How To Get Out Of Your Own Way

Often, it is what we don't see that is most important. It is what is apparently not there that is vital. Trees are lovely, if you value nature. Wood is great for building a fire or a house. These needs are real, but they are variable. Yet, it is the unseen air we breathe that is most vital to human life. Even so, it is the tension we carry that we are unaware of that may the greatest hinderance to the fulfillment of our potential in ways we cannot even imagine.


Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.
Tao Te Ching

In the practice of AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM), it is developing a sense of that which is unseen and unfelt that is most crucial. It is the low level tension you carry below the surface that makes your back give out one day when you bend over to pick up a tissue on the floor. ATM lessons create a context that allows you to begin to observe that which has been imperceptible to your senses: constant excess tension. How can you be impaired by something you don't even notice? Ask someone who's had money embezzeled from them bit by bit, drop by drop. It all adds up over time.

Perhaps you don't believe that this is an issue for you. The thing is, by the time you realize that there is an issue, the distortion to your posture is already so huge that some part of your musculoskeletal system is already way out of whack. Like a car with bad alignment, the tires wear in a particular pattern that eventually leads to a gradually increasing loss of control, so that the car keeps veering off to one side no matter how straight you hold the wheel...You can wait until chronic back or neck pain begins to impair you daily activities, or, you can nip the whole process in the bud.

Often, you may not notice you are hurting yourself when you pick up that full trash can. It may not be until the next day that you notice you tweaked yourself. My goal, as an ATM instructor is to give you the skill to catch the process first as it happens, then before it happens and ultimately before you even do anything that would begin to go in that direction. Most people treat their bodies like a rental car. They grab the keys and they're off. But if they give you a ferrari and you don't really know how responsive it is, you can land yourself in a ditch quite easily. It may be that you are driving a ferrari and that you have no idea how amazingly responsive it can be. The practice of ATM can give you access to that level of responsiveness so that you can apply it to everything you do.

Unfortunately, most people wait to do anything proactive until pain and nervous tension have become so problematic that some kind of symptoms develop. They wait until the shoulder craps out or the knees are 'bad.' Knees aren't bad, they just are. It's how we take care of ourselves, or how we don't take care of ourselves, that's often less than optimal. It's not intentional. Iit's simply because most of us have no inkling of the level of tension we carry. The more tense we are, the less we can feel. Eventually, even the simplest action is accopanied by so much tension that any effort is exhausting.

The amount of distortion possible is so great that you may be exerting effort when you think you are doing nothing. You can't feel it because it's normal for you. Your body will adapt to whatever conditions you present it with until it can no longer deal with it. And in the meantime, it will gradually wear out individual parts because the compression on your joints is virtually constant.

In the practice of ATM lessons, you learn the skill of sensing how you contribute to this detrimental process. The beauty of the Method is that it is not necessary to fix it or to work at improving. Often working at it causes an adjustment to the opposite extreme. It is enough to simply place the lens of your consiousness on yourself as you move in an ATM lesson. You learn to become adept at sensing yourself. Once you check in, with your intention in alignment with your use of consciousness, it changes, because the system you inhabit is self-correcting. There is something about this intentional use of consciousness that only human beings possess (as far as we know), that acts like an amplifier turning up the volume on previously inaudible signals. Gradually, you gain access to the sensitivity to change that which you could not even feel before. If the body is truly the temple of the spirit, why not open the door and look inside?

Changing How We Respond To Life

Do you only pay attention to the peak experiences of your life? Look to your history and see what you remember most vividly. Or, perhaps your formative memories are images or feelings of trauma. Your self image is determined, in part, by the filters you see the world through. These filters are based on past experience and the beliefs you formed about your experiences. This is how we condition ourselves to function on autopilot. Since we cannot control how we are conditioned by society or even by our own culture, wouldn't it be nice to be able to learn how to change how we condition ourselves? There is no line in the brain between thought and movement, these areas overlap. So when you learn to generate new responses to challenge at the level of moving your physical body, you stimulate your brain to consider new responses to emotional challenge as well. Moshe Feldenkrais, D.Sc. used to say, "What I'm after isn't flexible bodies but flexible brains."

