Volume 3, No

Volume 3, No. 2 – March, 2004

Quote from Moshe: “...if a man wishes to improve his self-image, he must first of all learn to value himself as an individual, even if his faults as a member of society appear to him to outweigh his qualities...Those who succeed in looking at themselves with a sufficient, encompassing humanity to achieve stable self-respect may reach heights that the normally healthy will never achieve. But those who consider themselves inferior because of their disabilities, and overcome them by sheer will power, tend to grow into hard and embittered adults...” Awareness Through Movement, p. 19

Being Good Enough to Get Better

I want to share a personal experience with you, something I just went through which changed me. As I examine the experience, both privately and with you, I see more and more how my understanding of the Feldenkrais Method prepared me for the moment and enabled me to make sense of it.

When I’m not writing about Feldenkrais, I’m playing or teaching the piano. I’ve been a pianist since I was five or six years old. As I approach my thirty-fifth birthday, I’m looking at thirty years of piano playing. In that time, I managed to do nearly everything a pianist can do: teach, write, perform, accompany, play in a jam session. There was only one thing I had never done on the piano: audition.

At the age of 18, when most high-school seniors who are serious about music are auditioning for Juliard, Eastman, Curtis and other noteworthy schools, I was applying to be an English major at Oberlin College. I probably could have auditioned for Oberlin’s conservatory, but no one was encouraging me to do so, and deep down I had serious doubts about my ability to play the piano at an acceptable level.

I spent five years at Oberlin hanging on the fringes of the music-school, playing the piano in the practice rooms, but never daring to share my playing with anyone else. As time went on and I spent more and more time around the truly gifted pianists who study at Oberlin, both my desire and my fear of piano-playing increased.

I meant to conquer that fear by coming back to Atlanta and making it as a professional pianist without a degree in music. Somehow, by luck and persistence, I entered the niche of ballet accompanying and within a few years I was playing twenty hours a week for the Atlanta Ballet Centre for Dance Education. As a musician I had done pretty well, and I was pleased with myself.

Once I got married and began having children, it was a different story. Suddenly the money I could earn and the hours I had to keep as a pianist were no longer working for me. Hoping to earn a decent living in the corporate world, I tried my hand in television advertising and medical administration, but it became apparent to me and my wife that I’d go crazy if I didn’t stay involved with music. Unfortunately, my options in that field were continually being curtailed by my lack of a bachelor’s in music. So we decided that I would return to school to get the music degree I had skipped a dozen years ago.

There was just one problem: To get into school, I would have to...audition. Ah, yes. Forgot about that. After all this time, I’d still never had to audition on the piano. I would be required to memorize about twenty minutes of difficult piano music and perform it for faculty members who knew how it should sound.

Although the prospect terrified me, I made the commitment to myself and to my family to go through with the audition and to do it well. I spent nine months working on the music I would play, learning it, getting it up to speed, memorizing it and polishing it. About a week before the audition, the music was ready, but I wasn’t.

I was terrified. For reasons I could hardly understand, this audition was some kind of passage that I had always avoided and which now I was going to have to traverse. It held some kind of an inner test, more significant than the outer test of performing. I was deathly afraid I would be unable to represent the music in front of people as well as I could play it by myself. Already in that last week, I was seeing my abilities start to deteriorate. I was making mistakes that I had never made before, forgetting parts of pieces that I had long ago committed to memory, and losing the confidence that I could complete my task.

It took a few pep-talks from a few worthy friends to help me through the last few days so that I could approach the music faculty of Georgia State University and play my audition. My desire was to play my music perfectly for them, so that I would never have to wonder about my abilities again. My fear was that I would self-destruct in front of them, make a big mistake, lose my place, and be unable to continue. Neither happened. I played my audition, made a number of small mistakes along the way, but managed to get through the music fairly well.

Something changed in me that morning, something very deep and powerful, and it wasn’t what I expected. I had hoped to go in and prove to myself once and for all that I was great. Instead, I found that there was this thing called “good enough.” Even though I had lots of places where I needed improvement, my performance was still acceptable to the task at hand.

This was a revelation to me because I have always lived my life as though I needed to be perfect in order to be worthy of anyone’s notice, that if I wasn’t perfect, I had darn well better be getting there. Life always seemed like a a slippery rock that I was always trying to scramble to the top of. If I ever stopped to rest I’d slide to the bottom. Instead I found that I could count myself as a worthy human being as I was now.

This is a central idea in Feldenkrais: improvement is always possible, but only with an awareness of who you are in the present. Such awareness is so difficult because we are often sad or angry in the moment and do not want to experience these feelings. Perhaps we avoid really looking at our weight, our clumsiness, our potential to hurt others, and instead try to jump straight to fixing these things, becoming a skinny person, a super athelete, a saint. Having defined ourselves as inadequate, we are doomed to keep that identity because, until we achieve our unattainable goal of perfection, we will always see our current state as one of failure. The sensation of inadequacy permeates our lives. It drives us forward even while it keeps us back. We seem to progress, but we never get anywhere. No matter how much we achieve, we remain fat, clumsy, mean.

Feldenkrais is an antidote to this way of thinking. As we do a Feldenkrais lesson, we move slowly and gently, stopping in our movement long before we reach the point of failure. We get so interested in what we are doing, and so curious about how we do it, that we no longer care about the goal. Suddenly, whatever we are able to do is good enough, even while one can see how it would be possible to do it better. We arise from the floor with a profound feeling of serenity, hopeful for the future, but satisfied with the present.

We can reach this state because the lessons themeselves are abstract. Movements done for their own sake are beautiful, and as we make the movements we see beauty in ourselves. Sometimes we cry when we see how beautiful we are because we never dared believe we could be worthwhile and still be so flawed. This is a powerful moment, and it happens again and again in the lessons.

As we learn to accept ourselves as moving, learning beings, we take this experience into our lives and our relationships, and suddenly we are living a different life, a life in which there is time enough for all things, in which we are good enough but not perfect, and in which we can allow other people to be wherever they are on their path as well. Surely this is a better world.