Segment 6, Day 3: movable shoulders! yay!

For the first two weeks of this segment, we have a guest teacher, Paul Rubin. He lives in San Francisco, where he had his own Feldenkrais training from Moshe himself in the mid-70s. That was the first US training, and Paul developed a close mentor-student relationship with Moshe. Paul's got all sorts of good stories on him. We've already heard at least 6 in the past three days. How he got that close relationship? By bugging Moshe with statements Paul knew would make him angry, taking the heat, and then standing up to Moshe and defending the original statement.

Paul is an interesting character himself. He's soft-spoken and fairly mild-mannered (except for the occasional sarcastic crack), but he has a large vocabulary and a huge amount of knowledge about the Feldenkrais Method and anatomy, and he likes showing it all off. Luckily it doesn't make him come off as pompous, just as an authority figure with no doubt about it.

I'm having a great week with what he's teaching us so far. We've been figuring out the connection between ATMs and FIs, which is a very strong but sometimes very subtle connection that can be tricky to find. Let me see if I can explain this a little better. This week, the ATM series we're doing has all been about mobility of the shoulder and arm, and how the spine, ribs, and sternum are all related to that mobility. You can see that connection in your own body. Lift one arm and use the other hand to gently push up under your armpit and along your side. Some pressure there will make you arm automatically rise further. Kinda fun, huh?

So, as we do ATMs learning to easily swing an arm like a windmill, or how to extend our arms farther above our heads than they would normal go comfortably, we're supposed to be analyzing the lessons themselves and seeing what pieces could be translated into or inspire an FI lesson, based on the function being taught. Yes, I could teach someone to reach further over their heads, but there's more to it than that. I could go farther with it and teach that person that they have a huge number of options about how they can move their shoulder blades.

(Did you know your shoulder blades can slide around in a full circle, not just a little up and down or side to side? No, not your shoulders, those are 7th grade PE shoulder rolls. Stop that. You're making me cringe. I said your shoulder blades.)

After a lesson like that, it's entirely possible that the person won't know for a moment where his or her shoulders and arms belong in space and in relation to the rest of his or her body. Strange idea, I know, but it happens all the time. Muscles that have been working too hard for too long breathe a sigh of relief as other disused muscles take a minute to figure out what their job actually is.

I always get excited when we get to explore working with shoulders, arms, and ribs. The ways people habitually use those particular parts of their bodies fascinates me. Feet are really cool too.