Possibilities,
Volume 1, No. 11, December, 2002
Quote from Moshe: “Do not be serious, eager, avoiding any wrong move. The kind of learning that goes with Awareness Through Movement is a source of pleasurable sensations which lose their clarity if anything dims the pleasure of it all.” The Elusive Obvious, p. 94
The
Difference Between Shopping and Buying
In this season of gift giving and gift finding it’s helpful for me to pull out some old stereotypes. Shopping: Women love it; Men hate it. Women like to wander around the mall for hours, trying on pairs of shoes, examining window displays, keeping company with their good friends. Men know what they want, go to the store to get it, and leave.
Whether or not you’re a fan of this characterization of the sexes, you will admit that, at one time, you either fit into one or the other of these categories. If you’re in a hurry to get your shopping done by Christmas, you’re probably a buyer. If you’re in a store that interests you, like a gun store or a hardware store, you might feel like hanging around. There are two different mindsets here, very human ones.
Shopping is
the last bastion of fun for some people.
Who has time in
When you go to the doctor, you don’t shop. This is true whether you’re a male or a female. You tell the doctor what’s wrong, and you expect them to tell you what to do. You’re buying. “I know what I want. Do you have it? Something to stop the pain. An explanation for what’s been bothering my leg. A means of getting through the day.” If you’re lucky, the doctor will have what you want and will give it to you. You’ll leave happy, or at least satisfied, because you can get back to what you were doing when the pain or discomfort stopped you.
Does this attitude really pay off? How many times have you gone to the doctor and told them about your pain (after waiting a month to get an appointment, and an hour in the waiting room during the middle of your work-day), only to have them look at you for fifteen minutes, shake their heads, perhaps name your symptom with a seven-syllable word, and give you a free sample of a drug that might help? Does it help? Often times, no. If it does, the fix is only temporary.
Why is this scenario so common? Because it’s what you asked for. You’re a buyer. You went in there asking for a quick answer to your problem, as if the problem was a briar that got stuck to you on your way somewhere. You wanted the doctor to pull it off. So did the other seventy people that came in that day. The doctor’s trying to oblige you, but ninety-five times out of ten, the thing that’s bothering you isn’t an isolated symptom, nor is it connected with a serious condition.
Sometimes we create our own problems by the way we look for solutions. If we go around as a buyer, looking for what we want, we’re risking getting the thing we ask for. But what if the thing we want, the thing we ask for, is not the thing we need?
Imagine coming to one of my classes because you heard Feldenkrais was good for the lower back. You have a lot of lower back pain. It’s been bothering you for ten years. The doctors have looked at it and found nothing. They gave you some exercises, perscribed some medication that makes you naseous, and all that happened was the pain got a little better sometimes. Sometimes. So you came to me, as a buyer, because you want to see if I’ve got what you need.
What you need is to be a shopper. Oh, sure, you could lie down on the floor, do an Awareness Through Movement lesson, and reach a point where your back feels better. You’d say, “Wow! My back feels better! That never happened before!” You’d nod and say, “I got what I wanted.” Then you’d leave.
I promise you, your pain didn’t go away because you did the Awareness Through Movement lesson. The lesson isn’t a pill you can take that makes things change in you. It’s not a set plan for a diagnosed illness. What the lesson did was turn you into a shopper for forty-five minutes. That’s what made your back-pain go away.
Being there on the floor, not thinking about what you want, where you were, where you’re going to be, only thinking about where you are. The lesson led you to a state where you were aware for forty minutes, where your back was a part of you, and its state, whether painful or pain-free, was reflected in its connection to the rest of you.
Our bodies want to come back to a state of equilibrium, where all the muscles are working just as hard as they should and no harder, where the skeleton supports and distributes the weight the way it’s supposed to, where you can breathe and smile and cry and laugh and move any way you need to whenever you need to. We’re always leaving that state of equilibrium, because we can’t do anything in that state. You have to get off-balance to move. It’s when we fail to return to our state of equilibrium for the next movement that we start causing problems for ourselves.
What caused the problems? Not a lack of drugs in our system, not a seven-syllable condition. What caused the problems was our loss of the awareness we need to return to equilibrium. When we lose it, we’re designed to be able to sense how we’ve changed. With that information, we can return to our stable state in time for the next movement.
We interfere with that healthy process through focusing on our habits, which work for us for awhile but do not change with us. If we stop paying attention, which happens to most of us, and rely on our habits which “work,” we find that as we change over time, either by growing or by interacting with people, our habits fit us less and less. Unfortunately, without awareness, as soon as we arrive in a situation which is painful and which interferes with our achieving our dreams, we’ll still try and hold onto the habit even if it prevents us from healing. Whether it’s the best or most comfortable is less important than “Can I do what I want to do right now?” We’ll do whatever we have to do to get back to what “works” in a hurry. We’ll buy anything that promises to get us there.
Any parent knows you can’t buy everything you want. You can’t buy love. You can’t buy happiness. You can’t buy self-satisfaction. You can’t buy these things because they require that you live your life a certain way to get them. They require a commitment in time, energy, focus.
You can’t buy good health either. It requires a kind of attention which is rewarded in the body. We’re designed to self-correct, but we require self-attention to do so. Feldenkrais lessons teach you to pay attention. For forty-five minutes, you can get in that state where you’re curious and where you don’t have to solve your problem. In that state, you find that many of the problems you experience are only choices you made so long ago that you’ve forgotten how to go back the other way. The state of curiosity is an ideal state for revisting those choices, exploring other options, and finding a way to do what you want without pain, strain or excess effort.
With time, curiosity and a will, you can extend that period of curiosity outside the lessons and begin living your life a different way. You can discover what your habits are and decide if you want to keep them. You can spend more time in shopping mode, never have to buy a thing, and walk away richer than you were when you got there.
Enjoy the rest of your shopping day.
Adam
© 2002 Adam Cole