To Feel, Or Not To Feel in The Information Age

Sophia came into my office for a functional integration [F.I.] session today.( I have changed her name, lest she be uncomfortable with being put on display for public scrutiny.) She initially came in for shoulder pain, and she was convinced it simply hurts to reach because she is short. Her height is under five feet and she has to reach for everything.

The lessons evolved out of the first, glaringly obvious fact (to me anyway - not to her) that she moved her shoulder as if it were a hinge joint instead of the ball and socket joint that it is by design. "So," you say? "What's the difference?" A hinge, my dear fellow somatic being, may move only 90 degrees, it may even move to a staggering 180 or 190 - but never featuring normal range of motion of 360 degrees. Nor would a simple hinge joint feature the graceful ability to move itself forward and backward in space around the ribs, or the ability to lift itself in unconscious tension patterns and get stuck close to the ear, held in space by a huge amount of pain-causing effort all occurring below the level of conscious awareness.

This phenomenon is very common. In Sophia's case, it was exacerbated by her experience that as a retired, married woman, who came to adulthood in the late fifties, it fell to her to do most of the daily work around the house (you know; the cooking, cleaning, dishes etc, etc, etc.) "That's just the way it is, somebody has to do it, so I do it." She had veritably manifested her self-image as a symptom. She had developed the pattern of using her limbs in the same way she felt she was being used; like a machine.

The problem with this way of moving is that it's limited and wears out the parts (anterior deltoid) prematurely. It also affects self-worth. She knew she was important - for getting the job done - but lent no credence to the value of her own experience while doing it. She didn't have time to sense herself, (maybe if I ignore the pain it will go away...unless it's glaring and can't be ignored). There's always too much to do. She had been a grade school teacher before she 'retired.' Her expertise was in passing on knowledge, not feeling. For her, how she felt never came into play. Her unconscious priority is 'duty before preference.' I call it the Queen Elizabeth syndrome. Stiff upper lip and all that, duty calls. The evidence of this was in the comments she made about the difference between being a woman versus a man.

For the record - this is not a feminist treatise and so I neither concur nor disagree - however I must point out that is is not an uncommon experience for many women. Another disadvantage to not being interested in feelings is that you often cut yourself off from sensation. If you find sensing yourself a challenge, you might not be so clear about what position you are in. It makes it hard to find the landing gear when you want to sit down. But if you are not sure about landing, chances are you will reach for the chair arms with your hands and lower yourself down with your arms, not realizing you are adding insult to injury by taking the weight of your body on your shoulders - that already tender and over-worked part of yourself.

The human soma is like a multi-faceted diamond, sparkling from many different planes of contact with the light at once. The soma is our felt experience of being alive with all the various levels of aliveness it is possible to feel (sensation, emotion, thought, personality, others, internal environment, external environment, expectations, disappointments, love, hate...you get the picture of the complexity, you live it everyday!) Sometimes it is overwhelming in areas we have not fully integrated and so we shut down.

In Sophia's case, I'm sure she was a very sensitive teacher, compassionate even. But she is less compassionate with herself. When she came in for her third F.I., she reported improvements in comfort and less pain in general. Her eyes were brighter and her expression softer. Yet, her request was, "Could you watch me to make sure I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing?" (This is where the practitioner cringes and refrains from ripping out her hair.) Personally, I think communication is The Greatest Challenge of Our Times. Just look at what's going on in the world. Clearly I hadn't been clear.

So I thought for a moment and I said to her, "There is no right or wrong in movement, there is only 'does it work or not?' Is it functional? For most people, reaching is functional if they get it done, no matter how they do it. Eventually, if they always reach without sensing, they loose the capacity to tell if it's functional on a subtler level. Are you overextended? Do you feel like you are going to fall down if you reach just a few inches more? How hard do you have to work to stay upright when reaching? The nuance you loose is that the amount of work in staying upright while reaching is relative to how overextended you are in space. If your head is hanging out on a limb, it will take you down. Gravity is reliable that way.

For those of you who were convinced that there is an Ultimate Truth about the Correct Way To Move, sorry. I have to knock all the external experts off their pedastals in the Gallery of Authorities. If you were a machine, it might be so, but you are not. Your mission, should you accept it, is to reclaim your own authority over what works and what doesn't by learning to evolve your abilty to sense yourself in space. You will begin to notice amazing things! Like, "Wow, man, if the pelvis is not under the head, it feels really different!" If you're lying down it can be great, but if you're standing up, get ready to lie down quickly. That's the Experience of being over-extended. If you are overextended in space but you can't sense that you are, you have sensory amnesia and FELDENKRAIS is the key to ageing without killing or injuring yourself by mistake before you do. The problem is that if you can't sense it, you have to wait for injury to let you know something is up. Unless you are smart enough to realize that there may be something here for you to learn that you are not aware of; hence, the name for our group lesson format: AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT.

