Segment 8, Day 14: musings over coffee

Today we had our final practicum of the training, working with someone we'd never met before while being observed by classmates and teachers. It was amazing watching my classmates give FIs this time around - COMPLETELY different from last segment's practicums. Last time we were nervous, unfocused, too focused, unsure of our touch, unsure of ourselves... but this time, we were calm. No one was obviously panicking. Everyone had a fairly clear idea behind what they were doing. We were more comfortable with our clients. Whether or not we all actually felt at east, we all appeared to be at ease. What a change.

We have a week left. Everyone's got senioritis, and it's showing in all sorts of ways. Some people are withdrawing a little, some are punchy, some are in denial, some are celebratory. I'm not really sure where I fall on that spectrum, but it's somewhere between punchy and denial all while feeling reflective, which is a strange place to be. I've never liked sudden changes like graduations. They throw me off balance. Doesn't matter if it's moving from the 3rd grade to the 4th grade or graduating from this training, I always find myself glad to be moving on but not wanting it to be over. Ready to take on what comes next, but scared of leaving familiarity.

I found a quote today in a book I'm reading that is helping me figure out the relationship between the work I do and the trouble I have explaining it with words. I thought I'd share it here.

"My eye, solitary, filled with its own history, is desperate to evade, erase, forget; it is watching now, watching fiercely, like a scientist looking for a cure, deciding for some days to forget about words, to know at last that the words for colours, the blue-grey-green of the sea, the whiteness of the waves, will not work against the fullness of watching the rich chaos they yield and carry." - Colm Toibin, The Empty Family

I have to remember that, while it may feel like words just get in the way, they don't actually do any harm.

Segment 8, Day 3: finding happiness, or not

Angel asked us an interesting question this morning. She wanted to know about our experiences of happiness during training months.

Many people answered along these lines: The time spent in class paying such close attention to movement habits and realizing you have more choices translates into realizing you have more emotional choices and can have more peace in your life because you don't act on impulse so much.

One person's answer: Happiness is a byproduct of the work we do, not something inherent in a training month.

I'm with that second person. I didn't give an answer in class because I needed more time to think about it, but maybe I'll say something tomorrow. If so, this is what I want to say. I think that looking for happiness during a training month is missing the point. The point of these 8 months, for me, has been to acknowledge the frustration, confusion, pain, terror, sadness, exhaustion, etc, this work brings up, figure out how to deal with it, and move on. There is happiness that can come during or after working through those things, but happiness is not my goal. I personally think happiness in essence is a little dull. I'd rather be a little unhappy but have interesting questions in my life to figure out. Wouldn't you?

new challenges keep coming

Today I was faced with an interesting challenge - working with a very shy insomniac who recently had a terrible experience with massage and hates lying down because he goes into spirals of frustration about not being asleep. On the rare occasion that he does sleep, it's usually in a chair and by accident for 30 or 40 minutes. Even before I saw him lie down, it was clear that starting a lesson in that position would be pretty much impossible, so my challenge was to find a different set up and figure out where to go from there.

Step 1. Have him sit at the edge of the table. Start the lesson there.
Step 2. Ask him to lie down on the table to let his body settle. He lies down for about 7 seconds with the expression on his face saying, "I'M LYING DOWN. SEE ME LYING DOWN? I'M STILL LYING DOWN. CAN I GET UP YET?" until I give him permission to sit up whenever he's ready.
Step 3. Have him sit back up and work a little more.
Step 4. Have him lie down again. This time, after a moment of panic about lying down, he reconsiders and finds a way to relax into the table a little. His breathing deepens a bit. He stays on the table for more like 45 seconds or a minute this time.
Step 5. More sitting work.
Step 6. Lie down again, but it's different this time. It's not obviously comfortable to start with, but it's not panicky either. He stays there, breathing and letting himself settle into the table for at least a full minute. I decide to see what will happen if I keep him on his back and continue the lesson there.

Despite my offer to let me know if he wanted a break from being on his back, he stayed there and let me work with him for a full half hour. I even heard a couple of snores here and there! (Please ignore the sneaking plan at the back of my head that he didn't know about to maybe help him sleep a little during the lesson...) When the lesson was over he was thrilled to have been able to be comfortable lying down for that long and said that he felt "like a million bucks!"

