Volume 6, Number 3, April 2007

Quote From Moshe: “The formations of new patterns out of the elements of total situations of earlier personal experience, in short, learning, is the distinctive human quality.” The Body and Mature Behavior, p. 198

Puzzling Over Feldenkrais

My boys both like solving jigsaw puzzles. The older one’s really good at it, but the younger one at three years old is a little slower. We were doing a puzzle together that was in the shape of a huge donut, with animals on the inner curve and the alphabet on the outer curve. Because there wasn’t a big picture, but a series of little pictures going around the curve, he was having trouble putting the puzzle together. I was thinking about the fact that if he knew the alphabet, he’d be much better able to solve the puzzle.

Interesting, because every struggle that a child undergoes is reflected somewhere in one that an adult undergoes. Picture the child working on the puzzle, putting one piece next to another, working at the level of “these fit” or “these don’t fit” as his only criterion. Now give him the knowledge of the structure of the alphabet. Suddenly he has a way of organizing the puzzle that is much more sophisticated: put the letters in the right order and you can finish. The presence of a higher organizing principle provides a powerful tool for the child who, before, was forced into a trial-and-error method.

As slightly older children, we are often faced with pieces of a human function that we try to put together: Throw that ball. Okay…I pull my arm to the right…no, that doesn’t work. I pull it to the left…no…how about back? Yeah, that feels okay. Now I move it forward…

We don’t learn to throw that way. At least I hope we don’t. Lucky for us we have a nervous system and a fine brain to operate it. We don’t start with limitless possibilities for where that ball can go and what we can do with it. We’re directed by our desire to move the ball quickly from here to there.

The higher principle that guides us in our quest to “throw ball” is our understanding of the act as a whole, independent of the flow of time. We can fast-forward or rewind the internal image of a throw, speed it up, slow it down. If we make a change to something like the position of our arm or the weight of a ball, that change is in relation to all the other elements of the throw. I challenge you, just for fun, to change just a single element in your throw. And I mean, just one.

I bet you changed just one finger, didn’t you? Smarty. Well, did you throw that way? Did you throw exactly the same way you threw when the finger was in its original position? Most people will adjust something else to counteract that finger, because it feels awkward or even dangerous to try and throw that way. If you moved your finger just a tiny bit, you probably didn’t notice the adjustment you made everywhere else. But if you move it far enough, you’ll start to notice the other things you change.

We have a bodily organization that acts a lot like an alphabet. You can run through it sequentially, from toes to head, but just like the letters, the “alphabetic order” is only used for orientation. The body, like words and sentences, is holistic. Things move in conjuction, or in opposition, for balance or impetus.

Our ability to act on our desires stems from our understanding of how to manipulate our physical alphabet. Really, the knowledge of this alphabet isn’t conscious. There are so many variables in the human experience that our “alphabet” might have millions of characters in it. The nervous system processes all of that for us so we can concentrate on the very outer level, putting the “big pieces” together. The more sophisticated our nervous system, the bigger the pieces we can work with. The “geniuses” in music or math or sports seem to be doing things that seem impossible to us because they’ve already got all the little pieces that we’d struggle with working together. If our struggle is to throw the ball across the plate, their struggle is to throw it at 86 miles an hour with a little spin just to the left of the hitter’s bat.

So how do we as adults improve ourselves? First and foremost, we have to make a difficult admission: we could have a better understanding of the organization of our alphabet. We can give ourselves some credit, because as kids we did a very good job of learning that organization to go from rolling around to crawling to walking, and so forth. But after a certain age, we often tend to decide that we know “enough,” and if we are unable to achieve what we want with what we know, then we must not be cut out to achieve our desires; we think of ourselves as too stupid, too clumsy, or “not enough of a genius.”

We can continue to improve our awareness of that organization just the way we did it as children. We only require a means by which we can turn off a lot of that adult certitude that we mistake for maturity. We require a method where we can safely experiment without worrying about what anyone thinks, where we can pay attention and make use of what we learn.

Picture yourself in a Feldenkrais lesson. You’re lying on the floor. Someone is giving you some instructions for how to move a certain way. You finally realize that they don’t care whether you do it right. What they care about is that you pay attention to yourself as you do it, to whether a small change make a big difference in the way a movement feels. You discover that, through this process, you become more aware of the organization of your personal alphabet and that, when you rise up off the floor, a lot of the little things seem to be fitting together much more nicely.

That’s your reward for paying attention, but I wouldn’t think of it that way. Instead, realize that this is what we are designed to do, that in any healthy society we benefit from opportunities to quietly and wordlessly assess ourselves, not for the sake of criticizing the incomplete puzzle, but for a continual refinement of our ability to put it together.