Now for Sophia, this idea was revolutionary. No, wait, correction: the Sensation of it was Revolutionary. When she got it she said, "It even feels graceful." The next time you are wondering if you are off-balance, check in to see if it feels graceful...Imagine, the entire world gracefully moving around in waves like reeds in the water, a global dance of lives lived in sparkling unison, graceful, aware, fully alive by virtue of seeking out self-integration intentionally. FELDENKRAIS is not the only path, but it's one of them. I look forward to meeting you on the mat.

Understanding Can Move Mountains! - Feet Don't Fail Me Now!

Estes Park, CO. - For those of you new to the world of FELDENKRAIS, this is an example of the kinds of moments of profound insight that rolling around on the floor can lead to. In this case, there was not actually much rolling around. As there are literally over a thousand of these strange movement 'lessons:' the particular lesson that lead to my experience of intuitive clarity was actually a standing lesson that would appear to be about the heels ('Dropping Heels'). Yet, like any awareness lesson in this method, appearances can be deceiving and the lesson can often be far more significant than mere physical improvement.

I just left the annual FELDENKRAIS conference for practitioners in Boulder, Colorado. Another fascinating aspect of this method, is that often you don't know what to make of it at first, and then it seems to all fall into place hours or days later. Going to the conference was a rich, amazing learning experience made buoyant by meeting so many people, extremely talented in such a wide array of fields in addition to our shared calling as somatic educators.

This is about what I learned not during, but after the conference. This 'Dropping the Heels' lesson was the last one I did there. It produced an expanded awareness of the way the 26 bones of my feet could move, in actual fact, but perhaps beyond a range that I usually engage in. This is a common experience in FELDENKRAIS.

What makes it really sweet is to connect this new awareness to something I do every day, like walking up and down stairs. Most people don't think of climbing stairs as an important function, but just imagine if you could not do it! How frustrated you would be, verging on depression, perhaps changing your living situation, or forcing you to move to some place with no stairs at great expense. Please consider that there might be another possibility: a possibility of functional movement. That is what FELDENKRAIS teaches you to find for yourself.

Finding greater range of movement is interesting, but it's not life-altering until you connect it in your experience to something really important to you.

For me, in this instance, it's my knees. My spouse was visiting a close friend and colleague in Penrose while I was at the conference. Ironically, we decided to meet after in Loveland, Colorado after the conference. It was a joyful reunion. What was sad, however, was that he told me that his friend, Gene Ovnicek, is about to have a second knee surgery on his other knee. Gene is a brilliant horse shoer, and a specialist in the mechanics of horses' feet. He has been shoeing horses for almost 50 years. I was disturbed to hear this, knowing how demanding it is to work in that profession, (my spouse is also a 22 year veteran horse shoer). It requires sometimes fighting upwards of 1,000 pounds of live weight while bent over, using sharp implements and driving fine nails with a hammer into the bottom of a horse's hoof. This was all in the back of my mind as the journey unfolded.

We ended up in Estes Park, a great place to stay while visiting the great Never Summer Mountains in Rocky Mountain National Park. Our goal was to take the motorcyles on the highest highway in America. It runs through the park and goes as high as 12,183 feet into alpine tundra, vistas in all directions breathtaking in their wild, untouched beauty. When we got to the top, I could feel the pressure building in my head from the altitude. I noticed I kept yawning involuntarily, my brain activating the impulse spontaneously to increase the oxygen to my brain - always a welcome event! After lunch at the top, we decided to park the bikes and hike up to the outlook above.

The path amidst the wildflowers was a sandy steep slope reinforced by wooden poles every yard or so to keep it from washing away in the winter storms. There was a thin foot-wide path next to it for drainage, but it was very dry now and I noticed some people choosing to walk there rather that attempt the steps. Halfway up it was clearly hard to be that active at that altitude, but we rested, enjoyed the view and continued on up the mountain. It was on the way back down that I had my great insight into my own function that I hope to share with my clients when I get back to help them in their own discovery of how to stay healthy, active and alive for life.

