Notes:
Warning: Feldenkrais-heavy content ahead. May induce eye-rolling or indifference. In case of severe boredom, scroll down to Hips Don’t Lie and Readers Write Delights. But here’s the thing: I am a Hare Krishna for Feldenkrais and if you’re going to spend time with me, you’ll have to listen to me bang my tambourine about it now and then.
For anyone new to Restless Egg (or if you skipped Issue #16) Feldenkrais is a somatic education with an aim towards improving and easing everyday movement.
If you have a spare hour in your week, follow the links for free online Feldenkrais classes with my favorite teacher, Nick Strauss-Klein. At the end of each session you’ll feel lighter, more balanced and way more relaxed, I promise.
Next week I’ll be traveling and probably won’t get an issue out unless— unless it’s 100% reader-written. I’d love to get more submissions to Readers Write Delights (and yes, I know it’s a cringy title, I’m working on it). Send your delights to me at thepoemelf@gmail.com.
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Love and Curiosity
Above my washing machine hangs a framed sign very simply embroidered with a question: “What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?” Jean-Jacques Rosseau wrote it, and it’s one the truest things I know.
An ethos of kindness is part of the wisdom of Feldenkrais. You’ll hear it in your teacher’s voice and the way directions are given; you’ll find it in the teachings of Moshe Feldenkrais himself. The particular brand of kindness key to the practice is kindness towards our own bodies.
Most of us have at one time or another disliked, loathed, or been disappointed by our bodies—by our aging, weight gain, less-than-perfect proportions, physical damage, illness, restricted mobility. Regardless of our limitations, in Feldenkrais we’re directed to feel wonder at the design of an ingenious muscular-skeletal system working efficiently with our nervous system. The more I learn the more I feel it’s as if hidden deep in a top-secret cave of the body is a clandestine agency working towards the good of all.
Ted Lasso fans will remember the bar scene when Ted tells the astonished and villainous Rupert that you can be curious or you can be judgmental but it’s much more fruitful to be curious. In Feldenkrais, curiosity is king; there’s no judgment, not from your teacher, not from your fellow students who all have their eyes closed and are focusing intently on themselves. There are no leader boards, no mirrors, no stopwatches, no better and best, just you and your curiosity.
Nothing against competition. Competition can push us forward. But competition has no place in Feldenkrais. The point is to learn, and learning takes place best when movement is small and slow, and our minds are curious and even fascinated by whatever our bodies are doing.
I’ve been seeing a Feldenkrais practitioner in person to help me with a pain in my shoulder blades. This injury has prevented me from hiking and swimming, two things I love to do, and thinking about my pain and constantly monitoring it occupies way too much of my time. I was complaining about this to my practitioner, well, maybe I was tearing up because I really want my old back back and I worry it’s going to be like this forever—and in her kindly way, she told me to focus on other things. Take short walks—look up at the sky!—float in the sea! Basically she was telling me to stop seeing myself only as a person with an injury. There was more to my life, there could be more to my life, than that.
In a recent online class, Nick Klein-Strauss, directing a complicated movement, put it this way:
“Can you find some places that are participating very beautifully?. . . .[Can you] give your attention to some pleasant qualities that you discover in yourself so that you can share a qualitative goal with places that aren’t moving as easily?”
It’s a great little mantra to keep in your back pocket for times of self-pity or self-recrimination: Give attention to some pleasant qualities of yourself! Nothing improves if we berate ourselves.
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Pardon This Interruption
Many religious traditions set aside time for an interruption of daily life—Lent and Ramadan, for example—so that adherents can re-introduce themselves to their deepest and most important values. Thoreau did the same by moving to Walden Pond:
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived . . . I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life . . . ”
Like Thoreau, Feldenkrais also employs interruption of routine in order to simplify. Automatic muscle firing patterns don’t always serve us and can lead over time to pain. To provide the body with new, easier, more graceful options, a lesson might ask us to de-couple habitual movements from each other.
Here’s Nick Strauss-Klein again. (Just prior to this instruction, he’s asked us to use our palms to roll our heads in one direction while moving our eyes in the opposite direction, an unnatural action.)
