Volume 7, Number 5, June 2008

Quote From Moshe: “Specialization in a limited range of acts for long periods is the most difficult adjustment for man to make. If a man uses his eyes as people in the past did, i.e – to look at the horizon, at the sky, at his body and at his work, the eye goes through the complete range of its capacity, and ignorance of the proper use of the eyes has no chance to cause real harm. But when the scholar, or composer, or draftsman has to use his eyes to focus at ten inches for hours on end, day after day, it is essential for him to know how to use the eyes properly. For he puts on them an extreme demand by excluding all functioning in favor of a particular act.” The Body and Mature Behavior, p. 19

Talking and Chewing Gums

As I’ve said before in this column, I always have some little thing that’s making me uncomfortable, some pain or ache or concern that comes for a few months, then vanishes to be replaced by something else.

My knee issue is mostly resolved now, although I have little reminders of it when I’m careless. Other strange things like a numbness on the outside of my little toes has come to visit for a couple of years and then returned to the ether from which it came.

One thing which has kept me company for a couple of years and which I hope is on its way out is bleeding gums. I went a couple of years without going to the dentist and when I finally gave in, I was informed that I had gum disease. I started brushing with a vengeance then, but my gums remained tender and very often bled.

After several years of this I finally went to the periodontist (the gum-specialist) who informed me that I’m brushing too hard and that’s probably why they bleed and are tender. I’m not sure that’s the only reason they’ve been causing me trouble, but I’m sure it’s a factor.

This month’s newsletter isn’t about better toothbrush technique (although that might make a good Feldenkrais topic!) It’s about what I discovered on my journey to gum-health.

Before I made my periodontist appointment, I asked some of my Feldenkrais friends why they thought I might be having problems. I got some very interesting answers. One suggested Vitamin C deficiency. Another suggested rinsing with peroxide. But the best answer of all was that maybe my gums needed to move.

I’m obviously not talking about flapping my gums, AKA talking. Sure, my gums move… every time I walk, right? They go where I go. And when I yap, they move up and down. But that’s not what my colleague meant. He meant maybe the gum-tissue itself needed to move independently of the rest of me.

There’s a concept in Feldenkrais called “differentiation.” That means that you spend some time taking a part of yourself out of context. You might lie on the floor and just move your wrist up and down, keeping everything else relaxed and still.

Why would you want to do this? Well, the obvious reason is that you’ll get to know a part of your body that you may have taken for granted. It’s like coloring it in with a highliter. “Wow, this is my wrist!” You can spend some time getting curious about your wrist, how far it moves in any direction, what kind of arc it makes on the floor as you move it side to side, all the different ways you can translate it left to right, and where in your body the movement originates.

But there’s another benefit to differentiation, one that makes the Method very different from other techniques. After you differentiate something, you put it back into the whole of you. You bring your entire self back into the picture as you move your wrist. Then something wonderful happens: It’s called integration.

Integration is the opposite of differentiation. It’s taking more than the sum of the parts, not just adding your wrist back, but weaving your understanding of your wrist into the whole of yourself so that you can no longer think of your wrist as something separate. That’s what we want, really.

Often an injury comes as a result from not including a body-part in our whole self. When you see the wrist as something separate from yourself, you manipulate it to get it to make that tennis serve, and you end up using musculature that you don’t need in order to get the control you want. That contrived movement causes strain and stress which often has to be compensated for by some other part of the body. Suddenly you have twelve seemingly separate problems which all have their origin in your attempt to manipulate your wrist to get that tennis serve you like.

What we want instead is to serve the ball with our whole self, not with our wrist. But to do that, we have to integrate our wrist into our entire self and our relation with our opponent. When we embody the thing we want, so that we’re not trying to control everything, but instead are letting our nervous system do its job and respond at super-thinking speed to the stimuli of the game, we play at the level we desire and often surpass it.

What’s this got to do with the dentist? Eventually it occurred to me to wiggle my teeth a little, just to see what would happen. I was surprised to find that some of my gum tissue, but not all, ached around certain teeth. They were sore like a leg that’s been supporting weight too long. But after I wiggled it, just enough to feel the movement in my gums, the ache went away.

The gums liked moving!

The point of this strange lecture is that no part of us is too remote to be included in the picture of our whole self. Who thinks about their gums at all, much less as an essential part of their whole self? Yet wiggling the teeth just a little, using the sensation to reconnect myself to the deep places in my mouth, connects me with my jaw, my tongue, and eventually my neck, head, and even my nasal cavity and eyes. No man is an island, and no part of man is an island either!