Day 20: End of Segment 3

Man, what a great end to a segment. Today was so much fun.

We finished the headstand series with a big emphasis on being happy about what you accomplished even if you didn't actually get into a full headstand, which most people didn't. I got to a point of being comfortable on my head and hands and toes, and I'm totally fine with that. Considering that two weeks ago I wasn't comfortable/didn't feel safe on my hands and knees with my head close to the floor, I accomplished a lot. I am also comfortable again in a long-lost position that I love - lying on your back and throwing your legs up in the air so you're balanced on your upper back, head, and elbows, supporting your back with your hands. I used to love to do that when I was little but lost the ability and strength to do it for a long time. It's finally back, and I love it just as much now as I did then. I can even bring my knees to touch my forehead there, not because of flexibility but because of actually having mobility in my spine and hip joints. It's totally thrilling, and hopefully I'll be able to hold onto it this time.

Oh, and in case I haven't mentioned it, it's become my life-long goal to never have hip surgery again. I'm done with it. I can take care of myself and not need the help of someone who wants to cut me open. Hip replacement around age 50 or 60, as my surgeon predicted? No thanks.

We did this amazing lesson yesterday about visualizing our spines, and I'm really enjoying the after effects. Did you know that your spine is not just the bumps you feel along your back, but a thick curvy column of vertebrae? Most people know that from anatomy books or x-rays, but actually getting a sense of that column inside yourself is a very different story. Since that lesson, I've felt very tall, very stable, and I've had a wonderful ability to curve my spine evenly and roll around on the floor without hurting myself.

More fun stuff from today... an FI practice! It went really well, not because the person I was working with felt perfect afterwards, but because we both just had fun with it. We were supposed to play with how our partner could turn, first lying on their side, then on their stomach, then on their back. When she switched to her stomach, it immediately became obvious to both of us that she wasn't comfortable that way. So, instead of going all goal-oriented and trying to make her turn, I kind of forgot about the lesson and focused on how to help her be more comfortable there. It was really relaxing to be able to forget about what I was "supposed" to be doing and instead do what my partner actually needed at that moment.

Here's a photo of us working. I'm finding out how much movement is available tipping her pelvis side to side.

By the end of the day we had all lost our minds, resulting in the first real class-wide fit of hysterics of the segment. Once we had finally settled down to do our last ATM, we heard a group of kids outside shouting and laughing. I don't know what they were doing because I was lying on the floor with my eyes closed, but it sounded really fun. Someone in the room commented out of nowhere, "I want to be doing what those kids are doing." I'm sure we all agreed. Alan told us that we probably would be by the end of the lesson. We weren't quite as loud as the kids, but we were definitely all animated when we stood up.

And that's it. We packed up, said our goodbyes, and went home to a beautiful sunny spring afternoon. As my carpool-mate Lisa said on the way home, it feels little like it should be summer vacation. Class is out, the sun is shining, and we'll all be back in September. In the meantime, I'm back to work on Monday, and most of us will see each other in study groups, regular get-togethers of students to do FI practice, ATMs, or just talk.

Podcast Recommendation

Anyone reading this blog might find this podcast episode interesting - Radiolab: Where Am I? I got it from a classmate, and it's got some bizarre examples of when things go wrong in the connection between your brain and your body. I particularly enjoyed the section about a man who lost all sense of himself in space and how to move himself from one place to another, and then found a way to teach himself to move again that sounds an awful lot like Feldenkrais. Hearing about army pilots with out-of-body experiences is pretty cool too. I'm not a huge fan of how the podcast is recorded (lots of cuts of different people talking spliced together can be a little hard to listen to), but they bring up some really interesting ideas and situations.

That's all for tonight. Tomorrow morning is Day 20, the last day of this segment, for better or for worse, and I should go to bed.

Day 16: Curiosity

We did three ATMs today. I slept through two of them. My brain has apparently decided it's overloaded and needed a break. It's a good thing, really. It means I learned a lot last week, and maybe the weekend wasn't quite enough recovery time. We spent last week learning how to do a Judo roll, although none of us really figured out where the series of ATMs was going until the last day or two. I never actually did a full Judo roll, only the very beginnings of it, but even that was enough to give me a solid idea of how it works and a lot of new information for my brain to process. This week's series is very obviously going to result in a headstand. I happen to be more interested in how to get into a headstand than in actually getting completely upside-down, so that will make the week much easier.

I listened to an interesting interview today, a recent edition of The Diane Rehm Show featuring Diane Ravitch. Diane Ravitch was an employee of the first W. Bush administration, and at the time was a full supporter of No Child Left Behind. Since then, in seeing the generally useless and negative results of the program, she's changed her mind completely and wants to get rid of it entirely. She's worried about schools turning into businesses based on competition instead of providing equal-opportunity public education, kids not getting complete educations because teachers are told to teach to the test and are forced to leave out some subjects, and teachers losing their jobs because their classes can't always meet the very high expectations of the tests. I think those are all extremely important points, but she's missing one, in my opinion.

