Volume 6, Number 4, May 2007
Quote From Moshe: “In order to change our mode of action we must change the image of ourselves that we carry within us. What is involved here, of course, is a change in the dynamics of our reactions, and not the mere replacing of one action by another.” Awareness Through Movement, p. 10
New books by
Author and Guild
Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner
Hofstadter’s Grandchildren is a collection of short-stories and poetry based upon Cole’s experience with the writings of Pulitzer-Prize winning author Douglas R. Hofstadter. It recounts Cole’s transformation as he struggles to escape a self-image which imprisons him. www.hofstadtersgrandchildren.com
Trance Forming Ourselves
Most of us already think we know what a trance is: it’s the Bela Lugosi figure with his hands out in front of him, sleepwalking. In other words, trance equals hypnosis, and as so few of us find hypnosis anything other than an entertaining notion, we don’t think much about it at all.
But we should. Trance is a powerful aspect of our everyday lives, and I can demonstrate it to you in one simple word: Driving. If you drive a car (or ride a bike) you rely upon a trance-state because in order to do the many things necessary to steer a car through traffic while having that conversation on your cell phone (shame on you), something’s got to be on auto-pilot. You can’t keep everything at the level of conscious choice. Some reactions have to be relegated to the automatic.
The trance works something like this: You assume certain facts about the world of the road, that cars are going to stay inside those dotted lines unless they give you some kind of signal, that your car will speed up when you push your right foot down, that it will stop when you shift your right foot to the left, that when the line of cars in front of you begins to slow, you have to slow too. We react automatically to these circumstances. It’s a trance, and while we’re in it, we can carry on a conversation totally unrelated to the road (preferably not over a cell phone).
The only time we come out of our trance is when something happens that doesn’t fit into our idea about the road: Someone changes lanes without signalling; The brakes don’t work; The cars ahead of you slow faster than you’re expecting. All of a sudden you have to break your trance in order to make a conscious decision about what to do. That’s a survival response.
We’re in trances all the time, not just on the road. People actually prefer to interact in a trance-state. Most of our relations with our friends, family and colleagues happen in well-worn grooves of action and interaction. “Hi.” “How are you?” “Fine.” “Got that report for me?” “Get it to you next week.” “How’s Mom?” “The same.”
Even fights occur in a trance-state, though we don’t like to admit it. We’re often arguing with someone we love because we’re confining ourselves to a limited way of thinking about the interaction. You’re mad at Mom because she always has to make a comment about your shirt. So you give it back to her because you’re going to teach her one of these days that she can’t do that. It’s really a dance between two people who have melded their thoughts together.
This is where trances get dangerous. Remember how I said we have to come out of them in order to make a survival decision? Well, in some kinds of trances we fail to recognize the danger of a situation because its detrimental effects are slow or subtle. Your relationship with your mother may be suffering from the constant bickering without any real sharing of loving words, but you don’t dare break that trance because you think that that if you persist strongly enough, you’ll win the fight some day. Really, the notion of “winning the fight” is part of the trance. If you were observing your fight with your mother as an outside person, you’d see that nobody was winning and that the argument was largely meaningless.
Breaking a trance involves entering into unknown possibilities, which is why we so rarely dare to do it. What if I stop reacting to Mom? Then what? How will we relate?
In higher-level martial arts fighting, we recognize the limits of our opponents’ resources, that is, the boundaries of their trance state. If we can keep ourselves from entering into their world, we can fight around them, or choose not to fight. If they punch us, we can run away, even though that wouldn’t satisfy the definition of “fighting” the punch implies. On the other hand, if we enter into their trance-game by, for instance, choosing a weapon that suits their style, we had better do so knowingly and with caution.
This kind of agreement is usually known as “sparring,” and it’s very useful for training purposes, but as with any kind of trance-activity, it can also be dangerous if we fail to recognize the trance for what it is. That’s the clincher, right there. Trances are useful and dangerous both, and unless we recognize them for what they are, we are at the mercy of the trance.
So how do you learn to recognize when you’re in a trance-state? How do you get out of it? Is it useful to be able to come in and out of a trance at will?
Feldenkrais was very interested in Milton Erickson’s hypnosis work, and he kept Erickson’s ideas in mind as he created his own method. Let’s take a look at trance in the world of Feldenkrais.
Very often we find as we’re lying on the floor during an ATM that we’re getting very drowsy, that the little movement we’re doing with our knee is no longer a choice but an automatic thing. How is this useful?
Perhaps it was an automatic thing before we lay down, too.
We think that we’re in “control” of our bodies, that we know what we’re doing with them, but in reality so much of what we do is kept at the automatic level. Nobody wants to think about typing when they’re writing a grant-proposal or a law-brief or a paper. Nobody wants to think about moving their knees when they’re trying to beat a tennis pro on the court. We’ve got better things to do than muck about with our bodies all the time. Still, if we take 45 minutes and observe how we use ourselves we can look at an aspect of ourselves through movement and see it as a trance we’ve entered in order to make our lives easier.
That trance is useful only insofar as it serves our purposes. Once we start feeling aches in our forearms or tendons, we might want to question the particular configuration of our typing trance. That means recognizing it’s a trance first, i.e. – shooting into space to see the entire globe of ourselves and how the typing fits in. Then we come out of our trance and explore other possibilities with our curiosity and our nervous system.
When we’re done, we may find our “new way of being” to feel rather strange, deliberate, even wrong or dangerous. But if it serves us, we’re likely to quickly incorporate it into a more successful trance and use it, sometimes even forgetting that we had a problem at all.
The Feldenkrais Method is ideal, not because it “fixes” us, but because it trains us to come in and out of our trance-state. We can make use of our trance instead of being a slave to it, or discarding it, neither of which is a really good option.
© 2007