Volume 7, Number 7-8, August-September 2008

Quote From Moshe: “When touching I seek nothing from the person I touch; I only feel what the touched person needs, whether he knows it or not, and what I can do at that moment to make the person feel better.” The Elusive Obvious, p. 4

Lessons With My Son

All my kids seem to like banging on the piano, and they all show some talent for it. My younger daughter makes up little rhythmic licks and improvises lyrics on them. My older son plays more drummer-like patterns. But my four-and-a-half year old son really seems to have the touch.

There’s something about the way he fools around that just looks like a piano-player. The way he approaches the keyboard, the way he moves in a pianistic way instead of a drummer- or singer-way.

I’ve been playing the piano for thirty-three years, and I’ve struggled with it for most of that time. Though most people would say I play with ridiculous ease, I know very well my own shortcomings. I can hear the difference between the way I play and the way someone who’s been playing thirty-three years could play.

When I watch my son, I see something in his playing that I haven’t got, even after all this time. So we have a neat activity we share: I call it “piano lessons.” I tell him I want to have a lesson with him. We sit next to each other on the bench, then he starts improvising. I watch him carefully and do my best to copy him when he stops. He corrects me if I do it “wrong,” that is, don’t copy him to his satisfaction, and I try to figure out what he’s actually trying to “teach” me.

He likes this game a lot. Because he’s too young to know the difference between what he does and what I do, he doesn’t really think there’s any difference between himself and me. He hasn’t yet learned to conceive of something that he can’t do on the piano. This is what makes him an ideal teacher for me. And, thanks to my Feldenkrais training, I am an ideal student for him.

Remember that my son is perfect in his own eyes. In a few years, he’ll discover that there are things he can hear that are beyond him. But right now, anything he can imagine, he can do on the piano. He thinks about what he wants to do, and he organizes himself perfectly to do it. Because he’s only four, he hasn’t had time to build up too many habits that would interfere with his playing.

In contrast, I’ve got lots of experience, but drawing on it is like licking a lollipop that’s been lying on the ground. Each time I access my experience with a lick, I pick up all the dirt as well as the candy. Each time I go to play a certain lick (no pun intended) on the piano, I do all kinds of things with my shoulders, my hips, my eyes, my mouth, and so on. I don’t usually know I’m doing these things, because they’re ingrained habits. And most, if not all of them, are completely irrelevant to my playing. I simply do them because I learned to do them at the same time I was learning the music.

As a child, when I first realized I couldn’t just play anything on the piano without some work, I started to feel very insecure. I hunched my shoulders when I played because that’s what I always did when I was “working harder.” Nobody was around to point this out to me, so the habit never went away. Similarly, my eyes darted around instead of moving smoothly across the music.

I’ve learned to recognize these things over the years thanks to my training in the Feldenkrais Method and my study of the piano as an adult, but even today I’m not as cognizant of my habits as I would like to be. So I watch my son, who does only what is necessary in his body to produce the sound he wants.

This is an amazing opportunity for me, because as I watch him organize himself to play, I can, with my training, notice little details about the way he moves, his approach to the keys, his follow-through. I can see how he bends his elbows without engaging his shoulders and I think, “Can I do that? How much am I using my shoulders to play? What if I did it his way?”

So I copy my son, and he watches me. If he sees I’m not doing what he does, he smiles and tells me how I’m missing. He doesn’t appreciate how powerful his example is any more than he knows how to play a Beethoven Sonata or improvise a bebop line. His complete satisfaction and confidence in his playing is extremely valuable, and also very fragile.

Soon he will begin to realize the world is larger than he thought, and he will hit his first wall as he tries to enter into that world. I can’t predict how he’ll handle that obstacle. People who become musicians later in life tend to deal with their frustration as kids without giving up what they do well. I can hope that he keeps this advantage and becomes one of these, even though I’ll be enormously jealous of him!

But just as likely, he’ll begin to bring in habits that will interfere with his progress. Then I will have the enviable job of being able to remind him that these extraneous moves are not necessary, that if he can conceive of the musical task clearly enough he can naturally organize himself to do it in the same way that he once organized himself to do a more primitive kind of playing. By teaching him what he taught me, I’ll continue to incorporate those lessons in my own playing. Our lessons will deepen and blossom into something that will continue to give joy to both of us for many years.

