olume 1, No

Volume 1, No. 9, October 2002

Quote From Moshe: “When you know what you are doing, you can do what you want.”

What Do You Need From Feldenkrais?

The biggest dilemma I face is convincing people who haven’t tried the Method that they should. Many of my friends and colleagues find themselves very curious about Feldenkrais and ask me all kinds of questions, which I (of course!) answer patiently and completely.

How do you know when you should be doing Feldenkrais?

Remember that Feldenkrais will benefit you no matter how healthy you are. You will find it relaxing at the very least, because Feldenkrais is designed to be pleasant. If you aren’t relaxed at the end of a Feldenkrais lesson, you’re either working to hard on the floor or you’re not telling your practioner when something is uncomfortable.

But relaxation is only a fringe benefit of the Method. The real goodies come when you desire to improve your health and functionality. Even if you’re happy, have no real problems, and just want to see what Feldenkrais is like, you may be surprised at what changes for you during and after a lesson.

Feldenkrais was designed to address the whole person. That means helping you to become aware of the connection between what you want and how you act. You come to the Method with a want, and you leave knowing something about how you act. What’s an example of “what you want?” How about sleeping?

If you desire to sleep better at night, the Method will help you discover how you are acting when it comes time to sleep. Have you thought about your sleeping position? Is it the most comfortable for you, physically? Maybe it isn’t that comfortable physically, but emotionally you feel safest sleeping that way. A Feldenkrais lesson will begin by asking you to pay attention to how you lie, how you sit, how you stand, before you make any changes.

Now that you’re paying attention to yourself in rest, you can begin observing yourself in motion. How do you get from sitting on the bed to lying in it? Do you sit on the edge of the bed and fall over to your side? Which side? You may have more freedom in your ribs to side-bend in one direction than other. Does the freedom to bend easier on one side have implications in the way you work and move throughout the day?

Perhaps you bend easily on both sides. Maybe your ribs and neck are very flexible. If you have that freedom when you lie down to bed, perhaps you can notice its use or absence in other places like on the tennis court, when your serve would be greatly improved by more freedom in your ribs and neck.

So here’s a hypothetical situation we’ve just created: You come in and start thinking about how you lie down. You discover your own flexibility, and you explore it and improve it. Then, knowing consciously what you had previously been doing at bedtime without thinking, you translate those abilities to other realms of your life for greater success.

How else can we connect what you want and how you act? Let’s go back to bed; plenty of examples left in that scenario, and after all, everyone sleeps (or tries to). What if you find lying down very painful and not easy at all? What if you’re one of those people who feel like a model dinosaur with those brittle plastic bones that would scatter into a million pieces if you put any pressure on them?

It would behoove you to discover what freedom you do have in your movement, if not in big places, then in little ones. There are hundreds of Feldenkrais lessons to experience, and each provides you a new opportunity to discover where you are capable, even if it’s only in a very small area of your pelvis, or your wrists, or your feet. You are encouraged to focus in on where you move easily and comfortably in a given scenario, discover how you can increase that place of ease by exploring movement within it, and subsequently be able to fuction in a much more sophisticated way than you could previously.

If you explore a lesson that seems to have nothing to do with lying down, and that lesson improves your ability to bend and fold in another context, you may discover that lying down is suddenly easier. After a Feldenkrais lesson, you bend and fold to lie down instead of crashing into the mattress, and suddenly, you’re lying in the most comfortable position and you fall right asleep!

It may be difficult for you to understand how Feldenkrais can improve your life until you’ve tried it, and stuck with it for a few lessons. It’s hard to imagine being able to move in ways you haven’t before. The benefits appear at surprising times throughout your life, and they can be as inocuous as the banishment of that crick in your neck, and as dramatic as being able to move across the room by yourself for the first time since your accident.

Often, we convince ourself that our reality is complete, that anything we know is sufficient for our purposes and anything we don’t know is more trouble than it’s worth. For us to admit we don’t know what we’re capable of would be tantamount to suggesting that we are incomplete. If we change that notion of incompleteness to one of having room to grow, we can think of ourselves as being able to refine our action the way we refined our walking and talking as children. Infinite improvement is possible in all of us, and when we pursue it with curiosity, patience, and good humor, many of the difficulties we face in life vanish as we are able to successfully adapt to our changing circumstances.

I’ll see you at the mat!