Volume 3, Number 8, September 2004

Quote from Moshe: “Verbalization can take the place of sensation and control. Of course, there is no difficulty at all in thinking the movement in words. One of the great disadvantages of the spoken language is the fact that it permits us to become estranged from our real selves to such an extent that we often have the mistaken belief that we have imagined something, or thought of something, where in reality we have only recalled the appropriate word…It is enough for [such] obstructive activity to become consciously aware, for a new flexibility to appear suddenly, a flexibility like that of an infant…continuous, comfortable, miraculous. The moment this happens the individual…has discovered mastery of himself, and realizes that the responsibility for his uncontrolled movements rests largely with himself.” Awareness Through Movement, p. 135

Better Than Experts

I once bragged in an article on Feldenkrais that I could teach anyone to improve their golf game even though I’ve never played a round in my life. Do you think that was an unsupportable claim? What if you were a ski-instructor and I told you I could improve your skiing, even though I am, at best, an infrequent skier myself? In fact, whether you believe me or not, using the Feldenkrais Method, I can help anyone improve in anything they do, whether I know a lot or a little about it.

Some of you are surely scoffing. These are the same people that will cut you off if they are paralyzed and you tell them they might be able to walk again, because the doctor already told them they wouldn’t. If it isn’t in their world, it doesn’t exist. I’m guilty of excluding new information myself, of course, out of suspicion. We all are. It’s that tendency in human beings that gives a Feldenkrais practitioner something to work with.

We go every day of our lives with two contradictory ideas in our heads. One is that we are complete, that everything we know or have access to is the sum total of the worthwhile knowledge in the universe. Whatever is left is either imaginary or unimportant. Very few of us get past this idea for any length of time. That’s because the other idea in our heads, that everything we know is fragile, that none of us truly are able to say what is right, that our world is based in the end solely on what we perceive and choose to believe, is so terrifying that we cannot face it. This idea causes us so much insecurity that we make a habit of clinging to its opposite, the “solidity of my world” tendency, to stay sane.

Nothing wrong with that. Who would fault us for having faith, if it gets us through the night? Who would blame us for walking across a bridge because we assume it won’t fall into the ravine? Life goes on and you have to do the best with what you have.

Ah, but what if it serves you to let go of that idea for a while…just a while! What if you’re a golf-pro and you decide that, after twenty years of study and play, you’ve pretty much seen every approach to the game worth seeing, and that everything else is just a rehash or a fake. You know you’re not perfect, and you’re still working on your game, but you don’t believe you have any fundamental discoveries to make about it anymore. It’s just high-end tweaking to try and drop that score another few strokes.

Then this Feldenkrais practitioner makes a claim in a magazine that he can improve your game, and you wonder what the heck he’s talking about? So you go in to see him and you find out, to your horror, that the guy’s never even played a round! What is this, some kinda scam? But you’ve already committed your time and money, so you figure, what can it hurt, and you lie down on his table.

What happens next is a discovery that the techniques you have learned to play golf are really just the leaves on branches you haven’t seen in a while, that golf isn’t about something you’ve been tweaking, like your grip. It’s really about something deeper, the extent to which you can sense yourself gripping.

You never figured there was any way to substantially change your game, because some people are “simply better” than others. You never dreamed that you might be able to improve your internal sense and start to differentiate between a movement that uses more of you and one that uses less of you, or that such a differentiation would make a difference in your game.

But it does! Suddenly, when you twist back to prepare your swing, you can feel that twist in more places in your spine. When you uncoil, you’re uncoiling in this wonderful sequential way, from your hips up through your ribs to your shoulders, wrists, hands, like a spring that’s been released. You’re no longer skipping part of your back, or failing to separate your shoulders from your ribcage, because you can feel that now! And when your club hits the ball after that elegant swing, the result of a perfect accelerated arc, the ball goes farther and straighter.

But that’s impossible! This guy knows nothing about golf.

The question is, how much do you know about it? You always assumed your world was complete, that what you didn’t know about golf wasn’t worth knowing. But when you discovered that golf, like baseball, like tennis, even like playing the violin, relies upon the elegant movement of the body mechanism, and that elegance is enhanced by a nervous system that is making use of new information. A twist, a roll, an arc, will be more perfect, the more you integrate new information about yourself into the movement.

Elegant movement is the essence of all physical activity. Even in something as mundane as sitting, our skeleton, the muscles that move it about, and the nervous system that controls it, are all designed to produce an optimal response to gravity and external stimuli such as a ball coming at you. All creatures are designed to move as efficiently as possible in their environment so that they can survive! It’s only the illusion of habit that gets in your way, the idea that you can intellectually know what you were designed merely to experience in the moment.

So many of us try to calculate and approximate complex movements like the swinging of a golf club which in reality are so complicated that only a supercomputer and an unhindered nervous system can take them apart successfully. If we had been forced to learn to walk in this way, by applying “lessons given to us from a pro,” by figuring out each little adjustment of the ribs, the legs, the spine, we never would have gotten off the ground! Instead, we learn to walk before anyone can really talk to us about it, using our unhindered sense of balance, orientation, and proprioception .

So the Feldenkrais practitioner woke you, the golf-pro, to the sense that the information which you have discounted or ignored internally is in fact useful and necessary. He led you to understand that the process of wordless questioning, a recreation through movement of childhood exploration, brings us back to natural, substantial improvement in anything we do. Even without a “professional hints” video.