A Somatic Approach to Patience

Managing the ebb and flow of attachment and desire would seem to be a spiritual issue, or an issue of managing the ego. But somatic theory frames it differently. How can movement be used to work with the excitement that comes unbidden when the seed of desire is sown?

"A man watches his pear tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe fruit at length falls into his lap." - Abraham Lincoln


I will say right off the bat that this is not one of my strengths. If there is something I want for myself, I am terribly impatient about it. By contrast, I am much more resilient when dealing with others. I am endlessly patient with muscle and fascia. I can wait for the unwinding to occur as it will. Sometimes just a minute or two, sometimes more, according to the length of time the restriction has been present. When I work with others, I enter a state where time does not exist. I enter the universe of their experience as evidenced by the consistency of their musculature. The history of your everyday activities, your proclivities and your personality is all written in the warp and weft of how you hold tension and where you have none...

But working with others is different because I have no attachment to the outcome, only an endless fascination with the process. Each soma is a magnificent conglomeration of physical, mental, and emotional responses, some spontaneous, some conditioned. As such each is entirely unique. Each time the process is completely different, and yet, patterns emerge. Patterns that I also see when looking at the fabric of my own life. When faced with my own motivations to begin this project or to end that one, for example, I am entirely human. I am pulled back from the curiosity that lures me into universe of the microcosm inside another. I get confused, just as we all do, by superficial appearances. I get sucked into expectations, diverted by life and tripped up by the unexpected that seems to occur consistently when I am busy making other plans.

I forget to make a back up plan. I forget that I have options. It's only when I lie down on the floor and reawaken my own creativity in the way I have learned to do in AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM), that I regain the endless capacity for patience that is an ocean. Only in working with myself in this way, can I access the same level of presence that I am able to draw upon when working with others. Time recedes and suddenly I drift gently, like Alice in Wonderland, into a rabbit hole. Only the path is one of fascinating discovery. I drop attachment to worldly things like a worn-out toy, in favor of a glistening bauble infinitely more immediate: the universe of sensory experience.

One of my favorite sayings is, 'The map is not the terrritory.' We never deal directly with life. We deal with our interpretation of it. This is why different people experience life in such blatantly contrasting ways, even when in similar circumstances. We 'make sense' of the world by stuffing what happens into the framework of what we know, how it relates to what we have known and what we are afraid might or might not happen in the future.

Interesting idiom, 'to make sense of,' considering that the only way we can interface with the physical world is by using the information our senses provide. Our footsteps on the path give us a sense of the terrain. Our sense of smell can dictate whether to feel comfortable or disgusted. Our visual field, now more than ever before, is assaulted daily with images that make the world a larger, more aggressive place. Images of war on foreign soil burst into the tiny interior of my car before I have time to change the station.

In the places where my map is inaccurate, I get lost. We all have preconceived ideas. If I am overwhelmed by unwanted input and need to tune out just to get on with life, I loose out. If I have to dull my senses to survive, I diminish myself. My aliveness is compromised. If I live in impatient desire for some future outcome, I starve myself in the presence of abunce. I can read about eating, but it will not nourish me. I can read about eating chocolate, but it's not the same as actually biting into the silky sweetness of it. And I can read about doing ATM, I can write about it forever, but it too, will provide no sustenance until I actally lay down, put a lesson on the CD player and give myself the gift of time for myself. Ironically, time, it seems, is the antidote to impatience.

Let's Nurture the Gene Pool

Nature vs. nurture, the age old debate, has received new input based on new equipment now available for the study of neurology. Just how important is genetics? How much of a role does environment play in how we fare in life? One thing is clear, by learning to nurture ourselves, we extend our own life span. The person who stays connected to self, to nature and to others lives longer.

This is why a machinistic approach is completely contraindicated. It doesn't matter whether we are speaking in terms of how we relate to health, to self esteem, or to relationships, international or personal. To ignore quality and make decisions based solely on logic is detrimental. It ignores the innate plasticity of the brain that allows for life-long learning. The possibility of learning separates organized life forms from computers. A computer can only do what it's told based on the input it receives. Humans, however, have an ability to generate completely unknown responses that can potentially create worlds of possibility previously inconceivable. Your ability to learn is a wild card that you can count on.

In the 1940's, the scientific worldview about human development was leaning heavily towards the idea that environment was the main factor that determined a child's future talents. Scientists had not yet cracked into a way to unlock how genes might determine character traits, or susceptibility to disease. A then-famous-study of two groups of disadvantaged infants made clear the magnitude of the importance of nurture.

Psychiatrist Rene Spitz compared two groups of infants raised in two seperate institutions. One group was raised in a fondling home, the other group was raised in a nursery that housed the babies of women in the nearby prison. Both institutions were comparable in that they were clean, and provided adequate health care. The crucial difference lay in the amount of nurture. The babies in the prison nursery received lavish attention. Their prison inmate mothers showered them with affection and care during feeding, diaper changes and playtime. These babies developed normally despite the impersonal, clinical setting.

The foundling babies, however, received only little stimulation. In the foundling home, every eight babies had one nurse to care for them. Feedings and diaper changes were brief. Each baby was kept isolated from others to prevent the spread of infection. They had nothing to look at, little affection and minimal physical contact. The startling result was that a large number of them did not even survive until the age of two. The infants that did survive to become children had a surprisingly broad range of problems. Some were physically stunted, some were severely retarded, some were highly prone to infection. They were socially inept. Their behavior was characterized by withdrawal and apathy. By three years of age, most couldn't walk or talk.

Now, consider this: walking and talking is based on the ability to move. They had the muscles to do the job, they just didn't have the neural connections. Exposure to stimulation and nurture lays down the foundation for learning: if the brain is not engaged, it vegetates. This is how we learn to interact with the world around us. Spitz showed that early nurturing and stimulation was imperative for normal function.

Modern medicine is now focused, almost to the point of obsession, on decoding the genetic blueprint responsible for human behavior and disease. Everything from alcoholism to sexual orientation, and Alzheimer's disease to cancer is being related to some chromosome or other. What gets lost in the media shuffle, though, is that these genetic links merely define a predispositon, not a certain, inevitable cause. Genetics merely locates potential weaknesses and strengths, not definitive ones. Heredity is only one factor in determining the outcome of health and behavior. Given, the current trend towards sensationalism in news media reporting, it's easy to loose sight of this fact.

To give genetics so much power is to reduce the human species to the level of machinery. It denies the two most irrevocable distinctions between ourselves and other life forms. Human beings, alone, have the capacity to choose, to invoke free will. And human beings, alone, have the capacity to use conscious intention to the service of learning.

Animals choose, based on instinct, even affection, perhaps, but only if raised in domestication. Set a dog free, and it will probably choose to stay with it's master. At least most dogs come home eventually, unless misstreated. And some dogs will travel thousands of miles to be with a lost human companion. Animals, like humans, also have a capacity to learn, but it is limited to necessity. I have an older horse. I teach her new things all the time, because it's good for both of us. But left to her own devices, she would only learn what she had to for survival. She would not wake up one morning and think to herself, 'Today, I would like to learn French.' Animals do not channel their choices based on desire or ambition. They do not determine what they might like to do with their lives.

The FELDENKRAIS METHOD revolves around free choice. It's about using your intention to effect change. I do FELDENKRAIS with both people and horses. There is a difference only in that with horses, I am the one actively providing the stimulus for change. With people it can be done either way. I can provide the stimulus, or I can teach people the skill of working with themselves. That's what AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM) classes are about. ATM teaches you to regroup, to reprioritize, to learn to focus on quality instead of viewing your body as a machine that will inevitably fail you. The ability to learn is as inevitable as the degeneration of ageing. The difference is, you have to exert free will to initiate it once you can just 'get by' without learning more. Do you want live life just making do, or do you want to live fully?

ATM is a process of learning to use our God given senses to the service of improving the quality of our lives. If the word 'God' rankles, think of it in terms of neurology. You can intentionally use movement with a specific level of awareness taught in ATM to foster the connection of neural pathways for improved function, learning and coordination. You could, alternatively, opt to use drugs instead. It depends on the situation. In some cases drugs are called for. In other cases, they are merely temporary pacifiers. It's an individual judgement call. I, myself, have thought long and hard on this: Do I want to tune out or tune in? Having experienced both, I choose to tune in. Not twenty-four hours a day, but as a practice. I choose to gradually refine my ability to respond to life rather than to deaden my senses. I have spent years of my life tuning out and the quality of my life deteriorated in a very predictable manner. The years I have spent tuning in have brought a completely different experience. Tuning in takes me to places I was never even able to conceive of in previous times. Why? Because we cannot know what we don't know, but we can sure intentionally endeavor to find out.

