Losing your balance in order to find it

When she was 10 months old, Annabelle slipped in the bathtub.  I caught her and, since she was unhurt but a bit scared, said lightly, "Oh no!  Did you fall down?" She laughed, and decided to reenact the fall.  She tipped over on purpose and it was much more fun.  This became a game for the next few weeks, migrating out of the tub onto our bed.  She'd wake up in the morning, sit up, raise her hands overhead, and open her mouth in mock alarm.  "Oh no!" we'd cry, and she would fall into our arms.  Some falls were really just token falls, where she just leaned over quickly and patted the bed with her hands.  Others were melodramatic--head tipped backward, hands thrown in the air, eyes closed, she would collapse onto a pillow.  We started encouraging her to play the falling game whenever friends came over because it was so cute.

But, as with everything in childhood, play-falling faded away too quickly.  Annabelle stopped instigating it.  A week or two later, we were playing on our living room rug and I tried to get the game going again.  "Are you going to fall?"  She smiled, stood, put her hands in the air, and got ready to fall.  But she failed to fall for a long time--she took about 5 steps trying to lose her balance.

I should mention that Annabelle hadn't yet figured out how to walk at this time. And what better way to learn to walk than to try to fall down?  There's no stress, no ambition, no failure involved--it's just an accident.  The whole thing was a game, not a studied effort.

Walking came about a month later, after surfacing and subsiding a few times.  She played around with the idea for a while and then one day decided it was a useful way to get around, and walked.   We could use more of this kind of learning in our lives.

By the way, there's a great Feldenkrais lesson (posted here) which uses this idea--playing around with taking yourself out of balance in order to find your balance.

Immersion Learning

Back in June, Annabelle and I were sitting outside on our wooden bench one morning. It was my favorite spring weather--cool, windy, and bright--and the leaves of the plants and trees around us were all shifting in the wind. Annabelle played with the ivy growing behind the bench. She likes plants, especially when she gets to tear them apart. She pulled leaves off the ivy growing nearby and began to push leaves down between the bench slats. She carefully watched each one fall to the ground, then picked another, turned it in her hand, and pushed it through the crack between the slats.
Finished with the leaves, she crawled over to the edge of the bench and put a hand out into the air. If I hadn't caught her, she would have crawled right off the edge--she tried to lean on the air the same way her other hand was leaning on the bench still. Once she felt that there was nothing there, she could see that it was an edge and avoided it. Instead she crawled toward the armrest, but stopped and reached for it too early--it was still five inches away. She could see it and wanted to touch it, but couldn't tell that it was too far away. She moved a few inches closer and tried again, and again, until she was finally close enough to touch it. I could visualize the neurons firing like crazy in her head: she was using her sense of touch to map out her depth perception.

It's been fun, and very difficult, trying to imagine how Annabelle sees the world. My husband pointed out that her world probably looks a lot like a moving, color version of the photograph above--a barrage of visual data without much meaning. From her point of view on the bench, the edge was only a change of color until she put her hand out and felt it was an edge. Same with the bench slats, and the distance of the armrest. The visual experience didn't make sense until her sense of touch that gave meaning to what she saw.

The same is true for all of us. Maybe because we have language, and categorize or label the senses as separate, we don't see that it's really not possible to experience just one sense. The way we learned to see is not the way in which we're taught a subject in school, one at a time. It's total immersion learning. It's the way we experience the world as well, although with all of our adult filters, categorization, and labels, we think we experience the world in a much simpler way. I can get glimpses of my unfiltered experience watching Annabelle learn.




Image: Ronald C. James, photographer, from J. Thurston and R.G. Carraher, Optical Illusions and the Visual Arts.

And we're back!

Hello!  I'm returning from maternity leave with a couple new posts.  I've been meaning to blog more frequently, but since my daughter Annabelle's birth a year ago things have been very different and busy--in a good way, mostly!  Because life and my approach to it feel so changed, I've changed the title of my blog, and the name of my Feldenkrais practice, to The Art of Curiosity.  The old title (move well=live well), implied a little too much judgment for me, and one of the things I like most about the Feldenkrais Method is its inherent lack of judgment.  I also didn't want to emphasize movement as much, since the method is also more about learning than about moving.  I'm working on a couple of new entries inspired by watching Annabelle learn, as her learning experience seems very similar to the kind of learning Feldenkrais lessons elicit.

On a Personal Note: Change

I haven't written a post for a while because life has been in flux. Change and movement constitute life. Static states and stagnation are a condition of death. Why then do we all cling to the static? Maybe because it's safe, it's known, it feels secure.

I'm expecting a baby at the end of October. Her birth will be the culmination of years of decision-making, the roller-coaster of trying to conceive, conception, miscarriage, trying again. It will also be the beginning of a new movement into life, of a constantly changing being. Actually, we've arrived at that point already--I have a clear sense that she's here, moving and changing inside me. Although there are strong punctuation marks in life, like birth, there is no real point of arrival because that would be stopping the ongoing process that each of us is. There is no period until death.


Being pregnant is like a Feldenkrais lesson at the cellular level. My body's chemical, hormonal, and physical habits are disrupted daily. Each day I have to negotiate a new balance because my center of gravity has changed again. This is really interesting, and attracts my curiosity, but it's also disconcerting at times. I've had a strong feeling more than once that I don't know who I am. It's true on so many levels. I have 50% more blood in my veins. My belly is huge. Hormonally speaking, there is a bigger difference between me and my non-pregnant self than between me and my husband. He and I, a couple, are becoming a family of three.

