Volume 2, No. 7 – August, 2003

Quote from Moshe: “So long as the organs of thought, feeling, and control are not organized for action that is coordinated, continuous, smooth, and efficient – and therefore also pleasant - we are involving parts of the body indiscriminately, even if they are in no way required for this action or even interfere with it. ” (Awareness Through Movement, pp.60-1)

The Doctor Is In

I used to have a steady job as an appointment scheduler in a doctor’s office. The job was relatively simple, although I had a surprising amount of responsibility in that the entire arrangement of the doctor’s schedule was up to me. I spent several months learning the job, how to navigate the computer program, what each type of patient needed in an appointment, and so forth. After four months, I considered myself at the pinnacle of my ability.

I was surprised a month later when my superiors suggested to me that I wasn’t doing the best job I could, that the doctor was unhappy with my scheduling, that the nurses weren’t crazy about it either, and that I had a lot to learn. This was a serious disjunct from my previous understanding of my performance. It was a kind of crisis. If I continued this way, I would most likely crash and burn, losing my job.

At first I was stymied. I couldn’t think of any way I could do my job better. To the best of my understanding, I was completing every task exactly the way I’d been asked to do it. According to my sense of what the job entailed, I was doing very well. But I couldn’t just ignore the comments. What could I do?

I began talking with the doctor on a more regular basis, consulting more with the nurses, and checking in with my colleagues. I took the attitude that the job, as simple as it may have been, was changing constantly in minute ways, and I had to become curious about how other the people who depended on my work were seeing it day to day. I had to become genuinely interested in how they perceived the schedule, renewing my understanding on a daily basis. The result: I may not have changed the way I did my job, but everyone was happier with the way I was doing it!

Perhaps you’ve gone through a similar maturation yourself. Deepening your understanding of the relationships between you and the people with whom you interact can make your life easier. Ignoring or neglecting those relationships will eventually cause you trouble. If we are not receiving good information from our surroundings as we grow, or if we fail to integrate that information as it comes to us, crisis and conflict ensue, and we may damage our family structures as a result.

We can look at our selves as a kind of “personal company.” Each part of us, our left hand for example, is like a worker with a job to do. If a worker meets with success in the fulfillment of his task, he will often assume he knows everything he needs to get the job done, and will continue in the same way without seeking to improve himself. If you write with your left hand and have no difficulties, you will continue to write with your left hand, and the fact that the entire body (the entire self, actually) is involved in the writing will make no difference to you. Thus does the appointment scheduler blindly carry on in his task, feeling like the king of all appointment schedulers.

But when the other members of the team complain, when the wrist starts to hurt and the back begins to ache each time the left hand writes, we begin to discover that what we considered “the way to write” is not sufficient. In fact, as the hand, or more specifically the controller of the hand, continues to write while ignoring the complaints of the rest of the body, the body moves towards a crisis in which it may incur serious damage.

How is a person to overcome this difficulty? How else can he write? There are only so many ways to write, aren’t there? He thought he knew the way. This may apply to his skiing, his mathematics skill, or his ability to digest his food. How can he improve these things when he thinks he’s doing them right?

Obviously he needs to generate a sense of the whole self in writing. In the case of my job as an appointment scheduler, I had to make a point of engaging in continuous dialogue with my colleagues, not with the aim of eliminating the complaints, but rather with a goal of continually improving my integration with the rest of the team so that I could act and react smoothly as we all progressed through varying situations involving the patients. This required curiosity and willful exploration on my part, and a pleasant method of interacting on a regular basis with the others. Such a process of curious exploration works as well internally as externally.

In the Feldenkrais Method we have such a means of interacting with our whole self. We are invited to overcome interesting challenges to our body and our mind, and we are expected to go slow and keep the process pleasant. When we do this, we get a better understanding of how our hands relate to the rest of us, how we can better use our whole selves to improving the approach to the challenge. The goal is not to give the hand a better way to write, but instead to give the mover of the hand a sense of the constantly shifting landscape that we traverse while writing, and skiing, and computing, and digesting. We must constantly adapt to changes in ourselves as we grow older, become injured, heal, change locales, write different kinds of things with different weighted pens, and so on. We never write correctly, but only improve our ability to pay attention to ourselves as we write. The result, which comes about almost as an afterthought, is that our conflicts lessen and our comfort while writing increases.

Adam

QUESTION FROM ASK ADAM:

“So, Feldenkrais is about improving movement, right?” Jason Harkins, Sydney, Australia

Answer: Feldenkrais is about improving our ability to pay attention. As we pay attention to ourselves when we move, our movement improves. If we pay attention when we eat, our enjoyment and digestion improve. We improve our ability to pay attention by engaging in a challenge that interests us, and observing the process we undergo in the face of that challenge.

We could improve our abilities in many ways: we could read, meditate, or engage in conversation. Moshe Feldenkrais chose movement as his means of teaching people to improve themselves because movement is fundamental to the propagation of life: We must move to breathe, eat and observe. Our first lessons as babies involve movement. Some people like talking better than meditating or reading, but everyone shares the basic experience of learning through movement.

So Feldenkrais uses movement as a medium to improve a person’s ability to pay attention.