Quote from Moshe: “As a general rule, human beings cease to develop or to improve their ability to adjust to circumstances at about thirteen or fourteen years of age. Activities of the brain, emotions, and body that are still difficult or impossible at this age will remain permanently beyond the bounds of the habitual. The result is that man remains far more limited in his capacities than he need be.” Awareness Through Movement, p. 86
One of the things that interferes with our ability to excel in life is our habit of thinking. No, I don’t mean our habit of using our minds...I’m referring to the way we think, the very human tendency to let the mind sit back in an easy chair once it’s “figured out” something. Really, we aren’t designed to be content with what we know. Our bodies and minds work best when they are constantly processing and updating information.
Renewal can be observed in every aspect of the world, from the cycle of birth and death to the seasons to the healing of a cut. We can stymie our sensory and intellectual renewal by an act of will; all we have to do is convince ourselves that we know something for sure and never question it. But is this habit to our benefit or our detriment?
Surely freezing knowledge provides us some help. Writing things down so that future generations can recall them, perhaps build on them, this is a hallmark of civilization. Thanks to our human ability to capture knowledge and put it in a static form, we do not have to invent the wheel once a generation. Instead, we can create algebra and physics and poetry and rock and roll by slowly adding to or violently altering the assumptions of a previous generation’s knowledge. We require some stability to advance, just as we must be able to trust the floor before we can move along upon it.
Stability is the trademark of intellectual advancement, with which we as humans proudly differentiate ourselves from the chimpanzees and orangutans, not to mention dogs and bugs. But there are many realms of the self, and intellectual achievement is only one of them. We humans have, lately, in the last thousand years or so, become fixated on the intellectual aspects of our personalities to the extent that we doubt, and have looked to our philosophers to debate, the nature of reality, so far are we from being able to trust our experience.
When we “know” something, what are we doing? We are engaging in a habit of the mind which assumes that we are safer with what we know than with what we do not know. This assumption is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if we remain in the realm of the familiar we keep the boundaries between what we know and what we have yet to know very clear.
Once we begin to explore our boundaries, however, we activate an aspect of ourselves too long neglected, our questioning side. We require the ability to explore and experiment as children, and we are literally unable to make assumptions by nature of our developmental process. Were we able as babies to make the assumptions of our elders, we would most likely never learn to walk, take much longer to talk, and perhaps be unable to feed ourselves. Fortunately, as babies our minds are immature and cannot be interfaced directly with the language of the adult world, so our parents cannot really teach us how to walk, but can only show us the result of walking. It remains for us to explore the boundaries of our abilities to move, to roll, eventually to crawl, and then to rise and totter forward.
Why do we assume that, as adults, we are better suited to deal with the world than children? Why do we correct them in the way they eat, the way they stand, the way they talk? Mostly, we are not teaching them how to eat, stand or talk, but are giving them instructions on how to conform to the society in which they live. This is a necessary and useful process in and of itself, but we as adults confuse our instruction in the niceties of living with the true process of learning. Many of us cease to explore much after we learn to talk and walk comfortably, and often times those who continue to explore are scolded, punished and ridiculed by teachers, parents and companions to whom any deviation from the common way is a danger.
We are all victims of this process of conformity at one time, and are all perpetrators at others. To really make a change in this process, we must recognize the need for the other kind of thinking, the exploratory kind, and see it not as a job only for the scientist or the jazz-musician, but for the everyday person who wants to minimize the effects of aging: loss of function, increased susceptibility to injury, increasing dependence on outside assistance.
We experience so many changes in our lives, from day to day, from week to week, from year to year. Even the most regimented, disciplined, dare I say boring person will change over time. Anything we find invaluable one day may be useless the next. At the very least, we find that what worked for us in one stage of our lives becomes less and less effective as we broach the next stage. What middle-aged person can successfully act the way they acted as a racous teenager? Like a sailor floating next to a bouy, we watch our signpost drift further and further away as the tide and the turning of the earth bring us willy nilly to a new location.
It behooves us not only to seek to stay aware of our changes, but to engage them and to desire to grow, even as mature adults. We can observe our own children and grandchildren and learn from them even while we are teaching them. Feldenkrais based his Method in part on the learning styles of children because they “muck about” and waste time but eventually learn to do what the most sophisticated computer cannot do: walk and talk. We make a serious error by assuming that we as adults have reached a kind of plateau, that we no longer need to attend to our walking and our talking because we “know how to do that.”
Improvement is still possible, even in the last stages of our lives. Possible? Necessary! If we do nothing, we watch our own function deteriorate. Slowly it becomes more and more difficult to walk, to talk, to feed ourselves. We think this process a natural one, but we are not powerless in the face of it unless we choose to be. While we may not be able to stop our deterioration, we can continue to grow in the face of it, learning better ways to move that fit our changing circumstances, keeping our balance as our bodies shrink, as our bones become more brittle; keeping our minds clear as our vision begins to dull so that we know better what we are seeing, even as we are able to see less.
The trick to this new way of living is that engaging our learning process as adults is not something we acquire like a cub-scout badge. No one can say the light has been turned back on. There is no certificate given to the person who has “got their awareness back.” On the contrary, keeping our learning going requires us regularly to risk everything we gain, to question ourselves daily, albeit in a slow, quiet way, and to renew not only our storehouse of information, but our very resolve to explore.
Do you know anyone who can teach you to do this? Of course! Try your local Feldenkrais practitioner! And be sure and ask lots of questions.
Adam
© 2003 Adam Cole