Volume 6, Number 6-7, July-August 2007

Quote From Moshe: “…a good deliberate movement is produced when there is no conflict between voluntary control and the body’s automatic reaction to gravity…” Awareness Through Movement, p. 86

Oh, Say, Can You See?

Some years ago I wrote a column in Possibilities about how I remembered to have fun while I was in the ocean. In that column, I recounted the story of being pushed around by the waves and wondering why it wasn’t fun the way it had been when I was a kid. The answer turned out to be that I had stopped playing some years ago, and while I was in the ocean I needed to play. I had to anticipate the waves, leap up to meet them, engage them with my eyes and my body.

This story is a little bit like that one, only it has to do with fireworks.

I used to love them, fireworks. They were the great passion of my childhood. I lived for several things: rollercoasters, the ocean, fireworks. At a certain age I thought that if I could lie on the ground and look at fireworks forever, I’d die happy.

A number of years intervened in which the fireworks shows got less fun. The crowds were busier. They played bad music during the shows, which ruined them. I got restless. Somewhere, I lost something that was my key to loving the shows, but I never thought to wonder about it until last July 4.

These days I take my entire family to the fireworks show, and I love the wonder on my kids’ faces. But when I watch the show, I keep asking myself, where’s my wonder? Why isn’t this great? Why don’t I love this anymore? I put my Feldenkrais cap on and I thought about it, and here’s what I came up with:

If you’ve ever seen more than one fireworks show, you know that you can see the rockets rising in the air before they explode. You follow a very dim ember as it rises to the top of the arc, where it explodes into the display it was meant to be. At some point in my childhood I made the connection between that rising ember and the resultant display. That was the beginning of the end of my wonder. That was when the “Ooohs” and “aaahs” disappeared.

It was all about anticipation for me. I knew pretty much when and where each explosion would be, and since I’ve seen so many of them, the surprise was really muted. Turns out, that’s not a fun way to watch a show. So this time I tried letting some of that go, decided to just watch the sky and let each explosion fill my vision rather than follow the rising ember.

It worked, to some extent. I’m not a child again, but I did get some of my enjoyment back. There’s so much about this anticipation that applies to the way we live, and to the amount of happiness and satisfaction we can expect in our lives. Let me give you two more examples.

I’ve discussed my ongoing struggles with eating in previous issues. One of the problems with eating, for me at least, is that there’s been little to no joy in it. Perhaps this is because meals when I was growing up were stressful, unpleasant affairs, or perhaps my mother’s illness, which made her waste away, frightened me and skewed my ideas about nutrition. Whatever the cause, I’ve developed a number of disruptive habits around eating that I continue to fight: I eat too quickly, I want to read while I eat, I gravitate towards extremely sweet things.

All of these habits really revolve around the same thing: substituting assumptions for awareness. Like the fireworks, I don’t really experience my food. In my mind, I’ve eaten it forty-five minutes before it hits my mouth. By the time I’m actually eating, I can’t find any pleasure in it, so I find I have to maximize the extreme aspects of the act, gorging only on the sweetest tastes.

The antidote to this kind of manic eating is similar to the fireworks cure. I have to stop, breathe while I eat, not try to anticipate anything at all, really be at the table when I’m eating. It’s not easy, especially when my mind is screaming “hurry up!” and “this is boring!” Nevertheless, when I’m able to take twenty minutes to eat lunch instead of ten, it makes a big difference in my ability to enjoy not only the food, but the time at the table.

An even more surprising anticipatory story has to do with getting sick. I used to get sick a lot more than I do now. Mostly it was little things like sore throats and colds. While I’m a hypochondriac, I’m also a drug-o-phobe, so I would rarely take anything for these maladies, not even ibuprofen.

Among the things that helped me start to change my idea about health and, subsequently, my state of well-being, was noticing my approach to getting sick and to getting well. In short, I would be on the lookout for the tiniest sign that I might be getting sick, and at that sign I’d do everything short of take medicine or supplements to stay well. I’d eat heartily, try to sleep more, wash my hands and face a lot.

It took me a long time to realize that by anticipating my sickness I was putting myself in a particular posture, both physical and emotional, that was the same as my sickness. In a sense, by fighting the battle of sickness I was empowering it, inviting the situation in by making it real even when it wasn’t. Once I recognized my own behavior, I began to try different reactions to these “signs of sickness.” In short, I ignored them. Imagine my surprise when I got sick a lot less!

I’m not suggesting that illness is caused entirely by mindset, any more than I’m saying that one can see fireworks with the eyes of a child even at forty. I am saying that by being aware of my habitual response to certain situations, I was able to recognize that I had choices where previously I had felt constrained.