Building on the ideas of yesterday's weblog concerning biorhythms, how does the innate organization of the human body dictate the use of awareness? Since human consiousness is based, in part, on the physiological processes of the brain, it stands to reason that downtime is also a basic need of the psyche. We have a physiolgical need to rest, to drift, to dream and to process experience into meaning, future, past and present. The brain is a meaning-making machine. Yet, the meaning derived from experience is entirely variable. Are you happy with the meaning you derive from your life?

"Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked."
Victor Frankl

Is the goal in the practice of AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM) to cultivate continuous attention at all times? No, there is no pinacle of acheivement to attain here. It is a process of learning to direct our attention, gently, moment by moment, on, off, like the pulsing current of electricity. It is a process dictated by the organization of the structure we inhabit on a daily basis: our bodies. It is a process of paying attention and not paying attention, of noticing and drifting, gently regrouping without judgement or determination. Most of us live with a gap between what we want and what actually happens. How can we narrow the gap so that our intentions are closer to the results?

Victor Frankl said that, 'Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.' Another psychologist, Rollo May, said that 'It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.' Still another psychologist, B.F. Skinner, put it this way, 'Man's struggle for freedom is not due to a will to be free, but to...avoidance' [of ill consequence.] It seems we are, by nature conditioned to avoid discomfort. This is one of the core principles around which we organize our behavior unconsiously. It guides our decision-making by limiting what we are willing to consider as possible.

If your knee hurts, you do whatever you have to do to not use your knee. You narrow your choices based on avoidance of pain. Not only that, but you exclude any action that you think might generate similar discomfort, which means you close yourself off to that part of your body entirely after a while. You skip the gap between stimulus and response altogether because in your mind, it's a done deal. Pain must be avoided at all cost. You are now functioning on autopilot and have effectively metaphorically dismembered yourself.

How can rolling around on the floor with awareness in an ATM lesson change anything about the way we relate to pain? It gives you a chance to learn how to observe that space between stimulus and response that Frankl was talking about. Thus, you will have a moment to consider options you might have otherwise excluded. From the point of view of the body, there are usually several ways to do any given activity, but most of us are creatures of habit. As such we choose the same way over and over to the exclusions of all others and wonder why it hurts. Our bodies, for the most part, are not replacable, at least not yet.

The structure of an ATM lesson provides a movement puzzle that intentionally guides your consciousness in doing everyday activities using more of your body than you usually do. If you are living life so fast that you respond to situations without making conscious choices, it's almost inevitable that you will loose your way somewhere and be really annoyed when that happens. Yet, if mistakes were unecessary no child would ever learn to walk, but would stay on the ground where they fell at the first attempt. ATM is a learning process that teaches you the value of mistakes kinesthetically. Mistakes are a vital part of learning. You will still loose your way, ocassionally, but you will become less upset about it. It is only when you are not upset that you will be able to perceive the possibilities as well as the pitfalls.

How can the practice of ATM change how we relate to life decisions? You will start to notice where you are functioning out of a conditioned response. Cultivating your kinesthetic sense puts you right there at ground zero where the problem is surfacing as it happens. It connects you to your gut. It gives you a felt sense of how to respond in the space between the problem and the knee-jerk reaction. How does this come about? It happens gradually as you learn the skill of using your own consciousness in a new way, a way that honors the time and the space required to make autonomous decisions rather than atomated reactions. Does this sound familiar? Does it sound like the benefits you might reap from meditation? It is. For in that gap where time and space merge, your unconsious has a chance to reveal it's mysteries. It may be that your superconscious has a chance to intervene as well, who knows? Not always, but often, the answer will come in the form of a feeling colored by sound, a memory laden with warmth, or an impulse striking like an audible light.

Self-Imposed Prisons

Be sure that your pain is not of your own making. It may be that what filters up from the unconscious when we finally relearn how to relax can provide clues to the ways that we imprison ourselves. Ironically, this bird is comfortably perched where no human could ever find comfort. Yet, we too, can learn to make ourselves as comfortable as possible no matter what. June 1st is National New Year's Resolution Recommitment Day. What changes do you want to make in your life?

