Volume 2, No. 8 – September, 2003

Quote from Moshe: “If we look at how we do things, we might find an alternative way of doing them, i.e. have some free choice. For, if we have no alternative, we have no choice at all. We may kid ourselves that we have chosen a unique way of doing things, but it is compulsive for lack of alternatives.” The Elusive Obvious, p. xii

A Habit of Attention

When we get into a fix with our bodies, when something is bothering us or when something hurts, all we want is for it to go away. We don’t care how. We’d even pay someone to take it from us.

That strategy doesn’t usually work. Sometimes you can pay someone to crack the thing out of you, or surgically remove it, or even talk it out. But more often than not, you find that it either comes back later or some other problem takes its place. Often times a surgeon will temporarily resolve an issue by removing some cartilege or fusing your spine, but a year later you find that your knees are going out. Fix the knees and the hips go bad. And so on, and so on.

What’s happening? Could it be that demanding an end to our suffering is not the most effective strategy for dealing with it? If not, what is?

Let me tell you a story. A little boy was playing a game of checkers with his friend, but he found that he was losing. Furious, he knocked the board to the floor, spilling the checkers everywhere. Did the boy solve his problem? He made the game go away so that it couldn’t hurt him anymore. Did he teach himself how to avoid feeling that way in the future?

Well, his friend won’t play checkers with him anymore, so in one sense he did. But in a larger sense, he will find that the feeling of humiliation he sensed playing checkers will recur in another situation, perhaps during a test in school, or at bat in a baseball game. At best, he will remember his strategy and destroy the thing that causes him pain, ignoring or ripping up the test, walking away from the baseball game. At worst, he will suffer and take it out on someone else.

Does he have any other options? Did he during the checkers game? What if he had decided to play the game despite his feelings, go ahead and lose, pay attention to how he lost? Would he have learned something that might have made him a better player? He might have discovered how to win next time. More importantly, he might have discovered how to deal with his feelings in difficult situations.

When you are faced with pain, emotional or physical, do you have a choice in how to respond? Often it feels like the answer is no. When we are working in a job that is difficult and we have a family who depends upon us, sometimes quitting is not an option. When we face excrutiating pain every time we sit, sometimes we must sit anyway. With only one path apparent, it seems we have no choice but to play the game and suffer pain.

We do have a choice, however. Instead of trying to ignore or banish our suffering, we can pay attention to the situation in which the pain is caused. Often we don’t see this choice because we don’t understand how paying attention can do us any good. This is more true of discomfort in the human body than of dissatisfaction in a job, but attention benefits us in both situations.

I’m not suggesting focusing on the pain is the answer to resolving it. On the contrary, focusing on the pain is in many ways the same as trying to block it out. Rather, we have to learn to pay attention to how the pain interfaces with our lives. Unpleasant feelings of all kinds are a by-product of the situations we find ourselves in. Cancer-patients and injury sufferers have more pain to deal with than the rest of us, but it’s a matter of degree. Each of us has our own amount of unpleasant sensation we must endure and it’s up to us to refine our understanding of its causes. How much is unavoidable, and how much do we bring upon ourselves? The answer will be different for all of us.

In the Feldenkrais Method we refine our ability to pay attention to ourselves as we face a challenge, usually physical. At first we tend to believe that overcoming the challenge is the key to feeling better. If we could only touch our foot to our mouth, to use one lesson as an example, everything would be “okay.” In fact, when we improve even a little bit in the direction of touching our foot to our mouth, we do often experience more well-being, a sensation of completeness, relaxation and heightened awareness. But touching the foot to the mouth is not the reason we felt better. Instead, the process of entering a state of heightened attention and curiosity brought about our well-being. In this state our learning was merely a result of the process.

In fact, if we lie upon the floor with our eyes closed and imagine we are doing the lesson, not actually moving at all, but feeling ourselves bringing the foot closer and closer to the mouth, our breathing deepens, our shoulders relax, and we get that sense of well-being without even having to move. Try it! What happens in this scenario is that we pay attention to ourselves even as we imagine the movements, and they improve. Hence, the movements themselves are merely a useful focus for us to improve our attention.

Were it possible for that little boy to pay attention to himself while losing the checkers game, he might realize how the more his anxiety and anger rise, the fewer moves he can envision. He might discover that, while humiliated, he starts to hold his breath and ball his fists, pulling his focus away from a smooth thought process. Were he to notice these things, he might decide he had a choice about them. He could not prevent the humiliation, but he could maximize his performance while humiliated. It might be enough to win him the game.

Adam

QUESTION FROM ASK ADAM:

I have a neurological condition (for the past 7 years) called Spasmodic Torticollis. My brain tells my head that it's correct position is a turned position over my left shoulder - as if I'm always looking to the left. Can Feldenkrais classes help me? Do you know of any people with my condition who have been helped through these exercises?

Amelia

Dear Amelia,

I believe the classes can help you, because Feldenkrais increases the amount of information your brain will get about your head's position. I wouldn't guarantee sessions will "solve" your problem, but they will improve it.

The reason is that your condition is a more extreme version of what all of us face. I don't think there's a single person whose head is exactly in the position which would provide for the easiest breathing, looking around, and so forth, and the reason is the same in their case as in yours: The brain is telling the head where it thinks "correct" should be. By increasing their, and your, awareness of how to turn the head, how to look in a certain direction with the greatest ease, and other human activities, you will increase on several levels your understanding of what "correct" may be.

In your case, there may be underlying reasons for the head to be off to the left which many of us do not have. If this is the case, Feldenkrais will help you come to understand the issue beyond the head and brain, so that you understand how it plays itself out through the whole body.