Too Many Choices

Ever enter a supermarket and go into the deer-in-the-headlight mode? Hmmn, what's the organizing principle going to be today? Is cheap more important than healthy today? Or, is healthy more important than going over budget? Or, are my cravings for junk food (chemically induced corporate control of the masses making the poor especially susceptible) going to win out over my desire to actually have more energy and feel good? And, more to the point, can I actually tell the difference?

It is a measure of the respect I have for the comment my esteemed FELDENKRAIS colleague posted after last weeks article that inspires a more lengthy response. I was going on about how improving our ability to sense ourselves may well be the greatest hope for humanity in terms of empowering people to freely modify their own behavior witout legislation, government interference or war. What he picked up on, though, was a question about whether or not FELDENKRAIS is about improving our ability to sense ourselves, or is it more about having additonal choices?


Recently, I was listening to a comedian tell a story about staying with a friend and her two kids. Before breakfast these two kids, one 8 and the other 6, were grilled with options: cherios or frosted flakes? Toast or pop tarts? Milk or orange juice? And we wonder why kids born into privilege  are willful!

Then there's a more difficult kind of choice. Typically, the average kid, whose parents are getting divorced, is asked who they want to live with. One million children in America are involved in a new divorce annually, according to divorcemagazine. That means that one million children are subjected to choice as one of the most stressful experiences they will ever encounter. Talk about having your loyalties pulled in two! For many, this is a set up for a sense that choices in general are difficult and stressful by association.

Objectively speaking, though, choices are like habits. They either serve or they don't. Either they have been made already, or they remain incomplete and slow the whole process down. If I've already decided what to do in advance, I can act faster. If I have a habit about how to get up in the morning, I don't have to think about it and can get on with it. Come to think of it, habits are very closely related to choice.

Most habits are acquired by default and not by choice. So it is essential to evaluate habits every now and then, to make sure they still serve. The same is true of choices. This is a huge piece of what FELDENKRAIS is about. For example, when I sit with the same leg crossed over the other all day, how does that adversely affect my neck on one side? By the same token, a habit of  eating frosted flakes since childhood can serve in dysfunctional ways, such as contributing to the potential for diabetes in an adult. 

I won't make these connections immediately, but if I stay with AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM) as a practice, gradually the metaphor of movement becomes clear in relationship to the rest of my life. It simply falls into place as I move my attention from one part of my life to another and as I form the habit of noticing differences and similarities no matter what I'm doing. These two self-sensing mechanisms are intrinsic to the practice of ATM, and eventually become so deeply ingrained they are a part of me.


I very much agree with the statement that, 'It's the questions we ask ourselves that determine the quality of our lives.' In , we encounter certain questions over and over again in any lesson. The bottom line in any lesson is always, 'Is it working for me or not?' and I evaluate that, by how it feels.

By refining my ability to sense myself, my environment, and, by extension, the results of my actions, I can tell if I am getting the results I seek or if I'm just running in circles. When shopping for food takes 2 hours instead of forty-five minutes, I'm missing the sunshine outside!

I really appreciate this topic, because it makes me acutely aware that having choices is really demanding and requires an organizing principle. If I live my life as a free-for-all where anything goes and choice is king, all I've got to show for myself is anarchy. Believe me, I know, I lived the first 25 years of my life this way and it's exhausting! One of the organizing principles I learn in ATM is to seek out the feeling of the force of gravity running through my bones instead of fighting it with my muscles. I learn to use it to my advantage to hold my structure in a stabilizing compression that leaves my muscles free for movement, creative expression and whatever work I have to do.

Those of you who have worked with me have probably heard me say, 'Strength without coordination is like the scene in the old black and white film when the monster, Frankenstein, rises off the mad scientist's table after a good jolt of lightening and rambles off into the village where people run screaming from his presence.'

Coordination, by definition, is an organizing principle. In the case of FELDENKRAIS, and I learn to organize myself so that I live in the middle of all possible options, so that I can easily move in any direction at any time. Not only is it perceived as safer by the nervous system. It's perceived as a feeling of security, and a sense of psychological freedom and empowerment. 

