The whole system

One of the axioms of the Feldenkrais work is that the whole body is a system.

As an idea, this may seem simple, but to make it effective in practice takes detective work.

Claire, a professional woman in her 50’s, came in this week and said, “Oh, thank you, Maureen, for last week. I have been remembering to stretch out my left ribs, and my neck feels so much better.”

I was glad to hear it.

Do you know what’s the connection?

The previous week Claire had come in and after the briefest hello, and while rubbing the right side of her neck, had reported, “Maureen, this weekend was so bad. My neck just seized up.”

She shared that after a full work week she had taken a long drive to spend the weekend with family. On Saturday morning there she was having fun with everyone, except that her neck was killing her. Over the course of the next few days, some of the tension eased up by itself, but now, home and back at work, she still hurt.

What could I do about it?

I asked Claire to walk. I saw my clue right away.

Claire was holding contraction in the left ribs. It wasn’t extreme, but the desired fluid shift among the central muscles was missing. The contraction naturally pulled the head to the left. But Claire didn’t want to walk lopsided. So, something inside – some part of the brain – automatically pulled on the right neck muscles. They brought her head to the middle. But the tactic overworked the neck muscles, and they hurt.

I asked Claire to lie down on my table. I explored what was happening in those left ribs. The muscles were tight! They were happy to let go! When Claire stood, she felt that she was taller and that her neck was fine.

Over the next week, the left side contraction would come back in again. But Claire noticed it. She could move in a certain way and let it go.

Breathing

Most of the people who come to me for private sessions are motivated by pain. As we work through the pathways that bring about relief, usually the person starts to feel a fuller breath. First a small improvement comes, and then more. A big breath means a big relief!

Today I was winding up a lesson with Maria. After having been lying on the table for a while, she was sitting and looking off into the distance, feeling that bigger breath, and enjoying it.

She turned to me and said, “You know sometimes when I am sitting someplace and wondering what I should do next, I say to myself, ‘Now you have time to just breathe.’

But then another voice inside challenges me, ‘You are not being productive!’

To this the first voice responds, ‘Yes, I am! I am producing calm, and well-being.’ ”

I added, “And these are in short supply.”

Lie on your back

Most Feldenkrais classes begin with the instruction: “Lie on your back.”

Why is this so?

For regular students, the answer is obvious: “Because it feels good!”

There is also a deeper reason: to be sensitive you have to be relaxed.

In this context, relaxed means that your muscles are not activated for exertion. Especially the extensors, which are along the back, should be resting and quiet.

In his book The Potent Self, Feldenkrais talks about his thinking process behind this starting position:

“The most complete elimination of the extensors in an act of spatial orientation would in fact be a complete contrast with our habitual experience and as little as possible associated with normal activity. Furthermore, the effort involved should be the smallest possible so that we can distinguish the slightest variations in muscular effort. For all sensations are so related to their causes that the slighter the cause, the smaller is the change that can be sensed. If we lift a heavy weight, for example, we cannot tell whether a sheet of paper is stuck beneath it or not. But on lifting a single sheet of paper we know at once if another one is stuck to it or not. Similarly, in daylight we do not notice a light bulb shining. But in the dark we can see the glow of a cigarette. Near an airplane, we cannot hear anything because of the propeller noise; in complete silence we can hear a fly or our own breath. Thus the intensity of the stimulus must be reduced if we want to become aware of small changes.” (1)

Taking this thinking into action, Feldenkrais developed a large number of movement sequences, which he called lessons and which students perform mostly while lying down, although sometimes in upright positions.

For example, a lesson might ask you to lie on your back and move your arms and head in one coordination and then in another. You are asked at the same time, “Please notice how you feel while doing it the first way, and the second.” Since you are able to do both, the distinction is usually small, but one way is preferable. By paying attention, you refine your ability to discriminate between these small differences and to make the choices that are best for you. Gradually, these awarenesses accumulate and deepen, and you find yourself moving in a way that makes you feel better.

Often, a whole lot better!


(1) Feldenkrais, Moshe. The Potent Self. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985. Page 135.

Sitting in an upright manner

Yesterday “Constance” sent me an email saying that she would have to skip one of our regular sessions. Then she sweetened the cancellation with this report:

“Last night at a concert I used your sitting position (both feet flat on the floor, head above spine and hands on legs) and had not one iota of back pain.”

I thought this was great because Constance has been living with a lot of pain and in our sessions so far we hadn’t worked that much on sitting.

Constance has been coming to see me privately for a little while because of pain in various places that is sometimes nagging and sometimes debilitating. It often surprises her with new manifestations.

During much of each session Constance lies on my padded table. At the end I ask her to sit and notice, briefly, how she feels.

She often reports that she sits upright more easily.

During one of our early sessions, I took out a notebook and showed her several photos of seated Egyptian pharaohs. From these sculptures, I call this way of sitting “Egyptian Pharaoh Pose.”

As you can see in the photo above, the posture is very upright and full of right angles.

Maybe it looks stiff to you. It’s not casual. It’s definitely regal.

It demonstrates “weight bearing through the skeleton.”

It has the advantage of efficiency. Once you feel comfortable like that, you can sit for a long time.

If you are in a lot of pain and try to sit like that, you probably won’t be comfortable. But if you do movements that bring you to a deeper state of relaxation, then sitting like that comes very naturally.

