FEET DON'T FAIL ME NOW!

understanding the foundation of your base of support...

When you have chronic pain, it’s usually because of an unconscious habit of overworking that the part of your body. For most people, it’s the low back or the neck…but the base of support is in the feet. What is "break over?" What can you bring to the table that you are not yet aware of?   When I encountered this novel way of thinking about pain that the Feldenkrais Method presents us with, my toe hurt most of the time. I was concerned because I thought maybe “bad feet” were hereditary. My mother had been a child in Switzerland, during WWII, living across the lake from Germany. The Swiss army, closing ranks, requisitioned sugar, butter, flour, chocolate and shoes. This meant my mother had to wear shoes too small for her feet during those war years. By the time I saw her feet as a child myself, they were full of bunions and corns and clearly painful. When my toes seemed crunched together, at first I considered that it might be gout, for I loved all things rich: French cream sauces, the pungent cheeses of Appenzelle and the fluffy lightness of Napoleons, the incredibly flaky layered butter pastries. Rich foods cause gout. It seemed appropriate. I had always felt as if I was born in the wrong century and I was drawn to the middle ages. Gout is a disease of the middle ages, both past and present! But it wasn’t gout. I noticed that my toes were as if crunched together even with no shoes on. Maybe it was from wearing high heels at work for an eight hour shift every night at the Mirage Hotel where I was working while I was first training for my career in alternative health. Surely that would cause the toes to smoosh together? The beauty of the Feldenkrais Method is that it doesn’t matter what the reason is, what matters is the current moment. What can be done to change the pattern now? When we did lessons in Awareness Through Movement (ATM) that revolved around walking, I learned so much, not only about myself and my feet; I learned about my other passion: horses. For in horses, breakover is a big deal. It can mean the difference between a sound horse or a lame horse. As it turned out, my point of breakover was caddywampus. What’s that, you say? Caddywampus, cockeyed, uneven, askew…when I was stepping off the foot, I bent the ball of the foot in such a way that my weight rolled over the inside of the big toe. Because of gravity, this caused my weight to go through my entire leg in a line of force that was indirect, placing more stress on each of the joints above AND more stress on the big toe. All I had to do was learn to walk by breaking over between the big toe and the second toe and all that pain disappeared. It was a functional issue: hence the term: "functional integration." It was like flying an airplane with no understanding of how to use the flaps. It’s true, the body doesn’t come with an instruction book. It comes with something far better, far richer, far more fulfilling. The body comes with its own feedback loop: your ability to sense yourself. Once you tune in, your nervous system is like a GPS system that will never steer you wrong. The thing is, most people tune it out, instead of tuning in. I hope to meet you in ATM class any Tuesday this month. In only a few lessons, you can discover a whole new world of enjoyment: a process that allows you to learn from your own experience. You can learn to tune in, to refine, to hone the perfection of your own pitch-perfect ability to discover new ways to access ease, comfort, freedom and joy!

Be Well! Gabrielle Pullen, MFA, GCFP Somatic Resilience Coach Feldenkrais Practitioner - Guild Member Since 2002. Writing Instructor - MFA and Certified by MNSU 2017.

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Small variances in initial conditions can have profound and widely divergent effects on a system. In this case, we're talking the Human Nervous System, which controls muscular tension, the visual field, perception and learning, among a zillion other things!!! Learn More