Volume 3, Number 12, January 2005

Quote from Moshe: “If I raise an iron bar I shall not feel the difference if a fly either lights on it or leaves it. If, on the other hand, I am holding a feather, I shall feel a distinct difference if the fly where to settle on it. The same applies to all the senses: hearing, sight, smell, taste, heat, and cold…More delicate and improved control of movement is possible only through the increase of sensitivity, through a greater ability to sense differences.” Awareness Through Movement, p. 59

If the Shoe Fits, Awareness

I love many things about being a Feldenkrais practitioner. I love the gratification I get when I ease someone’s discomfort. I love the excitement I feel when I’m doing an ATM and I learn something new. I love knowing the fascinating people who also do this work, people with whom I can interact and converse in a very special way.

There’s only one thing I hate about the Feldenkrais Method. When I try to explain to someone what exactly the Method is, I eventually run into “the blank stare.” If the person has a casual curiosity about the Method, they’ll likely blank out at the first sentence of my explanation. When they’re really interested, they’ll usually pay attention until they hear something unfamiliar.

Sooner or later I have to use the word “awareness.” That’s when the game is up. No matter who I’m talking to, I almost always run up against “the blank stare” at that point. If the person is a doctor, they may assume Feldenkrais is some touchy-feely psychosomatic nonsense involving unsubstantiated claims and vague results. If the person is a New-Age healer, they may assume that “awareness” refers to some universal awakening to the totality of the human spirit, and that they know all about this and can achieve the same results with crystals. Most often, though, the person is neither of these things, and simply blank out because they just don’t get it.

Few people really understand what Moshe Feldenkrais was talking about when he used the word “awareness.” In this issue, I want to set the record straight and be very clear about awareness, what it is, and how it so powerfully serves us in our goal to diminish pain and discomfort, or increase our facility. As usual, I will start with an unrelated example!

What if you wanted to draw a picture of a tree, but you couldn’t draw? I don’t mean a lollipop-type tree; I’m talking about a real, life-like drawing of a tree growing in your backyard. How would you approach this challenge? You could just dive in and do your best, going into the yard with a pen and a piece of paper, but the experience would most likely be unsatisfactory. You’d be lost; you wouldn’t know what to look at; you’d get frustrated and stop. End result: No drawing of a tree.

You could take a photograph of the tree and then trace it onto a piece of paper. The result would be something that looked a lot like a tree, so it would appear to be satisfactory. But it wasn’t, really. You didn’t want a drawing of a tree, you wanted to be able to draw a tree. By tracing it, you’d have undercut the process and you’d be no closer to your goal.

Now let’s imagine you’re a very patient person. I mean, like, old-man-on-the-mountaintop patient. Instead of drawing the tree, let’s say you go out into the yard, get a chair, put it under the tree and look for awhile. A long while. Let’s say you do this every day for a year. Maybe sometimes you touch the tree. Other times, you might climb into it. The point is, you study that tree regularly so that after a year you really know its ins and outs.

No, you know what? You get so excited that you do this for ten years. Wow. Imagine how well you know that tree now! You could probably envision all its curves and branches with your eyes closed. You probably don’t even have to be around the tree to be able to see it, and describe it. In fact, if I asked you what it looked like you could tell me in detail. You might even be able to show me by sketching out your description as you talked. “It goes up like this…then the trunk splits here…and this trunk twists just so…”

Wait a minute. You’re drawing the tree.

Yawn…there you go again, Adam. So obvious. Of course if you know exactly what the tree looks like in your head, you can draw it! What’s the point?

Let’s say you walk in great pain, and you want to walk pain-free. The doctors have no idea what’s wrong with you. Your chiropractor cracks you every week and it’s been helping less and less. What are you going to do?

Well, you could just start walking and hope for the best but…no, you know what will happen then. Pain, pain, pain…

What if you started paying attention to the way your ankles, knees and hips interact? What about your ribs? The balance of your head? What if you got off your feet every day and lay on your back where you’re fairly comfortable, and you bent your legs at the knee and started moving them around, paying attention to how they work, where they move more easily and where it’s more complicated. Maybe you’d begin to discover efficient ways to move them around. Let’s say you did this for a year, so that you got to know the insides and outs of your lower joints really well, getting so familiar with them that, as you walk, you could actually imagine them working together

This understanding isn’t clinical. It’s not anatomical understanding the way a doctor would describe it. Rather, it’s understood experientially. Just as when you talk you don’t think about all the components of your speaking, the same is true with walking. Rather than imagine every little detail of every bone pushing every other bone, you have a larger picture that is far too complicated to describe in detail but makes sense as a whole. The improved understanding has generated a more complete picture of yourself, not a string of concepts, and you embody this picture as you walk and can pay more attention to what you’re doing.

This is awareness: an increasing of self-understanding which leads to practical improvements. It’s time spent getting to know something intimately, which results in a greater sense of self.

That’s what always creates the blank stare among my listeners: the idea of a “greater sense of self.” But it isn’t that complicated. A “better sense of self” means you know yourself better. If you know yourself better, you use yourself better. You improve in anything you undertake.

That’s not so hard, is it? Now next time you consider doing Feldenkrais, remember, you’ll be lying on the floor or on a table, gently exploring. And as you do, your awareness will be increasing. Now can you see how that will benefit you?