We'll definitely be working together again.

opening up possibilities

A number of months ago, a friend of mine got into a bad car accident. No one really knows if the car flipped or rolled or both, but either way, her back seized up and she's been in a lot of pain since then. Physical therapy has been helping, but recently has been helping less, so I offered her a lesson. She took me up on it last week. Today we got to talk and she told me that her experience after that lesson was, for the first time in months, she could easily breathe deeply and felt like an actual recovery was possible. The smile on her face as she said that was priceless, full of relief and excitement. Plans are in the works for another lesson tomorrow.

The knowledge that I can help someone get a part of her life back that's been missing is hugely gratifying.

how to explain Feldenkrais

It's rare to come across such a clear and simple explanation of Feldenkrais. I'm holding on to this article for future reference for when I need to write blurbs.

Workout of the Week

by Aimee Heckel, DailyCamera.com

Instructor:Erin Ferguson, of Boulder. Ferguson started Feldenkrais to deal with her own muscular pain in 1996, and she started the four-year training to get certified in 1998. She founded a center in New York and worked there for several years, before practicing in London. She moved to Boulder County in 2007 and has been offering classes here since.

What is the workout?Feldenkrais is a method of learning new ways to move to replace your old habits. You do this by examining your muscle tone, skeletal alignment, breathing and specific movements.

These classes, based on physics, biomechanics, learning strategies and martial arts, teach the skeleton to move with intelligence, not effort.

For example, if you see a video of yourself running, you can see -- with "cognitive" awareness -- what your body is doing, and how it might not be moving the most efficiently. But Feldenkrais teaches "kinesthetic" awareness, or the ability to notice your body's internal positions when it happens.

"If you know where all your bones are in space, you can carry out your intention more clearly in the world," Ferguson says.

Who does it?The class I took had four participants, one of whom was a man. Feldenkrais is useful for people who want to improve a particular activity, such as yoga, picking up your children or rehabilitating after an injury. Feldenkrais focuses on how you distribute your bodily force through the skeleton, which can be useful for golfers, musicians, dancers or climbers. This list goes on.

When:The hour and 15 minute class is 6 p.m. Tuesday and 8 a.m. Thursday.

Level:My entire class was spent lying the ground and doing just a few small movements over and over. Sounds easy. But it wasn't -- especially not mentally. The amount of internal focus exhausted my brain.

According to Ferguson, Feldenkrais reprograms the brain. It is not about overriding existing habits, but rather exploring them, and also realizing there are more options to how we do things. There is no right or wrong, but that does not mean it is easy. Just highly personal. So the level of difficulty depends on what you are doing and how you feel on a particular day.

Format:There are thousands of lessons, some as complex as practicing Judo rolls, others as simple as just lying on your back and paying attention to how your bones are organized. In my class, we were on our backs, arms straight out above us, hands together and thenasked to drop the straight arms to one side or the other without lifting the shoulder. By paying attention to how this movement enlisted our hips, spine, legs and even feet, I was able to find different ways to accomplish the movement. It was like putting a puzzle together.

Group classes (called Awareness Through Movement) usually take either many small movements and build them together into a complex movement, or they take one complex movement and deconstruct it into smaller pieces.

Here are three tips on how to approach each lesson:

1. Listen to your own comfort. Feldenkrais is not about pushing yourself over the edge or trying to imitate a move the teacher does. In fact, she never told us how to do anything.

2. Maintain your curiosity. Learn in the same way that a baby learns to roll over by exploration and not by setting the intention "On Friday I am going to roll over."

3. Focused awareness. Move your attention to a particular part of yourself and examine the sensation there.

Equipment:None, other than the blankets you lie on . You can bring props for comfort. Even though Ferguson set up a space heater, I got kind of cold, so I recommend bringing a long-sleeved shirt.

What to wear:Comfortable clothes, no shoes.

Muscles worked:The brain as it learns to reorganize the muscles to work more efficiently.

One new move:Try this. Lie on your back for 10 minutes a day and give your spine a rest. Feel your spine. Focus on what percentage of your spine touches the floor, and track that from base to neck.

"This is probably a new move for more people," Ferguson says.

What's different:The focus on the skeleton, not just the muscles. If you don't know where you bones are -- how they are aligned, how they can move -- you have an incomplete self-image, Ferguson says. For example, she has had clients who don't realize that the ribs can move. This wrong assumption about your skeleton impacts your ability to function and understand your body and the different things you can do with it. Another example: Climbers who don't realize how their pelvis moves are missing out on many different options to support themselves when on the mountain.

Unlike other classes, Feldenkrais is not about the movement itself but understanding your own movement strategies.

What I loved:Feeling connected to my body and the value in the minimal. When you slow down, you are able to feel more.

