Volume 5, Number 5, June 2006

Quote From Moshe: “I have some difficulty in explaining to my followers that I am not a therapist and that my touching a person with my hands has no therapeutic or healing value, though people improve through it. I think that what happens to them is learning…[with] the accent on the learning process, rather than the teaching technique. After each session my pupils…often rub their eyes as if they have just woken from a refreshing sleep.” The Elusive Obvious, p. 7

Dream a Little Dream of Me

I don’t have too many nightmares. I have a lot of weird dreams, some that make for nights that are not all that restful, but I can’t remember the last time I had an honest-to-goodness nightmare prior to the one I had last week.

I don’t even remember what it was about now. I’m sure it was some kind of anxiety dream where I went from place to place to try and solve some incredibly serious problem. I lived with a huge block of anxiety for the duration of the dream.

I’m sure most (all?) of you have had a nightmare. Waking up from them is usually quite a relief, one of those whew moments. I want to talk about why it’s a relief. This may seem ridiculous…for crying out loud, it’s a nightmare, and we’re glad it’s over. But when I woke up from this nightmare I had a revelation.

The reason I was so relieved was that I recognized that I didn’t actually have to solve my dilemma. It’s like the difference between being a character in a movie and an actor in it. No matter how bad the situation is in the movie, the actor knows they’ll be fine. They can envision the beginning and the end as a finite entity called movie. The character in the movie has no such reassurances and is torn to ribbons with anxiety. If they could step out, go from character to actor, they’d experience enormous relief.

Strangely enough, we’re living in a movie of some kind right now, some scenario whose outcome we can’t really imagine. It may be a financial crisis or a relationship woe…of course, these have occurred to you. But perhaps you didn’t consider the state of your body to be one of those movies.

Rather than imagine a time-constrained dilemma, imagine a space-constrained one. You want to be able to straighten up without your back hurting. You’ve tried every which way to straighten up, but you can’t get around your pain. It’s a constant with no conceivable exception.

But what you imagine to be “your body” is just a fraction of your body. You don’t know this, but there are holes in your perception. You have no awareness of the space between your shoulders and your elbows; you imagine that your shoulder blades are tucked into your pelvis. Since you don’t realize this, you think of what you can feel as being everything. It’s like living in a house where you think you know all the rooms when in fact there’s a secret space between your closet wall and your bedroom that you never knew about. Once you discover the space, your perception of the house and how to live in it changes.

You have a physical dilemma: straightening up. You use everything in your body-experience that you know to straighten up correctly, or at least without pain, and once you’ve used “everything” you can only assume that “nothing” remains to be done. You decide that the problem is unsolvable and that you’re domed to a life of misery. In short, you’re living a nightmare.

Comes the Feldenkrais Method, where you lie down on the floor, listen to some direction and begin asking questions of yourself. After about forty-five minutes, you get to your feet and straighten up. Without even thinking about it, you stand tall, pain-free. You look around in amazement. It’s not as if there were a struggle, as if you suddenly figured out “the answer” to your dilemma. On the contrary, you just stood up in what seems to be a new body. Suddenly you don’t have to solve your dilemma.

How do we get from the first state to the second? When we talk about gaining awareness, we may mistakenly imagine it’s just adding information to our minds, like adding money to our wallets. But in order to make a change in ourselves we have to reorganize based on that new information. Awareness really means stepping up a level, going from character in a movie to actor, or actor to playwright.

Imagine you didn’t know what a hammer was and you had to put a nail in the wall. You could beat the nail with your hand, push it with your hand, back into the nail with your body, trying a million different ways to solve the problem called “push the nail into the wall.” It seems ridiculous that you wouldn’t even try to use a rock when what you’re doing causes you pain and doesn’t move the nail. But many of us do react to our problems this way! No matter how ridiculous our attempts are, we think they’re the only options. If every attempt to push the nail fails, then you can’t put a nail in a wall.

Of course, once somebody shows us a hammer, we don’t even try to solve the problem of “pushing the nail.” When we have a hammer we don’t have to solve it. We solve the larger problem, which is getting the nail in the wall rather than pushing it.

Awareness is that hammer, that awaking from the nightmare, that stepping up a level and seeing more of reality. It happens when someone outside of ourselves interacts with us in a way that enlarges our understanding of ourselves. In Feldenkrais this is done mostly through movement, through taking a physical dilemma apart and then putting it back together so that we can see what we’ve been missing.

That process of interacting with someone outside yourself, someone capable of bringing you even temporarily to a higher state, happens in any learning situation. Anyone who ever taught you anything did it this way. Anyone who ever beat you in a fight so that you knew how not to get beat next time, anyone who ever broke down your assumptions so that you could change your mind about something unquestionable, any of these people have changed your idea about what you need to solve.

The fact that this process exists in a physical realm is what makes Feldenkrais so remarkable. As Feldenkrais teachers, we use the human body as a model for the entire self, physical, mental and emotional. We show you problems to solve that seem like a waste of time. And once you realize that they are a waste of time, you’ve gotten the benefit!

This is why Feldenkrais can create opportunities for powerful change which usually results in the end of some of our worst nightmares.