The idea of having fun at school is mentioned very briefly in the interview, and I think deserves more time. Some discussion topics in class today were "What is learning?", "How do you know when you've learned something?", and "How can we learn how to learn?" We spent a long time talking about the last question, and the clearest answer we came up with was this...

It only becomes possible to learn when there is curiosity.

That's what Ravitch missed. We know now that teaching to the test doesn't work, because it leaves students and teachers stressed and leaves out major pieces of any curriculum, but it also doesn't leave any space for curiosity. Think back to your favorite teachers, at any point in your life, the ones who taught you the most. You probably didn't like them because they were funny, or strict, or whatever you liked in a teacher, but because they made you curious and made you think. That is impossible to do when you're teaching to a test, no matter what the test is. Whether it's a 3rd grader who has to take a standardized test or a 90-year-old who is told to do strengthening exercises, no one can learn anything unless they're curious about what they're learning. If that 3rd grader has decided they don't care about the test or about school, they might learn how to pass the test, but they won't learn anything about the information they're being tested on, no matter how much time they spend in class. If that 90-year-old has turned into a cynic from seeing too many pessimistic doctors and isn't interested in learning to walk again without a cane, they will have the cane forever, no matter how hard the physical therapists try.

If our class can remember this week to not worry about actually doing a headstand and keep our curiosity present in the process of learning how to do one, we will learn more than would ever be possible by forcing ourselves upside-down.

Day 12: Awareness

My classmates and I are all quickly realizing that the following statement is completely true: The downside of awareness is that it never goes away. Awareness is a wonderful thing, and can be very helpful in many situations. It can help you make yourself more physically or emotionally comfortable, and keeps you very tuned in to what's going on around you.

However, gaining awareness can also turn you into a stalker of sorts. I constantly find myself accidentally staring at someone on the street or in a coffee shop, not because of how they look or what they're wearing, but because of how they're moving (or not moving, depending on the situation).

An example - On the drive home today, my carpool-mate and I were driving downtown and noticed a guy at exactly the same time because his walk was so distinct. It was most obvious in his arms and hips. As he walked, his left hip swung back and forth, and his right arm swung so much that it almost hit the front and back of his body. His right hip, on the other hand, barely moved at all, and his left arm, instead of swinging forward and backward, didn't really go forward at all but swung back and up so that his elbow pointed behind him. When most people see someone walking strangely they think "Huh. Weird." and move on with life, but once Feldenkrais kicks in that's not possible. Three hours later I'm still thinking about him and wondering how he developed that pattern of walking.

Day 11: A New Perspective

We have a guest trainer for the next two weeks, Alan Questel. He's wonderful, but I'm not going to write about him now. I just want to write down some food for thought that came from him.

One of the less talked about purposes of Feldenkrais is to make it possible to like yourself more, not to the point of thinking you're perfect, but to understand what you already like about yourself, and discover what else could be improved and how. If you think you're completely perfect, you can't grow. If you entirely hate yourself, you also can't grow. There has to be some balance and space for learning.

Alan considers it his job to create that space and help people learn to like themselves more. Can we all have such noble goals in our careers?

Day 8: A Lesson in Self-Regulation

Part of the way Feldenkrais works is that by breaking down a movement into its most basic pieces and then slowing those pieces down, it allows you to access a very old part of your nervous system and change very old patterns of movement and behavior. When you access that part of your nervous system, it can bring up very old memories connected to those patterns, good or bad, and in a completely visceral way. It can be exhilarating, terrifying, painful, or a million other things, or a combination thereof depending on the particular memory.

I had one of those experiences today, a very powerful one. We were doing an ATM, one that integrates the movement of your legs into the rest of your body, so that every part of your body is involved in moving your leg to make it easier. We started lying on our backs with our knees bent and feet flat on the floor. I knew right off the bat that it was going to be a difficult lesson for me, because the first movement was to lift your right arm and right leg towards each other and hold onto your foot with your hand. I have limited mobility in my right hip, and that movement is not actually possible for me. I altered it by holding onto the middle of my shin instead of my foot to make it possible.

It got more complicated and more difficult from there. We were then directed to hold on to the right foot with both hands and roll slightly to the left to bring the right foot to the ground, but keeping the right leg bent and vertical (ie. the right leg couldn't rest on the left). That particular position is extremely difficult for me, and playing with how to make it possible brought me back to being an 11-year-old trying to do painful physical therapy after a hip surgery. That was not a happy 11-year-old. She was scared. She hurt. She was frustrated. The last time those memories came back because of an FI (one-on-one lesson), I hid in my room for 5 days caught up in the pain and frustration. All of those emotions came back again today and all I really wanted to do was stop doing the lesson, curl up on my side, and possibly cry.

When I realized where that reaction was coming from, I tried to remind myself that I am not 11, I don't have a screw in my right hip preventing me from rotating it, and that I didn't need to have that reaction. I was able to convince myself when I wanted to stop doing the lesson to lie on my back instead of on my side. Lying on my back with my eyes closed I could concentrate on my breathing and let go of those emotions, whereas if I had stayed on my side I would have hidden from the world inside those emotions. Using the lying on my back trick, I was able to stay with the lesson and finish it, taking breaks every so often to calm myself down.

