Volume 6, Number 11, December 2007

Quote From Moshe: “We have great difficulty in sorting out what we do as we should from what we want to do with ourselves.” The Elusive Obvious, p. xi

What I Really Kneed

I’ve always had a pet ache or pain, something that I can’t explain, don’t know where it came from, don’t know how I got it. A clicking thumb at fifteen, an aching back at twenty-five, a permanently pulled leg-muscle at thirty. It’s always been something, and I’ve usually been sure once it appears that the pain will never go away.

Then it goes away.

Then I get something else.

As I grow older, I expect the little aches are going to last longer, and perhaps one day one will come to stay. The injury du jour is my right knee, which now hurts when I put certain pressure on it. For a while it was very tender, but now the pain has retreated to where it only arises if I step on the leg the “wrong way.”

Having a knee-problem makes me feel very close to Moshe Feldenkrais, the founder of the Feldenkrais Method ®. He injured his knee playing soccer as a young man. The injury caused him a great deal of pain and prevented him from moving well.

Some years later he was working on a submarine and, while leaving the craft, slipped and hurt his other knee. You can imagine how he felt. “Two bad legs? How the heck am I going to get home?” But imagine his surprise when he discovered that the knee that he had injured from soccer no longer bothered him now that there was a new knee problem.

It wasn’t that the old injury vanished. Rather, it was that when he became injured on his other side he subconsciously reorganized himself, the way any of us would do, and that reoganization enabled him to stand on his old injury in a way that had never consciously occurred to him before.

That event was one of the seminal moments that got Moshe thinking about how he could create a Method wherby people could deliberately reorganize themselves to get out of injury. That Method is…everyone say it!

So now I have this knee problem, and I’ve been gingerly walking up the stairs every day, favoring my left side so that I don’t exacerbate it. But all the while I’m thinking that I have no idea what caused the injury in the first place.

The question I’ve been asking myself lately: “Am I really still injured?”
What kind of a question is that, you’re probably asking. You can feel it, Adam! Of course it’s still there. But I wonder.

A couple of weeks ago, I was teaching a class to some Kindergarteners and I had to do some jumping. Imagine my surprise when I found that jumping caused me no pain whatsoever, and that my walking seemed to improve for a while afterwards. That got me thinking…

What if I really had a knee problem two months ago, and I began walking in a way that protected the injury, but then when the knee healed, I continued to walk the same way? Is it possible that some of the pain I’m feeling isn’t the original injury anymore? Walking around an injury can cause stress to the surrounding area because it’s not going to be the most efficient way to walk. At some point, the old knee injury could give birth to a new injury. When the old knee injury heals, the new knee injury is already there, and if I’m not paying attention, I’ll assume the two problems are the same.

Feldenkrais offers me several ways to address this situation.

First of all, there are the very questions I’m asking. “Who am I now?” Not “Who do I believe I am based on my previous condition?” Other questions: “What am I capable of doing with myself at this present moment? Is my fear justified?”

Even more important: “Is there a safe way to explore the possibilities inherent in my knee the way it is?”

As a Feldenkrais practitioner, I go about this several ways:

One, I think about the uninjured knee. I want to recognize the pattern of my walking over that knee as well as I can. Then I want to compare the way I walk on the injured knee to see what the difference is. I have noticed that I no longer give the joint on the injured side a full expansion and contraction because I fear the pain. Ironically as I go through a full expansion and contraction the pain does not materialize!

Two, I think about my entire body in relationship to my walking, especially up the stairs. How am I using myself when I walk? Do my eyes shift when I believe I’m about to enter a more dangerous situation? Do I contract sets of muscles that are supposed to be working in tandem?

Three, I accept that there may still be some residual pain in the knee. That being said, do I need to protect myself as much as I did before? Is there a new pattern I can adopt that will serve me better now?

These are somewhat scary investigations. The moment I feel the pain in my knee I’m likely to think, “Idiot! Quit fooling around!” But really, I have to engage myself in this process. It’s like shedding skin. Fear is no substitute for paying attention. It’s important for me to be afraid and to go forward.

So is it working? Am I going to “heal myself?” Well, I don’t know. Ask me in a month. I’ll be here.