Weeding Out Dysfunctional Movement Patterns

'Now 'tis spring, and weeds are shallow-rooted;
Suffer them now and they'll o'grow the garden.'
- William Shakespeare, King Henry the Sixth

If you are reading this, chances are you are no longer in the 'springtime' of your life. You may, in fact, be quite set in your ways, already experiencing the 'inevitable' onset of chronic muscular problems. But muscular dysfunction is not inevitable. It occurs in recognizable patterns that are malleable. The sooner you start the easier it is, before they become so deeply ingrained that they become a part of your self image. You can recognize these patterns easily, all you need is to be willing to learn to channel your attention...

The structure of muscles moving together in patterns allows your brain to organize complex coordination immediately. No thought required. Hitting the break pedal at just the right moment means finding it with your foot without having to take your eyes off the road. This allows for a certain amount of freedom. It means you can widen your focus. You don't have to focus all your attention on driving. You can follow directions to a new place. You can see the scenery. In short, since the issue of functioning safely is handled, you can also focus on other things.

The structure of patterned movement is a framework that allows for greater freedom. It's like having a schedule. You don't have to worry about things getting done because they are already accounted for. In one of the teaching jobs I've held, I used to get these frantic calls from the administrative director at the last minute asking if I could teach this or that workshop in two weeks or sometimes in a few days. Well, yes, I had the dates available, and yes, I could do the teaching, but there is a certain amount of internal preparation that goes into teaching. Teaching is about taking information that often is available to anyone, and organizing it so that it can be easily understood. It's kind of like what cows do. You have to take the information and chew it down into bite size pieces like cud so that it is easily digestible. Then you have to organize it into a recognizable pattern so that it makes sense. The more regular the pattern, the easier it is for people to retain new information.

Discipline is very similar. It provides a framework that can be freeing. It creates a consistent set of assumptions about behavior and work ethic that allow some basic things to get handled. When the basics are accounted for, other aspects of life can flourish in fertile ground; things such as creativity, achievement and safety.

The discipline of AWARENESS THROUGH MOVMENT (ATM) as a practice, allows you to easily recognize movement patterns. Truly holistic in it's methodology, the lessons do not focus exclusively on dysfunctional movement patterns, but on optional ones as well. Kicking a bad habit by trying to stop doing it doesn't work. Substitute a new behavior, and it becomes much easier. In ATM, you learn new movement patterns. The lessons chew ordinary movements down into bite size pieces so that you can easily recogize what you normally do and what else you could be doing.

It's the 'what else you could be doing' that takes you from dysfunction into optional patterns. And somewhere in that lovely array of optional patterns is one that is optimal for you, given who you are, what injuries are, and what your preferences are. The beauty of the Method is that it is all done in a playful, relaxed state of hedonistic enjoyment. I don't know about you, but I'm in. I like to nip those movement patterns that are causing me discomfort in the bud, before they turn into chronic pain. And, yes, it takes the freedom of discipline.

The Compelling Nature of Habit

Habits are useful, because they allow us to perform routine tasks without thinking. But when routine tasks start causing you pain, it may be time to break out of your habit, to expand your possibilities, which is what this practice is primarily about.



What is routine can be accomplished with ease. Habit is hard to break because it usually starts in small ways that make life easier, more predictable, or less painful. We associate it with good feelings. Like a repetitve pattern, it provides comfort in it's regularity. Habits provide emotional sustenance, because they can be depended on. They are familiar, like a favorite pair of slippers. Yet, when that favorite pair of slippers start to wear out, they become threadbare without protection from the hard surfaces of the floor. Thus, what was once exceedingly comfortable, may turn into a problem so gradually, you barely even notice it.

'There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.' - Machiavelli 1469-1527

It may be precisely because the FELDENKRAIS METHOD is about challenging all the notions about ourselves that we take for granted that it is not more widely known and respected for the amazing results it can produce. Self emanination takes both courage and humility. It takes a trust in the process. You must be willing to let go of the comfort of old habits even when they no longer serve. One of the things I hope to cultivate in the general public by writing this weblog, is a foundation of understanding about the Method and to build trust in the process. AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM) lessons are designed to deconstruct habitual movement patterns. It can be scary to dismantle the comforting framework of what is familiar, even if keeping it intact produces pain. This is why people stay in relationships that no longer work. It's why people subconsciously abdicate responsibility for their health. It may also be the most challenging aspect of the FELDENKRAIS METHOD because it requires a leap of faith to submit yourself to the process.

So, what's the difference between a habit that is helpful and one that is not? Take driving, for example. It is best accomplished with certain habits around how you use the accelerator and the break pedal. Being able to perceive where your feet are without looking is pretty important. But there is an element of timing involved. It is also important to know when to stop using the accelerator and hit the break. Habits are like that. Sometimes they serve well, other times they need to be examined, lest they have outworn their usefulness.

A habit performed over and over again without thought can become detrimental. It can turn into a compulsive way of dealing with life. In the concrete realm of movement in the field of gravity, you can learn to distinguish the difference. For example, when a routine way of moving causes repetitive stress to a specific part of the body, it's time to learn how to redistribute the stress by learning how to use more of yourself. Or, when a routine way of doing things is the only known option, it can become a trap that limits your potential. You won't even be open to new possibilities because you will conceive of your way as the only way.

This is a common frame of mind I encounter in the field of pain management. People want immediate relief from pain without any willingness to change anything they are doing. That's why the quick fix of pharmaceuticals has such allure. It's a multibillion dollar industry. By taking that pill, you can keep doing the same old thing. You don't have to change. You don't have to look at what you are doing and you certainly don't have to take any responsibility for learning to do anything differently.

This is where I loose people with the victim mentality. 'Who me? It's not my fault.' - This is not a matter of fault. It's a matter not being able to feel what you are doing. Let me help you learn to notice what you are doing. 'I can feel myself just fine, it hurts whenever I use my right shoulder.' Well, whenever you have pain in a specific area, 90% of the time, there is another area nearby that you are not using at all and have no ability to feel. This is where you have to trust the logic of it. Any overuse pattern is usually accompanied by an area, usually closer to the trunk, where there is relatively little or no movement. In areas that are not used much, there are few neural connections. Learn to stimulate the neural connections using movement and you gain a more accurate image of your own capability. When you incorporate more of yourself in your own self image, you spread the stress of basic movements over more joints relieving localized pain in specific areas.

Surgery is an even more extreme example of how far people are willing to go, so that they don't have to change. It's not that surgery is not indicated in certain situations, but there are statistics that suggest that the number of unnecessary surgeries is over 40%. Why? Because it's much easier to get your stomach stapled than change your habits around food. It's easier to surgically change the shape of your face than to deal with ageing, that inevitable harbinger of mortality. It's easier to fuse your vertebrae than to take the time to learn how to move in a way that does not continuously challenge the area of discomfort. These are provocative statements, I understand that. And perhaps, on some level, my intention is to provoke you, to provoke you into action to the service of experiencing greater freedom and fulfillment in you life.

We are an instant gratification society. Recovery from surgery may only take six months. Learning to move in a new way may not even take that long, but people don't realize that it's even a possibility.

Well, listen up. I'm here to tell you that it is a possibility. But you have to do the work. It may be possible for you to learn how to move in a way that no longer provokes your pain. That is one of the main things the FELDENKRAIS METHOD is all about. As an instructor, my goal is not to teach you all the hundreds of lessons Moshe Feldenkrais designed. Rather, my goal is to teach you the skill of learning how to work with yourself so that you become autonomous in your ability to move in variety of ways. All those lessons are merely a template for you to gain self knowledge. Thus, you learn to notice what you are doing and you are no longer trapped by your own lack of vision. I will hold the vision for you.

A Congruent Life

Are you congruent? Are you presenting a happy face to the world when inside you are agonizing over something you are afraid to admit? This kind of internal conflict manifests as opposing tension in the body. Playing with movement using the kind of focused attention one learns in AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM) is a means towards resolution...

We all face potential conflict when undergoing major transitions in life. Other societies have maintained rituals to make these transitions easier. Western society has all but dropped the rituals that gave people a moment to reflect on the signifigance of moving from childhood into adulthood, or from an active working career into retirement. When conflicts like these are not resolved, they create an underlying tension in the body. Read on to find out how movement can be used to help clarify internal conflicts harbored just below the surface of consciousness.