In the middle of the lesson, Angel (the teacher leading the ATM) read us a Moshe quote (I told you they'd come up often...) that fit exactly what I was experiencing -

When we learn to really comfort ourselves, to manage our own comfort, joy, and well-being, then we will improve society. We will create comfort as the tightness in the brain is released. When this happens the evolution of our race will improve, and our children will experience this.

It's a relief to know that I can comfort myself, and begin to release those nasty old memories stored deep in my brain. I'll be free when those stories are free. I know that won't happen for a long time, but at least I've got a start on it.

PS. I taught my first ATM today. It was just to one person, and a lesson I'm very familiar with. It went way better than I expected it to.

Stand up straight! ...or not.

While physical therapy, massage, and yoga (kind of) focus on how a person uses their muscles, Feldenkrais focuses on how a person uses their skeleton. I just found a very clear explanation of that idea in "Awareness Through Movement". Moshe quote time!

"The nervous system and the frame develop together under the influence of gravity in such a way that the skeleton will hold up the body without expending energy despite the pull of gravity. If, on the other hand, the muscles have to carry out the job of the skeleton, not only do they use energy needlessly, but they are then prevented from carrying out their main function of changing the position of the body, that is, of movement." - pg. 68

So when someone tells you to stand up straight, all you probably do is work harder by pulling yourself upright with your muscles. Why not find a way to adapt better to gravity by letting your skeleton and muscles do what they're each made to do?

Day 3

Today was a classic sort of Feldenkrais day. We did three ATM lessons, and I had three completely different reactions to each of them.

The first was a lesson that started sitting on your mat with your legs stretched out in front of you, and pulling them towards you to sit cross-legged. I physically cannot sit cross-legged because of limited range of motion in my right hip, so as soon as I saw that sitting in that position was going to be a major piece of the lesson, I decided to lie back down on my mat and imagine doing the lesson instead. Imagination is an unbelievably powerful thing if you know how to use it, and I can often get a lot out of imagining a lesson. That didn't happen this time though, because within about 10 minutes of imagining the lesson, I was sound asleep and didn't wake up until I heard my teacher stop talking and noticed that everyone was up and walking around to go on break. I have no idea what the lesson was about.

I LOVED the second lesson. It was about organizing the way you use your torso, and involved very small, slow movements in your shoulders and hips while laying on your back to help you find the ways in which your whole torso can bend and stretch. It was one of those lessons that just fit. I got up from it feeling very tall and open to the world.

The third lesson confused me. It taught us a kind of crawling-while-lying-down movement, which was difficult to start with. The really tricky part for me is that thanks to various casts and braces, I never actually learned how to crawl when I was a baby, and then learned how to walk without swinging my arms. I didn't learn to swing my arms until I was about 8. For any developmentally normal person, a lesson having to do with crawling should be relatively easy. Since I missed that developmental step, crawling has never been easy for me. Usually when you crawl, your right arm extends as your left leg bends and left arm extends as your right leg bends, and your head swings to look toward the extended arm, and that's a very natural movement (for most people other than me). Part of this lesson was mixing that up so that when you extended your right arm, you bent your right leg, or you looked to the left. It confused me way more than it should have. It's times like that where you learn a major concept in Feldenkrais - self-regulation. Confusion like that makes my brain hurt. When your brain hurts, the best thing to do is lie down and just rest. I did a lot of resting in that lesson.

Day 1

March 1st. Here we are. Year 2, Segment 3, Day 1. Also my aunt's birthday and my sister's 21st birthday. What a crazy kind of day.

One of the things I've come to appreciate about our training segments is the schedule it puts me on. Working at Interlake is great fun, but being a substitute does not result in a normal schedule. Working full-time one week and not at all the next week when I didn't plan to go on vacation is just confusing. This puts me on a solid schedule for a full month, and it's kind of a relief. Up around 7:00, out of the house at 7:40 (7:30 if I want to stop for coffee on the way), pick up the first part of my carpool at 7:55, pick up the second part of the carpool at 8:00, a half hour drive over to the beautiful St. Edward's Park in Kirkland, a little free time, and class at 9:00. A break around 10:15, lunch around noon, another break around 1:45. Done at 3:00, home by 4:30.

Our days are spent on our mats, similar to yoga mats but wider and not quite so thick, mostly doing Awareness Through Movement lessons (ATM - a vocally directed class, looks like yoga), practicing Functional Integration lessons (FI - hands-on one-on-one work, looks like massage) on each other, talking about what we're learning, or watching old recordings of a training that Moshe taught in the 80s, just before he died. Some people also spend a lot of time sleeping, although while allowed and encouraged (a nap is time for your brain to process a change in the way you move), it's not usually intentional. I spent most of Segment 2 asleep. I don't know why exactly, although I did find out an interesting factoid today that could explain part of it. Did you know that the prefrontal cortex in your brain deals with emotion, personality, behavior, and judgement, and in doing so, uses the most calories of any part of your body? I must of had a lot of emotional processing to do that I wasn't entirely aware of. I wonder how this segment will compare.