Volume 6, Number 2, March 2007

Quote From Moshe: “…the learning process is irregular and consists of steps, and…there will be downs as well as ups. It should be further realized that as changes take place in the self, new and hitherto unrecognized difficulties will be discovered. The consciousness previously rejected them either from fear or because of pain, and it is only as self-confidence increases that it becomes possible to identify them.” Awareness Through Movement, p. 8-9

Thinking Inside the Box

My dad told me the most amazing story: Apparently there was a man who was trying to take his bicycle with him on the bus, but he was stopped by the driver and told that there was a limit to the size of items that could be brought on board. The bike was 5 feet long, and the limit was 4 feet in length.

Yet this man managed to get his bike onto the bus anyway, and the driver didn’t stop him. How did he do it? Take the bike apart? No, the bike stayed the same. Bribe the driver? No, the driver didn’t change the rules for the man. So how??? Read on.

Our hero put the bike in a large box, three feet long by four feet wide. If you know your geometry, you know that if you draw a rectangle three feet wide by four feet long, the diagonal line connecting opposite corners will always be five feet. The man put the bike into the box diagonally and closed the box. The box was only four feet long, so the man was able to take it on the bus!

You have to be able to think in a very special way to solve a problem like this. You imagine a context which is greater than your dilemma and you find a way to fit your problem into it. In this situation, the man was not constrained by the actual length of the bike, because he was able to see it as part of a larger (or, by the bus driver’s standards, a smaller) picture.

Perhaps we’ve all been clever like this without realizing it. Surely many of us have moved a large piece of furniture, like a sofa, through a doorway that seems too small for it. As you look at the sofa, you can’t imagine that it’s ever going to get through. At every angle, the furniture is too wide, or too tall. How do you manage to get it in?

Well, usually what you do is rotate the furniture as you move it through. Practically described, you’re putting the sofa through the doorway piece by piece, turning the large object to make each section accessible when you need it. A more elegant way to describe what you’re doing is to say that you’ve included time as an element of the sofa, and not just length, height and width. The sofa will fit through the doorway only in a particular sequence, and that sequence is another dimension of the sofa!

Does this line of thought seem useful to you? It’s more than useful. It’s transcendent, utterly necessary to solve certain problems and to grow in our maturity. Can Feldenkrais foster our thinking in this way? Do you really have to ask? Is this Possibilities or isn’t it?

The Method is designed to open our awareness. Lots of people don’t understand why they’d want to do that. Awareness is usually seen as some touchy-feely thing like being able to see the colors of the rainbow. Nobody finds it particularly useful to be more aware of the colors of the rainbow. Unless, of course, they’re looking for a pot of gold at the end of it.

A problem you are experiencing, be it pain or inability, may be the result of a lack of awareness of the larger context in which the problem can be solved. The most basic example of this would be something ludicrous, like not knowing you have legs. You drag yourself around all the time. Climbing steps is an incredible chore. Suddenly someone makes you aware that those feelings below your belt correspond to movements you can make. Once you begin to learn to coordinate the feeling and the movement with your desires, you can walk!.

It seems like a trivial example to most of us because we can’t imagine that our own problems are that easily solved. But like all problems, once we know the solution the original dilemma seems trivial. Is walking really that easy? No, we just got really good at it as kids. But if we were to damage our brains and forget what we know about the use of our legs, we wouldn’t find the problem so trivial at all. We might no longer associate the feelings in our legs with anything. The association is still there, but we’ve been confined to a more limited view and can’t see it.

While the approach to our work is done through a physical means, that of touch and movement, the resulting shift in our awareness manifests itself in our minds, in our emotions, in our relationships, and, of course, in our ability to solve problems. Feldenkrais had his own favorites. He taught his students how to stand on their heads, an activity that seems frivolous only until one recognizes the ability to fall safely in any direction, and to organize one’s weight perfectly along one’s spine.

Our problems always seem bigger than they are, and often appear insurmountable. Like the sofa, we can’t see how we could possibly pass them along when they’re wider and longer than our available space. Usually time sorts out a lot of issues in ways that seem obvious in retrospect. Surely it’s worth cultivating this kind of understanding ahead of time. It will save us a lot of grief in the long run, and may help prevent us from labeling certain aspects of our lives problems at all, “only solutions,” as John Lennon wrote.