Volume 5, Number 3-4, April-May 2006

Quote From Moshe: “Step-by-step subjective reality will give way to a slowly growing complex of sensations of a special kind – sensations which surrounding people approve or condemn…[Thus] Objective reality grows slowly, eroding subjective reality, and alongside this process, the curiosity to try anything once to see what happens, which we interpret as omnipotence, is diminished at the same time.” The Elusive Obvious, pp. 83-84

Feldenkrais and Me

When I was five years old, we had just gotten my grandmother’s 1926 baby-grand Steinway delivered. Having watched my father play a number of times, I sat down one morning and started banging random notes with all ten fingers at once. I’m sure I sounded awful, but I felt like a pianist.

I ran up to my sleeping mother (it was early in the morning) and said “Did you hear me, mommy? Did you hear me?” I got lessons shortly after that. I like to think it’s because she heard promise, but it may have been for exactly the opposite reason!

Why am I telling you this?

I just gave my first piano recital last month. After thirty years of playing the piano, it was the first time I’d ever played a recital for an audience. I had performed before, both jazz and classical, in front of many different kinds of audiences, but never had I presented a program that I had been preparing for a year, in front of family and friends, purely showcasing my ability to play.

Many people go through this when they’re younger…and THEN quit. Or not…Either way, for me it was an event that was long overdue.

What took me so long?

Better question: How did I finally get there? The answer has something to do with Feldenkrais.

I started playing piano in order to get attention, but it wasn’t long before I found that the attention scared me. Something was changing in my life at that time, and I didn’t want people to notice me when I was feeling so vulnerable. And I was very vulnerable when I played on that piano. So I started playing for a different reason: to hide.

How do you hide while playing the piano? It’s easy: You imagine you’re the greatest piano player in the world and you live in that fantasy every time you sit down. You never play for anyone else, never get any feedback, and imagine that you know exactly what it takes to get better. Then you repeat this thought process for ten years.

By the time I was 18, I had this delusion that I could do anything on the piano if I wanted to. That delusion was soon to crack. My choice of college: Oberlin.

Oberlin is not only an excellent liberal arts college, it’s also a world-class conservatory. The pianists there could play. I soon found out that I couldn’t. This didn’t destroy my fantasy self-image, but it drove me deeper into it. Where I used to play for a few people, now I found I couldn’t play for anyone. If I did it would utterly destroy what I’d created to protect myself.

Still, I knew somewhere deep down that if you don’t play for people you’re not really a performer, much less the world’s greatest. I wanted to change, to make myself capable of performing on the piano for people. I just didn’t know what I’d have to do.

I started taking lessons again with several teachers over the next eight years, but this did not relieve my performance issues. On the contrary, when I got into a high-pressure situation I would be unable even to execute the abilities that I had mastered. And paradoxically, rather than over prepare for such situations, I under prepared with the neurotic reasoning that I needed to learn how to handle the stress at its maximum.

What was missing was a way to understand the nature of my performance anxiety. It wasn’t just that I didn’t understand, but that I couldn’t understand. I was missing parts of myself, pieces which were there but were not functional.

Ah, functional. I love the word. It’s usually used in such a mundane fashion, but it’s so profound in its value. I wanted to be able to function, that is, to create, through action, a relationship between one aspect of myself and the world around me. In my Feldenkrais training, I was learning about Functional Integration®, one of Feldenkrais’ tools for interacting with people to awaken them to greater possibility.

My journey to the beginning of my return as a pianist was a profound lesson where I discovered that I kept my ribs very still, even when breathing. When I became aware of my ribs and my ability to move them, many other things changed in my awareness. The most notable of these was my depth perception, which seemed to be greatly augmented. The hours after that lesson, I walked around in a new world. Colors and shapes were vivid. I felt like I had just been born, a colt walking around on shaky legs, tasting the very air for the first time.

The sensation of great inner space and greater exterior space lessened after awhile. The sensations lost their novelty, and habit came back to rob me of some of the goods. But I want to call your attention to the process, that I had a powerful revelation catalyzed by a change in my physicality, brought about by a particular encounter between myself and a Feldenkrais practitioner.

What did depth perception have to do with playing the piano? I didn’t know then, but I can tell you now. In the first place, my perception of depth was a measure of my ability to interact with the world. When that perception was impaired, to the extent that I was “here” and everybody else was “there,” it reflected my desire to stay safe and never cross the line, never to mix the air between self and other. Performing to me had meant, “I play, you listen, and if I’m lucky, what I play will reach you across the void.”

But with depth I suddenly had the physical experience of being connected to the outside world, able to experience a specific dimension that could be measured between myself and another. Furthermore, the space between us was continuous. That meant I was inseparable from everything else, never really isolated. As I came to understand that notion, I started to understand what performing really meant. What had previously been my habit of isolation now became a choice, and more and more I chose to perform.

