Bell Hand Revelations

Way back in Segment 3, we did a very long series of ATM lessons about the "bell hand". To make a bell hand, close your hand slowly, keeping your fingers straight, and open it back up. The idea is not to open and close it from the fingers, but from the spot in your palm that you're closing around. It's weird and hard and at the time, I really didn't get it. I didn't like that we had to do this movement millions of times, trying to keep the movement consistent and steady while doing other things. We did at least a week's worth of this series and I never really got the hang of it. It was completely frustrating.

Jump back to the present, and I'm doing a 6-week series with Richard (one of my trainers), separate from the training. He calls it Feldenkrais Synergy and it's a combination of ATM and FI. There are five students, and over the course of an hour and a half or so, he gives us an ATM while occasionally pausing the lesson to give us physical input on what we're doing. It's really fun and really informative.

Tonight's lesson involved bell hands and, see if you can figure this one out, bell feet. Maybe it was having Richard come around and physically put his finger on that spot on your palm to close around, or maybe it was my body remembering an old challenge and suddenly understanding it, but tonight, for the first time, the bell hand idea made sense. We used that movement to strengthen the connection of our arms and legs to our torso. I knew how to do it, and I knew what to do with it when I stood up from the lesson. I know that if I make a slight bell foot while I'm standing, the rotation it causes in my leg makes that hip stronger to stand through.

Driving home, my hands were so directly connected to my torso that I needed essentially no extra pressure in my hands to make the steering wheel move. The natural movement of my arms as connected to my torso was enough. When I got home, I realized that I really wanted to try playing piano with my super-sensitive fingers, and it went wonderfully. It occurred to me how weird it is that thinking about the spot where my hand closes while playing piano makes it easier to reach an octave! (I've got small hands and short fingers, and running octaves can usually prove very challenging.)

I know it makes me a nerd, but man, I love this stuff. Very glad Segment 5 is coming up soon with lots of FI practice.

PS. I'm getting a Feldenkrais table! It should be here any day! Look out, guinea pigs. You know who you are.

Segment 4, Day 20: How To Put Yourself Back Together

Throughout our training, Angel and Richard have talked a lot about an idea called "completing your self-image". I've always known it has something to do with figuring out who you are, but it never became actually clear until about 3 pm today when Angel told us a story. I love it, so I'm going to share it here.

One day, when she was in kindergarten, Angel raised her hand to write down the answer to a question on the board. Her teacher had her come up to the board and he walked to the back of the classroom to watch. When Angel reached the board, she panicked at being in front of the class and froze. The teacher was apparently having a bad day, because he got so mad at her for raising her hand and then not answering the question that he threw a wooden chair at her. It hit the board next to her and shattered. Looking back on it, she sees that as a day when her self-confidence shattered along with that chair.

Many years later, during her own Feldenkrais training, she was in Haifa, Israel finding some peace from the city (she was completing the last part of her training in Tel Aviv). She found an open field to sit in and think, and saw a tree across the field that looked like it had blackened leaves. Suddenly a grenade went off in the distance (common occurrence there), and the tree that had appeared to have blackened leaves now looked like a tree with no leaves, because hundreds of blackbirds had been scared by the grenade and abandoned the tree. Over the next few minutes, all the birds eventually returned to the tree until it looked like it had black leaves again.

Watching all of this, Angel realized that that's what "completing your self-image" means. It's picking up all the little pieces of yourself that flew away when something traumatic happened to you. It's letting go of the leftover trauma and making space for all those original pieces to fit in again.

Segment 4, Day 19: where did this month go?

Tomorrow is the last day of Segment 4. It always sneaks up on me when I'm not yet ready for it. I've certainly got plenty to figure out between now and Segment 5 though. This has been a loaded one.

The whole segment has been about learning how to teach ATM classes. At first glance, most ATMs seem relatively simple to teach, but as it turns out, there's a lot of technique behind it and lots of tricks to learn. They're not easy tricks, either. It's a ton of information to keep track of, combined with the ability to watch what your students are doing and tweak the lesson to fit them, as well as observing yourself and staying calm, present, and conversational in your tone and manner.

I was never thrilled about the idea of teaching ATMs. FI work has always interested me more, and teaching an ATM sounded too much like public speaking to appeal to me. We found out at the beginning of the segment that at the end we'd be doing ATM practicums - teaching the entire class a lesson and then getting feedback on it. That sounded completely terrifying to me a month ago. After a month of reframing how I looked at it, and getting to know the lesson I would teach exhaustively well, yesterday's practicum went surprisingly well. Above all, I didn't panic.

Afterwards, when our group was getting feedback (we each taught 15 minutes of an hour-long lesson to 16 people), Angel told me something that I certainly wasn't expecting. She told me a few things I should work on, but also said that I have "something to share with the world". She explained a little, and I think she means that I should share myself and my experiences with the world on a grander scale than I currently do (she likes grand ideas). I don't think she specifically meant via ATM classes, but she'd definitely push it if she got the chance. I asked my mom for advice and she agrees with Angel. "Give yourself a shove and go teach", she told me on the phone.

After tomorrow afternoon and a slight delay for paperwork, I'll be certified to teach public ATM classes and charge money for them, but first I've got some processing to do.

Segment 4, Day 13: When Feldenkrais Gets Weird

We did a lesson this afternoon on learning how to expand your abdomen as your breathe in, expand your ribs as you breathe in, and expanding your head as you breathe in. Yes, I said expand your head. Basically, imagine a beach ball inside each, and as you inhale, blow up the beach balls so that all parts of your abdomen, ribs, and head expand equally in all directions. Very cool lesson.

