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

A Touch That Releases Fear

Wisconsin and me July 2010...touch as a form of communication that provides the freedom to move in unison: in cooperation.








I had never been touched that way before. I left that room in awe that there was a way to have an interaction including touch that had no expectations, no strings, no manipulation attached.

When I came in, he asked me how I was doing. I said I was tired and my back hurt from the labors of the day. I had been doing the mucking out of fifteen stalls a day for about a year and it was getting to the right side of my low back. In the horse world, where I worked as a groom/secretary/stall help, I was basically expected to work all hours in exchange for five lessons on horseback a week. The lessons could have been awesome, except for the sarcasm, and the impatient yelling of the trainer, who really didn't want to be bothered. But I was young, and I wanted to learn more than anything, so I subjected myself willingly and it was starting to tell on my body. It was talking and it was saying it didn't appreciate the abuse.

I lay on a low, wide table. In contrast to the hectic schedule at the barn it was exceedingly calm in this large studio with undertones of zen Japanese design; panels of rice paper and beautiful calligraphy decorated the walls. I had spent the day, as usual, first feeding 40 brood mares, doing stalls, getting one young horse after another ready, tacked up and shining for her ladyship while she trained the horse I had just provided for her to mount, followed by a few more hours of paperwork related to sales of horses worth more than I had ever made in a year, a lesson and evening feeding...It was all a bit much after a while.

But I was told this practitioner person could help me with my back pain and so I showed up for myself, game to try something new, something I had never heard about a few months before, something not mainstream: the Feldenkrais Method. This man touched me ever so gently in ways that informed me of my own tension and the muscles of my shoulder seemed to relax of their own volition. I hadn't realized I held myself so stiffly there. But what amazed me most was the touch of a man that did not demand a response. There was not call for me to do anything, and I was used to having the touch of a man be a call to action, to sexuality or to submission.

In my own family, my father was ill-at-ease with any kind of intimacy, especially touch. He did not even meet my eyes when he spoke to me for the first decade or two of my life. I never knew what that was about, I thought there was something wrong with me, but I think he was just not a social person, he lived in another world, the world of theoretical numbers and theorems. My mother was affectionate, when she was not drunk, but when she was drunk she sheared my sense of confidence away from me with snide insinuation and sarcasm, often related to things I did not understand at the time, or had no experience of. Again, I thought it was me. And from her I learned that men are to be disdained and manipulated and used. I did realize that it made no sense in the grand scheme of things, yet, it was the only power she bequeathed to me, after she stripped me of all self-esteem...

So, this person, this practitioner of this strange method that no one I knew had heard of, save a small group of enthusiastic horse people who were interested in working with horses that have behavioral issues, he touched me with with a quality of presence that I had never experienced before. He touched me with a sense of intention that was about the release of pressure, rather that the building of it. He made me wonder what I had been missing all these years. Was there, in fact, another way to be - one that did not include hyper-vigilance? I was not even aware that I had been constantly watching my back in case I did something wrong in the eyes of the people in charge of my survival...I had no clue that I was a bundle of tension I had no sense of carrying. Over a couple of weeks, I found that I was releasing a whole new supply of energy to live that had previously been tied up in living defensively, an unconscious habit that my body was beginning to rebel against with back pain. It was telling me that something had to give and if it wasn't going to be me taking better care of myself and my own need for rest, it would be my back. It was pretty loud and clear.

A few months prior to this I had had my first experience of what the Feldenkrais Method could do for a horse. In a public presentation, a woman named Linda Tellington-Jones brought out a large Hanovarian stallion, dark in color, high of head and pushy and unsettled in front of the arena full of an audience of thirty or so. Using nothing but her intention, her hands and her expectation, which she conveyed to this animal clearly, through the lightest of touches and the projection that he could do this thing that she asked of him, he began to settle. His head came down and his eye became soft - in a matter of 20 minutes of less. Having handled stallions of varying degrees of training, I knew how precarious it could be to work with them firsthand. I was impressed. This animal, who had come into the arena irate and irritable, disrespectful and full of intimidation tactics, was dramatically different. He was calm, relaxed and there was a light of understanding in his eye, a new intelligence: a presence.

Later, in asking more about her work, I discovered that it was based on Feldenkrais. That's why I went off to experience it myself when my back began to give out again. I have always been more interested in the source than the derivatives, so I went to discover what it was all about for myself. Yet, I got more than I bargained for. I was, in those first moments of being touched with that level of respect for the innate knowing of my own body to come up with it's own solutions to my pain, struck by the power of pure presence, and the gift of being shown how much was possible for me. I was given a new lease on life, in essence a new-found hope that I could live in a body that was relaxed and comfortable enough to be straightforward and direct without fear of recrimination. What would it be like to live without fear, in a body without constant apprehensive tension? It was a revelation; a revelation for what is possible for me, but also for what is possible in relationship between women and men: a world where respect and mutual support generates fertile ground for love, creativity and a kind of interaction that is rich in subtlety, delightful in it's depth and color. This is true freedom for all.

Oh, and, by the way, did my back pain go away? You bet. But that was just icing by comparison!

Many thanks to Ezra Marrow of www.equuselemental.com for his help with Wisconsin!