Volume 6, Number 8, September 2007

Quote From Moshe: “How can one know oneself? By learning to act not as one should, but as one does. We have great difficulty in sorting out what we do as we should from what we want to do with ourselves.” The Elusive Obvious, p. xi

Need Not Be Present To Win

Every month I write to you in this column about awareness, how great it is, how much it’s changed my life. I created this website to further spread the news about how The Feldenkrais Method can increase your awareness, and the assumption is that it’s a good thing, so good, in fact, that you can’t do without it.

But is that true? To what extent is awareness always necessary? Can you get by without it? Are you going to have a much, much worse life if you never read my newsletter, never have a Feldenkrais lesson, never experience awareness?

The answer isn’t “yes.” It isn’t “no” either! That’s the beauty of awareness, the fact that becoming more aware pulls you away from black and white contemplations. So let’s think about awareness not as a toy that you have or don’t have, but as a sweater or a block of cheese, something you might have, but might not need every single minute.

Awareness is a resource. It’s necessary to have some awareness, but you can function without being “fully aware.” In fact, it may not be possible, much less practical, to be fully aware. If it is possible, it’s probably equivalent with something called “enlightenment” where you’re so in tune with yourself and your connection to the world that you no longer have to eat or sleep or anything. That’s not very useful to talk about, since many of us really don’t have much hope for that.

So let’s talk about a more moderate amount of awareness, say “less” and “more.” Less would be the kind of awareness you had before you ever discovered Feldenkrais, when your back was hurting all the time or you had chronic headaches or you couldn’t sleep on your back or you couldn’t play the piano. More would be the amount of awareness you had right after your first great lesson, when you felt alive for the first time since you were six.

Let’s be fair. Can you really function at the “more” level all the time? It’d be nice if you could. You’d walk around feeling like every step connected you intimately with the earth, like you knew where every impulse from your toes went, all the way up to your ears. You’d have a perfect sense of where each finger was and how it connected to the rest of your body. You’d have a fantastic mental image of the orientation of your head, and so your eyes would be clear and you’d feel like you could talk to complete strangers with no fear.

That’s all fine until you experience fear or stress and want to enter a more protected state. It’s not necessary to be super-aware when what you really want is to retreat or narrow your focus for an hour-and-a-half so you can pass the test in front of you, or when you want to get lost in that book or that movie for awhile. I suppose ideally that the joyous state of awareness would make an escapist movie unnecessary, but let’s get real. You’re a person, you have a job, you get tired, and entering a super-aware state is just one option. The movie is the other!

There may be some purists out there who are twitching because I’m selling awareness short. Truth to tell, I feel a little guilty not bowing down to the great spirit of awareness myself. But I can make the picture a little more compelling by explaining to you that awareness by itself is not enough.

I just bought my six-year old son a harmonica. It’s amazing to hear him play it. He has no experience, but he’s got no fear about exploring his instrument. So he makes sounds on that harmonica that sound like something an eighty-year-old blues-player would come up with. When he’s playing, he’s totally “awareness.” He has no experience to tell him what he’s doing is “good” or “bad.” He only knows that some sounds excite him more than others, and he explores further to increase that body of experience, the sound-movement connection, to discover which movements generate the sounds he likes.

Is his awareness enough? Put him in front of a blues-band and see. What do you think will happen? Will my enlightened son thrill them all with his awareness-based playing? No! He’d stink! He wouldn’t have any idea where to come in, who to listen to, or what to do. Awareness wouldn’t solve his problem, at least not right away.

To be able to play with the group he’d need some concrete knowledge based on performance experience. It’s true that awareness would help him get to that point quicker, but it wouldn’t suffice if he didn’t use that awareness to gather the right information.

Now let’s go back to the other side of the coin. There’s probably someone out there who’s been playing the harmonica for forty years. They took lessons from the time they were six and always did what they were told. They used very little awareness to get where they are now, but they followed directions very well.

This person might actually be able to play quite successfully with a band, maybe even for a living. They know everything they need to know about when to come in, what to play, and so forth. It’s true that, lacking something in awareness, they may never be able to explore and create something new, but we can’t say that this lack prevents them from functioning quite well in their life. If they never take a Feldenkrais lesson, they’ll still be just fine.

That is, until they injure themselves…

That’s the kicker, isn’t it? We’re granted enough awareness as babies to get us through to the point we need to eat, sleep and walk. After that, awareness starts to fade and experience starts to assert itself, and as long as everything goes normally we’re just fine. But when things change in our lives, how do we change with them?

So often we don’t. We stay the same and wonder why things are getting harder. Where did that pain come from, we ask? Why aren’t people as nice as they used to be? Why is it so dark in here? We’ll be okay without that extra awareness…we’ll live until we die, no matter what.

But add that awareness, get that Feldenkrais lesson, and suddenly it’s like resetting the clock, or even turing it back. Awareness is a resource that we want to be able to access as we need it, so that we can explore, externally and internally, when something needs changing.

If we’re “okay,” then okay. We can leave it alone. But if we know something could be better, it behooves us to do more, to be aware of the paths leading every direction from where we are sitting.