Volume 5, Number 6, July 2006

Quote From Moshe: “The differences in simple head movement as performed by different people derive from the fact that one person may attend to his ear as he turns his head and considers that the required movement, another may attend to the configuration of his ear and shoulder, and a third to the folding of the skin on his neck…When the self-image is clearly present in the awareness of the individual during the movement…then the action becomes easy, accurate and pleasant…closer to the movements carried out by any person with a developed awareness.” Awareness Through Movement, p. 144

Face the Face

I made a startling discovery about myself the other day.

I like to think I have an attractive face…it’s not too bad, really. Some people like it a lot. One thing about it, though…it’s crooked. Like Lyle Lovett. Not quite as bad as that, but still, the mouth and the eyes make two converging lines that, if extended, would meet at a point somewhere about two feet beyond my right ear.

That wasn’t the discovery. I’ve known that since I was in third grade and Scott Williams said, “You got a lopsided head!” Ouch…that hurt.

Some of these types of things come about from irregular exit from the birth canal, and I never had any reason to think my “lopsided head” was anything I could control until about ten years ago. I was taking a Tai Chi workshop with the remarkable instructor Wei Lun Huang. He has a wonderful way of saying just what you need to hear at the point you’re at. It isn’t always nice, and he usually says it in a way that makes you want to laugh at yourself, but that’s a good way to make profound learning happen.

I was struggling earnestly to duplicate something he was doing and he looked at me. Instead of a complement or some encouraging word, he said, “You haven’t even straightened out your face yet.”

It wasn’t just some low insult. It didn’t feel like it, anyway. Instead it struck me as a bizarre idea that the state of my entire system could be read in my face. You may not believe such an idea is true, and I had no way of comprehending it then. But in light of my later experience, I’ve come to see that my instinct was correct: He was telling me something very important about myself.

It seems he thought it was possible for me to straighten out my face. But how in the heck was I supposed to do that? Surgery? Surely not. Some Tai Chi magic? Well, I suppose so, but what exactly? I’ve fooled with working the muscles of my face now and again, trying to see what it feels like to have those lines straight. It’s never felt natural enough to keep, though.

As a Feldenkrais instructor I have quite a different insight into that comment, and a big piece of the puzzle came together a few days ago.

Let me tell you what I know about myself: When I started doing internal exploration about 15 years ago, I had no sense of my spine. From the back of my head to my bottom was a blank to me. It should be no surprise that I tended to move my torso like the tin-woodsman, all in a block.

After several years of good Tai Chi instruction and a nice Feldenkrais training I started to get the feeling back into my back. I began to have an internal picture of my spine. That image still comes and goes, but it’s improving slowly, and guess which direction it’s been working?

Did you guess? Up?

Yup.

Towards my head, towards the base of my skull. Little by little I’ve been getting more and more spine to move with and more importantly, to balance on. Remember that the spine is our ultimate supporter. Many of us think our muscles are holding us up, but that’s only part of the story. Our skeleton is designed to bear a lot of weight in very specific directions, and our spine, if used properly, can hold us up so well that we feel practically weightless. The best acrobats are using this principle to the max.

The muscles are only there to make minute adjustments with gravity to keep us balanced on our skeleton. Unfortunately, many of us through the wear-and-tear of life without internal sensation begin to rely more on the “effort” of the muscles to hold us up, so that by the end of our lives we’re too exhausted to stand up at all. Over time the regular use of muscles for support instead of bone can warp us, change our shape.

It took me many years to realize that I was holding myself up by my face. Can you believe that idea? How, and why, would I do this?

Because my entire consciousness for years was in my head. I thought I had to control everything that was below my face rather than rely upon it for support. My conscious, willful attempt to steer the boat from the bow had led to some extreme muscular work going on in my face. A mild benefit: I learned some excellent facial discrimination. The muscles in my face are very well-developed and clever. This came in handy when I acted on stage.

Sadly I had no “off switch.” I didn’t even realize I had an option. Sure I could “relax” my face, but that begs the question, why didn’t relaxing my face do the job? Once you let go of a bad habit, shouldn’t that be enough?

Here comes the big thing I figured out: It’s not enough to let go of a bad habit. That habit is your means of organizing yourself. Without something to replace it, you have no way to get through the world. You’re almost certain to prefer the suffering of the old way to the formlessness of pure “relaxation.”

You have to have a new way to organize yourself after you let go of the old way. A lot of us may adopt a new way wholesale by standing the way our Sergeant tells us in boot camp, or the way our Yoga instructor tells us. This works for some people for a while, maybe even years, but the problem is that without the benefit of a certain kind of awareness, you’re most likely going to use the same principles of organization in your new setup.

Without awareness, my face would just change to follow the Sergeant’s orders, instead of my own. The outward appearance might be different, but the fundamental issue wouldn’t be resolved. The bad habit would remain, put to a different use.

In Feldenkrais we act on the idea that awareness, brought about through the input of a practitioner, can provide us with genuinely new information about ourselves. When we recognize the old habit that we wish to eliminate, we can replace it with a higher system of organization that utilizes much more of ourselves.

So after I stop holding myself up by my face, I have to get a better sensation of my spine. Only then can I use its support to hold myself up without strain. Otherwise I can “stand up straight,” but I’ll only be using a different part of my face to do it, rather than something entirely new.

I still don’t have this new organization in place. It takes years to really recognize that a comfortable habit may not be as effective as an unfamiliar higher organization. The nice thing about that is that I have a wonderful way to spend the rest of my life: daily increasing my self-awareness, learning to make things easier as I go along, recognizing that all the work I’ve been doing wasn’t necessary at all.