Volume 5, Number 1, February 2006

Quote From Moshe: “Concentration on the aim may cause excessive tension. [On the other hand] it is easy to shift your attention from the aim of a simple action to the means of its performance and to carry out the latter. Awareness Through Movement, p. 82

Our Fifth Year!

It’s hard to believe we’ve made it this far! Or maybe it isn’t hard to believe. Life is so full of things to become aware of. Why shouldn’t there be a forum for expressing our appreciation and suggestions for improving our capacity to appreciate? In any event, thank you for reading all these years (I can actually say that) and, God willing, we’ll keep Possibilities open.

Adam Cole’s Novel, Myth of Magic, Renewed!

About five years ago my novel, The Myth of Magic, went on sale. Last year I took it off the market and revised it. Now, after seventeen years of work, Myth of Magic, the complete novel, is finally ready! You can read the first seven pages of it at https://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp?bookid=28978

My Strength, My Weakness

I’ve discovered something over the years related to teaching: If someone is really good at something without having ever had to work at it, then they’ll be generally unable to teach it or even explain how they do it. In contrast, the people who have been forced to learn something from the beginning in order to achieve mastery are able to teach it very well. So the piano prodigy will not be your best piano teacher; in fact, the best players may not be the best teachers and vice-versa.

What about assessing ourselves in this way? What do you do naturally? What do you consider to be your greatest strength? I’d advise you to also consider it your greatest weakness, because you may have little to no idea how you do what you do and that means you cannot adapt that mastery to new situations. You’re like a shark: sleek, efficient, deadly. But if you get taken out of the water, you haven’t got a prayer.

Ideally we don’t want to be fish out of water. It can be humiliating at the least, and dangerous at most, to be in a situation where we are not up to the challenge we are facing. There are two common solutions to this problem, and, sadly, most of us adopt the first. That first solution is to remain in an environment where we can avoid challenge. You’ll see this often among academics who have spent their life mastering a very specific field and hole themselves away in a university. They rarely have to leave their comfort zone. We’re all guilty of this to some extent, and it’s no great crime. We want to be in an environment where we can do the most good with the least amount of effort.

But it’s a principle of Feldenkrais that creating a challenge to the system is essential for growth and even for survival. So assuming we want to put ourselves in a situation where we will have to learn in order to survive, such as the doctoral-level mathematician who decides to act in a play for the first time, what’s the best way to overcome our obstacles?

This is a very human question. Often we’re put in a challenging situation that is much more mundane than the above example. It’s rarely a matter of choice. We’re fired from our thirty-year job and must learn people-skills to get a new position. We lose the use of our legs and must develop the skills to operate a wheelchair. Whatever the situation, the common element is learning in order to maximize our potential to survive and to thrive.

In the Feldenkrais Method we address this question deliberately, in a very abstract way. We pose a biomechanical challenge to ourselves and attempt to solve it. But what really makes the learning is the fact that we observe ourselves in the process. It’s this metalearning that enables us to recognize where our self-imposed limits are so that we can make a choice to work around them.

For me, the process involves understanding our greatest weaknesses. I’ll give you an example from my life. Long ago I stopped relying on my eyes for acquiring most useful information. I used my vision for reading (though I read with some difficulty) and for identifying objects. But I relied much more on hearing, touch, and a certain intellectual process to get through the day than others might have. I couldn’t remember faces at all. I’d forget what someone was wearing as soon as they left my vision.

In my barebones functional approach to vision, color and depth were largely irrelevant, and many details, such as the interlacing web of tree-branches, were overwhelming to me and were filtered out. For a long time, I neither knew nor cared about these deficits. I assumed what I had was enough to get me through. I relied on my strengths and stayed away from uncomfortable situations.

But in my Feldenkrais training I found myself having to address these vision deficits. This was, as you can imagine, a very stressful prospect, and it took me a number of years to navigate it. I have published several articles about the subject (My Eyes Uncover My Hands, and Mathematics and Feldenkrais: Discovering the Relationship) for those who want to read more about my process.

The relevance of my vision-journey to this journal entry involves my use of my vision, as one of my weaknesses, to further the cause of my learning on a day-to-day basis. Every morning when I walk my dog, I take note of what I can see. By that I don’t mean the objects I see, I mean rather how well I am seeing. Am I sensing depth well? Do the objects in my field of vision form a nice picture or is it a jumble of unrelated objects? Can I follow moving objects well or do my eyes skip around?

By taking note of my visual state, I get a quick meter of my entire state. My ability to see on any given day is much less about my eyes than it is about my mind. My vision is a kind of gauge for the level of awareness I am experiencing everywhere. I can recognize greater extremes of quality within it than I would for something like my hearing which varies only from good to great.

Once I notice the quality of my vision, I can start to explore other parts of my awareness: my inner sense of space, my breathing, my gait as I walk. As my awareness of these things improves I find that my vision will change as well, all by itself, as a reflection of my overall improvement. Again, my vision becomes a very convenient meter for the changes I’m experiencing all over.

I suggest that you find your own weakness and use it in a similar way. It may be your patience-level, something about the way you walk or breathe, or the quality of resonance in your voice. Remember not to judge this weakness or try to fix it. If you do, it will no longer serve as a meter. Take stock of it, then do whatever you do to bring yourself to a higher state: Yoga, Alexander, Tai-Chi, Feldenkrais, a good swim. As you progress, use your weakness as a monitor of your change. It’s a very pleasant experience to watch a liability improve all by itself!

I firmly believe our strengths can be our weaknesses and our weaknesses can be our strengths. In the end, strength and weakness are two parts of a greater whole, and can no longer be used as means to judge ourselves, to put ourselves down or lift ourselves up. We see ourselves as whole.