The most common example of this kind of conflict is a phase that everyone has to go through in the transition from teenager to adult. How are you going to support yourself? Will you follow the dictates of your mind, which analyzes the financial pros and cons of a given career. Will you follow your heart, which may lead you in directions that society scoffs at. Everyone knows you can't make any money in the Humanities or in the Arts. Then there is the issue of self esteem. Maybe you think you have what it takes in spite of what 'they' say. Doing what you want when it goes against 'common knowledge' is a statement about how you feel about yourself. It takes courage to fly in the face of convention and do it anyway. It takes an ability to manage conflict, the conflict between fear which pulls you back, and the determination which pushes you forward.

This naturally raises internal conflict that must be resolved before you can fully realize the dream, whatever it is. Examples abound: the son who is expected to follow in the family business, but would rather study art; the daughter who is expected to marry and be a mother but would rather focus on a career in design or business...If you follow the expectations of others, you are conflicted because you are not following your heart. If you follow your heart, you are conflicted because you are not respecting the wishes of your parent. Or, you could decide you don't care, in which case you will experience the internal conflict of trying to pretend it doesn't matter when it does. You get the picture.

Unresolved emotions such as disappointment, resentment, and guilt have a specific way of being expressed in posture. That's why certain postures are so very expressive. Think of someone jumping for joy. It's pure exuberance expressed by complete expansion in all directions. Legs and arms outstretched, the head is up, the eyes are bright. Joy is expressed somatically by extending onself towards the environment. You don't do that unless you feel safe. Disappointment, by contrast, is expressed by withdrawal. Think of anyone you've ever known who battles depression. They usually have hair over their eyes, the shoulders are hunched forward, the head is in front to the vertical and the overall posture gives the impression of defeat.

These are all extreme examples anyone can recognize. Yet, there are many levels of subtlety in the expression of emotion and everyone harbors unexamined conflicts below the surface that manifest in the same way. The signs are not as obvious, because the conflict is less blatant, but the tensions are there, nonetheless. When you work at a job just for the money with no outlet for your passion or your creativity, for example, chances are you will have a continuous low level tension in your body because you are conflicted. Half of you knows you need the money. The other half of you yearns for a life that is about more than survival. You are, in effect, facing in two directions at once. Ouch.

Dr. Caroline Myss is an author who has studied mysticism extensively. She states in her book, Adanced Energy Anatomy, that the main purpose for our lives may well be to learn to become congruent. It may be that we are really here to learn to resolve all the conflicting emotions that come up in the course of a lifetime. This translates to living as a conscious expression of what you believe. 'They,' (there 'they' go again,) say actions speak louder than words. Becoming congruent means learning to make our actions and our ideas match. It requires that we resolve all our myriad internal conflicts, large and small. It's a lifetime proposition, not something you just decide to do and be done with.

Think about being a parent. Children really challenge us to look inside and make our actions congruent with our beliefs. The problem is, most people don't even really know what their beliefs are at that point. And they are certainly not yet in touch with the conflicts that parenting can give rise to. When do you say 'No?' What parent hasn't experienced the conflict of wanting to give in to those adorable little munchkins, but knowing that to do so has the potential to create a monster of mass proportions? Then they become teenagers. Teenagers have an incomparable ability to sniff out incongruencies. They will nail you to the ground for acting out the saying, 'Do as I say, not as I do.'

In movement incongruence manifests as a lack of coordination. It's not that all our little conflicts are reflected in the body by a lack of coordination. Rather, by improving our coordination in movements we are not familiar with, we can learn to feel the tension of little incongruencies we otherwise ignore. Movement in an ATM is designed to give you an opportunity to learn to clearly distinguish the difference between feeling congruent, which feels smooth and free, and feeling conflicted, which feels like your muscles are tensed and ready to go in opposite directions. When you are tensed in preparation to go in opposite directions, you can't go anywhere. In the field of gravity, if you can't move, you fall over. You are trapped, immobilized by your own conflicting intentions.

In ATM, you learn to sort out the conflicting directions of tension in your body, like sorting out a tangle in a skein of wool. Free yourself from all these conflicting tensions and you will find you have more energy. From there, as you learn this skill, it becomes much easier to spot in your psyche. The physical becomes a non-threatening place to explore how to work with elements of how we think that are at times very painful and uncomfortable. Conflict resolution becomes a new habit rather than something we need to force upon ourselves like a distasteful tonic. After all, your body merely expresses what your mind is thinking, whether you want it to or not.

How We Contain Ourselves

Prisoners, when released, often experience an amorphous, seemingly disproportionate feeling of fear. The walls that once kept them from freedom have come to provide a container for their misery that is, at the very least, predictable. The beauty of what lies beyond seems overwhelming, unrooted. The ebb and flow of their yearning is no longer hemmed in by an external physical structure, or by the decree of others. If things don't work out this time, it's on them. The moment of release is an opportunity. It's a unique moment in which there is a powerful choice to make.

These moments of choice can be used as a catalyst for huge changes. We don't often get these windows of opportunity to change the underlying attitudes that form the basis of our behavior. Usually, we can't even see them, they are too familiar. An attitude towards life is an underlying assumption we make that is used to make a zillion little decisions about whether to give or to take, to release or hold on, to expand or contract. It's the choice between embracing life and rejecting it. It's the choice between embracing responsibility or abdicating power. Without thinking about it, we organize all our decisions around the basic assumptions we harbor about whether or not life is safe, whether it's worth living, or whether we feel victimized by it.

How we learn to manage the ebb and flow of desire and revulsion, of excitement and indifference, of hope and despair is crucial. It affects our lives in profound ways. It's a handle on the suitcase of repetitive behavior. How do you handle projects, for example? Do you run out and get all the stuff you need to organize a project, be it a knitting project or a new business, and peter out after the first three days? Or, perhaps your'e not quite that bad. Do you loose momentum gradually, and give up just before the end? Or, maybe you never start anything yourself, unless someone else has a hand in it. Maybe you deal with excitement by avoiding risk at all costs. Maybe you tamp down excitement like a fire that needs to be put out before something is damaged. Maybe you chase excitement like a fiend. It's quite fasionable right now. Extreme sports are in.

Who cares? How vast are the number of ways we sabotage ourselves. How prolific the number of opportunities we watch from a distance afraid to experience the burning of desire or the cold, dead feel of defeat. Why extend oneself at all? It's up to you, it's entirely a matter of choice. (Choosing to ignore your power to manage yourself in this way, is a choice to renounce all claim to the very things that make life fulfilling.) It applies equally to human relationships. When you look at your life, do you see yourself as always extending yourself to others? Or do you 'keep people at arms length?' Do you let people 'get close to you?' Or, perhaps, you know women, or men, who consistently date and eventually always end up giving their date the 'cold shoulder?'

Common phrases such as these indicate that most people intuit the underlying fact that how we manage this ebb and flow of emotion and disinterest has a definite physical manifestation in our bodies. The reason I find working with AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM) so endlessly fascinating, is that you can approach rigidity in thinking from the mind or the body, it doesn't matter. Either way both aspects of the self change. ATM is a way to connect with the felt sense of ebb and flow, so that this entire discussion becomes concrete, rather than conceptual. Translated into plain English, that means stick with a practice and you will gradually learn to respond to these impulses appropriately, without thinking. It will no longer be just an idea that sounds interesting. Some things must be felt to be understood.

Looking at the ebb and flow of your impulses in this way can prevent burnout. Unfortunately, there is no cure for burnout. You have three options.You can rest until you can continue. You can use chemicals to continue; socially accepted (caffeine) or professionally prescribed (pharmaceuticals). Or, you can learn to prevent burnout in the first place by learning to manage your work rhythms better.

Looking at the ebb and flow of your desires in this way can help you accomplish more of what you set out to do, because you will learn how to manage your time so that you finish what you start. Looking at the ebb and flow of your relationships in this way can help you be less unpredictable human being, so that other people relate to you without the confusing push/pull strategies that can warp even the warmest friendships.

Looking out at the evening sky as a child, I used to be overwhelmed at the vastness of the stars at night, even to the point of fear. I had a sense that if I was not careful, I might fall into the starry night, so strong was the pull of all those beautiful lights shimmering across the galaxy. I had a fear of release, as if release might mean complete and total surrender. And perhaps it does...there is the paradox. We have to be able 'to stand' the feeling of surrendering to the unknown to be able to experience our own power to create. In the end, the power is not ours, it runs through us in an ebb and flow that can, with time, become recognizable, even welcome.

ATM As Spiritual Practice

The FELDENKRAIS METHOD is not in any way related to spirituality or religion, yet, it offers a way to practice spiritual principles. Just as Buddhist philosophy offers a conceptual framework for living without being a religion, FELDENKRAIS offers a concrete way to practice spiritual principles on the physical plane, through movement.

