, like fixing a broken car, I could tell you to move in such-and-such a way and function X will improve in a very linear way, like changing a spark plug.
But you wouldn't own it, and it wouldn't last, because it didn't come from your own explorations. What is missing is your own personal creative act, the act that compiles your own car parts in a way that is uniquely you. No one can predict what that looks like because your path of discovery is yours alone.
Feldenkrais is a simply a catalyst for your own creative act.
Note that Feldenkrais teachers don't put you in a room and say, "Now sit there and behave like this." Instead, they say, "Hey, what happens if this interesting person—with all their habits and unique history and personal experience—checks out this room over here? What would that look like?"
More lessons:
This lesson is from the Diagonal series in the Feldenkrais Treasury. I recommend doing all fourteen for a strong, coordinated torso.
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Quote of the week:
“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”