Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash
unpolished thoughts 3/4/2019
This morning, I’m very aware of the space between thought and action. What I mean is the time that elapses between the idea, “I’ll do this,” and the actual doing.
That moment can be so short that it doesn’t even seem to exist, like when a glass of water teeters at the edge of the table and you quickly lunge to grab it.
But you did actually think first to make that happen.
In your brain, you made a prediction about the glass crashing to the floor and you inserted yourself into that movie, rewriting the script with you swooping in to the rescue.
It would be easy to miss the mental aspect of such a swift action. There was only one moment in which that action could take place – you probably came about as close as possible to moving without thinking.
But when I’m filling the coffee filter with five scoops of ground in the morning, counting each scoop and sometimes purposely overfilling in order to make the brew just a little stronger, the mental image before each movement is unmistakable.
There is no urgency which is why it’s easy for me to suddenly stop – “wait, now that’s really too much – I better put some back” – and change directions.
But even when we are moving gradually enough to be capable of doing this, are we actually aware of how body and mind are interacting?
It certainly never occurred to me to think about it much before my Feldenkrais training. But then I had the repeated experience of being asked to perform movements in my imagination.
Slowly it became clearer to me that the moment I even consider a movement, my body is already in motion.
When you take a step, pick up a book, turn your head to see something – or any other number of other such actions, you must organize your entire body to carry out that action.
In the Feldenkrais Method, one of the goals is to increase efficiency by incorporating an awareness of your whole skeleton as you move, even if most of the action is carried out with just one limb.
But even in inefficient action, the entire body is still affected.
Let’s say I pick up a book off the table in the sloppiest possible way. As I lift it, because I don’t know how to support myself, the weight of the book actually pulls me towards the ground, compromising my skeletal integrity in relation to gravity.
But no matter how inept I am, unless I have a severe neurological difficulty or physical handicap, such an action is unlikely to knock me completely off balance. The moment that I begin to fall just a little bit, my system will do everything it can to keep me upright. I will invoke sudden extra effort in many places to prevent the fall.
But whether I will act efficiently or not is already written into the thought that precedes the movement. If my mental image of picking up the book doesn’t include the ground under my feet and how I will relate to it when I move my arm, it’s not likely to be as easy as it could be.
But even when we move well, this “thinking” is mostly below the radar. It’s so quick, and it’s not like the action of “thinking about” something. That’s why it takes dedication become aware of this moment.
But once you are aware of it, you have the possibility of changing it – as well as the full-blown physical action that grows out of it.
Practicing the Feldenkrais Method is especially useful for that.
But most people don’t have a practice where they are asked to regularly consider their entire skeleton in relation to the supporting surfaces below them in each action. So it’s little wonder that many of their everyday actions are performed inefficiently.
Yet there is one situation where most of us have had enough life experience to become aware that mental rehearsal impacts the quality of our action.
Although some have more skill than others, most of us have refined the way we speak over time, including by noticing the words in our head before we say them.
We’ve all had the experience of hearing words pop into our head that we decide not to pronounce out loud. We may discard them entirely, or we may simply alter them slightly.
Or, sometimes, we don’t, and afterwards we wish we hadn’t said what we did. But that counts too – because we can refer back to it the next time.
If you’ve ever communicated with someone who is mentally unstable or in some other situation where saying the wrong thing might have negative consequences, then you know what it’s like to carefully choose each word, adjusting as you go.
If every conversation you had was just like that, you can imagine how you might develop a certain skills over time such as the ability to rephrase your ideas in different ways, read facial expressions, or create areas of agreement.
Each of those skills requires some amount of reversibility – the ability to stop in your tracks at any moment when you sense that continuing your current course could be detrimental, retrace your steps and restart your action along a new trajectory.
If you think about it, you can probably think of occasions where you have done this.
What I’m trying to underline is that pausing in this moment between thought and action in order to suspend what you are doing and initiate something new is a skill that you can intentionally develop.
It’s worthwhile to practice in a context that has little to no emotional charge because it’s our emotions that usually get us in trouble in this respect.
Because when we’re sad or angry or excited or nervous – whatever – we miss the moment where we project a mental image of an action that we wouldn’t carry out if we really examined it carefully.
But that moment is so quick. If our emotions drive us, we miss the thought before the action and are stuck with the the thought that comes afterwards, the we wish that we hadn’t just said or done that.
As they say, “Look before you leap!”
Look at what you’re thinking.
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This is isn’t the first time I’ve written about this moment between thought and action. If you’d like to explore this subject further, check out the following posts:
the moment between thought and action
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Learning to inhabit the space between thought and action will be a recurring theme of my 2019 online program, ¡Reimagine Yourself! which starts March 25.
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.
To participate in a free sample Awareness Through Movement class on Thursday, March 7, click here.
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