weighty questions

unpolished thoughts 1/22/2019

These day I find myself repeating over and over that the Feldenkrais Method is about so much more than “better movement.”

Here’s why.

There is something more fundamental than your childhood experiences, your financial situation, your physical health, your passions and other weighty features of your life story.

There’s something that easily weighs more than all of those things that simply can’t be ignored – except that most of us rarely consider it.

What weighs so much?

Gravity.

Moshe Feldenkrais used to point out that if there were no light, there would be no reason for us to have eyes. Likewise, if gravity didn’t exist, there would be no need for us to have a skeleton.

But gravity does exist and we do have skeletons. Everything we do must be carried out in the field of gravity. This means that in order to function, we have to know how to balance ourselves. To put it more plainly, we have to know how not to fall over.

This is where some of those other important features of your story show up.

What’s your story of what happened when you were a child?

We are all shaped by our childhood experiences and no one experienced a perfect upbringing. Most of us can tell stories about past events that still resonate in our bodies to this day.

In some cases these are stories of physical trauma or ongoing formation we received through some form of  physical training that have impacted our physical movement through the years.

Some of us grew up in environments with more resources than others did, and this impacted our understanding of how the world worked and what we expected of it.

Some of us discovered a particular passion at an early age, and some of us didn’t. This affected each of us in our ability to find meaning or feel that we have a sense of direction.

But all the while, gravity weighed us down.

Except when it didn’t.

Moshe Feldenkrais once said that the most important factor that determines our health is our ability to return to being upright after taking a blow.

It’s a basic biological function to seek equilibrium.

Life constantly knocks us off balance, but some of us are permanently damaged by the blows we take. Others of us are not.

Whether we take a blow directly to our physical body or life delivers punches to our heart or our ego, when we find ourselves pushed off center, we all have to come up with some kind of adaptation to respond.

A broken limb, a sickness, a heartbreak, a dramatic change in family circumstances – none of these things can be ignored and shrugged off in an instant.

But what do we do over time with these events in our life? Do we use them as lessons that teach us to become more skillful at rediscovering equilibrium, or do we compensate for them forever after?

A broken leg necessitates crutches and a long period of shifting our weight unequally before we can retrain ourselves to walk again with an even step. We may even have to discover a new gait in order to regain our previous efficiency.

Or we can embed deep inside ourselves the idea that on one side of ourselves we have a “bad leg”.

We can permanently distrust that part of ourselves, creating consequences that resonate through our daily life well beyond the sphere of our physical movement.

A broken heart also requires healing before we can move through the world with the same vigor we once knew. In this case, we may also be unable to exist as exactly the same character as we were in the previous chapter of our story.

But embedding the idea that we are not loveable into the core of our being isn’t necessary. Nor are so many of the other stories we carry with us, creating additional weight that corrodes our ability to adjust for gravity.

I’m currently involved in a very careful study of my human experience as a creature with a skeleton moving though gravity, whose quality of life is determined by my ability to remain upright under any and all circumstances.

Yesterday was the first day of the second meeting of the Feldenkrais Training Academy. We experienced two Awareness Through Movement lessons in an upright sitting position and had considerable discussion about the principles of biomechanics that were involved in what we had investigated through our felt experience.

But we dealt with much weightier questions than simply discussing skeletal alignment and healthy joints.

The entire human experience is shaped by gravity. So in order to train ourselves for ideal functioning in gravity, we have to acknowledge the entirety of human experience.

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How is your embodied life narrative reflected in your relationship to gravity as an upright organism? What are your historical compensations?

Here is a little experiment we did in class today related to this question that you can also try at home.

It might give you a taste of how the study of self-organization could interact with your life narrative – both of which take place in gravity. It will only take you a couple of minutes.

(We explored this experiment after engaging in an Awareness Through Movement exploring the breath. If you like, you might find it useful to do the same before trying this experiment. Here is a 10-minute video that will help you have a better overall sense of your breath before you begin)

Spend 30-60 seconds with each step: 

• Stand still, and listen to your internal experience of breath and your experience of connecting to the external world through the soles of your feet and the space around you. Notice any thoughts you have.
• Shift your weight just a little too far forward, not so far that you fall, but so that you feel your body has to contract in various places to keep you from falling. Stay here for a short time and listen again to your breath, your connection to the environment, and the story in your head.
• Return to the most comfortable place you can find right now. Observe what changes in yourself as you return to equilibrium.
• Shift your weight just a little too far backwards, not so far that you fall, but so that you feel your body has to contract in various places to keep you from falling. What differences do you notice in your body compared to moving too far forwards? Stay here for a short time and listen again to your breath, your connection to the environment, and the story in your head.
• Return to the most comfortable place you can find right now. Observe what changes in yourself as you return to equilibrium. If you listen for the place where breathing feels easiest does that make it easier to find a feeling of being centered and grounded?
• If you are curious, you can investigate other small deviations such as rolling too far to the inside or outside of one foot, excessively arching or rounding your low back, allowing the head to fall slightly off the top of the spine to the front, back or to the sides.
• After exploring all of these compensations to gravity, can you better imagine a place where you could find your balance with a freer breath, a clearer connection to the world you live in, and an experience of the present moment less colored by your historical narrative?

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¡Reimagine Yourself! 2019 online classes start March 25

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