This is not by design, it's just that the physical laws of the universe are related to spiritual law. Certainly this is my own personal take on the what I get out of the practice of AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM). It's not 'orthodox' FELDENKRAIS thinking. But then, the Method is not an ideology. Rather, it's based on the principles of physics. It's based on the laws that govern the motion of objects (i.e. physical bodies), in space. It's based on learning how your structure responds to being in the field of gravity. This is where we live, and these laws are immutable. They never change, and learning how they affect us can be comforting, because they are so reliable. You can count on them. Once these principles start to become clear in movement, they become like old friends, familiar, easily recognized. After a while, somehow, life seems more secure, more comprehensible, less unpredictable.

Educated in a convent, now a lecturer on the 'Anatomy of the Spirit,' Caroline Myss proposes the idea that the spiritual almost always manifests in paradox. What seems desirable, like fame and fortune, for example, often turns out to be hollow. What seems unexciting, like a dependable job, can be the foundation for relationships that lead to an amazingly fulfilling career. These kinds of paradoxes crop up all over life. Our most painful experiences can turn out to be crucial crossroads that change the course of our lives for the better - should we have the strength of character to see things that way. The horrible accident that left Christopher Reeves a paraplegic after a fall from a horse could have been the beginning of the end. However, he was able to find it within himself to use this crisis in a positive way. A crisis in the physical body always amounts to a crisis in consciousness. Do you think for one moment that not being able to walk or even breathe on his own did not cause him anguish beyond what most of us have ever experienced? Yet, he was able to work through the temptation to give up. He eventually went on to change the consciousness of thousands of people in similar condition. He provided inspiration and guidance that still inspires today. He was able to see the paradox and run with it from a wheel chair: it's possible to turn a horrific experience into multiple blessings.

The FELDENKRAIS METHOD clarifies certain paradoxes, if you care to look deeply enough. Not that you can ever really understand paradox, but if you can distinguish what is and what isn't, you don't get stuck in the potholes as long. Some people take twenty years to move past trying experiences. Some people take twenty days to move past the same circumstance. Go figure.

How does paradox manifest in ATM? Well, here's an example. The structure of an ATM lesson is designed to take you to unfamilliar places, to take you outside the realm of your habits. Being deliberately non-habitual, it sometimes takes you to places that are uncomfortable. Human beings don't seem to like change. So, how is it that an ATM lesson can possibly help you feel more secure in your body and more secure in your life? The link between clarifying the paradox and you is learning. When you learn good coordination your body is more stable. The word 'kinesthetic' comes from the Greek 'kinein' meaning 'to move' and 'aisthesis' meaning perception. This translates to a feeling of emotional safety in your environment. Learning to sense how the laws of gravity affect your body kinesthetically, is an experiential sense of certainty. You know, literally, where you stand. It's not something you can comprehend until you feel it.

In a new ATM lesson (as opposed to one you have done before), you never really know where it's going to take you. Even if you know the general topic of the lesson, the lesson itself is almost always guaranteed to surprise you in some way. There are thousands of lessons, so you can always meet some part of yourself from a completely new perspective. Even with lessons you have done before, rarely are they done without new insight. Each lesson is like those rare books that you can read over and over and see something new each time. In the spiritual realm, it is not given to us either to know why things happen or what the outcome will be. Yet, it's human nature to obssess about trying to secure the outcome - give it up, it doesn't work! There are no guarantees in life. In ATM, I get to practice not knowing and giving up knowing. Not only that, I get to practice trusting in the process. I don't know why we're doing this lesson or where it's going, but I never fail to get something out of it. This, for me, is a spiritual practice. This is truly how I would like to live my life. For me, there is no other way. I've already tried the other ways and they all leave me feeling futile. This way I can learn to transmute experience into something that leaves me feeling fulfilled. The practice of ATM teaches me to use my consciousness as a magnifying lens to expand my perception beyond it's previous capacity.

Moving to Face Unconscious Attitudes

Attitudes, like emotion, are expressed in movement. In your practice, you can meet your unconscious attitudes on the floor.


Are attitudes addictive? Do you know anyone who perpetually plays the martyr? Do you know people who sabotage their own success? Everyone recognizes the stereotype of the mother who sacrifices all for her children or the person who perpetually sticks his foot in his mouth like so many characters on television sitcoms. These characters are recognizable stereotypes because they are universal archetypes. A study of how these arechetypes pop up in our lives can help us see our own behavior in a new light.

"Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart . Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes." - Carl G. Jung

What does all this have to do with movement education? AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM) is a process that takes us within. When we take the time to spend moments with ourselves, the most amazing things start to crop up. You may start to discover things in yourself you never saw before, such as how the way you move is a manifestation of unconscious attitudes.

For example, it is very common to see a newcomer to an AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM) class going through the lesson in sharp, jerky, abrupt motions more reminiscent of a fish out of water than of smooth, fluid grace. When people are very abrupt in their movements, it can be a reflection of a habit of being abrupt with themselves. One of the greatest learnings any ATM lesson can provide is to be more gentle with ourselves.

The FELDENKRAIS METHOD is a means of awakening to how we accomplish basic movements necessary for survival. Since movement is so closely tied to emotion in the geography of the brain, when you stimulate yourself to explore movement patterns in a new way, you also stimulate yourself to notice your own emotional patterns. Returning to the topic of archetypes, there are many levels of subtlety in their appearance in our lives. Stereotypes are easily recognized because they are exaggerated versions of behaviors we all do. Who hasn't played the martyr occasionally by commiting to do something that they didn't want to do? Who hasn't had the experience of speaking without thinking, of saying the wrong thing, inadvertently sabotaging a relationship?

Caroline Myss, in her book, Advanced Energy Anatomy, states flat out that the appearance of these behaviors reflects underlying attitudes that relate directly to archetypal patterns. This seems to ring true for me. Yet, what really got my attention was when she made the statement that addiction encompasses not only alcohol, drugs, food, sex or obsession with specific people; one can also be addicted to certain attitudes.

Now, I'm open minded, so I thought, let's try this on for size, what does she mean here? Self pity, for example, how does that rate as a possible addiction? Self pity is about avoiding responsibility. It's about making other people responsible. Funny, as I write this, I notice I have had a long-standing mental block regarding that word. I can never seem to remember how to spell 'r-e-s-p-o-n-s-i-b-i-l-i-t-y' no matter how many times I look it up, year in, year out. Freudian slip? Perhaps. Anyway, an addiction is a repetitive behavior performed out of a compulsion to avoid specific unpleasant feelings. That's my definition. The New World dictionary says that addiction is merely the act of 'giving oneself up to some strong habit.' Well, that's a relief. Makes it sound easy to kick, doesn't it? Unfortunately, as we all know, there is surely more to it than that.

One of the most basic principles of the FELDENKRAIS METHOD is to work within your range of comfort. Let's make this discussion concrete by putting it in terms of the physical body. If you suffer from chronic physical pain, for example, you will organize your entire life around avoiding anything that might even provoke it. If it hurts you to bend over, you will avoid it at all costs. You will not pick things up off the floor. Small price to pay. You will not pet the dog. Maybe you don't like dogs anyway. But the price gets higher and higher. Eventually, you will inadvertently exclude not only activities, but people, that you love. You will not pick up your grandchildren. Out of habit. You will not be conscious of how your decicions are ever more limiting. You will not make the connection that maybe you are not very close to your grandchildren because your relationship is defined by an unusual formality. You don't touch much. It will simply be a fact of life for you that you don't do these things.

Sounds a lot like the discussion of addiction, doesn't it? Remember that addiction is about compulsive avoidance of discomfort. So, in the case of one addicted to self pity, life choices, be they large or small, will be organized around the perception that they are somehow being taken advantage of, or being dicsounted. Since this is an unpleasant feeling, their behavior might tend to be organized around a sense of entitlement. Why? Because this is what fits in with their self image. This person will have a blind spot that always amounts to somebody else being responsible for what's going on in their lives. We all know people like this. Their justifications are so deeply embedded in the psyche as to be invisible to themselves, but obvious to everyone else. When the wounded child archetype pops up again and again to justify making someone else responsible, it's a clue. Looking at archetypical patterns that crop up is like having a side mirror that allows you to see in your blind spot.

