Volume 6, Number 5, June 2007

Quote From Moshe: “The Elusive Obvious deals with simple, fundamental notions of our daily life that through habit become elsuive.” The Elusive Obvious, Preface

The Elusive Made Obvious

Frequently I quote from a book of Moshe’s called The Elusive Obvious. The title might intrigue some of you to pick up the tome. For me, the concept of the elusive obvious is a powerful aspect of our work as Feldenkrais practitioners. I want to give you a personal example of what the elusive obvious can mean.

Occasionally I have the pleasure of getting a lesson from another Feldenkrais practitioner. Being a practitioner can mean that the lesson means more to me than it would to the average person, because I’m attuned to what’s happening. It can also mean that I am more astonished by what the lesson uncovers. I often think of myself as being “more aware” than the average person, but I’m really not. My smugness or arrogance is often dissipated in the face of real awareness.

This was the case with the lesson I received recently from a very experienced teacher. My daughter and I went together, and she had her lesson first. She’s only seven years old, so when her lesson was over and it was time for mine to begin, I was naturally a little anxious about whether she would sit still long enough for me to get what I needed.

My daughter had brought some things to do, but she’s a talkative, friendly sort of person. So while my lesson was beginning, she talked incessantly to the instructor and to me and made lots of little play noises. I did not scold her, as I thought that kind of exertion would put me in a bad mood and have a worse effect on my lesson than her disruption.

When the practitioner asked me what I wanted from my lesson, I told her, “I want you to help me put the pieces together.” Being very intuitive, the teacher didn’t need anything more than that to understand me. But I ought to explain to you, the reader, what was obvious to her.

When I began my training there were large parts of my bodily territory that were missing from my awareness. If I were to have drawn you a map of myself, many areas would be uncharted. I had only the vaguest notion of what my back was, so the varieties of movments in my spine went on without my cognizance. My shoulders were practically nonexistant, as were my hips.

Over the years, I have come to know my parts better, and at different times I’ve had greater and lesser experiences of true integration. Lately I’ve been under a lot of stress and so retreated into more habitual ways of thinking and doing. The result is that I’ve lost some of my picture of wholeness. Yet I still retain enough of a picture that nothing is “missing” anymore. At the time of my lesson I saw myself as divided into about five segments: ankles-section, legs-section, hips-section, back-section, head/neck-section. I wanted to understand myself as a whole person again, to unify, to “consolidate” as the instructor said.

As I lay on the table I felt very anxious that I wasn’t going to get what I needed from this lesson, and that my daughter’s ruckus was going to keep me divided out. I had to hope that the instructor knew what she was doing, so I didn’t ask the instructor about my daughter even though I wanted to.

It turns out the instructor did me one better than I asked for: She explained her thinking by telling me, “I’m deliberately not asking Cecilia to be quiet because I think of her as one of the parts.”

She could have stopped the lesson right there. That was really the information I needed from her. The rest of the work, all the moving and twisting and wiggling of my feet, head, shoulders and hips, was gravy.

She was telling me what I hadn’t considered about myself, that I as a person am inseparable from the people and events in my life, and that all of these people and events are connected through me. For some readers, a statement like this will seem trivial, dare I say, “obvious.” Of course everyone you know and everything you do is connected through you.

Not so obvious to me. The fragmentation in my body was reflected in my approach to my environment, the various aspects of my world, my attempts to be a musician and an educator and a writer and a Feldenkrais practitioner, and a parent! On one level, I’ve always known I needed to continually find a way to unify the various things I do in my life. But I hadn’t really considered my family and my body as aspects that needed to be considered too. There was a greater fragmentation than I had been aware of. I wasn’t calling every part a part! That’s what made my obvious so elusive.

So I had the pleasure of letting my daughter’s noise be part of my lesson, as it had to be. The thought of her presence as being another part that needed to be integrated steadied me, gave focus to my physical consolidation, made it possible to get what I needed from my lesson wheras it would have been impossible without her!

This is not a lesson I “got” when I left the table. It’s a lesson I’m going to have to get again and again as I rethink the concept of my “self.” There will be times when it will be painful to admit that I’ll have to integrate aspects of my life that appear to disrupt the other aspects, but the truth remains that these are all parts of an inseparable whole, parts which will function at their highest only when their relationship to one another is clear in myself and the way I live.