Volume 7, Number 4, May 2008
Quote From Moshe: “…the head-shoulder muscles are not involved in any activity when I am handling the cerebal palsy person as I have described. The nervous system as we have seen, will take a few minutes or ten to twenty rehearsals to recognize it has the ability to leave all these muscles quiescent. This is, maybe, the first occasion in a lifetime that the cerebral palsy person feels no movement occurring in a region that had never stopped contracting, with or without the slightest intention to do anything.” The Elusive Obvious, p. 138
Put Your Back Into It
This month’s topic deals with parts of the body that are not often discussed in private company, so let me warn you before you begin that if you have a weak stomach, don’t continue. On second thought, if you have a weak stomach, this might be just the issue for you!
I’m always
trying to make my life easier, more joyful, more
pleasant. Just a few weeks ago I had a
revelation (they seem to fall on me from somewhere) about contraction and
relaxation. We all know that it’s better
to “relax,” but what we in these 21st century
We’re under the impression here that true bliss is the true letting go of every muscle, a sinking into perfect oneness with the ooze of the earth. We love our couches and our easy chairs, we love our deep tissue massages, we love our sleep.
This kind of surrender to gravity seems pleasant at first, but the reality is that it’s not the best way to go through life on the planet Earth. Unfortunately, a lot of us think the only alternative to this total relaxation is “tension.”
Now I’ve always believed I’m a “tense” person, not a “relaxed” person, that I go through life with too much “tension.” It’s no wonder I’ve always longed to be a “relaxed” person. But what I found out through my work with The Feldenkrais Method is that I feel best when I am “balanced.” In other words, my mind, body and emotions are optimally functional when all my muscles are at the appropriate level of tension.
What’s “the appropriate level?” Simply put, when I’m standing in gravity, the muscles that are designed to keep me upright should be just as contracted as they need to be to balance me. The bones in my skeleton are designed to support a great amount of weight when the force goes through them in the right direction, and if the muscles keep me over them in the right way, it takes very little work to keep me standing. I don’t want to completely relax, because my skeleton doesn’t balance by itself. I need exactly the right amount of tension to balance.
The other side of the coin is that I have a number of muscles which are not meant for balance but for manipulation. They’re the muscles I use to pick things up or to chew. These muscles should only be working when they have something to do. When they aren’t in use, they should be relaxed!
Are you wondering when I’m going to get to the parts that aren’t fit for private company?
In my Feldenkrais training, I came to know a muscle that I took for granted, the anal sphincter. This is the little contracting tube that you use when you force the waste materials out of the rectum. That tube isn’t used for balance. It has a job to do, and when it’s not doing anything it should probably be relaxed.
But I had no means of really feeling the workings of that muscle until I started thinking about my buttocks. Recently, in an ongoing effort to figure out why I can’t dance, I started exploring the contraction and relaxation of my buttocks muscles. In other words, when I danced, I included my butt.
At some point I got this idea that the buttock muscles and the anal sphincter, although close to one another, don’t necessarily have to work together. I wonder if I could differentiate those two things. One could tighten while the other relaxes, and vice versa.
So I began trying combinations of movement between the two muscle groups. And an amazing thing happened: the muscles in my butt-cheeks were free to revert to the level of contraction they needed to support my back.
Let me repeat that: I needed my butt muscles to work in harmony with other muscle groups, but they were restricted in their ability to contract. My antigravity buttocks were doing whatever my anal sphincter told them to do! When I freed them I also freed the chain of muscles related to them: my stomach muscles, my ribcage, and my lower back. All of these muscles also need to be at a certain level of tonus to hold me upright. Because the buttocks had not been working properly, they could not do their job.
Do you wonder what was holding me up? Overworked muscles in my legs, overworked muscles in my shoulders, overworked muscles in my jaw, my eyes…the list goes on. Beacause one set of muscles that I couldn’t feel wasn’t doing their job, the entire rest of my musculature was working overtime. Really, some things were too relaxed, and others were too tense. Once I corrected the problem, my whole shape changed. Again, some things were relaxed and others were tense, but they were the right things!
After this wonderful physical change, I had some startling mental revelations that came with it. I have always been addicted to closure: I can’t wait to finish projects, get to the end of books I’m reading, make it to my next vacation. It’s so hard for me to enjoy whatever process I’m in. But once my body reverted to a state where the work was more evenly distributed, I no longer needed that kind of closure as badly.
I realized that everything I did, be it working, reading, even just moving around, was going to require a certain amount of effort. It wasn’t as if true joy would come from doing everything in a relaxed way. On the contrary, the way to joy was to put the effort in the right places. It was as though the need for closure came from my desire to not feel the constant contraction of my shoulders, my legs and my jaw.
Habits run deep, and I have to regularly remind myself through exploration that my butt should be free! But the jail is unlocked now. And while I may not have eliminated my effort, I can now start sending it to the right places.
© 2008