 I can learn this principle, if I'm sharp enough to pick it up, from Martial Arts, or Yoga, but in ATM it's a primary goal. In ATM, it's not just a means to an end, it's a main theme in every lesson. The point is not simply to have more choices, but to have a way to 1) discern my choices in the first place, and 2) to choose more functional choices than I have in the past, and 3) to be able to sense when circumstances have changed and be able to respond accordingly.

The gift and the legacy of Moshe Feldenkrais is that he created an easy Method for anyone use to discover how to move in the direction of the unknown without an expert or someone telling them 'What their problem is.' It's very foundation is in learning to be self-directed.

At first, we learn how to use the framework of a lesson to discover how to make more comfortable, safe and functional movement choices. Once the nervous system recognizes the difference, by how it feels, it becomes a new habit. It no longer requires the safe environment of a lesson to be implemented, it crops up when needed.

I was just listening to FELDENKRAIS Trainer, Elizabeth Beringer, mentioning a client who did a lesson involving the judo roll. She complained after the lesson to Elizabeth that she felt she didn't 'get' it. Of course, Elizabeth told her there was nothing to 'get,' it's a process that goes on in some place other than the intellect. The woman then went on with her life. A while later, she took off for a bycycle ride and was abruptly knocked off the bycycle only to roll spontaneously on the ground completely unharmed to the applause of the people looking on. She had no idea how it happened. The magic of the nervous sytem is intact should we care to trust it's infinite intricacies to the schooling of the FELDENKRAIS Method!

Imagine, what would it be like to live a life based on the organizing principle of choosing greater ease, of making more functional decisions without having to first decide if functional was more important than whim, or approval, or duty? So, I agree whole-heartedly, choice is a huge part of FELDENKRAIS. It's a matter of first choosing to be more functional, and then choosing to notice the difference, and then feeling how empowering that sensation is, and finally, learning to notice those sensations even in the midst of chaos, even under pressure, even when not in the safe construct of an ATM lesson.

image courtesy of www.thesituationist.wordpress.com

Hope for Humankind

When you drive a car, you think it’s the car that has the blind spot. That’s how it’s constructed. Guess what? "You've got mail!" If you're driving, you are a part of the car. That place behind and to the left of you as driver is YOUR blind spot. The inability to see another car coming up on your left when it's really close to your vehicle is YOUR limitation, not the car's. It’s remarkable that we don’t have more accidents, but some part of you often senses the other vehicle, often moments before peripheral vision can lay any claim to having contributed to perception.

Growing up is like that. A child stuck with the frustration of learning to tie shoelaces may throw a tantrum. But as a parent, you know that after shoelaces, there’s reading, there’s going to school, and any number of unknowns that will need to be navigated to move into adulthood.

As adults, we think we’ve arrived somehow and that there shouldn’t be any blind spots. Silly humans. The ancient Greek word, ‘hubris’ may not be very popular anymore, but it’s sure a rampant behavior! Where, in society, do you see the extreme arrogance of people over-estimating their competence?

The weird thing is that teenagers and young adults can get away with it. There’s a phase in everyone’s life when you can bluff your way through anything with a blind combination of confidence and ignorance. It’s as if Not Knowing is no hindrance at all and you proceed along your merry way without thinking about it. It’s an gift of youth that gets tamped down by time, ground under the weary feet of the accumulation of disillusionment.

In the tradition of the American iconic folk singer Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger tells a story about two frogs. Now these two guys knew something about disillusionment, having survived the Great Depression. The story goes like this:  one evening after milking the cows, a farmer left a tall can of milk in the barn without a lid. Two frogs hopped into the luscious fresh milk and then found they couldn’t leap out. After much thrashing around, the one frog said, "There’s no hope.” With one last gurgle, he sank to the bottom. The other frog thought, "There must be some other way," and refused to give up. In the morning, the farmer came out and found one live frog on top of a big cake of butter.

