Photo by Fabrizio Verrecchia on Unsplash
unpolished thoughts 3/6/2019
I’ve become very interested in my heels recently.
Yes, that knob at the back of the foot.
It might not be a part of yourself that you give much thought, and neither had I, despite all my years of practicing the Feldenkrais Method.
Other parts of myself simply drew my attention more.
Maybe that’s why the heel feels so important to me all of a sudden. I realize that it’s been languishing in the shadows of my attention for so long. In other words, it has been a perceptual blind spot for me.
Whenever you leave any part of yourself out of your image, you can be sure that you aren’t realizing your full potential. Yes, even those places you consider to be your “trouble spots.”
Especially those places.
Once I was in a workshop with Feldenkrais trainer Jeff Haller. I was lying on the table while Jeff demonstrated Functional Integration, the hands on practice of the Feldenkrais Method. He wanted to teach us something about the shoulder and I was eager to be the test subject, given ongoing shoulder difficulties I was having.
As soon as I lay down, Jeff invited me to roll back off the table. Just as I began rolling to my left, he said “stop!”, and pointed to my right arm.
It was as if I hadn’t sent the memo to that part of myself that I was rolling to the left. It lay there waiting for the rest of me to pull it along, like a dead weight. Using the vocabulary of the Feldenkrais Method, you could say that my shoulder simply wasn’t part of my image of that movement.
Subsequent Feldenkrais practice has brought substantial improvement in the use of my right shoulder.
How did that happen?
Through many experiences, I learned to fill in more details of my image of that part of myself. When you can imagine where more parts of you are in space, and feel them, you will more readily incorporate them into every movement you make from the moment of initiation.
A principle of any ideal movement is that the necessary muscular effort will be evenly spread throughout your body. This simply isn’t possible if some parts of your body aren’t fully present in your sensory motor cortex, the part of your brain that organizes physical movement.
I’m not an anatomical genius, but today when I move my right arm it’s much easier than it once was to sense, feel and visualize what all the moving parts are doing, from the turning of the top of my arm in the shoulder joint, the glide of my shoulder blade over the back of my ribs, and the turning of the collarbone at the top of my chest.
I also now have a clearer sense of how this entire landscape is altered each time I change the shape of my spine.
I can’t remember any time when I’ve experience serious pain or difficulty in my feet aside from the occasional twisted ankle.
Still, as I’ve become curious about my heels and how they function in relation to the rest of me, I’m discovering that here is a whole area of the map of myself that I’ve never really explored in depth.
Having learned a few simple things, I’m amazed at what has changed for me already in my experience of standing, walking and generally, keeping myself balanced in many different situations.
This is the joy of a blind spot. Once you’ve clearly identified it, you know where to shine your flashlight to find improvement.
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I’m offering a free online Awareness Through Movement class this Thursday at 2pm EST.
Given my current fascination, I’ve chosen a lesson that will help you add more detail to your image of how your feet relate to your whole skeleton as you move.
(This class will also bring joy to your hip joints!)
If you’d like to participate, sign up here
(even if you can’t come to class live, you will receive access to the recording after class)
***This free class is a preview for my 2019 online program, ¡Reimagine Yourself!***
This program is about building a movement practice to rewrite the story of how you move through the world.
To learn more about ¡Reimagine Yourself!, click here.
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