What I didn't like:It was difficult to not peek around the room and see how everyone else was doing it. I wanted to copy others or ask the teacher how to do something, but that was a no-no. The weirdest thing I found out when I did peek: Everyone started out doing the movement differently, but ended up doing it the same, just through our own paths of exploration. Interesting.

Inspiration for class:Feldenkrais was developed in the'40s by an engineer, Moshe Feldenkrais, the first European to get a black belt in Judo. He created this after he suffered a knee injury from playing soccer. Feldenkrais made it to the United States in the'70s.

What others say:After class, most of the others said their feet felt oddly heavy. Ferguson said this was our skeletons, holding themselves up with less muscular effort.

How I felt after the class:Also heavy, like gravity had increased. I was blown away by being able to feel my skeleton more. Who knew I had those bones under that muscle? I have not seen my body the same since.

How I felt later:I want to talk to Ferguson about how the Feldenkrais lessons and concepts can apply to life, in general. Slowing down, being driven by curiosity, using muscles more efficiently, understanding how you individually do things and all of the different ways you could function, without the labels "right" or "wrong." We have so many choices that we don't even realize because we rarely take the time to stop and pay attention to how we are "stacked up" at that particular moment.

I think a class like this can have an impact much deeper than even that mysterious skeleton that I forgot I had.

I'm not sure what to call this post.

In the month since Segment 7 ended (has it really only been a month?), I've made a strange and occasionally maddening physical discovery. Thanks to an FI practice we did in class about side-to-side rib movement, I've figured out my scoliosis. I can tell you, without feeling with my hands, the location of the curve and twist in my spine. (Did you know part of a scoliosis is a twist, not just a curve? That was news to me.) I can even play with very subtly changing the curve and untwisting the twist, but it takes so much concentration that it makes me feel a bit like I'm putting myself into a trance. I have to be careful with how much I play with it - too much makes me feel a little sick, but it's exciting nonetheless! I love the idea of my scoliosis not being there or at least being smaller, and knowing something about how it works is the first step to getting there.

It's been a busy month of work, dancing, gardening projects, visits with people I don't get to see often enough, a whirlwind of a trip to California, and some time spent figuring out how this whole starting a professional Feldenkrais practice thing works. Did I mention I'm graduating in 4.5 months? October and Segment 8 are coming up really fast. I'm mildly terrified of that idea, but it's becoming less terrifying and more doable as I get more advice on what to do between now and then and what to do after I graduate.

What to do between now and then? Work with as many people as I can. I need to get better at that one and actually contact the list of people I have who are interested. Continuing to journal the lessons I give will also be helpful in terms of figuring out my preferences/habits/patterns in lessons. I'm also considering asking a local practitioner if she would be interested in letting me mentor with her for a little while, to observe lessons and get more advice.

After I graduate? Marketing, marketing, and more marketing. And networking. And website building. And more marketing. I know very little about any of that, but luckily I've already discovered that a good friend of mine knows a whole lot about marketing a one-person business, and I've got a bunch of friends in the broad field of body work who I can start networking with.

I'm beginning to think I can actually do this.

Segment 7, Day 19: Vitality

It's kind of stunning how much has happened in the 10 days since I last wrote here. Feels more like a month than only 10 days. In that time, we've done 8 practicum sessions (4 as practitioner, 4 as observer), done feedback sessions for all of them, gone into to detail on aspects of lessons that weren't so clear during the practicums, observed Richard give 4 full-length lessons to classmates, been taught and practiced a number of new tricks and strategies to use during lessons, celebrated Richard's 55th birthday with homemade root beer and chocolate cheesecake, done a bunch of difficult ATM lessons, lost our minds in giggle fits, and today, watched a Moshe lecture. It's been a busy 10 days.

The lecture is what I wanted to write about here. It was on what Moshe called "levels of vitality". I found very quickly that I didn't like his idea of levels, that some people are more vital than others and are therefore better people, but the different types of vitality interest me. Oddly enough Moshe got them from Ron Hubbard, Mr. Scientology, of all people, but they're still worth thinking about.

Type #1 - The person who adjusts to the reality around them whether they like it or not. That can mean anything from someone who surrenders to a bad situation because they don't want to deal with it, or don't know how, to someone who realizes they don't quite fit and changes their own behavior to fit better.

Type #2 - The person who doesn't accept the reality around them and runs away, out of fear, anger, because they just need a new start, or countless other reasons.