“Feel a curious sensation while we interfere with a very basic neurological pattern, interrupting it for the purposes of getting to examine ourselves, maybe rebuild some simple habits.”
In the beautiful Feldenkrais way, de-coupling allows the brain, mysteriously, magically, to figure out new options for movement.
You may think it’s silly that I began this section with cosmological ideas only to bring you down to the most minuscule of carnal ones; but here’s my real point: we can get so stuck in automatic pilot that options, cosmological or carnal, seem unthinkable. Being reminded of options, even the smallest ones, makes life bigger and more exhilarating.
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A Pause for Better Living
For years I’ve been working on becoming a less reactive person. Acting impulsively without regard to consequences, shooting off my mouth, and expressing unsolicited opinions are habits I’ve long struggled to unlearn. But . . . once again—and you know where I’m going— Feldenkrais to the rescue!
A Feldenkrais PAUSE is what’s needed.
In a very dryly titled lesson “The Hip Joints: Moving Proximal Around Distal,” the instructor suggests pausing:
“Before you push next, imagine the direction you intend, and can you feel the recruitment of the musculature? Can you feel yourself begin to think, I’m going to move that way. It’s that space between intention and action where we can really become graceful, where we can refine how we do what we do.
Again, these little non-judgmental scientific experiments. You knew what you intended and pictured—what came out? The distance between those two is really interesting, right? My mind was clear, my action in the world was not quite what I intended. How can I align those more?
This is a principle for good movement, and I think for good living. And just like refining things in our wider life, usually when we apply force we get a little bit less graceful, a little bit less pleasant, within and without ourselves.”
There’s a whole lotta wisdom there.
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Last Thoughts on Feldenkrais (at least for a while)
The two very best things I’ve learned in Feldenkrais are paradoxical. (Just to be clear, when I say I’ve “learned” these things in Feldenkrais, I don’t mean I didn’t already know them, I mean I learned them in a new way, in a visceral way.) The first is that change is always possible. How great is that! Physical change happens slowly, over time, sometimes without us willing it to happen. Slow change is a neurological Amazing Grace.
The second truth of Feldenkrais is that we must accept and love ourselves, even with all our limitations.
And there you have it. The challenge of life. Believe in change and at the same time work towards acceptance. I’m still figuring that out.
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Hips Don’t Lie
In writing so much about the body, two very fleshy poems came to mind. The speakers in both poems are not model-sized, a condition they accept and celebrate.
Homage to my Hips by Lucille Clifton these hips are big hips they need space to move around in. they don't fit into little petty places. these hips are free hips. they don't like to be held back. these hips have never been enslaved, they go where they want to go they do what they want to do. these hips are mighty hips. these hips are magic hips. i have known them to put a spell on a man and spin him like a top!
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Here by Grace Paley Here I am in the garden laughing an old woman with heavy breasts and a nicely mapped face how did this happen well that’s who I wanted to be at last a woman in the old style sitting stout thighs apart under a big skirt grandchild sliding on off my lap a pleasant summer perspiration that’s my old man across the yard he’s talking to the meter reader he’s telling him the world’s sad story how electricity is oil or uranium and so forth I tell my grandson run over to your grandpa ask him to sit beside me for a minute I am suddenly exhausted by my desire to kiss his sweet explaining lips
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Readers Write Delights
My sister-in-law Maureen Hathway knows for whom the bell tolls and she finds it a delight:
The sound of bells ringing in the distance delights me. My love of this sound started in college where the chapel bells rang out from morning until sunset, every 15 minutes. The musical notes were different on the hour. Now I hear our parish bells ring out to announce the start of Mass, regardless of the day, as well as at 12N and 6pm every day. It reminds me that no matter what the state of my life, time marches on and God is with us through it all.
And there's nothing like starting your day with a fresh cup of coffee and ending your day with a bowl of ice cream. Truly two of life's best delights.
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Enjoyed this! Richard and I will try a session with Nick. A refresher for Rich and intro for me.
I must try Feldenkrais!