Moshe Feldenkrais noted that any compulsive behavior is always accompanied by heightened muscular tonus. Heightened muscular tonus equals constant low-level tension. In an ATM lesson, sometimes when you bump into parts of yourself that harbor excessive tension continuously, it's an expression of unconsious patterns of thinking. When you are in the relaxed, exploratory mode that ATM promotes, you can meet your archetypes on the floor. It's most likely to occur during rests, when images and memories float in and out of your consciousness. Or, it may happen days later. The learning that occurs in ATM does not all happen in class. Much of it comes later when sleeping, or days later when your mind has had time to integrate past experience with new input. Come roll around in my class and we'll explore various archetypes together. They are not bad habits, rather, they are guides that offer insight. I have my own, just like anybody else. And with any luck, I am also about to have a skeleton in my closet. Purely for teaching purposes, of course.

Rolling With The Punches of Life

As infants, we are totally dependent on our parents for nurture. Initially, the interaction is primarily physical. Yet, physicality between two people is extremely intimate. Thus, emotional response is interwoven with physical action from the very beginning. In this old photo of myself and my lovely daughter, Ilonna, she is just about to learn how to stand on her own. Now, at almost twenty, she is learning how to stand on her own again, this time as a self-sufficient adult. How can movement facilitate moving through the major changes in our lives?

Why study ourselves from a somatic perspective? Because the earliest emotional responses we have are linked with the physical movement of being cared for and learning to care for ourselves. Our attitudes and habits around these two issues permeate our lives with either pain or pleasure, depending on our relationships with ourselves and others. Our emotional habits are linked with muscular and postural patterns from day one. By playing with how we move, we can learn to move past old attitudes that keep us stuck emotionally.

Most people have experienced a car accident at one time or another in their lives. Take yourself back to the moment of impact in your mind. Remember the sense of timelessness. The sudden dawning of awareness that there was no where to go to avoid the collision. Feel your body stiffen again, just slightly, almost, but not quite, imperceptibly. When you imagine a movement - or, in this case, an impulse to inhibit movement to protect yourself from injury - there is a neurological response. And since the areas in your brain that govern movement and memory are adjacent to each other, the stimulus produces a slight, but noticeable physical response.

Now take yourself to a later memory, for this experience has also happened to most people. Remember a time after the accident when you were almost hit again. Remember how you flinched before anything even happened? This is because when there is enough resemblance between two situations, the neural response from the original experience is reinstated, whatever the response was, be it physical, emotional or both. This is the phenomenon commonly referred to as 'muscle memory.' The term is a bit of a misnomer, because it's actually a neural response. Muscles don't respond unless the nerves fire.

The older you are, the harder it is to distinguish old reactions from present reactions. Why? For one thing, the response is almost instantaneous. For another thing, the older you are, the more all your cumulative experiences pile on top of each other making it difficult to tell one from another unless you train yourself to do so.

The basis of the FELDENKRAIS METHOD is learning to distinguish what is an appropriate level of muscular tension and what is not. In AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM), you learn how to sense this. You learn how to work with yourself to eliminate extraneous tension. You would be amazed at how much more energy you have when you are no longer bound up by tension related to experiences that happened long ago.

In his book, The Potent Self, Moshe Feldenkrais points out that we all know neurotic people who apparently cannot get it together, can't stop spending, or eating, or gravitating to negative relationships or whatever. What's up with that? In movement, coordination comes not only from being able to move, but from a combination between movment and inhibition. In other words, say you want to hit a golf ball. You need to be able to organize yourself so that only the muscles you need to get the job done are involved. If any other tension is present in your body, it will throw off the swing. Even a small difference in tension near the center of the body will translate into a much larger divergence from intention at the end of your golf club. Whoops!

"What is needed is a positive method of directing onself, a way whereby one can learn to produce the wanted effect without, at the same time bringing on unwanted impulses..." - Feldenkrais, The Potent Self

This quote pretty much sums up the whole Method. It's a means to learn how to produce an effect without bringing your history into the present. Sometimes it's appropriate to push, sometimes it's not. Thus, whether life gives you lemons or roses, you can respond fully in the moment. You can roll with the punches spontaneously, without the drag of old stuff slowing you down. For myself, I have much more energy now than I ever had as an adult before doing ATM. Now, the problem is that I keep taking on more, so that I am overloaded anyway, but that is the residue from another, a deeper pattern. It's a process, not a magic bullet. But it's a process that unfolds comfortably. No hours of painful self examination on the therapists couch. No self flagelation required. Only learning to stand easily, without effort, and learning when not to stand so as to get out of harm's way when necessary, in the present.

What Is Somalogic?

Anything worth learning usually takes a long time to learn. Musicians take years to develop their skills. Usually, the learning comes from working with others who have taken the same path. Unfortunately, when we are born, the human body does not come with a book of instructions. We have to learn how to survive in a confusing and complex world.

Often, we settle for what we already know, as long as it's enough to get by. Yet, the heart knows intuitively that more is possible. It yearns for a deeper level of meaning. But what we don't know is inaccessible. How can we reach past our blind spots into a world where more is possible? Moshe Feldenkrais, D.Sc., discovered a way to use movement as a doorway into learning beyond what is merely enough. With this Method, you can stimulate dormant abilities to quicken into fulfillment in ways you might never be able to conceive of on your own.

Why is learning so important for humans as a species? Well, for one thing, it has a direct relationship to self esteem. Kids who know how to do things feel competent. Notice I did not say, 'Kids who know things.' Kids, or adults, for that matter, who 'know' things often fall into the trap of having massive egos. On the other hand, we all know people who know a lot but have relatively low self esteem. But people who are capable at doing things are usually too busy getting stuff done to sit around and grapple with self esteem issues. And they often lead very interesting, stimulating lives, rich with experiences that elude those with less skill.

Moshe Feldenkrais had a very unique take on learning. Over the years, he collected some forty definitions of learning and found that every one of them related to some form of intellectual learning. To his mind, something was definitely lacking in this view of learning. Not that intellectual learning is bad. It's how we accomplish most of the major advances in technology. It's how we verbalize our process. It solidifies our thinking into concepts that we can relate to each other. Most of what is important to us as a society, is related to some form of learning that has been passed down from one generation to the next. We are dependent on each other, and on the generations that went before our own, for the learning that has created the lifestyle to which we are accostomed in any culture.

Moshe said in his lectures that it would take a gorilla a life time to learn what 'a human idiot' could learn in the first three weeks of his life. He also pointed out that birds not only sing without instruction, they cannot learn any song other than the one that is hard wired into their brain genetically. A major distinguishing factor in human learning is the ability to learn a variety of ways to do the same thing. Animals governed by instinct generally just do what they do. Dogs, for example, don't sit around and wonder if they should bark at the neighbor's truck driving by or if they are too depressed to bother this morning. If they don't like your neighbor's truck going by, they bark no matter what. Sometimes, they bark no matter what you do to stop them. When it's almost impossible to train them not to, we are talking about a compulsive behavior.

In his book, The Master Moves, you can read transcriptions of some of his lectures. In one, he talks about what he considers to be the most important function of learning: the implementation of free will through choice. He says, 'Thus, for anything you do; speak, write, sing, if you can't do it in two different ways, you do not have free choice. And therefore, the truly important learning is to be able to do the thing you already know in another way. The more ways you have to do the things you know, the freer is your choice. And the freer your choice, the more you're a human being. Otherwise, you are like a computer that is switched on and can do very clever things, but only one way.'

Another way to look at learning is to distinguish intellectual learning from skill. Even intellectual learning can encompass skill if it's in your head. Skill or knowledge is what you have access to right here, right now in this moment. If you have to look it up, you don't know it. You just know where to find it. Currently, in the information age, it's increasingly acceptible to know where to find it or how to look it up on the internet, how to figure it out on a calculator. What if a flood took out all the electrical circuits that power our electronic toys? Where would we charge our batteries? If you have to plug it in to figure it out, it's not ingrained. It's not 'organic' learning like riding a bicycle. It's not something you will ever really forget because it has become a part of you.

When learning is done via kinesthetic experience, you learn by feeling it. It becomes a part of you. AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM) is the Method Feldenkrais developed that teaches people how to access learning somatically, which means it has taken hold in your entire being. It's like learning to ride that bicycle, it's a kind of learning you never forget. Once you learn how to learn in this way, you can apply that skill to anything you want to learn.

So ATM is not just about learn how to move better. It has global applications to learning in general because it teaches you how to take information and make it real for yourself. It teaches you to be creative with finding anchors in your own experience to make learning stick. It teaches you the value of systematiclly discerning differences using all your senses. For a blind and deaf person such as Helen Keller, the world became infinitely more profound once she was able to learn how to use her senses to speak, read and write. Why? Because not only could she express what she was feeling and be understood finally, she gradually gained access to the cumulative learning of her own culture. By her own testimony, her life became fuller, richer and more vivid. Imagine how much more full, rich and vivid your own life could be if you spent some time learning how to learn in this way, using your tactile senses to jump-start the latent potential of your brain. That's somalogic.

