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.
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I remember learning something about imagination, along the lines of how it relates to physical learning/development. I think the experiment involved recording the electrical and magnetic signals from the brain to, say, the hand. If the subject merely thought about moving their hand in a certain way, nearly all of the signals were transmitted from the brain to the hand, aside from the very last few that were actually involved in the motion. I'm probably not explaining it well, but I remember it gave a good insight on why someone like an expert musician can practice, or even learn new music, simply by reading a score and working it out in their head. Seems like it might even be useful as a complement to physical therapy or something, like if you can't sit cross-legged now, if you can practice imagining it, along with doing whatever other exercises would help get you to that point.
ReplyDeleteYeah, imagination can be an extremely powerful thing. I've just had small successes with it, but there are some unbelievable stories out there. I heard a story from one of my teachers about a quadriplegic man who taught himself to walk again through imagination. It took two years, but after imagining what each little step would be to sit up, stand up, and walk out his hospital door, and teaching his brain how to do it, he succeeded.
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