Of course, the more practical aspect of three-dimensionality was the gaining of new directions in which to move. Playing the piano no longer had to be a left-to-right thing. I could move up, down, in and out, and could combine these things into a sphere of movements, spirals of movements, each of which provided a different direction to approach the keys, and henceforth a new way to create a sound.

I’m talking about all of these things because I want to make it clear that Feldenkrais, for me, is not some theoretical therapeutic idea, some mystical or scientific system that I put into play for someone’s benefit. Instead it’s a primary means by which I can interact with my world, and it’s a means by which I have profoundly bettered my own life. If my explanations and stories seem too quick and unclear, then I encourage you to ask me to clarify. But better yet, try the work for yourself. You’ll have your own revelations which you may not understand at first, and you’ll watch your own failings become choices, a most empowering (and sometimes frightening) thing.

What’s the Baby Got?

The other day I watched my two-year-old son put his seat-belt on. He likes to do everything for himself if he can. If he’s capable of an action, he’ll fight you for the opportunity to do it. Now that he’s learning to buckle the belt, I have to wait for him to get it buckled, no matter how long it takes, or he pitches a fit!

It’s funny to watch him try to close the seat-belt; it’s a chest-harness with two plastic pieces, a male and a female, that have to be clicked together. It takes more than strength, of course. One needs a certain amount of coordination to do the job. If you don’t push the two pieces together at just the right angle it’s impossible to close them.

Well, my son doesn’t give up. It’s really funny to watch him strain and shove. He’ll raise his shoulders high as he pushes, and get this expression of indomitable effort on his face. Surely you’ve seen small children do this. They’ll try and try and try. We know that it doesn’t matter how hard they try, sometimes, because they’re missing some aspect of the task. You can shove the square peg at the square hole forever and if it’s not rotated to match, it’ll never go in.

We look down on kids for this activity only because we so often fail to recognize ourselves doing the same thing. What? You’ve never tried to force the block in the wrong way? Sure you have!

What I mean is that you, as an adult, have been faced with a more complex task, and have tried and tried to complete it; maybe it was playing the piano, or maybe completing a tax form. But because you lacked some insight, usually simple but elusive, you were unable to fulfill your task. Your effort would appear comical to a vastly superior intelligence, but to you it’s confounding.

This happens all the time. How many times a day are you unable to solve a problem?

So why do I bring this up? What’s the difference between you and the child?

Did you notice that most of these kids eventually figure out how to rotate the block? How do they do that? Oh, sure, you could give yourself credit. You showed them, right? You turned the block for them. They watched you do it, and they saw it go in. That was that, right? Oh, or did they grab the block and try to put it in the hole exactly the way they did it the first time? Hmmm…

No, you may have modeled a good solution for them, but likely they were too young to be able to recognize the solution visually. Instead, they did something that all normally developing children do: they experimented.

You probably missed it. How long can you watch a child struggle with what appears to be a simple problem before either trying to solve it or leaving to fix dinner? But while you were gone, that child was paying attention to herself. She noticed how much effort she was making, and she didn’t like making it. That kind of effort is tiring. So after some rest, she started playing. That’s right. Just fooling around, moving random ways and all the while she was playing she was paying attention.

You see, luckily for children, all they have to do all day is pay attention. They can’t do much else. And with that incredible ability to notice, they take in vast amounts of information and they filter it. The process is part intellectual, part emotional, part physical, involving the whole of themselves.

Eventually the child not only discovered the right way to put in the block, she was paying attention while she discovered it. In the process, she learned not only the solution to the problem, but the entire situation surrounding it. You’ll never catch her not rotating the block again! She’s mastered that.

Oh why, oh why can’t we as adults still master tasks that way? Dude, we can.

So why don’t we? Well…we do, somewhat…in our areas of expertise, those places we’re comfortably competent, or in those arenas where we gladly engage our ignorance. But in most other areas we avoid failure like the plague. It’s too humiliating, too frustrating, too exhausting.

Of course we don’t have the luxury of avoiding all difficult situations. Sometimes we lose our ability to walk or speak or feed ourselves. Then we’re in a real bind. You’ll often see those of us in those situations struggling with our shoulders up, pushing and trying and failing. And that’s not funny at all.

But if we take a cue from our baby, we may discover that such efforts do not have to be the entire picture, that paying attention to ourselves while trying can offer us keys to doors we didn’t see. The “impossible” task of feeding ourselves with atrophied arms may be possible after all, or maybe we really can find a new way to walk.

You don’t need the Feldenkrais Method to learn to pay attention, but that is what it will teach you. And the lessons will work whether you’re sick or well, and for that matter, whether you’re a grownup or a baby. You’ll see!