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.