Graceful, Relaxed Attention

Posture may be a reflection of the unconscious, but it is not controlled by it. Nor is it controlled by consciously admonishing yourself to stand straight. This beautiful child is my daughter, Ilonna, not three years after learning how to walk. Children, before the age of reason, are rarely subject to postural problems, perhaps because they live entirely in the present. Or perhaps it is because they still have access to innate regenerative processes, processes that adults can relearn how to access with practice.

Why Is It So Difficult To Control Posture?

How many times have you been told to sit up straighter or to drop your shoulders? Does badgering someone to stand up taller work? Of course not. Why not? Because posture is not regulated by the conscious mind.

People often ask me what the difference is between massage and FELDENKRAIS. Having spent over ten years working directly with muscle tissue as a massage therapist, I can say with complete assurance that muscles only do as they are told. Why is it, then, that attempting to control your posture by repeatedly telling yourself to sit up straight flat out does not work?

Your posture is a reflection of the length of your muscles at rest, otherwise known as the 'normal resting length.' This set length (different for different muscles) results in posture and is set by the nervous system. The nervous system consists of a network of several branches, some of which are within our conscious control, such as the use of arms and limbs for reaching and walking. Yet, a huge portion of the nervous system is not usually accessible to conscious control. This is the portion of the nervous system that regulates the things we do all day without awareness: breathing, for instance as well as standing, sitting or other basic activities required for survival.

AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM) is a process by which you can learn to bring these basic functions into conscious awareness and change how your nervous system regulates them. Say you live in continuous tension: your back is tight, your neck is sore and your feet bother you all the time. Consciously, there is not much you can do. Unconsiously, there is not much you can do either, because control of postural muscles does not lie in the realm of the unconscious. The control of postural muscles lies in another realm entirely, a realm that heretofore has only been accessible to yogis and people who have spent lifetimes in meditation on mountaintops. These masters, according to documented science, have learned to change things like heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature. How is this possible? Some might call this access to some kind of superconsciousness. Whatever it is, it is a place where consciousness and the normally inaccessible portions of the nervous system overlap.

What most people are completely unaware of is that the nervous system seems to have an innate intelligence that can specifically control and make changes to the resting length of postural muscles. It may be the same innate intelligence that directs all regenerative functions of the cells so that often, the body heals itself. Any general practitioner knows that healing is a matter of generating the right conditions. It's not the doctor that does the healing, it's the patient. ATM is a practice that teaches you how to lie down on the floor and get this innate intelligence to kick in and change your posture for you so that you do not have to engage the consious mind.

This principle dictates the fundamental difference between massage and FELDENKRAIS. Massage can release muscles locally, temporarily, but it cannot change the resting length of the muscles. Trying to change posture from this level is like trying to change the course of a war by blaming the soldiers. FELDENKRAIS deals with the command center because it is a method that works directly with the nervous system. ATM does this by cultivating the awareness that is the key to accessing this innate intelligence. It's like developing the skill to recognise where the door is. Once you do, it's up to you to knock on it with enough regularity to create permanent change.

How much of your energy is tied up in conflicted emotions? Are you really present? When internal conflict is resolved, the experience of life is fuller, colors more vibrant, response more spontaneous, in the moment, as it were. 

Mindfulness Is A Learned Behavior

Mindfulness is about paying attention to the present moment without judgement, but rather, with intention, so that we interact with our environment directly. Most of us get caught up in the filters of our minds: what we want to hear, what we are tired of hearing or what we want to say...

Most of us live in the presence of a mind that dominates, that dictates, that thinks randomly, in effect, a car with no driver. My own experience with becoming more mindful was initial surprise at how much of my thinking revolved around evaluating and judging experience rather than just being present. I was amazed to find out how my perception was ruled by unconscious conditioning, like a dog wrestling with a bone I was unable to let go of habitual thought patterns and responses.

What is the difference? Have you ever noticed how five people in the same circumstance may have five entirely different reactions? Why is this? Have you ever heard of a person with emphysema who chose to smoke while receiving oxygen? What about the diabetic who continues to eat sugar? Clearly what is an absolute truth to one person may be inconsequential to another. Yes, these are extreme examples, but what about the compulsion to eat more on your day off than you would when working? The very idea of eating out of boredom rather than hunger suggests mindlessness or a mind that is in charge of you rather than you being able to use your mind for what it is: a tool for making intelligent decisions, just as your body is a vehicle for enacting those decisions.

Feldenkrais developed the bulk of ATM lessons during the fifties and sixties, way before new age thinking became a fad. Yet, already then he was thinking in terms of maturity as relying on the development of voluntary control. Control of what? Taking responsibilty for our own actions which is reflected by how we behave and think. This requires making conscious decisions, not mindlessly acting out of conditioned expectation. It's only by paying attention that we can catch ourselves in the midst of acting in ways that conflict with our intentions.

