Volume 1, Number 4, May 2002

Moshe Quote Of the Day: "A violinist, an actor, a writer, or whoever, who is not aware of the importance of awareness of the way one directs oneself in acting or functioning in life will stop growing the moment he achieves what he considers to be the right way of doing." (from The Elusive Obvious, p. 96)

Did You Know You Were Missing Information?

by Adam Cole

Have you ever tried to solve a problem? (I’d like to see if anyone doesn’t have their hand raised!) How about this: Have you ever worried because you couldn’t solve a problem, fretting because it seems unsolvable, pacing the floor at night, not getting any sleep? Have you stressed yourself sick, not knowing how it will ever be resolved? And then, all of a sudden, something shifts, and information that you didn’t have before comes to you? Then you go to solve the problem and it’s easy.

I had a friend who had to take a trip to Birmingham from Georgia one afternoon. He was required by his employer to give a speech at a special convention for the Association of American Caterers at 7:00 PM . The speech would mean a big promotion for him if it went well, and it wasn’t an option in any case.

My friend had a problem. The trip from Atlanta to Birmingham takes about two-and-a-half-hours, as long as one doesn’t run into any traffic, and my friend only had two hours to make the trip. He looked after his baby son during the day, and his wife got home at 5:00 to take over for him. He was unable to find a babysitter or a neighbor to help him through the crunch on that particular day. It was a week before the trip, and he was sweating bullets. Even if everything went perfectly, he’d have to make a two-and-a-half hour car drive in only two hours, and then rush up to the podium. Nothing could go wrong. His wife couldn’t be late getting home, he couldn’t run into any traffic along the long, well-traveled route, his car had to be in perfect shape. He worried so much that he began to lose his voice from the stress. He thought through the trip again and again and considered all his possibilities, but he just couldn’t see any way to solve his problem.

Finally, a day before the event, he confided in an acquaintance. The acquaintance listened to his problem, then laughed. “You’ve got nothing to worry about,” he said. “There’s a time change from Atlanta to Birmingham! You’ll be leaving at 4:00 their time. That gives you three hours!”

Problem solved. Suddenly what seemed impossible became easy because of a little information that my friend not only lacked, but didn’t know that he lacked.

That’s an important piece, his failure to know that he lacked an important piece of information. We should always assume that we’re lacking information when we attempt to solve a problem because, in this imperfect world, none of us know everything about anything. But we forget that a lot, don’t we? Most of us act as though what we knew were all we needed to know to base our opinions and make our decisions.

A lot of children in abusive homes often face problems such as “How do I deal with my parent’s violent behavior?” Often lacking adult help with these dilemmas, the children often come up with their own solutions. The decisions they make may get them through the of trauma but may have equally harmful consequences that an adult in the same situation would recognize. Obviously, the child has only their own experience and information to draw on, and so running away, or closing off all vulnerability, for example, may be the only solutions they can come up with. As adults, we know that these options can put the child in equal or greater danger, and we would choose differently. What we would hope is that someone would provide such a child with information that they didn’t know they were lacking such as, “It’s not your fault,” “It’s not supposed to be this way,” and “There are people who you can call for help.” When the child has this information, other solutions present themselves which may be a great deal easier and more effective in addressing the problem.

So what does all this have to do with Feldenkrais®? A lot, actually. Our lives are full of “unsolvable problems” that relate to the way we learned to move, problems that can often be solved when we get new information.

Many of us had a parent who told us to “stand up straight.” Have you heard that before? I bet you can still hear it. You heard it as a child, and you tried to obey. You “stood up straight.” The problem was, you didn’t really know how to do that. You were happy with the way you were standing, and someone told you, “No, that’s slouching.” Well, there are lots of ways to change the way we stand to look straighter. You can tighten up your lower back muscles and keep them contracted all the time. You can stiffen your neck. You can clench your jaw, so that you don’t ever have the urge to relax these muscles again. Then, according to someone, you’re standing up straight.

But is it possible that both you and the observer didn’t know some things about the way humans stand, and worse, you didn’t know that you didn’t know? What if I told you that standing is not a static state, but in fact a state that requires you to be in constant motion, albeit tiny motion? What if I reminded you that the spine must be curved in two places in order to provide the strength to hold the torso and head, and if it were straight it would most likely snap under the stress? What if I told you that forcing yourself to stand up straight using those constantly tensed back muscles would cause you all sorts of problems, not the least of which would be an inability to move that region of your body at all?

When you lie down on the floor and take an Awareness Through Movement® lesson, or experience a Functional Integration® lesson, you’re getting information from the floor and from the hands. The sensation of movement is interesting to your brain and provides information. The Feldenkrais lessons themselves also pose problems that you may or may not be able to solve, such as “How can I hold my foot in my hand and straighten my leg?”

If you run to the floor and try to solve that problem right now, consciously, vigorously, “no pain no gain,” going at it like a dog after a tossed bone, you’ll most likely fall short of the best solution. You’ll try all sorts of combinations of movements that you’ve always done and you will either do the movement painfully or find you can’t do it at all. Consequently, you’ll decide that doing this movement easily, without strain or pain, is impossible, at least for you. (The other possibility is that it’s easy for you, in which case I’d suggest asking yourself why you can’t play the piano as well as that six-year old prodigy over there.)

In order to solve the problem so that you can take your foot in your hand and easily straighten your leg, without strain, as simply as you might straighten your fingers or turn your head left and right, you need to discover what information you’re lacking about yourself. What parts of you are missing from your picture that you had forgotten you ever had? Do you feel all of your ribs moving when you bend to the side? Do you know how much they need to collapse on one side to make this movement easy? Did you even know they had to collapse?

The Awareness Through Movement lessons are designed to bring you along a path where you can start to really listen to yourself in a way that you so rarely have time for. When you start to listen, your awareness will be increased. The more awareness you have of yourself and your movements, the easier the unsolvable problems will become to solve. There are lots of ways to increase your awareness, but I think the Feldenkrais Method is the best way!

Listen.

Next month: Feldenkrais or Yoga: Which is better?