Volume 4, Number 1, February 2005

Quote from Moshe: “…when your attention and awareness are improved, in a few moments, your judgment will be better, as your sensitivity will increase with the reduction of your efforts. The situation proposed is realizable by either sex, fat or emaciated, old or young, athletes as well as the not-too-severely crippled.” The Elusive Obvious, p. 105

Our Third Anniversary Issue!

This marks the beginning of our fourth year serving the greater Feldenkrais community. As always, I’m thrilled at the large and growing number of subscribers we’ve got. I love getting your questions and I can’t wait to tell you more about the promise of this work each month. Keep telling people about this site and keep in touch with me! Best of all, keep learning.

Welcome FeldenkraisAtlanta.com!

We’re so pleased to announce a new arrival to the Feldenkrais web community, a most welcome addition to those seeking to find out about this work on the web. It’s Atlanta Guild Certified Practitioner Louise Runyon’s website, FeldenkraisAtlanta.com! We’ll be interviewing Louise in a future issue. Until then, check out the link at the bottom of this newsletter! Congratulations, Louise!

Flexibility Is More Than Meets the Head

Would you like to be able to put your foot behind your head? Sure…who wouldn’t? Seriously, though. Such flexibility as Yoga disciples cultivate is within the reach of many of us who believe we are hopelessly stiff. Often the ability to contort ourselves has a lot less to do with our muscles than it does our ability to organize ourselves the right way, bend in places we forgot we can bend, and so forth. It has to be experienced to be believed.

Let me demonstrate backwards. Can you imagine someone unaware that they can bend their arm? Let’s say that physically there’s nothing wrong with the elbow joint, but the person simply doesn’t recognize that it’s a joint at all. They always keep their arm stiff. If you ask them to put their hand behind their head, they make an effort like a sqeezing in the shoulder. They get nowhere, and they can’t imagine for the life of them how anyone could do such a thing.

Instead of lengthening the back of the arm and contracting the inside of the arm, they try to contract both sides of the arm at once. You can do that if you want to see how it might feel. Stick your arm straight out, imagine you can’t bend the arm at the elbow, then try and think of “another way” to bend it. You’ll grunt and groan, twist and pull, but, of course, you won’t find another way.

As crazy as it might sound, this is precisely the kind of situation others face when attempting to put the foot behind the head. Instead of the elbow, the troublesome joint is the hip. Those who can easily reach their heads with their feet (that is, most little children) have enormous freedom in their hips. For most of us, those pathways are still there and have simply been forgotten. Feldenkrais created a series of lessons to remind us of what we have to do to configure ourselves to move in this way easily. I myself, who still cannot touch my toes without bending my knees, have learned how to get my foot to my forehead. It can be learned (though not forced).

So we can use the Feldenkrais Method to improve our flexibility. But such improvement is really not the true gain of our work. Being more flexible in and of itself is not that valuable. Nobody really cares if you can touch your foot to your head. Often while chasing these accomplishments we become blind to the process behind them. That process is the real value of learning to touch our foot to our forehead.

What do we learn while we are lying on the floor, foot in hand, wiggling around, rolling from our back to our side like some hapless infant? How about patience? How about recognizing the very thing I’m talking about, that getting the foot to the head really isn’t that important, even if Dr. Feldenkrais “wants” you to do it? When we slow ourselves down with a difficult, complicated task, we see the importance of filling in all the space between “can’t” and “can.” It’s the map, the journey, of our lives. It’s the definition of growth and maturity, as opposed to haste and short-sightedness, which we all long for but so rarely address here in the United States.

Even more than a physical flexibility, we learn a temporal flexibility. That is, sometimes we can reach our foot to our heads, other times we can’t. Is there something wrong with that? Should we be able to “perform” every day, exactly the same way? Maybe some days we are farther away from our goal than others, and we gain something from the extra distance we have to travel. Maybe other days we spend all our time on just that extra distance, not even coming close to where we were a few days ago, but fascinated nonetheless by some tiny detail which opens up a world of inner peace to us. Maybe realizing where we are that day is more important than knowing where we want to be.

Flexibility, like strength, like health, is a concept often relegated to a static idea: You are or you aren’t. But these concepts are really continuums, not isolated concepts. Strength is meaningless without a task that requires a certain amount of work; how healthy is “healthy enough?” Strength, health, and flexibility are useful only in relation to all the other aspects of our lives, including the deeper, more abstract ones. That’s the true value of the Feldenkrais Method, offering us an embodied experience of the total interrelatedness of the many facets of our lives. We experience flexibility by learning that we can reach parts of ourselves we never thought we could.