Volume 7, Number 3, April
2008
Quote From Moshe: “…there is a Reality which has given birth to the subjective mother reality – nine months – and the objective father reality – a few minutes.” The Elusive Obvious, p. 87
Read it here!
Right Now
What is it about the ocean that brings out the best and worst in me? A number of years ago I wrote a column in Possibilities about how I “Remembered to Have Fun” at the beach by playing with the waves and engaging my awareness of three dimensions. I recently went to the ocean again with my family and had another revelation that relates to Feldenkrais.
Whenever I go to the ocean I know I’m going to have a period of anxiety. I can’t say why exactly, but I think it has something to do with transitions. The idea of getting in the water always puts me off, and until I actually get my hair wet in the ocean I find I’m sort of miserable and irritable. The colder the weather the worse my anxiety, because I find getting into a cold ocean to be almost unbearable.
I never thought to wonder about it until I shared the experience with my kids. In some ways I envy my older son for all the things he has that I never had: good looks, friends, a perfect father… No, seriously…I find that in many ways my son is fearless in situations that I’ve always been timid. He’s a remarkable climber, unafraid of falling, great at sports where he doesn’t mind diving all over the place to get the ball, and most remarkably, he doesn’t mind the cold.
I have a lot of trouble with cold. It takes me a conscious effort to tolerate cold weather. I’m better with it now than I used to be. Once I would bundle up tight as a drum, scarf and all, in autumn chills. Now I struggle not to let the sensation of cold dictate my every move. My son, on the other hand, goes out in cold weather in shorts and a T-shirt. When he was smaller and we let him do this, thinking it would “teach him,” we found it didn’t teach him a thing. Unlike me, he just doesn’t mind the cold.
Of course he had no trouble with the temperature of the ocean, and he dove right in the first chance he could get. In contrast, it took me 24 hours to get up the nerve to dunk my head in, and I didn’t want to stay in for very long.
None of this would merit an article if I hadn’t noticed something this time that I never noticed before, something that changed my perception of the difference between my son and me. I took him to the pool, and I watched him play, and all the while he was playing, he was shivering. Hmmm, I thought. He’s actually cold. That’s interesting.
So I asked him, “Are you cold?”
He gave a shivery nod, yes. But he continued to play in the pool.
“Doesn’t the cold bother you?” I asked.
He shrugged and went on with his game.
Until that moment it had never occurred to me that he felt the cold in the same way I did. I thought he had a physiological immunity to it. Suddenly, watching him shiver, I realized that his body is just like mine. It feels the cold just like mine. The only difference: He doesn’t care!
What does that really mean? One thing I know about my son is that he lives very much more in the present than I do. It’s sometimes difficult to threaten him with punishment because he doesn’t think about future consequences the way I expect him to, nor does he dwell on past problems. If he likes where he’s at, then he doesn’t think about anything else.
I think this is what allows him to tolerate the cold. He’s not afraid of how cold he’ll get, or how long he’ll be cold, or whether he’ll ever be warm again. He’s just “cold,” right now.
Recognizing this about my son, I also learned something about myself. I dwell very much in the past and the future. I have incredible abilities to use past experiences to advance myself, and to plan elaborate plans for future success. But even when something is happening to me in the present, I find I abstract it to a previous or future experience.
I knew this about myself to some extent, but I never really considered that this mindset might be hampering me. Perhaps I hate the cold so much because all I can think about is when I’m not going to be cold anymore. The less I know about the outcome of my experience of cold, the less I can tolerate it.
Seeing my son, it occurred to me that there are very practical advantages to obscuring the future and the past. As I began to think about the cold weather on the beach, I reasoned that it wasn’t really that cold. I was able to separate my emotional and intellectual experience from my physical experience so that I could recognize the true quality of the physical by itself. Later as I found myself thinking only about the moment, I found myself drawn into the ocean. It was cold, no doubt about it, and every slap of the waves against my chest was a powerful sensation. But after all, it was only a sensation. I recognized that another person might find it fun to get such a shock on the chest, that it was my own particular mindset that made the experience what it was.
As someone familiar with the Feldenkrais Method, I’ve cultivated an ability to observe myself, to question my basic assumptions. By learning to differentiate the movements within a function, I’ve gotten adept at seeing around my habits of mind to discover that what I thought was a given is in fact an option. In this case, I’ve been able to translate what I learned on the floor and apply it to a more general frame of mind: my experience of cold is not a single experience, but a braid of several conceptions.
It’s not easy to change my options. Just because I recognize that I can tolerate cold by being more in the moment doesn’t mean the moment is suddenly more available to me. Unlike my son, I’ll have to make a conscious effort to live in the present, just as he’ll have to make a conscious effort to think about the past and the future. But because I have practiced entering and leaving unfamiliar states on the floor courtesy of the Method, I have some experience to help me as I move forward.
The long and short of it is that the Method has paid off in unexpected ways and, despite its appearance as a kind of body work, massage or stretching it actually works on a far deeper level. When one has taken up the Method’s challenge to slow down and gently, curiously examine oneself, one finds so much there that is unexpected, and still more than is unanticipatable, simply because one must be in the present to experience it!
© 2008