Most of us don't realize that when we are conflicted in this way there is a somatic price tag. What that means is that if we stay to watch the kid's ball game when all we really want to do is be at home lying on the couch, low level resentment is expressed, unwittingly, as static low level tension in the musculature of the body. This translates as aches and pains. Now if you can sort out your thoughts, let go of what you want for yourself and commit to hanging out at the ball game so that you can be there for your kid, then you won't be carrying excessive tension because you will have resolved the latent conflict. You can resolve that conflict at the level of the mind, or you can resolve it at the level of the body. Either way is an opening to resolution.

The beauty of ATM is that it gives you time to find and resolve these latent conflicts through the doorway of what you feel in your body rather than by sitting on the analyst's couch. (I know of at least one FELDENKRAIS practitioner, I'm sure there are more, who was a practicing psychologist and gave it up to teach FELDENKRAIS because it's a way to address many of the same issues without the anguish of constant mental examination.) It's a form of moving meditation. It's like training wheels for people who want to learn to meditate.

Professor of Medicine Emeritus at University of Massachusetts Medical school, Jon Kabat-Zinn has done research to validate what most people who meditate already know: that measurable benefits on the psyche, the brain and the immune system are derived by continuous practice. I would affirm that ATM does the same. Kabat-Zinn says, "What we're really talking about with mindfulness is awareness. But, no one, I'd like to point out, teaches us how to cultivate awareness." Well, come to my class, or hit the Guild link to find a practitioner near you, because that is exactly what I teach as a FELDENKRAIS practitioner in my ATM classes. Hope to see you soon. Movement without conflict is a joy because it is a return to complete spontaneity.

A Portal Into A Change In Perspective

When life is at it's most difficult, or merely just redundant, a change in perspective transforms crisis into opportunity and the mundane into a thing of transparent beauty.

One of the many things that is so alluring about the practice of AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM) is that it draws on principles from all sorts of different areas of human knowledge. Some are more recent additions to the treasure trove of human experience: physics, child development, kinetics and psychology for example. Some have been handed down generation to generation through the centuries: acupuncture, martial arts and the ancient healing pracitces based on movement such as Tai Chi, Chi Gung and the work of Gurdjieff.

It's not that Feldenkrais, D.Sc. blended all these together to come up with a new field, this is not a composit body of work, rather it is something entirely original that makes use of existing principles and laws that all physical bodies are subject to. Yet, as physical bodies animated by a spark of some unidentifiable magic, it seems some of these principles translate to living not just to moving. How so, you ask?

Whenever I am stuck or in emotional turmoil I think of my experiences over the years as a student of the Course in Miracles. In that text there is a spiritual principle that you cannot find the solution to a problem at the level of the problem. In the FELDENKRAIS METHOD, this principle is expressed in terms of not focusing on the problem, but finding what works and expanding on that. In other words, if you have pain when you move, in your ATM practice you adjust or modify what you are doing so you are comfortable. You find a way to move that feels good and focus on that.

Feldenkrais, held the first Europen black belt in Judo. The concrete Judo/Aikido counterpart to this principle is that when faced with an opponent, you endeavor to find a way to use the force of their bodyweight in your favor. The Taoist counterpart to this principle is that you go with the resistance rather than fight it. The force of water finds it's strength in adapting slowly, gradually, ever so persistently to the lowest place it can flow through, thereby wearing away rocks that have withstood the tempest of time for a million years.

ATM is a portal to a change in perspective. By focusing on the present, on the movement, on what works in spite of a world in apparent chaos and confusion, a door is opened into a change in perspective regardless of what seems to be at issue in any given movement. If you submit yourself to the process, you create an opening for new visions of reality to emerge as concrete learnings rooted in your innate ability to regenerate, to morph and to adapt.

Gabrielle Pullen, GCFP teaches AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT at Wild Mt. Yoga Ctr., 574 Searls Ave. in Nevada City CA. Call 530 263-3323 to register today. You have nothing to loose but being stuck in the same posture you have lived with for years!

Hope or Desperation; it's all a matter of perspective. Do you see disability or do you see a beautiful sunset? And how can we learn to work around or within our limitations in relative comfort no matter what? 

A Way Out

Where is the line between hope and desperation?
In complete desperation, there is no hope, there is only giving up. Only a tiny increment of hope, often literally perceived as light, can provide a glowing, gradually growing guide out of the furrow of desperation. This is good. But at what point does that hope turn into a not so useful thing?

When hope grows into expectation and when there is attachment to that expectation, then hope has become blind. The light is perhaps so bright that it obliterates the boundaries between you and I until all the ego sees is it's hearts desire. Only then am I likely to pursue my hope with insensitivity to others, perhaps even with insensitivity to myself.

If I can separate myself from my hope turned into desire, so that I am detached from the outcome, then I am again able to see with the perspective of the larger picture and the relative importance of all the players. So, it is not that hope is bad, or even that attachment is bad. It is as in all things, a matter of balance.

One of the greatest lessons I have learned from the FELDENKRAIS METHOD of AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM) is to check to see if my intention is in line with what is going on in my life. So many of us, myself included have lived oblivious 'lives of quiet desperation' unaware that there might be another way. As I wend my way through the experiences of my life, this blog is a place where I translate what I learn on the floor in my practice, into how it relates to living, loving and managing the ebb and flow of somatic experience.