I noticed that most people chose to descend along the drainage path, avoiding the wide path with it's small steps. Those that did take the steps often seemed to be jarring themselves in the way they moved down the slope. It was visible as a slight jolting when they landed after each step. Because of the lesson the other day, I found myself instinctively moving differently than I normally due. I had not been hiking down a steep slope in six months so it's not really something I do that much of. However I found myself reaching for the ground gently, tentatively touching first with my toes, then the ball of my foot, like a blind person testing the ground testing the footing before I put my full weight on it.

Suddenly I realised this was completely new for me. Usually I step down with a bit of a clunk I am not really aware of (often, you only notice the absence of something when you have a new alternative to compare it to!) sending waves of concussive pressure into my knee, prematurely wearing out the delicate structures there. The knee is said to be the most vulnerable joint in the human body.

I realized, out of this, that the toes, and the bones of the ball of the foot are designed to have a spring action, all 26 bones of the foot acting like shock absorbers to protect the knee from excessive concussion. This is why there are so many knee injuries out there, because people loose the functional mobility in their feet as they age, becoming slowly oblivious to the huge range of motion that is not just possible, but necessary for healthy limbs.

This is the action of the foot that should be 'normal,' rather than the limited flat-footed way that most people use their feet, completely ignorant of what is really possible. Why is in not normal? It's a long story of diminishing returns. In some cases, it's due to a less active lifestyle; the same factors that have produced a generation of kids that prefer video games to the adventure of real life. In other cases it's due to habit that eliminates certain possibilities or overwork that prevents living fully. Workaholism has it's price.

The the magic of FELDENKRAIS is that it reawakens us to the fullness of our own ability. It can help us buy back the time we have lost by being unconscious!

This is how awareness can inform us with vital information that has the potential to be life-altering, given that we act on what we know and actively seek solutions based on the experience we garner from our lessons. Stay tuned for a version of this lesson online. I plan to record one as soon as I get home!

p.s.

I don't mean to imply that people should always walk by landing toe first - I know what a big issue that is for you horse people out there! However, I do mean to state that there is a certain way the human foot is designed, in contrast to the equine digit, that when fully made use of, lessens the compressive forces on all the other joints. When walking on flat ground, this design - when fully activated - enables people to push off from the foot in a way that mimics the action of shock absorbers on a two or four wheeled vehicle (see Moshe Feldenkrais's book: Body & Mature Behavior, Chapter 8, Erect Posture & Action - but don't go there unless you have a solid sense of anatomy, because this is one of his more technical books, not easy for the layperson to digest.)

It's common sense, is it not? Pass the stress around and there is less stress locally on one specific joint. Mobilize all 26 bones in your feet, people!

What Is Integration?

Learning Without Trauma





The foundation of an integrated structure provides stability, and is an even, regular pattern that is solid and pleasing to the eye...


I have just come back from a long ride in the desert. As the miles fly by, the pieces of my life seem to fall into place of their own volition. But it has been a long time coming. That's one of the characteristics of integration. It happens in due course, when the time is right and not before. It happens as a result of work that has been done in advance, like the percolation of yeast that sometimes must be kneaded heavily and then left to rest before it can later rise in the oven of a willing consciousness.

The brain is like a topographical map with areas designated to provide sensory and motor function for specific skills, yet it's living, ever changing according to what we spend our time doing. If we do the same things over and over again, we tend to have less change in the way our brains function and some activities tend to fall away over time if not pursued. We all know that stimulus is what generates intelligence in babies. We have yet to realize the implications of the new research that proves the same is true for adults...FELDENKRAIS works with this principle of the extreme adaptability of the brain to experience.*

Any FELDENKRAIS lesson also works with the fact that it's often in silence, or in rest that the pieces fall into place. It's a concrete way of feeling the difference between not integrated and integrated. Not integrated feels vague, unsure, chaotic, sometimes frustrating. In movement, it looks disjointed to the outside viewer, like the uncoordinated walk of the toddler. Once integrated, it looks like a smooth, even pattern. It feels delicious, comforting, pleasurable.

There are many aspects of human experience, some seem at times to conflict. This is a lack of integration. Integration happens at a different pace for different kinds of intelligence (emotional, numerical, spatial, linguistic or survival skills just to name a few). Ideally, as we grow from child to adult, our ability to manage our emotions becomes more coordinated even as our ability to move in space or to survive in the world becomes more effective. Often, however, these different intelligences grow at different rates. Hence the experience we have all had of meeting people who seem old beyond their years, or others who seem incredibly immature, considering their age.