Discerning Optional Pain

When people come for the first time to one of my AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM) classes, often what they have the most resistance to, is taking the time to rest. Most people are not initially comfortable with being in process. Many people especially women, are socialized to put other peoples' comfort first rather than their own. Many lead lives that are centered around frantically working towards a better life in the future. Finding ease in the present smacks of laziness. They go through the motions, but the whole while there is a series of judgements and verbal castigation going on in their minds. It may not even be something they are conscious of. It may be a voice that is constant in the background, always pushing for more, no longer really audible. Yet, beginning to hear what tapes our minds are playing in the background of our experience is one of the many fringe benefits of the practice of ATM. For these thought patterns can be extremely detrimental, but can only be eradicated if we become conscious of them.

Interestingly enough, in ATM, the pattern of negative thoughts is not eradicated by vigilant refutation, rather it seems to fall away naturally as you gradually sink into relaxation and become more intrigued by the nature of the lesson. Since there are literally thousands of lessons that bring your attention to parts of yourself you may not have visited in decades, there is an element of surprise, like a child on a treasure hunt, you rediscover yourself, an old friend that you may have been ignoring for quite some time.

Most people move into adulthood like a freight train moving from birth to death with no stops in between. Fact is, if you study human physiology you realize that the body was not designed to function that way. Muscles need rest to gather reserves of oxygen and nutrients and to rid themselves of wastes. The nervous system requires time out to periodically change the electrical charge and the replenish the chemicals necessary for the nerve endings to fire. The endocrine system produces hormones that stimulate growth, regulate mood and inhibit cellular activity according to a rhythmic pattern that determines the seasons of our lives. Any medical tradition that has been handed down over the last four-thousand years such as Ayurvedic medicine and Chinese medicine recognizes this.

Kids, puppies and sensible people have an on/off switch. They play, they fall asleep; they eat, they go for a walk; they move, they stop. They smell the roses. This is not just a nice idea. It is not even just for people who are into a slower more relaxed, meditative life. Nor is it merely a psychological need for people who are stressed out. It is a physiological need. It is also something that could, if we learn to respect it, make a substantial contribution to peace on earth in the form of improved human relationships, both with ourselves and with others.

There are many ways to learn life's lessons, some more painful than others. For some, who have grown accostomed to learning in the presence of pain from an early age, that seems to be the only way there is. Indeed, some of the growing up we all have to go through cannot be done without pain. The question is, do you inadvertently make it harder for yourself than it has to be? Pain may not always be optional, but anguish certainly is. ATM provides a means to learn to distinguish the difference so that the unnecessary patterns fall away without ceaselessly trying. In the process of learning to discern new possibilities in the face of challenge, the old pattern becomes incidental.

When I first started doing massage therapy professionally, I was amazed at how many people live in constant muscular pain, unaware that there is any other option. They just accept constant low-level pain as normal. Some of them may go in for a massage periodically to have someone fix them, but they have no clue that there is anything they might be able to do to change how they feel. I'm not talking about chronic pain sufferers either. I'm just talking about functional people who have basically learned a kind of somatic disassociation, meaning they tune themselves out in order to cope. It works for a while, years perhaps, but eventually either the muscular system or the immune system breaks down under the strain.

When I finally started doing ATM on a regular basis I was again amazed. This time I was amazed at the level of stress and tension I carried in my own body. I thought after ten years working as a massage therapist, educating people about their options, I knew how to take care of myself. I had no clue. Massage just touches the surface, it alleviates discomfort, but it doesn't change the fundamental patter. FELDENKRAIS takes it to a whole different level. ATM teaches us to perceive what we are doing to ourselves inadvertently. It takes time, but once learned as a skill, it can be revisited whenever necessary. Once perception kicks in, there is no going back. I knew that if I ignored my realization, it would haunt me forever. This is where I had to take a leap of faith. I had to trust in the process no matter how awkward, how strange or how mysterious. Believe me, I was not disappointed.

Graceful, Relaxed Attention

Posture may be a reflection of the unconscious, but it is not controlled by it. Nor is it controlled by consciously admonishing yourself to stand straight. This beautiful child is my daughter, Ilonna, not three years after learning how to walk. Children, before the age of reason, are rarely subject to postural problems, perhaps because they live entirely in the present. Or perhaps it is because they still have access to innate regenerative processes, processes that adults can relearn how to access with practice.