Hoop arms overhead, free the shoulders
(If you have a challenge putting your arms overhead, place a thick blanket overhead on the floor for your arms to rest on.)
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Have you ever said to yourself:
I shouldn’t have this reaction.
I should be able to manage this better.
I should be able to move better.
I should be able to handle my emotions better.
We all “should” ourselves into tolerating painful experiences. With our powerful, integrative, prefrontal cortex, we can rationalize and override all kinds of pain when it might not be healthy to do so.
We're just too smart for our own good.
Sometimes we override discomfort and pain for a good reason: To please our parents, meet social norms, do well at work, get through a stressful time, help a spouse.
There’s nothing wrong with overriding pain when we deem it necessary—unless the override becomes the norm and we get stuck in a compulsive, reactive state. Once this happens, we’ve lost our choice and diminished our humanity.
Personally, I do Feldenkrais to relearn to trust basic sensory input and stop this overriding, which is so easy to fall into.
We are all mapping sensory inputs all the time, whether we know it or not. It’s a lifelong training to distinguish between what’s easy and what’s effortful, over and over again.
I put a high value on this training because I spent a long stretch of my life forcefully overriding negative sensations and telling myself I shouldn’t be having them, which led to a lot of suffering.
I’m still learning to discern when there’s a real benefit to overriding painful input and when there's too high a cost. I practice every day to honor my sensations as they are, with acceptance and curiosity instead of judgement, shoulding, and resistance.
It's not like I figure out how to move my arm and I'm done. It’s more like, how do I map the arm, sense the arm, relate to the arm, integrate the arm, connect to the arm?
Cross motivation
We all get into cross-motivation, which is what causes much of our everyday tension. For example, if I spend too much time contracting and pulling back when I intend to go forward, I feel stressed and dysfunctional.
A constant state of cross-motivation (think of a traffic jam in your insides: going two directions at once) causes serious health issues and blocks forward momentum and growth.
Our behavior is constantly being trained—by inner feedback loops and by the external environment. The way I see it, I might as well train in having less inner contraction so I can move forward without feeling compressed and stuck.
Feldenkrais encourages me everyday to seek more kindness in myself than judgement. Then, I can expect more kindness from others as well.
As Moshe Feldenkrais says, “awareness is not reversible.”
Food for thought.
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(I know this is a little longer than normal; this note is also going into the monthly newsletter.)
More lessons:
This lesson is from the Seven Best section, Unwind your shoulders and upper back, in the Feldenkrais Treasury.
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Quote of the week:
“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”