Volume 3, Number 9/10, October/ November 2004 (double issue – two articles!)

Quote from Moshe: “Organic learning is individual, and without a teacher who is striving for results within a certain time, it lasts as long as the learner keeps at it. This organic learning is slow, and unconcerned with any judgment as to the achievement of good or bad results.” The Elusive Obvious, p. 30

Trying to Learn, Learning Not to Try

I’m going to share something personal about myself with you. I have always had a serious fear that I am unlovable. To stave off that fear, I learned to excel in as many things as I could. That way I’d never have to feel like someone could reject me. But I’ve come up short, no matter how I’ve tried. Never satisfied, never happy, I was chugging along knowing full well that this ceaseless quest for invulnerability was unattainable.

Yet I was unable to drop it. Like a slot-machine player, I kept on feeding my obsession, trying harder to seal off every chink of my armor so that no one could find me unlovable or undesirable in any way.

Only recently have I found relief. As I have re-entered school and become twice as busy, there simply isn’t time to try to be perfect in every way. So I’ve had to decide to polish the most important things and to just do well-enough on the rest of them to get credit. That sounds obvious enough, doesn’t it?

It took me a long time to learn to do this. What finally made the difference to me, so that I could begin to live another way, was a related truth that is also obvious to many others: People will love and hate me no matter what I do to influence them. I could work all my life to be loved and still people are going to decide for themselves how they feel. I have influence over the outcome, but not control. Realizing that fundamental truth, I was finally able to let go a little bit, to realize that I didn’t want to be perfect all the time, that I didn’t have to be perfect all the time, and that even if I could be, I still wouldn’t be in control of other peoples’ feelings.

Why am I telling you all of this? What does it have to do with human learning, functionality and the price of a mat? Well, I’ll tell you.

Imagine you’re an athlete. A very good one. Olympic, say. You spend all your time trying to be the best at what you do. In fact, your goal is to be as close to perfect as you can. Not so you’ll be loved, but so you’ll win. You force your body, your mind, your spirit to bow to your will so that you can become the perfect machine to accomplish your goal.

But then you hurt yourself. Not just a sprain, but a recurring injury that plagues you throughout your training. It goes away, it comes back. You try to will it away, to understand every medical detail about it, but it has a will of its own. It will keep you from excelling, from being your best. What can you do?

Athletes can make the worst Feldenkrais clients. It’s because they “know” everything about their sport. They can’t admit to any gap in their knowledge because if they did, it would be the same as admitting they’ve been lax in their pursuance of their passion. And heaven forbid they shouldn’t know something about the way to use their body in the service of their sport.

Injured or healthy, athlete or schlep, we can all improve from where we are. Injured or healthy, athlete or schlep, we must let go of what we know is “true” to learn something new. Most athletes will find this too threatening. At best, they can augment their knowledge. But to throw it all away, even hypothetically, even temporarily, is too much to ask. Insane. Suicide.

Here’s where my confession comes in. What if I told them, and you, that your nervous system operates on a different level than your conscious level? What if I said that you can interact with your nervous system consciously, but you can’t control it? Learning is not like drinking. When you drink, you pull on the liquid and it goes in. When you learn, the process is much more interesting, more like a dance, in the literal and metaphorical sense, between you and the things you’re trying to understand. Your nervous system is like a friend or a lover. You have influence over it, but you can’t control it.

If you’re learning a sport, and you pay attention to yourself as you move, you might feel something new and recognize it as such. Based on those feelings, you might discover a new direction to move. Then your nervous system may put the pieces together for you the way it’s designed to, and suddenly you’re using more of yourself to achieve your goal. In fact, you’re using so much more of yourself that just yesterday you didn’t know about the part you added!

You can’t decide to learn this information. You can’t read about what you’re missing in a book (or even in this newsletter!) The only way to learn anything is to give up the idea that your knowledge is complete. That’s often a very distressing sensation, a sinking feeling, a return to the vulnerability of ignorance and the helplessness of childhood.

You want so much to just “take” the learning, to force yourself to get it, as if trying to understand this information is enough. But you’ll never get anywhere that way. You have to realize that sometimes trying prevents you from getting the thing you’re trying for. When you try, you’re using all you know about something in order to achieve. But if you do this, you operate on the assumption that you know all you need to know. You assume that success is only a matter of putting forth enough effort.