Where do you suppose I got the skills to recognize these things? You guessed it: my experience with The Feldenkrais Method. You see, each lesson I did in the Method provided me with an opportunity to face a habitually difficult task, such as putting my foot on my forehead. The only way I could improve in this function was by slowing down, examining myself at the moment I contemplated the task, increasing my sensitivity to all the connections between my bones, my joints, my mind, my body. The more aware I became, the more I realized I had choices, and the more choices I had.

As messed up and tied in knots as I’ve been, it’s a true blessing to have embodied this work. While there are many things in life I find I’m unable to enjoy to the extent I’d like, I do see myself on a road back to that kind of childlike wonder, that inner peace. When habit rears its ugly head, I’m able to look at it with a certain amount of wonder and say, “Ooooo. Ahhhhh.”

The Gravity of the Situation

We are creatures of gravity. Every single one of us, at least to the date of this writing, was born on the planet earth under the strictures of gravity. True, we spend a great deal of time in the buoyancy of our mothers’ wombs, relatively weightless as we are surrounded by amniotic fluid. But we are not designed to remain as fish. We’ve evolved out of that, and almost as soon as we are in the air, we begin our dance with the oppressive taskmaster known as gravity.

But is gravity really our enemy? Of course I’d like to experience weightlessness, or at least to fly through the air like a bird, and I imagine many others would too. Yes, I enjoy floating in the ocean, or even resting in a bath. It’s nice getting away from gravity for awhile, just like it’s nice to have a vacation. Sometimes when you go to a Feldenkrais lesson, the practitioner will support you in a way so as to remove your obligations to gravity. The experience is so powerful that you may get up refreshed without having any other work done, simply by the virtue of having gotten a little break from your habitual struggle with the pulling force.

Yet we are designed to exist in gravity. Our bones, when used properly, are capable of supporting an immense amount of weight. Many people who seem stronger than others despite having a rather slight musculature are really experts at using their bones as levers. But gravity is more than just the inconvenience our bones were designed to mitigate.

We often shine the brightest under the greatest challenges. Have you ever been in a crisis, only to find yourself discovering resources you never knew you had in order to overcome it? If you think about it, gravity serves that function for us in a less metaphorical sense. Without it, we cannot orient ourselves. We don’t know what to push against to move forward. It’s a constant reminder that we have to keep going because the alternative is surrender.

Still, it’s no joke that those who have lost their inborn sense of how to stand and sit in gravity can be miserable. In these people, muscles have come to do the job of the bones, and many of the muscles simply aren’t designed to do that. People experience bad backs, stiff shoulders and necks, headaches, varicose veins, and a host of other complications that arise from these things.

Many people who find this situation intolerable attempt to escape gravity on a more permanent basis. They may wear braces to take the place of bones, or supportive belts, or may end up confined to wheelchairs or beds. These solutions may short-circuit the law of gravity upon their bodies, but there is a price to be paid.

I’m not actually talking about the atrophy of the body. Let’s take a step back to someone who’s not actually bedridden yet. This person has long ago lost the sense of connection through the entire skeleton and they hold themselves up with a less effective combination of bones and musculature. Perhaps they bypass their spines completely and stand soldier-straight, doing fifty sit-ups every day to keep the stomach and back muscles strong. This strategy may work for them for years, but eventually it will fail and the chair will be waiting.

Before the chair, though, is another, subtler cost. When we fail to address gravity correctly, fail to really stop and feel its pull on us, we are doing without an essential experience. That sense of connectedness through the ground should by rights give us the sensation of wholeness, an understanding of the interrelationship between distant parts of our whole self. Gravity gives us an opportunity to develop this sense. In addressing its challenge, we become more complete.

When we bypass the sensation out of habits resulting from fear or illness, we also bypass that sense of completeness. We may find ourselves feeling empty, incomplete, lost and disoriented. We may try any number of cures, but in the end nothing can take the place of our connection with the ground through our skeletons.

There really is good news at the end of this sad tale: such awareness isn’t so hard to come by. Tai Chi and Yoga are some of the oldest contrivances to reconnect us with our ability to move in gravity. The Feldenkrais Method is a more modern take on the dilemma, designed on the same principles but with a slightly different modus operandi. It does not require a religious or spiritual outlook, but deals as concretely as possible with the problem of awareness and the self-image.

By examining ourselves in the context of the Feldenkrais lessons, we can focus on our ability to improve our relationship with gravity. Our spiritual and emotional state changes as a result, certainly, as these things are inseparable from the physical, but we need not get lost in the seeming contradictions of ancient belief systems to reconnect with our birthright, the gravitational force of the planet Earth and feel ourselves whole again.