Well, cool during the lesson. The aftereffects I'm not so sure about. I stood up and felt like I was floating (actually meant I was walking through my skeleton instead of working muscles too hard). Sometimes that floating feeling is really fun, but today it wasn't. It was really disconcerting. Along with floating, I felt like I had giant chipmunk cheeks, and some tension had let go behind and around my eyes that I didn't know had been there before. My eyes felt enormous. I didn't feel like myself and immediately started dreading the parent-teacher get-together happening at work this evening.

I got multiple comments from classmates saying I looked noticeably taller and that my eyes looked different. I went to look in the mirror, and it was true. I definitely looked taller and all the little creases around my eyes and eyebrows were gone. Talking felt strange too, as though my voice was coming from a different part of me than usual. I didn't have the same control of my lips I normally do.

The whole drive home (luckily I wasn't the one driving), I kept very quiet unless asked questions by my carpool-mates. It seemed like I was looking out of someone else's body - my eyes, my brain, my voice, but in the wrong context. I knew what was going on in this new body, but had no idea how to react to it or what to do with it.

Getting out of the car helped a lot. Walking from the car to my front door, I began to feel a little more settled in this new context. That was half an hour ago. I'm feeling a bit more like myself now, but a version with bigger more open eyes and very quick reflexes. Tonight's work event will be an adventure.

Segment 4, Day 2: vocal experimentation

It turns out that this segment will be about learning how to teach ATM lessons, the kind that looks like a yoga class. A major part of teaching an ATM is learning to make your intentions clear through your voice, both in tone and in content. We did an activity this morning that was so much fun that I'm going to share it with you here.

So, I have an experiment for you to try. Find a person to do it with. You could do it in the mirror, but it's more interesting with another person.

1. Take the list of words and phrases below and read them to one another as if you were actually in the situation presented by each phrase. Make it sound real. Make sure you look at the person you're talking to instead of at the list. Trust me, it's fun.

Yes.
I'm feeling confident. I know I can do the job.
You-hooo!
I'd like to make an announcement.
Help!
This is really uncomfortable.
Ouch!
I have a secret to tell you.
Stop it.
I don't think I can do this.
Whatever.
Hello there.
I'm cold.
I'm hot.
Oh baby.
I'm scared.
Go!
Come here.
Ohhh that feels so good.
Please lie down.
I am really angry.
Taxi?

2. Next, find the place in your voice where you naturally say "yes". Using that same place in your voice, read through the list again and see what happens.

3. Pick another phrase, find that spot in your voice, and try it again in that voice.

Ridiculously fun, and not nearly as easy as it seems like it should be.

a clean start

Final prayers have been sung, the shofar has been blown, the sun has gone down, I've eaten a giant break-fast, and I recognize many more Hebrew words at a glance than I did a week ago. Yom Kippur is over. This was a surprisingly easy Yom Kippur - I had a relatively easy fast, and I didn't have anything major that I felt I wanted to atone for. It was very different from last year, which happened when I was still in the midst of learning how to forgive my surgeon for his mistakes. That was an intensely painful process. This year was MUCH easier in comparison.

Yom Kippur came at an interesting time this year, three days before Segment 4 starts. For the past month and half or so since I realized Segment 4 was coming up soon, I've been panicking about it. I realized that since the last two segments were so physically and emotionally demanding for me, I unconsciously blocked Feldenkrais all summer. I didn't think about it, I didn't practice it unless someone asked me to practice on them, I didn't read anything by Moshe... It even got to a point where I would notice that I was falling back into some bad habit and in physical pain, but despite being able to help myself pretty easily, I didn't do anything about it. So, since August I've spent a lot of time worrying about how I would get back into it, and especially how I would find the necessary mindset.

A couple of days ago, I realized a strange paradox. If I try to put myself into a Feldenkrais mindset, I will just get worked up and worried about it, and not be able to get anywhere with it. However, if I decide to just show up at class knowing it'll be totally different from "real life", I can let the mindset find me. I'm learning how to not overthink things, so I'm opting for the second choice. It seems appropriate with Yom Kippur so close to the start of class.

return from an absence

Huh. It's been a while since I wrote here. Two months, in fact. I've spent most of that time working, dancing, and getting settled in my new apartment, and not doing a whole lot of Feldenkrais or even thinking about it. I can only guess why it disappeared like that, because I don't really know why.

Moving myself and my former roommate out of our old apartment and into our new places definitely put me in some old pain and old habits of moving that I did not want hanging around, but I didn't actively do anything about it. Maybe I needed a mental break. I got myself very deeply entrenched in the psychological aspect of my Feldenkrais training last segment and stayed there for a while, working out some of the stories that came up from my past and figuring out the physical repercussions of those stories. That was a tiring, difficult process, so maybe my two month break from the world of Feldenkrais was to recover from that. I feel like I can come back now though.

Recently there seems to be a lot of talk about marketing Feldenkrais. I recognize the importance of learning how to do that, but I'm so much more interested in the moment I'm at RIGHT NOW in my training and the process of getting to the next step that it doesn't feel very relevant. The next step is making it to Segment 4, Day 1, on September 20th. Setting up a career is not the next step, not for me at least.

A more immediate next step might be getting one of these books though - The Body Moveable. Check out the sample pages. Anybody interested in anatomy should get one of these. I got to look through one yesterday and they're beautiful, and have a great balance of basic information and as much in depth information as you could possibly want. I've been told it's far more useful than having a model skeleton to play with.