Volume 3, Number 11 December 2004

Quote from Moshe: “In order to think…a person must be awake, and know that he is awake and not dreaming; that is, he must sense and discern his physical position relative to the field of gravity. It follows that movement, sensing, and feeling are also involved in thinking.” Awareness Through Movement, p. 11

Move First, Learn Best

Movement has many uses, not the least of which is getting you to your food. Another nice one is getting you away from the tiger that’s chasing you. But movement transcends utility. Moshe Feldenkrais equated movement with life itself. By that he meant that every aspect of life depends, to some degree on movement. Not on communication. Not on comprehension. Movement.

The single-celled organism moves for one reason: to eat. As we go upwards in complexity, we find that every organism requires movement as a necessary component of its life. Even plants, which on the whole remain in one place, must move to live. Trees follow the sun; they extend their roots. Think about something that doesn’t move and you’ll think about something either dead or inanimate.

Feldenkrais noted that, as humans, we learn as we move. In the beginning of our lives, all of our learning comes as a result of movement. We learn that in order to eat we must suck. We learn that in order to see we must turn our head. The need for movement comes before the learning in every case.

Flash forward to the adult who thinks they have nothing left to learn, but needs to get rid of these constant headaches. You might think, based on what you have heard about Feldenkrais, that you can learn the right “kind of movement” and your headache will go away. But that’s not how the Method, or human development, works.

The need precedes the learning. You have a need: to be able to work and play without enduring a distracting pain in your head. How will you learn to reach this state?

Before you could look around in your crib as a baby you had to discover how to raise your head. That took a good deal of trial and error on your part. You didn’t notice the passage of time, then. All you knew was satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The dissatisfaction encouraged you to fidget for some indefinite period and your nervous system took note of your abilities in differing positions. When you found one that worked for raising your head and you were able to come to it a number of times, it became a learned function.

To eliminate the headache, you will have to undergo a similar trail and error period, perhaps not knowing exactly how to change to a state that increases your satisfaction. Remember, the learning does not precede the movement: You don’t figure out which way to move and then go that way. You move and then learn what worked.

Feldenkrais lessons make some of the trail and error easier. In ATM’s, the pre-planned lesson limits your options so that you can focus on something that is missing in your understanding of yourself. In FI’s, the practitioner provides another pair of eyes and hands to guide you along the most promising paths.

Those paths lead to a self-awareness that is greater than it was before, in which the headache is seen as a facet of one state, and the absence of a headache the facet of another. In order to keep the headache away you must be able to tread the path from headache to no headache and back again. You must discover that, no matter how important the headache or its absence seems to be, it is not the most important thing in the universe, and not even the most helpful thing to pay attention to.

In the end, by paying attention to yourself as you move, you will discover a state of being that is more advantageous to you. If you are patient, you will integrate the knowledge you need to get back to that state from wherever you are. If you are very patient, you will discover that the path to and from that state is also very interesting.

The Feldenkrais Method puts itself at a disadvantage from a marketing standpoint by emphasizing learning. No one wants to think they have more to learn. But learning doesn’t have to be a befuddling intellectual process. It was and is an organic, necessary thing in human maturity. When learning can be done through slow, patient, curious movement, it may have profound benefits, even for adults.