Volume 3, No

Volume 3, No. 7, August 2004

Quote from Moshe: “The improvement of awareness is preferable to any attempt to overcome instinctive drives.” Awareness Through Movement, p. 173

Notice Less, Notice More

I have ample opportunity to practice my own personal work in The Feldenkrais Method. I do it when I’m out walking.

Last week I was on vacation at the very same beach where I had my ocean-revelation two years ago (see Possibilities, vol. 1 number 7 in the archives!). I wasn’t doing very well. Here I was, in a beautiful place, away from the stresses of my daily life, and yet I was still feeling tired and unhappy. I thought to myself, “Why isn’t my Feldenkrais thinking working wonders for me like it should? Why can’t I Feldenkrais my way out of this funk?”

I was staining to notice the things that were causing me problems. I tried very hard to find the place in my back where I was tensing, wracked my brain for the things I had previously learned which had always helped me before, searched earnestly for the element that I was overlooking which would release me from my pain. Then I noticed how hard I was trying, and that the effort I was exerting to release myself from stress was itself stressing me out.

I changed my tactic. Okay, I thought. Instead of looking for the solution the way I’d look for a grain of sand on a patterned quilt, I’ll simply ask myself “What I am seeing? I don’t want to do anything thing with the information. I just want to know, where is my attention?”

That was the right question. Everything changed for me as I left my trying behind and simply became more attentive. I relaxed and enjoyed the sensations which now crowded in, images of the sky and the people, the smell of the sea in my nose, the sound of the waves lapping against the shore. I relaxed and walked easier.

For a moment, everything was great. I felt like a Feldenkrais person again. Then, all too quickly, I started sinking back into the funk. But this time I began to understand why I was losing my euphoria: So much information was coming in that I couldn’t really maintain this process. Just a few seconds after my epiphany I was moving back into habitual thought and stress as a way of filtering out the overwhelming information..

I realized at that moment the fundamental genius of The Feldenkrais Method which makes it more useful than meditation in a world where there is precious little time or incentive to practice emptying the mind. Despite the benefits of doing so, Moshe knew that it would be far too much for a person to simply notice anything and everything for an extended period of time. Even if the experience brought them some change, they would most likely fail to recognize it and would not value it. They would not give the Method, or any other type of noticing, another try.

Moshe solved this problem by creating a lesson. In it, the practitioner does not simply ask clients to “notice,” but instead directs their attention to something specific that they can pay attention to. They may succeed or fail to maintain their focus on this one thing as time goes by, but if they falter, they need only return to one idea.

That one idea is invariably a function. We attempt some activity which is generally so abstract as to be devoid of any associations, such as lowering the leg to the side or bringing the chin to the knee. We are asked to notice how we do it. As the lesson progresses, we are given a number of variations which we may or may not recognize as being related to the original movement but which we nonetheless register in our nervous system. In the end we may be surprised by the improvement in our ability to touch our chin to our knee, or we may understand very well what has happened, but one thing is clear: We notice a difference.

Improving our ability to notice by experiencing a difference is the thing that cures us of our ills. We examine ourselves in movement because of its neutrality, because that is the way we first learned and so we cannot as easily interfere intellectually with what we experience. We cultivate a process of noticing rather than striving because the awareness is the elusive thing that prevents us from taking giant leaps forward; and we limit that noticing to something specific which we can improve upon in forty-five minutes.

The process has been refined and perfected in the thousands of lessons Feldenkrais left behind and in the training he offered the next generation of practitioners. We do not have to recreate the wheel to experience the kind of improvement Feldenkrais discovered when he first began experimenting on himself. We need neither meditate for fifty years nor become brilliant scientists in order to better understand ourselves and grow into happier, healthier people. We have the benefit of the guidance of a man who knew how to tell us exactly where to look and exactly how to keep us from staring.