A Tool for Our Times

When things are too strange, they move from the realm of interesting to the realm of disturbing. Imagine being dropped off in the misdst of a people whose language you didn't speak, whose very appearance was totally foreign to all you are familliar with. In a situation like this, not only the nervous system, but the psyche often shuts down. When we feel threatened emotionally, the mind becomes less open to new ideas. When emotionally threatened, the body responds by producing hormones that fire up all systems to be ready for any possible emergency.

One of the main functions of the nervous system is to provide a consistant internal environment. That means there has to be a normal range of temperature, heart rate and hydration. In any percieved emergency, be it real or imagined, many basic functions such as digestion and relaxation are relegated to the sidelines temporarily. If the excitation is too great, the ability to be open to anything new or different is diminished. Vision is focused on discerning possible threat. Perception begins to organize itself around survival, and thus, avenues for discourse are nipped in the bud.

One of the main functions of the psyche is very much the same: to provide an internal environment that can be recognized as familiar, safe and normal. Normal being a term relative to whatever is your usual range of circumstance. For the Native Americans who first greeted the pilgrims, nudity, arrowheads and a very literal way thinking governed their very direct way of communicating. For the pilgrims, however, nudity was offensive to their moral values. Arrowheads seemed unduly primitive. And communicating in a literal way that did not use the cultural conventions they were used to seemed downright rude. What they found in the New World was so alien in so many ways as to be threatening to their sense of self. When this happens, the psyche shuts down to foreign ideas and the ego kicks in to justify, rationalize and generally maintain the status quo so that an identity crisis does not undermine survival.

As a species, we have a need to construct a familiar world. As human beings, living in wildy divergent cultures, we have a different need. As overpopulation brings us in ever closer proximity to each other, we have a need to find a new way to relate to each other so that we can all live on the same planet without destroying it.

In his book, The Master Moves, Moshe Feldenkrais describes meeting a Yemenite man with a beautiful, intelligent, benevolent face' on a train in Israel. He held a book. Moshe saw that it was upside down, but the man was clearly engaged in reading it. Intrigued, Moshe asked him, "Can you read?" The man said, "Yes, can't you see that I am reading?" When Moshe pointed out that the book was upside down, the man replied, "We Yemenites lived in the desert. We had no more than one Bible in the town...and all the children had to learn to read and write. So our teacher had a book and the children would sit around...Each one would see the book from a different angle...For us there is no upside down, no side at all...You European people...go to universities, and can read a book only in one way...For us, that is completely unthinkable."

It may be that our way is not the only way. When you are feeling safe and comfortable, it's easy to hear this statement, but when you are threatened, it becomes less audible. Another principle that Feldenkrais made use of in his Method is the concept that change must be in bite size pieces that are small enough to be digested, but not so big that they are threatening to the psyche or the nervous system. If you try to drastically change your diet all at once, for example, chances are you will eventually go on a binge in the opposite direction shortly thereafter, because we tend to regurgitate the unfamiliar if the dose is too large or too forcefully administered. Consider the backlash of the Russian revolution. Consider any revolution for that matter. Like a pendulum, the response over time swings from one extreme to the other, until eventually some kind of equilibrium in the middle is reached, often not for decades.

Enter the concept of rhythm. In AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM) the lessons are constructed around gradual change that incorporates rhythmic movement done with isolated successive variations. The lessons are very systematic. Like the ticking of a clock, rhythm seems to be soothing to the nervous system. Women who knit say that the rhythmic movement of the needles calms the mind. The surest way to soothe a crying baby is to rock back and forth. In ATM the first new movements are awkward. The lack of rhythm is visible to anyone's eye. Yet, as coordination and learning begin to dawn slowly, the movement gradually becomes more rhythmic, more consistent, as if rhythm were somehow related to being something one could rely on. And perhaps it is. As the song goes, "All God's Children Got Rhythm." Is there a way to use rhythm to calm ourselves so that we can hear each other without the defensiveness that characterizes disension? The more people learn to be master of their own responses, the more they are able to choose how to respond rather than react in irrational ways. ATM is a tool for learning to respond rather than react. It is a tool for our times.

Intention and Tension Are Related

Do you ever perform for yourself? Probably not, the very idea of performance assumes an audience, an observer. But, you probably rarely play either. Kids do, adults just don't. Or, when they do, it has to count, it's competitive. So, we're back in the realm of performance again. If you almost never move your body unless it counts, is it any wonder that tension constrains your comfort? Understanding the relationship between intention and tension may shed some light on the presence of unwanted stress in your life.

We are not separate from our environment. Nothing we do can be separated from the environment in which we do it. Neurologically, the brain is organized to function for survival. Any function you like, be it eating, sleeping, sitting, or standing is usually done in a specific position. Once you put the person in a different position, the neurological relationship to that particular function is challenged and the brain is able to perceive that action as if it were a completely new phenomenon. This is one of the principles that Dr. Feldenkrais takes advantage of in AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM) lessons.

In Buddhism one of the prevailing themes is the idea of cultivating the ability to approach the world with 'beginner's mind.' In ATM, the design of the lesson allows you up to appreciate being in the experience of your own body with beginner's mind. How is this done? Each lesson is a set up expressly created for the purpose of helping you to see how you move in a new way. By having you do ordinary or not so ordinary movements in foreign positions your brain is tripped up to see the mundane as unusual. Rather than requiring a shift in perception in order to see the world as new, ATM uses your neurological organization to challenge your everyday perception. The brilliance of this design is that what you normally take for granted becomes apparent and is no longer hidden from view.

This is not always comfortable, initially, but then neither is the first day at school, or a new job, or the beginning of a workout when you are in training. To start with, beginner's mind is often miles away, submerged under 'monkey mind,' which equates to the automatic gyrations of cumpulsive thought and judgement. Monkey mind is extremely verbal, and very redundant. It spouts off a non-stop stream of mental spittle that questions, compares and reminds you that your ego is alive and kicking. Thank it for sharing and proceed. For underneath the compulsive thought you will find the gift of beginner's mind wrapped in the beauty of a renewed relationship with your own senses.

Now you have entered the realm of play. You move because you're curious, it feels good or because you are in the zone. What zone? The zone where creativity is born. The place where nothing is present except what you are doing. You are so focused that the rest of the world is on it's own for a while. No matter. It will get along fine without you for now. At this point, you have let go of goals. You don't care what the other people in the class are doing, let alone how you look doing it. You have completely let go of acheiving anything. You are in your experience. This is a crucial transition because it's only when you no longer need to perform that you are really able to completely release tension.

Tension is tied to intention. Release the intention to get somewhere and the muscles relax. Release the intention to get something and the brain organizes your muscles around that intention. Release the need to perform and feel your tension evaporate. Release the desire to please, the obsession with a certain outcome, the attachment to control, and feel your body regroup. It's a more pleasant place to be. It's certainly a more pleasant body to inhabit. Clean up your internal environment. Move into a body that can freely negotiate the path from necessity into pure spontaneous presence.

How the Brain Is Wired

Counting, rhythm, language, and learning, are all dependent on spatial cognition. Without it, learning to count is impossible, rhythm is distorted and language becomes meaningless, because it uses sound to represent abstractions like location in space. The round beaker is above the red flask, for example. All normal children have this ability, but it must be encouraged for innate intelligence to flourish.

U.S. 15-year-olds performed below the international average of 29 industrialized countries in both mathematics, literacy, and problem solving according to the most recent findings published by the National Center for Education Statistics. What could possibly impact this disturbing trend? An understanding of how movement forges neurological connections may shed light on possible avenues to pursue.

Neurologists have found that many patients impaired by damage in a specific location of the brain have difficulty with basic subtraction. They cannot subtract three from seventeen. They also have difficulty finding their own fingers. They can't tell which finger the doctor is touching. In his ground-breaking book, Phantoms in the Brain, neurologist,V.S. Ramachandra, M.D., wonders if this is a complete coincidence, since the ability to do arithmetic, and to recognize which finger is which, are both operations generated by the same area of the brain. Could it perhaps have something to do with the fact that most of us learn to count as children using our fingers?

In the brain, the areas that control movement of the fingers are adjacent to the areas that are subject to excitation when one does arithmetic. Have you ever been counting silently to yourself and found your fingers were moving involuntarily? Moshe Feldenkrais, who developed the FELDENKRAIS METHOD, found a way to stimulate memory, cognition and problem solving skills using movement to stimulate overlapping areas of the brain. Also known as a form of 'somatic education,' the Method uses a blend of consciousness, intention and movement to improve learning. In fact, Dr. Feldenkrais often made reference to the idea of 'learning how to learn.'

