Volume 6, Number 10, November 2007

Quote From Moshe: “Motility seems to be more elementary because it is essential to the lowest level of existence. In certain cases, it is therefore the only part of the personality that is amenable to reeducation at all.” Body and Mature Behavior, p. 208

Drawing on Feldenkrais

I have always done way too many things at once, and I don’t just mean multi-tasking. I mean, in my life. I play five musical instruments (only three at any real level of proficiency). I play jazz, rock and classical. I write articles, essays, stories, poems and novels. I teach in the public schools. I have children. Of course, I’m a Feldenkrais Practitioner. If I watched TV I’d probably be out the window.

Many people throughout my life have advised me to pick something and get good at it, rather than flit about and try to do too many things. They have a point. It’s taken me far longer to get good at playing the piano than it would have if I had specialized. But they’ve also missed something.

As I’ve gotten better at a number of seemingly unrelated things, I’ve found the common elements in them. Learning one thing has helped me to understand my difficulties in another, and my Feldenkrais training was the keystone to making that process concrete.

For example: I just recently visited my daughter who’s attending art school. At their annual parents’ weekend, I was given the opportunity to take a drawing class from one of her instructors. I jumped at this, because drawing used to be my passion. I had taken several years of art classes in high-school and had seriously considered going to art-school myself.

But the difficulties I had faced in drawing kept me from producing work that I found satisfying. I could see images in my head, but as I tried to get them on paper, something broke in the middle of the journey. For reasons I wasn’t ready to comprehend, the images I wanted to draw almost never made it intact onto the paper.

When I got to college, music began to take over and drawing began to fade. By the time I was 25, I hardly did it at all anymore.

Flash back to my trip last month…here I am in this one-shot art class, wondering if I can still draw worth a flip. The teacher gave us 10 minutes to draw the shape of the model in front of us. Eagerly I began to draw. I was enjoying the process, feeling good about the lines coming out of my pencil, and was sure the instructor was going to ooh and ahh when she saw it.

Instead she seemed uncomfortable when she saw my product, like she had something to say but didn’t want to hurt my feelings. I knew that I wasn’t doing a bad drawing. What could have been bothering her? Eventually she gave us other types of assignments: gesture drawing, line drawing, and she seemed much happier with my results in these.

I was very curious to know where my blind spot was, how my habits had hindered me. The answer seemed to be in my failure to understand the requirements of the assignment about shape. Without even trying, I had retreated to gesture and line to fulfil her request. Twenty years ago, I would have assumed that the instructor just “didn’t understand me.” But now I was mature enough to want to ask, “Why did I do that?”

The shape-drawing exercise seems to be the visual wall I hit twenty years ago, and now I’m ready to climb it. You might wonder why I’d bother. I’m not about to become an artist now. I hardly have the time to draw. Why should I even be curious about this? Am I some kind of a megalomaniac that has to be good at everything?

Well, yes, but that’s beside the point. The fact is that what I’m missing in my drawing I’m missing in my perception of the world. If it’s missing in my visual perception, it’s missing in my thought process. If my thought process is fragmented, that will manifest itself in everything I do. Overcoming this drawing deficit may be the key to overcoming other difficulties in my life. I only need to make analogies between shape-drawing and other aspects of my existence.

Making those analogies isn’t easy. How do you compare an inability to draw shapes with gaps in phyiscal ability, failures in relationships, or blocks in creative endeavors? The answer is that you find a core from which all of these elements spring. That core is human movement.

Drawing is the act of translating an image into movement and representing that movement on a flat surface. If I have difficulty seeing shapes, it will say something about the way my eyes are functioning. If I have difficulty drawing shapes, it will say something about the way I like to move as I draw. Line-drawings favor a certain kind of movement that reflects a desire to follow a path rather than explore an area.

Take that idea through to the other side and you see a person who may move blindly along the path of a relationship rather than evaluating it all at once. You may understand the limitations of a writer who has to write everything start to finish rather than piecing a book together in what might be a more effective and creative way. You might be able to explain to him why certain physical activities, including throwing a ball, are hard to improve upon because these are activities too complex to be represented linearly.

So how can Feldenkrais help? I can use the Method to explore this “linear core” at a basic level, without trying to solve the problem of drawing, or throwing, or being a good husband. I know that as I grow in my core fundamental ability, everything that depends on that ability will improve. If I wish, I can use my improvement or lack therof in drawing as a gauge to see how the core might have improved, because it’s harder to monitor profound human change from the inside without some kind of external evidence.

Stuck in my linear framework, I might encourage you to follow the path from one of your endeavors to another to see if you can find a link. Struck with the knowledge that I often miss more efficient ways of describing things, however, let me suggest that you take the shape of yourself and examine it in a lot of different contexts. You never know what your old frustrattions might teach you.