Imagine, though, if you wanted to sail and you didn’t know anything about sailing besides where to sit in the boat? You could try to sail all day, but no matter how hard you try, your sailing wouldn’t improve. In fact, by trying to sail without admitting what you don’t know, you would be blocking your opportunity to get that information. All your energy would be spent going the wrong direction.

Feldenkrais lessons are designed to help you circumvent that trying habit. Often the lessons pose a challenge to you that is so overwhelming that you will have to decide you can’t do it. Then you stop trying. You begin to focus on the questions the practitioner is asking, you follow the process, you start paying attention to seemingly unrelated things. And you find, sometimes without knowing how, that you learn.

It’s not all up to our will. Everything we want is not within our immediate reach. There’s a process involved, over which we have influence, but not control. What we must do is discover the dance, the subtle interaction between our conscious mind, our curiosity, and that in us that makes the quantum leap. We cannot take the first step until we admit we cannot dance alone.

What Side Are You On?

Have you ever seen Lyle Lovett’s face? Very interesting looking. What makes it so compelling (or perhaps disturbing) is simply that it’s not symmetrical. We prefer to look at symmetry in ourselves and in others; studies have shown that we find people who are more symmetrical more attractive and may even have a greater desire to bear children with them. Take a look around you. How many things in the room in which you’re sitting are designed symmetrically? Your printer? Your desk?

You’d think with all our love of symmetry that its attainment would answer all our prayers. But think again. We may desire symmetry, we may strive towards it, and occasionally we may design it into something. But we rarely go so far as to insist on perfect mirroring of left and right. If you see a picture of Lyle Lovett with half of his face reflected onto the other half so he’s symmetrical, it isn’t really appealing. It’s rather artificial.

Symmetry is necessary but not sufficient to fulfill our lives. If you think about our bodies, they appear symmetrical on the outside. Most of us have a body where one side mirrors the other side. The differences tend to be in the details, especially in the face. But symmetry tends to serve us only in that it allows us to both move and balance. Beyond that, its usefulness has limits.

In fact, we are designed not only to be attracted to symmetry but also to strive against it. We tend towards being right- or left-handed, not because there is something wrong with one side or the other, but because it is useful for us to choose a side. We do certain kinds of learning on our dominant side that would be too confusing if we had a choice. Ambidextrous people may experience such confusion.

The beauty of Moshe Feldenkrais’s work is that he incorporates the idea of symmetry and the striving against symmetry in his lessons. Moshe figured out that when one learns a new movement on one side, one may transfer that skill to the other side without the same degree of effort. Even more interesting, if a series of movements on one side makes one more comfortable on that side, causing the ribs to drop for instance, one need not necessarily go through all the same motions on the other side for the corresponding ribs on the other side to drop.

We serve ourselves well when we learn to differentiate between one side and the other, not only in movement, but in stillness, as we lie upon the floor. How does the left wrist lay, compared to the right? Do the thumbs stick out at the same angle? Does the wrist arch on one side but not the other?

Learning to take note of these differences without doing anything about them is a very valuable skill. It’s the attention we are able to pay to the difference between the sides that clues our nervous system in and begins to change us. The better our attention and the more refined our differentiation, the more changes we may discover. In fact, you may very well find that things you were able to do only on one side, like using a fork, you can suddenly do on the other, simply as a result of recognizing the difference between the way you use each hand.

A couple of years ago I challenged some of you to go to a restaurant and do everything backwards, starting with desert, using the opposite hand to eat, drink and so forth. A few people tried it and wrote in that they had experienced a strange sense of calm and well-being. What happened? The quality of their attention changed. When we stop thinking in our one-dimensional what-am-I-going-to-do-next mode and start paying attention to the infinite dimensions inside ourselves, we find ourselves so fascinated that our conscious mind goes quiet. What we “know” suddenly becomes irrelevant. In this state, great changes can occur. We have access to learning we haven’t made use of since we were infants.

There are lots of opportunities to explore the differences between your sides. One of the most powerful is in determining which eye is your dominant eye. Can you begin to look more through the other eye without closing one of them? Does that change your vision?

Which way do you roll off the bed? Is it always the same? When you put on your underwear or your pants, what leg goes first? Any sense of why? Can you imagine putting in the other leg first without actually doing it?

Is it harder to imagine than you thought? Wondering why?

The choices we’ve made for one side or the other range from genetics to patterns of abuse to necessity. What makes the difference in our lives is recognizing that they are choices, and not merely the situations we find ourselves in. If something as basic as your handedness can be some kind of choice, what more profound choices can you make in your life?

©2004 Adam Cole