Why would it be necessary to learn how to learn? Don't we all know how to do that already? As it turns out, human beings take longer to mature into adulthood than any other mammal. If you look at the lifespan of any other mammal, the amount of time their offspring are dependant on the parent for survival is proportionately smaller, usually much smaller. On one end, we have the horse, the new-born foal is up and walking by the end of the day. On the other end, we have the human being, who takes one to three years to learn how to walk, and more like eighteen to twenty-five to become self-sufficient.

Human survival is dependent on learning, more so than for any other species. Without recognizing why, we already intuitively use some of these principles in our schools. Both music and athletics have been shown to improve cognitive skill, spatial coordination and self esteem. How? One reason is precisely because they require movement that stimulates adjacent areas of the brain regulating these functions. Unfortunately, perhaps because the way the brain works is still so unfamiliar to the voting public, these programs are falling in popularity. There are rampant cuts to funding for the arts in education. There also seems to be a drop in participation in school athletic programs. Why move the whole body, when you can sit at a computer and conquer the world by playing a video game with your finger? It may be time for intervention before this trend gets worse.

The FELDENKRAIS METHOD uses a class format to teach movement with a level of attention that facilitates focus. It stimulates the creative juices by teaching people how to release tension. Tension inhibits spontaneity. In a FELDENKRAIS AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM) class, the student learns how work with their own psyche to regulate inhibition and exitation. They not only improve the abilty to learn, but they learn to be autonomous. The student learns self-reliance as it gradually becomes clear that they can trust themselves. There is a slowly dawning realization that the nervous system will kick in to resolve seemingly impossible movement proposals. The format of the lesson is designed to bring this innate capacity forth.

Both the ability to subtract numbers and the ability to separate out one's own fingers are, in part, based on recognizing spatial relationships. Movement that is structured to improve general coordination by definition improves the ability to sense spatial relationships. Perhaps it is time to use this principle in our schools consciously. ATM is a systematic, precise method for improving sensory awareness. Living in a virtual world, such as the world of computer games, diminishes sensory awareness. It's not enough for today's youth to relate emotionally to the popularity of the Star Wars trilogy. They are attracted to that imagery precisely because they need to be able to experience struggle, defeat, and success themselves. They need to be able to feel it, as Yoda advocates when he speaks to a struggling Luke Skywalker, "Use the force. Feel it. Yes."

Letting Go

In the beginning, there is only the vague inkling that something must change. Then, gradually, there is the sense that something must give, but what? Eventually, the first crack in the armour of the psyche is either physical or emotional pain, or some event that grabs your attention violently, such as an accident or a change in circumstance. Are you able to move through the transitions in your life? Are you able to let go of knowing what comes next and be with not knowing? This vital life skill is one that can arise as a focus in learning AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT as a practice.


Letting go is often uncomfortable and frightening, but there are phases in life when it is absolutely necessary. Like a chick about to break through the shell that has housed them in complete safety. It's the only existence they have ever known. Learning to practice the art of letting go on a regular basis makes these transitions much easier.

One of the ways to practice letting go as a skill is to take AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM) classes. There are certainly others, and this practice is not for everyone. But then, neither is yoga, or religion or tai chi. And yet, the overlap is unmistakable. The chance to practice letting go is presented. There are moments, in each lesson, when you do not know how to proceed. This is when you have a choice. You can either go into your habit, or you can learn to let go.

These crossroads are intentional opportunities woven into the lesson to stimulate you to generate new ways of doing familiar things. For, in movement, doing things in the same way over and over again can eventually lead to repetitive stress injuries or drastic imbalance in muscle tone from one side to the other. Symptoms such as pain, spasm or fatigue may be early warning signs that need to be addressed now, before they become so insistent that they require conventional intervention.

Another pitfall in the habit of doing things in the same way always, is that you fall into thinking you know what you are doing. In fact, you are merely doing something the way you have always done it, without question. This may not be a problem unless you are suffering some kind of pain or discomfort that you never had years ago. It may be that over the years, you sit in a certain way that has always worked for you, but now it hurts if you sit for too long. In this case, it's possible that your way of sitting no longer works for you. You need to take a look at how you are doing it. So, along comes the handy framework of an ATM and sets up the conditions which require you to find some other way to do it. Rather than showing you something you may or may not remember, ATM allows you to learn by experience. This is why it can be so baffling for people, because many people prefer to have things handed to them. They don't want to have to work for it.

Most people say they learned much more when they finally got out into the workforce than they ever did in school. This is because work experience is usually kinesthetic, you learn through doing a job. School is usually intellectual learning. You learn by reading about something. No one learns a skill by reading about it. You can teach it to yourself from a book, but you still have to do it.

An ATM lesson is like a puzzle that you are guided through. The instructor will provide the dots but you have to connect them somatically. You have to figure it out by feeling it rather than using your intellect. This is the aspect of ATM that sets this Method apart from any other. Yet, this is also what sets up the condition that there are times when you are not sure what to do., when you get to practice letting go. How do you handle it emotionally when you are physically stuck? Do you immediately get frustrated and annoyed? Do you take it out on other people? Do you go right judgement? Take an extreme example, perhaps you can remember a time when your back went out and you could not move. Terrifying? You bet. Enlightening? Not when that much fear is present.

An ATM is a setting intended to create a movement proposal without the element of pain, fear and discomfort. As a matter of fact, those conditions are detrimental to the learning process, they slow it down. The difference between these two settings is that in ATM you have an opportunity to check out your options in a slow, relaxed way. Not only is there no pressure due to pain, there is no pressure to succeed. Again, this can baffle people because they do not understand what the point is. Have you ever noticed how when it doesn't matter, you learn more easily? When you are not attached to the outcome, it's as if it creates an opening. Your perception of what is possible is not hemmed in by fear. This creates an opening for using parts of yourself you may not have used in years, or may never have used at all in the same way.

In an ATM lesson, there are rests. These rests are essential to learning for without them, the mind is overwhelmed. There is no integration of the movement. The nervous system cannot piece together the relevance of what it has discerned. The rests are crucial because it is most often in the periods of downtime that things start to make sense. Hind-sight is twenty/twenty for this very reason. But don't wait until life forces you to be still to take advantage of this principle. Do it now, while you can still move. You never know what amazing experiences await if you let go and take a risk to go where you have never gone before.


Learning to let go can be a window of opportunity for wonderful new adventures, like life, for instance...

Releasing the Need for Approval

The limits of our ability are what they are, right? Maybe not. What if your ideas about what is possible for you are restricted by factors you are not even aware of? Read on to find out how you can use simple movement lessons to surpass your limitations. Regardless of whether you are limited by your beliefs about yourself or by physical pain in your body, there is a way to open the door and step through to the other side. The gap between almost being there and being there may be more accessible than you think.


The FELDENKRAIS METHOD of AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM) meets you at the cusp of where your mind, your body and your reality meet. It does not matter what day it is, what country you are from or how badly you have or have not been mangled by experience.

We are all, to some degree, prisoners of our own bodies. We are limited by how far we can reach, how much pain we live with daily, how long we can work before running out of steam. We are also a product of our thinking. Our ability to reach is determined by what we think is possible. For example, if you don't think of yourself as very athletic, you are much less likely to even try. Our perception of pain is determined by our mental attitudes and how we choose to present ourselves to others. For example, the martyr milks the pain, whereas the stoic pretends it doesn't exist. Even energy levels are related to how we represent reality to ourselves. Unconsciously, the body honors emotional conflict by holding micro levels of tension. This exhausting process can lead to on-going fatigue with no apparent cause.

Have you ever been talked into volunteering your time for something you didn't want to do? Then you probably remember the increase in tension that you felt when it came time to do the deed. Or maybe not, maybe you just got a headache later in the day. Or perhaps you were able to resolve any resentment, in which case there was no longer any conflict for the body to hold as tension.

In his book, The Potent Self, Dr. Feldenkrais stated, 'One of the most pernicious motivations that persists unrecognized in many of us is the longing for approval.' That's pretty strong language. According to Webster's New World Dictionary, 'pernicious' means 'causing great injury, destruction, or ruin; fatal; deadly.' Perhaps you are familiar with the phenomenon of codependance. Certainly when the need for approval is so strong that a person sacrifices their integrity, their self-esteem or their relationships, the compulsion is pathological. Yet, for many of us, low level strains of the need for approval still predominate, dictating our behavior below the level of consciousness. Does this mean we are doomed to years on the analyst's couch? Hardly. ATM is a means to routing out such neurosis at the level of where it manifests in the body.