When I asked Constance if I could talk about her experience in this post, she said, “Yes, of course, you may use my experience. It was truly wonderful for me.“

The purpose of the skeleton

A couple weeks ago I was working with “Patrick,” a man who for months had been waking up with back pain. He had pain intermittently during the day, but consistently in the morning.

I asked him to show me how he slept. He lay down on my table on his stomach and turned his head this way and arranged his legs like this and his arms like that. All fine. But as I looked more closely, I could see that there were odd things about his ribs. They weren’t going the way one would expect them to.

So, I sat next to him and gently pushed on each rib, a little this way and a little that. I wasn’t trying to put them “in the right place” but to clarify possibilities to his brain. Through movement I was saying, “Dear Brain. You can hold the rib here, or you can shift it there, or there, or there.”

Patrick was taking some big breaths, so I had the feeling that I was going in the right direction. Over time the ribs as a whole were softening, and he looked more comfortable in his sleeping position.

Then it came time to sit. He sat quietly for a moment; he looked nice and easily upright. Then he made the transition to stand, and as he did, he said with surprise, “This feels a great deal lighter than I usually feel.” At my suggestion, he went back and forth between sitting and standing a few times, and the feeling of lightness continued. Then he walked around my room, and felt the lightness also in walking.

He turned to me and, “How did that happen?”

So I told Patrick a story.

About 15 years ago, when I had been a Practitioner for a few years, I went to my annual week of continuing education. In the opening session the trainer, Jeff Haller, asked the group, “What is the purpose of the skeleton?”

Jeff was sitting on one of our low tables while about 20 of us were sitting around him on stools and on the floor. There was a long silence as we reflected. One answer was offered. It was a beginning. Another few offerings were made, but none seemed to hit the mark. Silence returned to the room.

Jeff answered his own question: the purpose of the skeleton is to make the body light.

If you think about an amoeba, he continued, it only moves by projecting a pseudopod against a squishy mass. It can never get very big, and it cannot live outside water. To get bigger and still be able to move, fish developed with vertebrae and muscles to pull against them. To move across land, amphibians developed limbs. And to get the head at maximum height to the ground, apes and humans developed the ability to walk on two legs.

In the process of being human, things happen that lead to a loss of the natural alignment. Then the weight of the body, and particularly the weight of the head, is no longer carried directly over the bones. In consequence, the muscles have to do extra work.

When the alignment is restored, weight is taken off the muscles, and the person feels, in every action, lighter.

An unexpected benefit

Two weeks ago I was talking with Stephanie, one of my students, as we were waiting for the evening Feldenkrais class to begin. Stephanie is in her mid-20’s, vivacious and charming. She started coming to my class several months ago for help with back pain.
We were sitting on a balcony overlooking the gymnastics gym. As we watched the girls flip around, I asked her, “How’s your back doing?”
She said, “It’s much better, thanks. But, you know, a funny thing happened. This past weekend I was with my family in California for my brother’s wedding. My mother and I were getting changed in one of the bedrooms. She was standing behind me and all of a sudden she said, “Stephanie! What happened to your bruises? You’re not all bruised any more. Where did they go?”
Stephanie said, demonstrating, “I twisted around and looked at my legs and my back. Then I said to my Mom, ‘You’re right! I’m not full of bruises.’ “
Stephanie took in the question mark on my face and explained that she is a manager in a shop where there is a lot of equipment coming and going. Every day something heavy and awkward is in a place where it was not yesterday. She has a long habit of bumping into these things.
“Before,” she reported saying to her mother, “I was always ahead of myself. I was thinking about the next thing. I wasn’t really paying attention to where I was. Now I am more focused on my self, on where my body is in space, and on what’s around me. All that! So I am not getting bruises.”
We both agreed: this is a nice, and unexpected, benefit from the classes.

"That's the way I work best!"

Hello everybody.

This is my first day of blogging, and I am excited about it.
I am starting this blog because I want to share interesting things from my practice of the Feldenkrais Method.

When I meet with my students and clients, most of what we do is about movement. I do, also, talk about the "envelope" of the movement -- the concepts that are behind it and the types of experiences that people have through participating.

Through this blog I wish to share more about that envelope.

Here is my first item, a true story:


Overheard in a restaurant

I had lunch in a restaurant a little while ago, and a family of three sat at a table behind me, mother, father and a boy about 3. Dad stayed with son Matthew while Mom went to get food from the buffet.
Matthew had a strong, well-enunciated, little boy voice. While he was waiting, he kept up a running commentary that everyone could hear. He asked Dad when the food was coming, and what he was going to have to eat. He had a lovely upright posture and projected a strong sense of himself.
When Mom returned and he ate, he observed that he liked the food, and that the rice had gotten cold.
Suddenly, Dad noticed that Matthew was kneeling while he ate. He told him, “Sit down, son.”
Matthew glanced at him and then looked away and continued eating.
Dad repeated: “Sit,” and pushed the boy’s legs to move him into position. “You don’t kneel on chairs. You sit on them.”
Matthew maintained his kneeling, his silence and his eating.
Dad raised the stakes: “It’s wrong to kneel on a chair.”
This brought Matthew to respond: “That’s the way I work best.”

Ignoring this logic, Dad picked up his son and placed him on his tush.
Mom, silent until now, protested. “But look at him. The table is too high for him. How would you like to eat with your chin in your plate?”
Dad looked. Dad relented.
Matthew quietly returned to his kneeling position. The way he works best.

I feel this simple story says a lot about what we are trying to do in the Feldenkrais Method. We are looking to develop ways of moving, and living, that are in accord with our natural design.