For myself, I have my own difficulties with being congruent: in Europe I feel very American, it oozes out of my pores. In America, sometimes people wonder if I am European, there's just something slightly different about me. It's not necessarily a problem, just a place where I am rough around the edges. A slight conflict that is more at odds with my well-being is that sometimes the workaholic in me takes over, sometimes the sloth, although I have not seen much of the sloth in recent years...

Yet, thankfully, being alive is more complex than how we behave, there's the little detail of what motivates us to behave that way. Having spent most of the beginning of my life as the sloth, there may be a part of me that is overcompensating. This is a problem for me, knowing what I do about how the brain works, and how all systems of the body require rhythms of rest and action in equal proportions. Yet, the drive to keep going is strong, it's motives unconscious.

These are the pieces that must fall into place. When I am not clear about what I am doing, the result is bound to be failure. When I am not clear about why I am doing it, I loose momentum like a car running out of gas. Often the deeper layers of why are hidden in subconscious decisions made long ago in moments of emotional upheaval. The stories I tell myself about what my life has been about are clues to these hidden motives. Often these stories, when laid out in the light of day are tinged with judgment.

In rolling on the floor, doing FELDENKRAIS lessons in AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT, I learn to practice the art of non-judgment. I learn to give myself a helping hand, to be the silent witness. This skill is transferable from observing movement of the physical, to observing behavior, thought processes and motivations. It's one of the most gentle, non-intrusive ways to allow integration to happen of it's own volition. It allows self-correction motivated by awareness of incongruity. It allows me to streamline my convoluted consciousness without force or trauma.

These lessons are a place to practice the skills that feed me inside and out. They are a place to practice integration in a very real setting: I can feel the changes almost immediately when things fall into place. I have time to notice it and I have created the opportunity to grow from it. This is worth taking the time for. In the rest of my life, it allows me to move along what I consider to be the culmination of a life well-lived: to move in the direction of integrating all the various intelligences I possess in varying degrees. As a practitioner, I am good at the movement part of the equation, but I still have plenty of areas to transfer these skills to. I am happy to make it a lifelong journey; it makes life entertaining, juicy, plenty interesting without tragedy, thank you.

I change as a result of being present rather than being pummeled by experiences that prove my lack of coordination. I gracefully lay down the baseball bat. I have learned from the drama. I have learned the greatest of all lessons: that the drama is not necessary. I can learn without it.


* See The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge, M.D. (Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science)

Are You Response-Able?

On the surface, FELDENKRAIS seems to be about mobility. Fundamentally, it's about stability. The misconception is that stability is static, like a rock. This may be so for buildings, yet the architecture of a living structure is completely different in it's requirements than an inanimate object. The foundation of stability in living beings is mobility that is free enough to allow for constant, immediate responsiveness to the surrounding environment.

To make this idea more concrete, imagine being a little grey sports car riding down a country road. If your driver does not constantly adjust the steering to the twists and turns as they arise, the car will run off the road. As we age, over time, we become numb to our experience, we tune out our own bodies, we let go of our ability to move by discounting it's importance. Gradually we loose the ability to respond readily to the road. We start responding by rote, without really perceiving the road. Our vehicle, that was once amazingly fine-tuned, gradually turns into this Stephen King version of the same sports car, a vehicle out of control, veering dangerously close to missing the curves and seemingly responding only to it's own agenda.

Like a car whose shocks are defunct, we move through space and time in a lurching manner, reacting ever more slowly to our own reflexes. The impulse is still there, but the ability to be present is dull and the body's ability to respond is slow and limited. Then we retire.

Note to myself: if I want to retire in a state of restriction, ignore the warning lights on the dashboard. If I want to retire in a state of mobility that is so responsive that my reflexes are as sharp, both physically and in terms of mental acuity as they ever were, then FELDENKRAIS is like the nectar of the Gods, a delicious elixir of longevity. Especially if I am interested in being more than I was when I was young and agile by default. FELDENKRAIS is a magic carpet ride towards being more able, more intelligent, more accomplished and - what? you say this sounds like an ego trip? - I am merely referring to being more than I was, not more than you are! Try it, and then you'll know what I'm talking about! These lessons are like a primer in how to expand who you are, not to mention becoming more readily maneuverable - often in the most unexpected ways. It's perfect for me. I get bored easily. Why limit myself to linear learning, when in fact, I am a dynamic, multidimensional being existing on several planes of experience at once? Hello, friends, I'm baaaaaaack!

Warm virtual hugs and thanks to all of you who have emailed and encouraged and cajoled and requested more of my nimble fingers (after all these years of working with my hands!) on the keyboard - as a means of providing the stability of concrete words to stimulate further expansive adventures in experience a la FELDENRKAIS.