If you look at your life as a whole, you may see patterns of behavior that repeat themselves. If you look, do you see a repetition of relationships in which there was seemingly no way to please the person in charge, be boss, mother, husband, father, child? Do you notice a pattern of thinking that revolves around what you did wrong or what you didn't do, constantly finding fault? There is a somatic consequence for this kind of thinking. The muscles live with a constant low level of tension that after years of habit become so normal as to be imperceptible - almost. The gift of ATM is that it teaches you how to perceive what was once not even on the radar screen and to move through it to the other side. The gift of awareness, as you probably already know, is that it is the first step in the direction of change.

As far back in history as 400 B.C., Plato, in the first written record of western philosophy wrote the allegory of the Myth of the Cave in his book, The Republic. In this story he relates how perception and self image determine experience. Imagine being one of many people imprisoned in a cave where no light can enter, tethered, unable to move or turn your head, facing a wall. There is a fire behind you casting shadows on the wall. Also behind you, between you and the fire, another wall conceals people walking back and forth. All you can see, is the shadow of what they are carrying on their heads. All you can hear, is the echo of the sound of their passing on the cave walls.

If this were your life, the image you would have of reality would be merely a shadow. If you were allowed to move, you might not believe you could. The point is that we are all unable to discern our real selves. Our direct experience is a function of what is in our minds. Our minds are a product of our times, our culture and the environment of our family values.

Now, when we take a look at the cultural beliefs of our society, the history of western ideas forms a subtle backdrop which determines modern thought. For example, the ancient Greek ideal of the human body, was that it needed to be disciplined by athletics into near perfection. Check out any magazine on a modern news stand to see if this idea has diminished in popularity lately. Another concept that peeks through the fringes of modern consious thought is a left-over from the middle ages when the Catholic church controlled much of the wealth of western civilization. The popular belief of the times that still has a hold on us, was that mortification of the flesh would somehow redeem the soul.

This idea has been transmuted into more socially acceptable avenues, such as obsessive dieting and cosmetic surgical enhancement. Redemption of the soul has been replaced with appeasing the ego. It has also been transmuted in less socially acceptable avenues, such as the practice of cutting which is endemic amongst our teenagers.

So, while you, as an individual, might passionately denounce these ideas, you, as a product of the environment you grew up in and live in, are influenced by these concepts in subtle ways.

'Our culture hates the body and has created a terrible metaphor for it. The body, we are told, is nothing but a machine. It can be swapped out for parts and tinkered with to improve its performance. Sculpted, surgically altered, chemically enhanced, we try to reassure ourselves that we can live forever. Medical cures focus on the symptoms of parts; side effects can be expected and tamed by other medical cures.'
Maggie Macary (www.mythandculture.com)

If you relate to any of this, chances are, you would seriously enjoy learning a new way to relate to your body. Via the ever present senses of touch, smell, sight, and sound you, too, can have a new experience of color, understanding, relaxation, inspiration, yearning, desire, fulfullment and joy. You already have a ticket, but you have to come to the show. How do you get in? You lay on the floor and begin to sense yourself, gently checking out what is up for you now in this moment. You need more guidance than that? Learn ATM. Find an ATM teacher. ATM is a course in the skill of sensing yourself, both to pre-empt pain, dysfunction and neurosis and to help you move through it, in the direction of pleasure, integration and balance. The goal, like balance itself, is not a static place. It is an on-going journey, a practice that provides on-going rewards, in the present, wherever you are when you begin.

Using Your Biofeedback System

Balancing on a bench is an activity that uses the innate capacity of the nervous system to sense itself. How do we catch ourselves before we fall? Sensory and motor nerves run back and forth continuously correcting, assessing, readjusting...


I was so excited to hear about a new trend in the fitness industry: it's the concept of measuring how hard your heart is working during exercise by using your senses. It's call the Rate of Perceived Exertion (or RPE). You measure your exercise intensity on a scale from one to ten. One to two levels of exertion would be equivalent to sitting at your desk, four to five would be a light jog wherein you can still talk but are breathing a bit more rapidly than at rest, ten would be gasping for breath at which point your heart rate is acelerated past the point that is desirable for a basic aerobic workout.

The goal of an aerobic workout is to keep the heart rate above normal, but not so fast that you are straining, for at least 20 minutes. You can feel how fast your heart is beating. Using an RPE to judge the appropriate level of your workout is taking advantage of the most sophisticated biofeedback system known to humankind: the nervous system. Everybody has one.

What amazes me is that although everyone has the ability to notice if something feels like a strain or not, most people seem to completely disregard their own ability in this area. Many of my clients over the years have been people who were working with a physical trainer and injured themselves by pushing past what felt good to them. I have heard the same story over and over again, 'I had a feeling I shouldn't do that last set, but I did it anyway and the next day, I couldn't move my arm...' This is not meant to discount fitness trainers. It's not their fault that people ignore their own internal cues. And frankly, perhaps it is a confusing thing for someone just beginning to workout. I can envision that it is possible to be so set on the external goal of fitting into that bathing suit or running that marathon, that the 'no pain, no gain' mentality becomes a mantra that guides all decisions about whether or not to quit at any given time.

Actually, I have done it myself. I remember training for a hunter/jumper show. It was the last session with my trainer before the show and it was very windy. We talked about whether to ride or not, but I wanted to get in as much practice as I could get and we went ahead. My horse and I got over the first few jumps okay. Tia, my horse, was spooky, but that was to be expected with so much wind. On the next jump, a white gate, a gust of wind pushed the bottom of the gate forward just as we were on the last few strides of the approach. Tia planted her feet and stood her ground going from an easy canter to a dead halt in point two nanoseconds. I didn't come off, but my forehead slammed into her neck and I was stunned. It turned out I had given myself a slight concussion and yet another whiplash injury. Not only did I not compete in the horse show, but I had to spend a day or two in bed as well. At that point the entry fees were a wash, but that was the least of my problems. So, when there is a lot 'riding' on a workout, it's easy to get disconnected from oneself.

There is also cultural support for the common disconnect that happens with people and their own bodies. We live in a society that has evolved into an era of specialisation. If you have legal problems, it is well known that it isn't wise to represent yourself. If you need a house, you almost can't buy one without a realtor, because houses for-sale-by-owner aren't allowed on the listings. The Food and Drug Administration issues proclamations about what it is safe to eat. But the greatest disconnect of all is probably initiated by pharmaceutical companies that give away free samples of pills. Pills that deaden the discomfort of common symptoms that are clues to more serious problems with digestion, repressed emotion or an unwillingness to change one's habits.

They say that seven years after you quit smoking, your lungs finally rid themselves of the black deterioration that smoking causes in the bronchioles. Seven years after I had quit smoking, I decided I wanted to ride horses again. I had ridden most of my life but took a hiatus as a young adult. Not only did I want to ride, but I wanted to learn how to compete in the sport of combined training. I wanted to experience the exhileration of flying over a cross country course over solid fences at a gallop. I wanted to learn how to dance with my horse in the centuries-old tradition of graceful gymnastic performance in the dressage arena. I wanted to know what it was like to have the skill required to be precise about distances and stride lengths in the staduim phase of this three phase sport. I remember walking along in the desert, trying to run at the ripe age of 35 or so and realizing I had no wind.

Fat chance that I would ever be able to ride a horse, let alone compete in that condition. I had no money, I had no trainer, I had no horse either, for that matter. But I had what we have all been graced with but often completely discount: this amazing capacity to sense ourselves. I did not think of it in those terms, I just began, slowly, to jog until my breath became labored. Then I would walk until my breath returned to normal and I would jog again. I would quickly loose my breath and I would walk. And so it went for twenty minutes the first day. For twenty minutes the next day. For twenty minutes the third day. By the fourth day, I was happy to be able to increase my time by five minutes. A month later, I could keep it up for an hour at a time and I was able to breathe in a way I had not experienced for years. I was also experiencing the power of making conscious decisions about what was right for me rather than abdicating my own authority over my behavior.

So it seems, inadvertently, I stumbled on this technique of using RPE to rate my exertion level all by myself, long before it was an accepted way of assessing a workout in the fitness industry. I stumbled on it long before I did the FELDENKRAIS training. I had, however, gone to a series of five AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT classes a few years earlier. It was there, I am sure, that I first came to honor this amazing capacity of the human nervous system to sense itself. It was there that I learned how to direct my consciousness to take advantage of my own biofeedback system.