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!

Pain

"Learning to inhibit unwanted contractions of the muscles...is the main task in coordinated action."
- Moshe Feldenkrais, The Potent Self




The Chinese word 'Song' means relaxation, but not in the sense of eliminating all tension. Rather, it means to cultivate a sense of greater aliveness born of the absence of unnecessary tension. Learning to sort out what is and what is not necessary is the how the process of AWARNESS THROUGH MOVEMENT does it's magic.

I am not my pain. I am not my ego, nor the roles I play. I am not my work, not how much money I make. These are places where we all loose our way from time to time. In teaching ATM to the public, I am constantly amazed and slightly horrified at how much people are willing to live with in terms of pain. These people accept as ordinary, as just the way it is, a level of physical pain that boggles the mind.

It has become who they are. It is their history, the focus of their daily regimen. As such, it becomes their identity. They get tired of talking about it or not. Some talk about nothing else, some just sublimate it, shoving awareness deep beneath the surface just to cope. I either have to gently keep reminding people not to continuously recite a litany of accidents or injuries that explain why they hurt all the time, or I have to get them to admit that they really do hurt, much more than they can say. In the first case, the constant repetition of the 'story' of pain is like a form of self-hypnosis that perpetuates it. In the second, the denial is as fierce as the pride of any serious drunk intent on defying the world to call them on their misery.

One of the most significant ways that FELDENKRAIS works is by helping us to have a more accurate self-image. Following the neural pathways that babies go through during early development, basic ATM lessons help us define how our bodies work. Babies learn to where their feet are by moving them, touching them to things, feeling how they make contact. In the same way adults can pursue FELDENKRAIS ATM as a practice that completes and defines more accurately who they are.

In rolling around on the floor in this slow, relaxed state, observing our experiences without judgment, I learn volumes about myself. I learn what my realistic limitations are as governed by the laws of gravity. I also learn surprising things about the ways I limit myself. I discover how I can move in places where I had no idea that movement was possible. In the most recent lesson I put up as an audio file on http://feed.awarenessthroughmovement.info called 'Low Back Pain,' I learned about the places my spine can move so that my low back does not do all the work.

For every place that hurts, there is a part of the spine or the self that is blocked, that is unfamiliar, unused and not a part of our self image. In the same way that children clarify what they are able to do with their bodies, the practice of ATM clarifies how we can enlarge our repertoire, expand the spaces between our joints and enter the expansive realm of life as a learning rather than life as an ever shrinking prison of pain.

In the FELDENKRAIS Method we do not cure, heal or fix. We change the focus and teach you to move in new places, and to trust your own ability to make improvements. Once you have an injury or a chronic pain, you can never go back to the way you were. But you can become greater than you were, bigger than your problem, if you will. You can LEARN what provokes it, what makes it better and how to move through it. You can trust that learn how to work with your own nervous system's ability to self-correct.

FELDENKRAIS is self-empowering. By working with ATM as a practice you become self-sufficient in learning how to improve how you feel, so that decline is not a fact of life, a belief that propels you into premature capitulation and aging. It gives you a tool so invaluable it is difficult to communicate to others. There is no price that can be put on it because it involves a perpetuation of your own ability to learn. It cannot be patented, and no one else stands to benefit from it but you. Teaching this is a challenge, because it is like leading people on an intimate journey. I can't go with you. I can merely show you the way. The sooner you commit, the sooner you will transform your pain into a new perception of possibilities.