Now the structure of an Awareness Through Movement® (ATM) lesson doesn’t APPEAR to be about finding hope-no-matter-what, but it may well cultivate it. How? By virtue of the way it cultivates a habit of always looking for another, easier way to do whatever it is you are doing. For most of us, it’s a new habit altogether. When that happens, you start to have a new faith in your own ability to figure things out, even when you don't know what to do. What is hope, but a sense that maybe I don't know everything, but it's gonna be okay? 

ATM cultivates this attitude towards life by teaching you a process of systematically experimenting with one specific option several times to check out how it feels until it’s clear. Then, you take a break, so that the next attempt is clearly separate or differentiated. Then, you try a different variation on how to do the same thing until it’s clear. An important piece it to take yet another short break, to give the brain time to process incoming sensations as data. Without these little rests, the brain has no opportunity to assess what works and what doesn’t.

What’s the difference between one option and another? Without awareness, it’s all unclear. Additionally, you’ll usually only notice if something is NOT working, when you give yourself a little break. This holds true for life as well as ATM. So you see, ATM provides vital life-skills.

At first, differences may be vague, but they become increasingly more apparent. In ATM, the elusive is made obvious as a sense of having overused a few specific muscles without discrimination. The goal of any lesson is to notice which parts of yourself you are NOT using that could be making a bigger contribution. Which of your habits are serving you and which ones are limiting you? Again there is a chance to develop a primary life-skill: it's not just about movement! Which of your habits in thought, word and deed are no longer serving you?!?

This question of 'Which parts of you are not coming to the party?' is posed in the background of every ATM lesson. It's said that it's the questions we ask ourselves that determine the quality of our lives. This question is a direct path to expanding the boundaries of what you don’t know. From my training and from working with hundreds of people, I can guarantee that there parts of yourself are you not even aware of, so that they couldn’t participate if they wanted to. Chances are you even have a sense there there is something you don't know that you need to know, but it's so vague you don't even know where the problem lies or who to ask. In ATM, you don't need to know. When you pursue this as a practice you do on a regular basis, the clues to where the answers lie get laid out for you like bread crumbs leading you on a magic treasure hunt driven by your own curiosity.

And here’s another one of the other major gifts of ATM:  every lesson is an opportunity to revisit the humility of childhood that allows you to BE with NOT knowing the answers, trying different things until the best answer becomes apparent. This ability is not just helpful; it's a huge part of the creative process. Artists, actors and writers never really know how their art is going to come out until it’s finished. Inventors, research scientists and innovators of social and environmental change also dwell easily in the realm of NOT KNOWING as a means of finding answers that have never manifested before. Remember when we thought the world was flat?

Listen up: it's not just about movement, it's about the evolution of human consciousness. What's that, you say? This evolution is inherent in the gradual advancement of our sensibilities. For example, the advancement from the preoccupation with trivial social niceties due only to an elite who happened by chance to be born into nobility. This social superiority was carried by whiplash and tremendous suffering on the wings of the slave trade which finally led to a sense of hipocracy that took several hundred years to become enough of a FEELING of conflict between ideology and behavior after the idea of equality was written into the Declaration of Independence. Then, during the French Revolution, the momentum of the emotional charge between conflicting ideals and actions exploded in violence against the Nobility. The abolition of slavery in Britain and America did not lag far behind.

Other examples of the evolution of human consciousness are inherent in the gradual worldwide shift from colonialism and despotism to a more equitable political systems where people are not starved or locked up without trial. It's also evident in the slow change from religious persecution - the Inquisition, for example - to religious freedom. It's inherent in the shift from segregation to civil rights, or from women-disposed-of-as-property - whose very children were taken from them when widowed - to women-seen-as-individuals with their own right to own property and how to best care for their children. I could go on, but I won't. You get the idea.

