Segment 6, Day 12: week 3. yuck.

In every segment, there's a shift that happens when Week 3 starts. I've probably written about it before, because it's always a weird week. After two weeks of messing with your brain, your normal patterns (both physical and emotional) are scrambled enough that symptoms of Week 3 show up.

1. Energy drop. We started class on Monday a full 10 minutes late, when we're usually good at starting right at 9. Everyone was quiet and very low energy all day.

2. Incompetency. By the end of Week 2 you feel fairly competent in what you've been working on for two weeks. When Week 3 comes around, it all disappears and no one feels like they have any idea what they're doing anymore. Everybody gets extremely picky about who they chose to pair with for FI practice.

3. Irrational irritability. This morning, for example, we did an ATM that was difficult for me. All the difficult pieces of it made me generally frustrated, and because of the build-up, hearing Richard ask during the lesson if lying down was getting "better" pissed me off, because no, it was not getting better, and why should it be? (He had framed that phrase at the beginning of the lesson. There was no valid reason for me to interpret it that way, but it happened regardless. Classic Week 3.)

4. Breakdowns/Meltdowns. If it's gonna happen during a segment, for most people it will be during Week 3, maybe Week 4. My little episode this morning didn't turn into a full blown breakdown, luckily, but I did excuse myself from the FI practice that followed the ATM. The morning would have gone much worse if I had been part of that practice.

There are probably more symptoms, but those are the major ones I can think of right now. Luckily the week will likely get easier after tomorrow. The slump is usually just the first two or three days of the week, and then the energy picks up a bit again. Just have to be patient with yourself and others and wait it out.

Segment 6, Day 6: panic-free moments

You know that point in doing an activity that involves skill and attention where you can suddenly look away without losing track of what you're doing? I recently reached that point with giving FI lessons. I don't know when the actual moment was, but I noticed it today very clearly.

The easiest thing for me to compare giving an FI to is learning a difficult tune on an instrument by ear. At first, you can't exactly figure out how to pay attention to the millions of pieces - how to play the instrument, what key the tune is in, what the tempo is, what all those notes or chords are, when they show up, when you think they should show up but they don't... It's easy to get stuck in the details and completely lose track of the tune. After a bit though, once you've got a few details down, you can begin to let the tune flow through you and pick up more and more details without having to work at it so hard. When those details are solidified, it becomes possible to stop staring intently at your fingers or clenching your jaw quite so tightly, and maybe even look around the room, laugh, or say something while playing.

Giving an FI, it's just as easy to get stuck in the details. What the hell am I supposed to be doing with this hand I'm holding? I don't have any idea what that demo was about. Are my feet connected to the floor? Is my spine as long as it could be? Is the person on the table bored? That person over there looks like they know what they're doing... Oh my god, I'm still holding this hand! ...What was I supposed to be paying attention to all this time?

Eventually, you learn to put your neuroses aside, and if they do come up, you remember to put that person's hand down, deal with the neuroses for a moment, then go back to what you were doing. You learn that if your mind is clear with nearly everything pushed into the background, you can do what you need to do with that hand (and arm and shoulder and nervous system and everything else) without thinking too hard about it, and it becomes possible to keep that attention going, even if you're doing something else at the same time.

While giving a classmate an FI today, I overheard my teachers joking with each other nearby. In some previous segments, I might have wanted them to shut up and go away so I could pay attention to what I was doing, but that definitely wasn't true this time. I caught the joke, laughed to myself about it, and looked up and smiled as one of them walked by me, all the while showing my classmate some options in how her wrist could move.

So now, the question of the evening - do I dare take my newly organized collarbones out to dance lindy hop, or will that just confuse me? They're in a completely different place than they were a week ago...

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.