Type #3 - The person who doesn't accept the reality around them and finds ways to change reality to fit them. The other extreme from #1, which can range from a person in a bad job changing what they can in the situation to a dictator changing how a country works to fit their desires.

The idea behind the different types is how people react to life, and how alive they feel based on those reactions. An activist who manages to reverse a major piece of legislation probably feels more alive in that success than the old lady who refuses to leave her house in the winter because she once broke her hip falling on ice (true story, Richard's grandmother). That's not to say that the activist lives a more worthwhile life than the old lady (although I think Moshe would not agree with me), it's just a different sort of life. Maybe the old lady likes her small life. She adjusts to it and realizes how safe it feels. The activist continues to be disappointed with government and continues to fight, successfully or unsuccessfully.

What we realized in discussion after watching the lecture was that you can't stay one type your whole life. At some point, everyone needs to settle and be okay with what they have or where they are, at some point everyone has a situation to escape, and at some other point, everyone gets the chance to change reality, even if it's a tiny change. If you only know one or two of those reactions, your life can't be full and something will go very wrong. All three are equally important and equally vital - it just depends on the situation at hand.

Segment 7, Day 9: Practicum #1

Today was our first set of practicums! Everyone brought in a guest, then handed that guest off to a classmate and received their own client, so we all worked with a stranger. We did two rounds of lessons, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, so that if you were a practitioner in the morning, you were a facilitator in the afternoon for the person who facilitated you.

I was a facilitator first, so I got to start the morning sitting back and observing a lesson, giving tips when needed. The practitioner I observed got paired with a woman, bus driver by profession, who complained of having a tight lower back and hips while doing yoga. I found myself very surprised that she did yoga. Maybe it was the way she held herself (she was very tall and perhaps felt a little awkward about her height), maybe it was the bus driver uniform she was wearing, maybe it was the motorcycle gear she took off before her lesson... Whatever it was, she turned out to be a very different person than I would have guessed by first impression. By the time she was on the table, her practitioner realized very quickly that there was all sorts of holding going on in her torso and not a lot of movement available. I think it scared her off, so she ended up working from the woman's feet and legs instead, trying to free up her hips a little. It was a tricky lesson, and when the woman sat up she said she didn't notice any differences. What she did notice was that she had gotten a feeling of "universal love" through the practitioner's touch and had really enjoyed that sensation. Neither the practitioner or I really know what she was talking about, but she's coming back for another lesson next week, so she got something out of it...

After lunch, I became practitioner. My client was also a woman, although a very different one from the morning. She was tiny, talkative, had done a little Feldenkrais a long time ago and remembered the impacts, and was very sure of her self-awareness. She also knew exactly what she wanted me to do. After telling me "someone" had told her she had scoliosis in her upper back and neck (quite extreme, actually, I'm amazed it doesn't cause her pain), she said that she wanted me to straighten her spine. She also mentioned some deterioration of her lower spine, the kind that comes with age, and clearly would have liked me to reverse her aging and bring her lower spine back to perfect 20-year-old health. I explained to her that straightening a spine isn't something I can do, or certainly not in one lesson, but I could at least send her in the right direction.

I started the lesson not actually knowing what I wanted to do, exactly. I knew it would be about her spine, but I didn't decide what until I'd had my hands on her for a few minutes. At that point, it became completely obvious that where there should be a clear line of the spine, there was a major disconnect between her pelvis, ribcage, and head. Her head was forward and turned a little to the right, her ribcage was both shifted and turned to the left, and her pelvis also turned a little to the right. I spent the rest of the time helping her find connections between the disconnected parts of her torso along the line of her spine (ie. when your head turns right, so can your sternum and your ribcage and your shoulders AND your pelvis, imagine that), and by the time she sat up from her lesson, she said her spine felt straighter!

Ladies and gentlemen, the power of intention.

Later, already feeling pretty good about how it had gone, Angel came up to me and said that she hadn't wanted to overly compliment me in the group feedback session, but that I had done "really, really good work." Comments like that from her are excellent ego boosters. I feel pretty proud of myself.

Segment 7, Day 7: an experiment in progress

I'm not sure where to start with this entry. I should have written sooner this segment before my head was so full of information. It's been a busy seven days. I'm not actually overwhelmed yet, just trying to process what's happened so I can figure out what to write here.

In most Feldenkrais trainings, students have two opportunities to give FIs to non-Feldy people in class and get feedback from their trainers. They traditionally happen in the last part of a training, and they end up being very stressful and high pressure for the students. Then, after those two practicums, students are kicked out the door, out of the nest, off the cliff... Pick your metaphor, they're all bad situations leaving the students unprepared for starting a practice.

