unpolished thoughts 1/31/2019
How clear is the information you give to the people around you?
Yesterday at the Feldenkrais Training Academy in Seattle we had a clear experience of how another person’s communication affects the way we experience ourselves.
It was a partner exercise related to the practice of Functional Integration (which I wrote about in detail yesterday), but perhaps its useful to think of a more general example first.
“Do you maybe want to go to the movies tonight? I think Jane and Frank are gonna go and I’m kind of sick of just watching Netflix. I know you and Frank don’t always get along, but how about if you pick the movie?”
How does that make you feel?
Compare that to:
“Hey, do you wanna see a movie tonight?”
Maybe yes or maybe no, but the obvious difference here is how much information you are being asked to process at once.
Even if there are multiple factors to consider, it makes a difference to get clear on one thing before you move to the next. When there are too many moving parts, it’s hard to know what to prioritize.
It’s easy to get stuck when you want to go to a movie, but you don’t want to hang out with Frank – was that also an option?!
At the training yesterday, Feldenkrais trainer and neuroscientist Roger Russel spoke to us via internet hook up from Heidelberg, Germany. The subject was “self-organization,” already the primary focus of what educational director Jeff Haller has been teaching for the past two weeks.
Broadly speaking, self-organization refers to the way that we are with ourselves as we move through the world. The key point for Feldenkrais practitioners is that even as we are teaching our clients how to improve, our success in doing so is entirely dependent on our own self-organization.
Roger’s presentation was designed to give us a broader sense of what this dynamic means. He asked us to think about three categories of self-organization: biomechanics, psychological and biological.
Your biomechanical self-organization refers to your ability to move your skeleton efficiently through gravity.
When we only think of this category, we can talk a bit as if we were simple machines, asking questions about counterbalance, distribution of muscle tone, our center of mass, and other questions of the physics of movement.
That’s crucial to understand, but it’s not the whole story. As I’ve written about previously, it’s damn near impossible to have perfect biomechanics if you are mentally distracted in one way or another.
That’s where the question of psychological self-organization comes in.
In short, how present are you?
Are you able to focus your mind on the relevant details of what is happening here and now in order to respond effectively to the needs of the moment?
Biological self-organization is a higher level of self-organization than either of the other two categories because it encompasses them both.
It also relates to how our limbic system works, the way our brain responds emotionally to different situations, literally shifting chemically in such a way that both our biomechanics and our mental state are affected.
In any given moment, the human organism is organizing itself on the level of emotion, thought and movement.
Despite all the things that make humans unique, one overall organizing factor that we share with every other living thing is the question of survival.
At the end of his presentation, Roger led us through an exercise that helped us understand how these three aspects of self-organization come together in the interactive experience Functional Integration, a largely non-verbal communication expressed through touch.
Two partners stood facing each other holding hands, then one turned the other around their axis.
Roger asked us to perform the movement two different ways, one of which clearly involved more efficient biomechanics than the other, so that we could notice the multi-faceted difference between the two experiences.
In the first instance, we thought of turning our partner with the effort of our arms and hands.
“It’s likely that this makes both of you feel stiff,” Roger said, and my partner and I both agreed that this was true.
Roger also drew our attention to another thing that our experience confirmed to be true.
Every time we did the movement this way, the hands never moved simultaneously. It was always one hand before the other. So in the experience of the partner receiving the movement, it actually felt like receiving two different movements in succession.
Then Roger asked the partner in the role of the practitioner to make the movement again by turning from the pelvis.
Suddenly, the movement was much smoother – and it felt like a single movement. The partner in role of the student had a much clearer sense of what was happening.
I’ve tried so far to describe the difference between the two variations mostly in terms of biomechanics, but perhaps you already sense that isn’t the whole story.
Here are some of the other differences we noticed with our partners between the two variations.
I feel you moving me vs. I feel as if I initiated the movement
I feel like you want me to do something vs. I feel like you are inviting me to do something
I feel corrected/judged vs. I feel accepted as I am/encouraged
In previous discussions, we had already noted that when a skillful Feldenkrais practitioner moves us – with very gentle hands, clear skeletal contact and transmission of force – we have the feeling that they almost disappear.
When this happens our attention can focus more on our own experience. Ironically, we often feel in this moment, connected to another person, that we experience ourselves more completely than we do on our own.
The quality of the interaction on the emotional and psychological planes is also much more conducive to creating the possibly for learning without excessive distraction.
Rather than creating extra noise in our system, the practitioner helps to reduce it in multiple ways so that we are in a much better physical, mental and emotional place to attend to ourselves.
From here we can notice aspects of our experience that usually unfold below the level of our radar, details that can we can use to explore new ways of being in the world that we never previously knew were available to us.
Stepping back from the Feldenkrais experience into everyday life again, the basic idea still holds. When we are clear in ourselves, we offer the possibility of greater clarity to those around us.
When we aren’t so clear in ourselves, we can benefit from the company of those who have greater clarity than we do.
In short, we can all help each other to experience more or less noise in the system.
When we’re aware of this dynamic, we can begin to include both sides of our joint experience when we make our choices – and the choices themselves get clearer too.
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