Volume 3, No. 3

The Silence of Learning

Quote from Moshe: “Organic traits derive from [a person’s] biological inheritance, and their expression is essential for the maximum functioning of the organism. As the trend to uniformity within our society creates innumerable conflicts with individual traits, adjustments to society can be solved either by the suppression of the individual’s organic needs, or by the individual’s identification with the society’s needs...” Awareness Through Movement, p.6

When I was a kid I used to imagine strange things. One of my strangest ideas was this: What if there was a sound that had been going on since time began? We heard it from the moment we were conceived and we continue to hear it until we die. Because we never experience life without this sound, we don’t “hear” it as a sound. For us, silence is the absence of every sound except this one. Even our instruments for detection of sound would not register this sound, because they would be calibrated for silence with this sound in the background.

One day, the sound stops.

We hear everything differently because this sound is not there anymore. When the other sounds cease, we hear true silence for the first time. What would that experience be like? Would we be able to process it? Would we still be able to hear?

Something like this has probably already happened to you. It’s called “learning.” By that I don’t mean “adding to your store of information.” I don’t mean learning as in “I learned the name of my supervisor today.” I’m talking about undergoing an experience that takes away one of your fundamental assumptions.

Maybe you are a German in pre-world-war-II Germany and you grow up with Nazis all around, telling you that Jews are not humans, but a kind of animal. So you do not question when they are rounded up and sent away, perhaps to their death, because after all, they are being treated according to the kind of creatures they are. Then one day you are petitioned by a Jewish couple to take in their baby, to hide it from the Nazis, to rescue it from certain death. You are a good person, and you find you cannot refuse.

Then you discover that this baby is a human child. How can that be? It’s a Jewish baby. But also a human. That means...Jews are humans...

Suddenly a fundamental assumption is shattered. You never questioned it because you didn’t realize there was any doubt. It was part of your landscape, something solid, a fact like gravity. Only now you discover you have been standing on a lie. You can no longer accept the same things or live the same way again.

What if you are a manager at a small warehouse, a single woman, divorced, living alone, getting by all right. Your days are pretty ordinary; you go to work, you come home, you watch some TV, you go to bed.

You like to read bestsellers and romance novels during your lunch hour. You wish you could be one of those people who write those books, but you know that’s an unrealistic dream. You don’t know how people do it. You have no talent for writing, yourself, and no imagination. When you try to think of a story, you come up with nothing at all. You go through your life content to read other people’s stories.

One day while on a business trip, you accidentally wander into a writer’s convention at your hotel. Not having anything to do, you sit and listen to the writers talk. One of them describes how they come up with their ideas, how they write down the things that come into their mind and then use those things in their stories.

You have always had things that come into your mind, too, strange ideas that aren’t about your job, your meals or TV. You’ve always assumed they were stupid, pointless, meaningless things. You never listened to them, because you never recognized them as having any value. No one ever suggested that these things you think about were just the same as the things the writers think about.

Suddenly it dawns on you that if all it takes is to simply listen to the voice in your head, to decide it might have value rather than be nonsensical garbage, then you might be able to do what those writers do. You begin to write things that you think down. This changes the way you relate to everything in your world.

Now let’s say you’re a person whose back hurts. It’s always been hurting, ever since you can remember. Even when you were a child, it hurt on and off. Now it hurts all the time. You get tired sitting, and you get tired standing, and your back aches either way. You’ve tried pain-relievers. You’ve tried exercise. You’ve gone to see an orthopedic surgeon. No one has any good ideas for you. So you suffer, do your best to make it through each day, and assume this is what the rest of your life will be like.

One day, you hear about something called The Feldenkrais Method which is supposed to help people when nothing else has worked. You are skeptical, but you’ve got nothing to lose, so you go to a class.

You lie down on the floor and you follow instructions that seem to have nothing to do with you. You’re instructed to wiggle this way and that, to notice something about the length of your legs, and finally to make some movement that you can’t quite pull off. “What does this have to do with my back?” you wonder.

Then you get up and your back doesn’t hurt anymore.

Why? What the blazes just happened to you? Was it magic? Was it the mystical energy field created by the Feldenkrais instructor which enveloped you and rearranged your vertebrae?

No. You learned something. You may not know what it was yet. It may take you months to discover. Your back-pain may recur and then vanish again a number of times, seemingly arbitrarily, before you finally notice a connection between the muscles in the front of your body and the pain in your back.

You find that when the muscles in your chest, abdomen and hips are contracted in an organized way, your back can lengthen, and your pain vanishes. You don’t like to stand this way; It’s “slouching,” and you always thought slouching was bad posture. But over time you come to realize that when you thought you were “standing straight,” like your mother always told you to do, you were really trying to contract two sets of muscle groups on opposite sides of the body, and that caused incredible strain.

Once you realize that you are happier standing in this new way, that your assumptions about good posture were just that, assumptions and not rules, then you begin to wonder what else about yourself you have never questioned, if only because nobody ever told you it was acceptible to question them.

You sign up for another class.

-------------------

Ask Adam

Question: “Can you do exercise while you’re learning Feldenkrais?” Ivana Noe

Answer: Typically, our exercise routines often reinforce habitual ways of thinking and moving. Weight-training and cardiovascular workouts are great, but you may be working harder at them than you need to be. Perhaps you are strengthening the very muscles that cause you discomfort. If your back is not flexible and you make your stomach very strong, you may wind up with a perpetually sore back. Should you stop doing sit-ups? Maybe you should stop until you’ve learned how to expand your back while you’re doing them.

There’s nothing wrong with exercise, if it’s done with awareness. Feldenkrais lessons are a great place to learn to use more of yourself, body and mind, when you exercise.

Do you have a question for Adam? Write him at adam@feldenkraisinfo.com. The most interesting questions will be posted in Possibilities.

© 2004 Adam Cole