A Farewell to Arms

My kids can give very good Feldenkrais lessons.

Children are similarly remarkable at leading us where they want us to go. Often as adults in their world we use our greater power to avoid allowing them to lead us. This can be a necessary and beneficial choice, as children are many times just as likely to lead us over a cliff as they are to take us to a treasure-chest. They have limited experience of consequences, and it behooves us to use our own experience to predict which pathways we may safely journey with them, and which we should strive to avoid.

But in using our power this way, we may miss what they offer. Whatever advantage we may have in persepective over our children, we lack their ability to be present to their situation, their ability to react spontaneously and with perfect health to whatever is in front of them. They often recognize things we have ignored or discounted for so long that they have become invisible to us.

The story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” exemplifies this tendency perfectly. For anyone that doesn’t know this old story, I will relate it briefly: Two con-artists convince a king that they are tailors of consummate skill and they ask for a huge sum of money to create for the king the finest outfit he has ever worn. The men pocket the money and offer the king an “outfit” that is really made of air. Because the king cannot admit he is being tricked, he allows the men to convince him that the “air suit” is really a fine fabric. Because the king’s advisors are afraid of contradicting their monarch, they support the charade, convincing themselves in the process.

Finally the king parades through the town in his new outfit. All of his subjects react the same way the advisors did, complementing the king on his clothes. Finally, a little child cries out that the king is naked. After a moment of shock, everyone admits that this is the case and the king, humiliated, slinks away to his castle to put on some clothes.

Children in our lives are often telling us that we are naked in one way or another, by letting us know that our punishments are unfair, that our accomplishments are mediocre, or, most devastating of all, that our appearance has nothing to do with how valuable we are. We can resist these illuminations, but then we end up teaching our children to value our perspective over their own. Better that we use our experience to decide how much of what they say is true and how much is incomplete.

So back to my kids: occasionally one of them will grab me by the hand or the arm and start tugging or pulling me. I find, if I can be patient and open, that the quality of their touch is very much like the quality of their words: surprisingly powerful. Many of us have experienced the incredible grip of a three-month old baby. The child can organize herself perfectly to do this one thing, and nothing is interefering with it.

My child’s touch is also very similar to that of an experienced Feldenkrais teacher works with me during a lesson. It takes me into account. It reacts to me at the same time it tries to elicit a response. If I’m listening, with my whole self, that is, I can hear the way I react to that touch and notice things about myself that I always missed before.

The other day my younger daughter was tugging on my arm. I felt the pull and started to notice just how much I was resisting in my shoulder. Now, my shoulders are tense all the time. It’s one of my oldest habits. But I’ve kept them contracted for so many years that the sensation of tensing them is imperceptible most of the time.

After my daughter released me, I had a strange sort of revalation. I know for a fact, I thought, that if I didn’t have any arms at all I could still stand up straight. I don’t need them just to balance over my legs. This thought-process was the child that told me I was naked. Suddenly I could feel, to some extent, that I was contracting my shoulders to hold myself up, and that I might support myself better from some other source.

Now as I walk down the hall or the street I imagine that I have no arms and, instead of holding myself up by my shoulders, I balance my spine, letting my arms hang. This affords me a great many more choices for how I orient my head, which way my chin points, how much I tilt left or right. I’m able to make a great many adjustments in so many places that were constrained by the needless effort in my shoulders.

This revelation, a better expenditure of energy in the use of my arms, could help me greatly in my typing, my writing, and my piano playing. I might even conquer one of my oldest deficits and be able to throw a ball with some distance and accuracy. I can feel a release in my neck and am beginning to reoganize my swallowing so that vitamins no longer get stuck in my throat and my meals are more pleasant. All this from the tug of a child!

The Feldenkrais Method makes these revelations possible. Having been led through the dance by my skilled partners, I am able to dance with anyone and everyone. I can hear my children as, without realizing it, they encourage me to experience my own world more fully and more beautifully.

© 2008 Adam Cole