Volume 4, Number 6, June 2005

Quote from Moshe: “Actions that are hard to carry out…will never become part of his normal daily life; as he gets older he will lose his ability to carry them out at all. This does not mean that we should avoid everything that seems difficult and never use our will power to overcome obstacles, but that we should differentiate clearly between improvement of ability and sheer effort for its own sake.” Awareness Through Movement, p. 57

Physics Made Easy

If you hate physics, then by the time you finish this article you’ll love it. If you love physics, by the time you finish this article you’ll love The Feldenkrais Method. Why would I make such bold claims? Because I’m about to tell you what you may always have suspected: you’re capable of much more than you’ve previously been able to accomplish. What’s often missing is good physics.

Before you run screaming, let me say that you won’t need to understand a single formula to get through this issue of Possibilities. You won’t have to memorize the biography of Isaac Newton. There isn’t going to be a test at the end. That’s the beauty of what I’m going to tell you: what you need to know you can practically learn in your sleep!

As a piano player, I’ve known for a long time that very small people can make very large sounds at the piano, and what’s more, they can do it without making huge movements. A good young performer can play very loudly without pounding at the piano with a baseball bat. When you’re learning how to get to the next level as a player it can be very frustrating to see the phenomenal things other players can do, especially when those other players are six years old. You stare and stare, but you can’t really see what’s making all that sound.

My teacher clued me in. He described the body as a series of levers. Okay, pop-quiz: What’s a lever? If you’re thinking of that stick coming out of the wall that you pull on, and Frankenstein’s Monster rises up out of the floor, you’re only half right. A lever is something you pull on, but it’s more useful than simply tripping a switch. A lever is a simple machine; it multiplies force. If you want to roll a boulder along the ground and you stick your fingers under a convenient hole and lift, you’ll very likely strain your back before you even budge the thing. But if you take a very long, thin rod and stick it in the hole, then put a smaller rock under the rod, close to the boulder, so you end up with a lopsided see-saw, you’ll discover that when you push down on the long end of the rod, the short end will go up and the rock will move.

It’s almost magical. You’re no stronger, but now you can move the rock! It’s because you’ve applied physical principles and used your strength more efficiently with the help of the lever. Archimedes, the first great discoverer of leverage, said that if he had a long enough stick, and a place to stand, he could actually move the entire planet Earth!

You can move the rock even easier if you set up a series of levers: one lever pushes another lever pushes a third lever pushes the rock. Each lever adds mechanical advantage so that you get more and more force for your push. It sounds too good to be true, but you can do seemingly impossible tasks if you know how to apply physics.

Back to my teacher. Remember his insight? The body is a series of levers! Each joint, starting from the largest to the smallest, that is from the hips to the fingers, acts as a lever to multiply force. Our bones are designed to withstand tremendous stress when compressed along their lengths, and our muscles are best used when they apply the strength of the bones in physically advantageous ways.

Back to the piano: A good pianist learns to transmit force from where their sitzbones touch the bench, through the spine, into the two large lever systems known as the arms, down a series of ever-decreasing levers we call the hands and fingers. If I wanted to make a large sound at the piano using just the fingers, I’d have to pummel the keys with such force that I’d most likely break my poor little digits. But with proper application of force through an unbroken chain of levers stretching all the way back to my bottom, I can make a lot of noise with hardly a twitch.

So. As always, you’re wondering at this point: Where does Feldenkrais fit in? Ah. Glad you asked.

It’s simple enough to describe the body as a series of levers, but making use of those levers is anything but simple. If you’ve ever wondered why we don’t have a robot like C3PO walking around, it’s because planning the “simple” act of walking, that is, using the body’s levers to balance and propel our significant mass around the room, requires such a vastly complex series of computations as to be unmanageable, even with today’s computing power. In short, the mind is absolutely amazing; it does all that for us.

But we’re human, and we have ways of interfering with our minds. Unlike dogs and cats and mountain goats, by age 4 we start getting smart enough to question our own programming. For many reasons, we often interfere with it to such an extent that we add unnecessary computational demands to our minds. “I want to walk, but I want to do it in this strange way that allows me to look more macho.” “I want to walk, but I don’t want anyone to see my butt jiggle.” The result is that what should be a subconscious process becomes a very conscious, and very imperfect one. We create problems with our lever systems, interrupting them with unnecessary muscular effort. We think we’re “trying harder,” but we’re really getting less out of our bodies.

Feldenkrais lessons bring us back to physical principles. They are designed to reintroduce us to effortless movement that springs from perfect application of physical principles on our bodies. This works even if we are “handicapped.” We can take our “imperfect” bodies and make the most of them, applying our force in the direction that our unorthodox frame requires.

But because it takes far too much effort to consciously make all these calculations, Feldenkrais leaves most of the work to the nervous system. When we do the lessons, we get into a state where we pay attention to what we feel. As human animals, we don’t need to control every aspect of our movement; we only need to steer. The more attuned we are to the complete experience of moving, sensing and experiencing ourselves in space, the better our bodies will respond. We take full advantage of our mechanical miracles this way without having to write out the formulas each time.

Does that sound great? It’s like having a little physicist inside of you, making adjustments to your machine based on your desires. Of course, if you’d rather write out the formula each time…