Volume 4, Number 4, May 2005

Quote from Moshe: “A violinist, an actor, a writer, or whoever, who is not aware of the importance of awareness of the way one directs oneself in acting or functioning in life will stop growing the moment he achieves what he considers to be the right way of doing.” (The Elusive Obvious, p. 96)

Questioning Your Assumptions

When two people get married, they usually get along great for the first…year? Month? Week? It depends. Whatever…they usually get along at first. Why shouldn’t they? They’re married now; they’ve been looking forward to being together; love solves all problems.

Anyone that’s been married (or is still married) knows that I’m being facetious. Love only solves all problems if the people in love come up with the solutions. What happens after the first year, or the first month, or the first week, is the first fight.

Two people have very different ideas about something but, until now, they’ve always been able to ignore or work around their disagreements. At this point, however, they can no longer use the same strategies because things have changed in their lives. A conflict arises and when it becomes clear that neither side is going to give way, the result is pain of some kind; sadness, anger, fear, even physical harm.

Couples that make it know that the only way to resolve the fight and preserve the relationship is for each person to give ground. Not just any ground; sacred ground. Each person in the conflict has to examine a fundamental belief, usually an assumption, and decide whether it can be compromised. For some people this question is incredibly difficult, and its true resolution may not come for twenty years or more. Such questions include whether one can give on religious questions, whether one can do without certain types of foods, whether one has to be in control, and so forth.

What often happens is that one person in the argument surrenders something first, most likely believing that they will be hurt or damaged by doing so. If the relationship is to survive, the other person will recognize the surrender and will surrender something in return. When each person finds they have not been destroyed by their compromise, the relationship grows.

Each person in the argument usually believes they have surrendered first and that what they have given up is more precious, but it doesn’t really matter. What is important is that the fundamental need, the sacred idea, the unquestionable truth is examined. Even if the valuable thing is not done without, the act of questioning it may make dialogue and growth possible within a relationship.

We have relationships with ourselves as well, and strangely enough, even though there is only one of us, we often experience the same dynamic when we are in self-conflict. Something in our lives changes and we find ourselves in unfamiliar pain, physical or emotional. Whatever strategies we may have used to avoid or ignore the pain are no longer working. Now our choice is either to bear the pain, find an even better avoidance strategy, or make a change in our lives that will ease the pain.

The last option looks like the best one, but it’s the hardest. Making a change in our lives usually requires examining a fundamental assumption about what we need in order to live. It may be something as simple as giving up chocolate (simple, but not easy), or it may be something as complex as undergoing radical chemotherapy. Examining our sacred ground when in conflict with ourselves is no easier than when we are in conflict with a partner.

You can try to go cold turkey with the thing you want to eliminate, but your chances of relapse are high. You can get counseling, therapy, support from friends, but these things drag in a lot of excess baggage which can be hard to separate from the actual issue at hand. Moshe Feldenkrais figured out, though, that we can examine ourselves in a way that is more neutral, a way which limits conflicts so that they are perceivable and manageable: Our movement.

Often we embody our fundamental assumptions; they can be seen in the way we move, the way we carry ourselves, the way we physically interact with others. People with a fundamental belief that they deserve abuse often keep either a submissive posture or one that invites attack; they may keep their back bent, their head tucked, may hyperextend their knees or keep their throat bared.

Because of this correlation between identity and physicality, it is no easy task to examine one’s movement. Often people will set out to change an aspect of their physicality only to fail as they approach the change. The most obvious example of this is the person who cannot lose weight. When they begin to lose, they abandon their diets “temporarily” as a reward or a break, and in the end never return to their regimen. The result is that they stay in an unhappy place, but a familiar one.

Movement may not be a foolproof way of examining ourselves, but it is far more neutral than psychology. Recognizing that you is unwilling to move a certain way on the floor, even when that movement is quite possible for you, gives you an opportunity to make a change without having to think too much about it. When you move in a new way, you may get up from the floor feeling very different emotionally without knowing why. When your head and shoulder-blades rest in a different position without your having to make any discernable effort, you may feel very liberated.

It helps greatly to have a practitioner giving the instructions and, even better, making observations. One of the toughest things about examining your fundamental physical assumptions is recognizing them. If a practitioner suggests you do something that you never even would have thought to do, you may wind up feeling quite different.

My favorite story is about when Feldenkrais was training several hundred people in Amherst. He turned to a man and instructed him to bring his shoulder up to his ear. “I can’t,” replied the man, claiming the movement to be far too painful. Feldenkrais worked with him for a little while and slowly brought the man’s head down until it touched his shoulder. Then he lifted both head and shoulder up so that the man was in the proper position. The man realized where he was and said to Moshe, “You don’t understand. I can’t do this.”

He experienced a radical change so quickly that he was unable to question the assumption of whether the position was possible for him. He may have attached identities to that simple failure of movement, of his ability to do certain kinds of work, to pursue his youthful hobbies, even to make love. Once he was forced to see that he “could” do it, he had to reexamine the question and ask himself why he couldn’t do it before. What was stopping him?

When we come to a juncture in our self-examination where we see a way of moving, of standing, of sitting, that we always believed was “not allowed,” or “not possible,” we have a chance to rethink that assumption. The result can be more powerful than you might suspect. Everything we do with our bodies is connected in a fundamental way to our emotional and mental states and changing our posture, our movement, is a way of changing our relationship with ourselves, and even, perhaps, with others.