Angel and Richard decided that because our class did really well in the past two segments getting the hang of how to give an FI, we were ready for more than most trainings. In fact, they decided we were already ready to give public lessons and receive feedback, even though we still have two segments left. That means we have become guinea pigs for a new version of Segment 7 that has never been tried before. Instead of two practicums at the end of our training, we get four each just this month! To take the pressure off a bit, we'll be observed directly by a classmate who is there to help if we get stuck, and observed from afar by our trainers. Leading up to the practicums, we've been breaking down the structure of an FI and testing out pieces of it in a variety of imaginary and real client situations to get a handle on each piece. That way, when we get a stranger sitting in front of us with an odd request, we won't get stuck in the cycle of OH GOD NOW WHAT quite so easily.

Here's an example of the imaginary situations we've been playing with. My classmate, Gwen, as the client, goes over to a bag of slips of paper and picks one out. It says she's an airline pilot. She goes to the next bag, picks out another slip of paper, and this one tells her she has incontinence. She comes back to my table, sits down, and acts out the part. I, as practitioner, panic. Incontinence? I don't know anything about incontinence. I certainly don't know how to help it. This is really awkward. AAAAH!! I turn to another classmate, Kuniko, my facilitator, and ask her desperately for help. We chat a little. Gwen, who happens to know a little about what can cause incontinence, chimes in with what she knows (even though as client she's really not supposed to). Eventually I work out that this airline pilot sits all day on long flights. Incontinence comes from a lack of pelvic muscle control. If I give her a lesson on pelvic support while sitting, there's a chance it will increase muscle control and that might help the incontinence, and even if it doesn't, she'll be more comfortable at work.

If you were to talk to my classmate Kevin, he'd tell you that I start to glow when I talk about this segment. I got excited about it the minute I got the email introducing the idea of extra practicums before class started. Besides the fun of playing with an entirely new format, this is a very clear signal that Angel and Richard trust us. They trust that we can give them good feedback about the experiment. They trust that we have a good enough sense of how to use ourselves while giving a lesson without getting overwhelmed by the details of structure. They trust us in our ability to work with people we've never met before. I consider all of that an honor.

Our first round of practicums starts on Thursday morning. Off we go!

still here

Hello all. I know it's been far too long since I've written in here, but I couldn't for a while. I got my heart broken in October and spent the rest of October and November essentially emotionally shut off to help myself heal. I realized very quickly that just the idea of doing Feldenkrais or anything equally self-examining terrified me of the wound I'd find inside, so I stopped for a couple of months. Over my Thanksgiving vacation in Santa Cruz, my mom convinced me to give her an FI. I was extremely reluctant, but decided it was time to try to move on and gave her one anyway. It went surprisingly well, all things considered, but it also showed me that I had been right to wait - giving a lesson sooner than that would have gone very badly for all involved.

Since then I've continued letting my heart heal (getting a little better every day), and have slowly been making my way back into giving lessons. I have an assignment from class to try to give 20 FIs in the current break between segments and keep a journal on them, and I've done 3 so far, so I've got some motivation to get going. If anyone wants one, let me know. I need to do a bunch between now and mid-April.

What prompted me to finally write here again was an eye-opening experience I had this morning. My friend Bethany's cat is very sick (she's got kidney disease and a tumor in her bladder) and it means a lot of trips to the vet. To spare Bethany's boyfriend another trip so he could have some needed extra time at work, I gave Bethany and Rose (the cat) a ride and stayed with them for the vet visit. What didn't occur to me going in was that we'd be going to a veterinary hospital, not a clinic, and how similar the experience of being there would be to a human hospital.

So, in the middle of hearing about possible treatments for Rose's tumor, my brain decided to take all the familiar medical terms it was hearing and the familiar medical exam room it was seeing and twist it all around. My head started to feel fuzzy, I lost track of what the doctor was saying, the room started to feel too hot and stuffy and small, I felt all the blood drain out of my face, and if I hadn't left the room to sit in the hallway where there was a little fresh air and a kind nurse with a glass of cold water, it could have turned into a full-fledged panic attack.

Luckily I was able to stop it before it went all the way, but it was a useful reality check. It's clearly not just Stanford Childrens Hospital I have a problem with, or other pediatric hospitals. It's just... hospitals, off any sort, even if it's completely unrelated to me or my history. Too many bad memories of that atmosphere, of that pain. Must find a way to move on from this part too. No one can avoid hospitals forever.