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.