The significance of this is that we usually think of it as an evolution of ideas. In actual fact, it's the self-revulsion and the sense of horror all these ways of behaving evoked in both witnesses and in perpetrators that gradually changed our way of thinking about those once common practices. Hence, the evolution of ideas has it's seed in our ability to sense ourselves. The Information Age is over. This is a New Era: one in which our ability to sense ourselves is the key to moving out of old, insane social structures that foster violence and destruction into ways of being that work for more and more people. Now I'm not saying Feldenkrais® is the only path at all; but I am convinced that it is definitely one of the ways out of the madness. What madness? A world that turns a blind eye to 12 million souls wasting away their lives in refugee camps while on the other side of the globe, a floating mass of plastic garbage from affluent countries gradually grows bigger than the size of Texas. If you haven't heard about it, it's in the Pacific ocean.

The core of ATM is improving our ability to sense ourselves. The impetus for the evolution of consciousness is in the refinement of our sensibilities as sentient beings gifted with the awareness to know the difference between hypocrisy and integrity. It's a FEELING. Feelings are registered as sensations in the body. The greater our sensitivity to feel the effect of what we do, the faster we will move through the anger, the fear, the guilt, the shame, the denial, and finally, into constructive action. Ah, there's one more vital element: the cultivation of allowing ourselves the feel whatever comes up without resistance. ATM is about that too.

This is what the Feldenkrais Method® has to offer a world entrenched in economic, environmental and social turmoil. It’s a pathway into the unknown, a yellow-brick road from chaos into order; an order that respects the individuality of each unique living, dynamic system, and at the same time honor’s it’s potential for contribution to the well-being of the whole. If you would like me to be your guide on this road, it would be my pleasure.

Photo Curtesy of © 2009 Smart-Kit.com

How I Got My Juju Back

How I Moved Out of Back Pain That Would Have Kept Me From Everything I Love To Do In Life...

After all this rain, there is a sun! It would seem I lead a charmed life. After the first six weeks, eventually the buckets of rain washed away all previous footing in the horse corral until the big dutch warm blood, affectionately known as ‘Himself,’ after the Irish tradition, churned up a soupy mess of wet clay with his huge feet. It was like quicksand, only worse, because it was on an incline and I was afraid it would suck his leg right under the fence, forcing him into a position he couldn't’t get out of. Miraculously, he never lost a shoe. (I have an excellent horse shoer - my spouse - is the head farrier at U.C.Davis Large Animal Veterinary Hospital). But the mud was treacherous, slippery and seemingly bottomless.



There I was, slogging around digging trenches in the wet clay for the water to drain out, spreading a half ton of gravel into the corral by hand in the downpour, changing out soggy wet blankets in the relentless rain that went on for a good three months solid. My back never once gave me a twinge of discomfort. Not once. I never was incapacitated by back pain, neck pain or a knee problem.

But it was not always this way. Thirty years ago, when I was in my twenties, my back went out while I was picking up a tissue from the floor and I was down for the count of three full days looking at the ceiling. In that time, I had plenty of opportunity to think about what I would be willing to do to be able to walk again. I tried a lot of things as you can imagine. I also had more problems along the way. I have survived seven whiplash injuries including a few concussions mostly from car accidents, but a few from falls off horses - mostly while jumping. 

But still I lead a charmed life. I have never broken a bone.

Yet, the most amazing experience for me has been the slow introduction to the FELDENKRAIS Method. That is what has given me this ability to do really heavy physical labor without any physical fall out. It’s what has taught me to work my body smarter, not harder. It’s what has given me a new sense of self that is stronger, more adaptable and more grounded. Now I can lift, sweep and tote that bale with the core of myself, activated by the use of the pelvic floor in a way that has so completely reorganized my use of self that I no longer fear the work involved in keeping horses.

In short, FELDENKRAIS has allowed me to pursue my dreams and live the life I have always wanted to, in spite of injuries that, for most people, would be so debilitating that most exercise would be suspect or painful at the very least. With this gift, I can continue to be a part of that amazing dance with the horse that is a give and take that is non-verbal; a relationship with the horse wherein my body is my voice; one that has called to me my entire life.

Oh, to sense that soft muzzle in my hand, and to see that beautiful clear eye waiting, inviting, challenging me to play, to run, to buck and to experience the warm sun like any new foal drunk on the warmth of the sunshine after a long hard season of gray fog and rain...

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