Segment 5, Day 5: Sharing Secrets

We've reached the end of the first week of Segment 5, and what a week it's been! This segment is focused on Functional Integration (FI), the hands on version of Feldenkrais. So far it's been lessons in how to organize your body so that you can connect with your student, (dancers - think a not too firm frame) which involves keeping your whole spine really long. It's a lot harder than it looks.

Because we've been obsessively thinking about this all week, we're all suddenly noticing all the time where and when we shorten parts of our spine. One of my spots, for example, is that when I'm cutting something on a cutting board I tend to lift my shoulders to lift my hands to lift the knife, which then shortens the part of my spine between my shoulder blades and my lower neck. If I concentrate on it and just lift my hands from my hands and let my shoulders relax, I can cut more accurately and don't have to work so hard if I'm cutting something hard.

Richard has been sharing secrets with us this week, such as, he has to find that length in his spine again every time he's with a student. He's been a practitioner since the early 90s. He's reminded us that he never knows how a lesson will turn out at the end, or even necessarily where to start, but that he does know two things - 1. He knows how to look for what to do. 2. He knows what NOT to do. It's nice to know that we're not alone in our frustrations, and intriguing to know that this will be a lifelong process if we choose for it to be.

He also read us an interesting Moshe quote this morning, explaining the secrets behind why the Feldenkrais Method does what it does. It's a little dense, but worth reading. I thought I'd pass it along.

"The motor cortex of the brain, where patterns activating the muscles are established, lies only a few millimeters above the brain strata dealing with association processes. All the feeling and sensing that a man has experienced were at one time linked with the association processes. [...] A fundamental change in the motor basis within any single integration pattern will break up the cohesion of the whole and thereby leave thought and feeling without anchorage in the patterns of their established routines. In this condition it's much easier to effect changes in thinking and feeling, for the muscular part through which thinking and feeling reach our awareness has changed and no longer expresses the patterns previously familiar to us. Habit has lost its chief support, that of the muscles, and has become more amenable to change." - Awareness Through Movement, page 38-39

So to translate, muscles memory is really strong in all of us, whether we realize it or not. Linked to muscle memory are the feelings and sensations that went along with that action, and they will always be linked through that pattern. Once you break a pattern, you open up a new range of feelings, sensations, reactions, etc, that weren't available before because the pattern blocked them.

This stuff is so freaking cool.