Just to add more change, my husband and I decided to move from San Francisco, where I have lived my entire adult life, to Berkeley. Not a huge distance, but a big change for us. It's kind of satisfying to change everything externally at the same time that so much is changing internally. It's also interesting to notice how much I identify with my home--how difficult it was to take apart the San Francisco home, how in a hurry I am to set everything up in a familiar way in the new home. In the same way I identify with my body, and do double-takes when I look down at my big belly. That's me. This is my house. Not really believing it yet, still stuck in the old patterns.

If I lie down and breathe, let my breath find its natural rhythm, that rhythm has changed because my metabolism has shifted during pregnancy. I'm lying on the floor in my new home, looking out at the redwood tree in the front yard. All these indicators of identity are superficial, even the rhythm of my breathing. I cling to the old familiar indicators, but there is a core of myself that is deeper than these indicators, and when I can stop for long enough, when I look for it, I can sense it. I couldn't describe or locate it, except perhaps in the primary image, in my representation of myself as directions and lengths. I can sense myself at some points as a continual process--my history feeding into who I am now, but also able to shift and change. When I can sense this, I can also sense many new possibilities for how to be myself. If I can change this much, what else is possible?

Where to begin?

I just received an email from a young woman from Greece who is studying the flute. Her question:

"The thing is that I have tried so much to find a good balance, body posture and breathing that I am really confused at the moment and all the flute teachers tell me about it. It is about time for things to change! Could you please suggest to me a method and/or a place to begin?"

My response: Everyone has an opinion about posture! I'm sure you hear many confusing and contradictory things. What I like about the Feldenkrais Method is that there are no rules about posture, and there is no one good position. Feldenkrais sees posture as a point of equilibrium and uses going in and out of balance to find the place of balance, which can be different every day. My favorite flute teacher, Liisa Ruoho at the Sibelius Academy in Finland, says "You have to lose your balance in order to find it."

It's important to find your own balance and comfort from the inside, exploring different movements until you find what suits you. Everyone has a different shape and a different history and different habits, so one teacher's solution may not work for you. Also teachers tend to simplify and turn advice into rules. For me following rules takes me out of myself and causes more tension.

I recently taught the Feldenkrais lesson called "What Is Good Posture?" and recorded it. I'll post it now on my blog so you can do it if you'd like. It's also published in a book by Feldenkrais called Awareness through Movement. This book has 12 sample lessons which are a good introduction to Feldenkrais. There's another good one concerning breathing, which I have posted here.

Disclaimer: this is a recording of a live lesson, unscripted, and responding to the people who attended the class. It is not a substitute for a live class, where the teacher can observe your movements and respond to your pacing. But it's a good introduction to the method.

More Core

This is another lesson from the February series, exploring core muscles and using the breath to sense the core from the inside out. It's a recorded class, which isn't as effective as a live class, where the teacher can respond to the pace of the students. But if you're curious about the class or can't attend, this is a good sample lesson to try. Find a comfortable place to lie on your back, on a carpet or other firm, padded surface. Wear comfortable clothes and allow about an hour for the lesson. Take care and don't do anything uncomfortable. You can always make the movement smaller and slower to be more comfortable, or simply imagine it, and still get the same effect. Enjoy!

Come as you are!

As for me, the Feldenkrais Method is the most rebellious thing I have ever engaged in. It locates authority within oneself rather than outside oneself and gave me tools to enrich my own authority.

Erin Clark, Blogosfeld

I was happy to read the above quote in Erin's blog, because the lack of external authority is one of my favorite things about the Feldenkrais Method. After years of traditional education--trying to please the teacher, being told how to play a piece, studying for a test--it's a relief to finally learn on your own terms. The movements in a Feldenkrais lesson are done at your own pace, within your own range of comfort. Discovering your own internal rhythms and organization, you end up with a strong sense of ownership of what you've learned.

People who come for lessons are usually full of judgment about how they move and act--"I'm sitting the wrong way. Look, my shoulder is too high. I have really bad posture." But in Feldenkrais the conventional sense of right and wrong doesn't exist. Dennis Leri writes in Learning How to Learn:

In the Feldenkrais Method, each person already presents the ideal body, the ideal way to move. For many of us this is a difficult concept to grasp. We take pain, ‘poor’ posture, or limited movement as symptoms of something wrong. Yet each and every person makes the best choices possible given his or her perception of choices.

After I explained this to a friend with whom I was working, he coined a new slogan: "Feldenkrais--come as you are!"

Another friend, when I quoted Erin in a weekly class, asked, "But who locates the authority within oneself? Who has the authority to do that?"

The picture above, from an interesting article in the New York Times, may illustrate a partial answer to this question. The sign is there. But the directions in it are blank. The method creates a formal process through which you can discover your own authority. In order to create the space to experience discovery, you follow the framework of the lessons, but the content is your own. Dennis Leri describes this process in a recent interview, when discussing the work of renowned hypnotherapist Milton Erickson:

Erickson used what we call metonymical distinctions. So he would say “a man came to me today”--doesn’t say what kind of man, right? So automatically, you’re filling in content...you’re thinking, OK, not a woman, a man. So he says, “46 years old...married...6 kids...the eldest two in jail...the wife works two jobs.” In other words, he doesn’t say “The guy’s a slacker.” He doesn’t give you an interpretation. As you go along you end up filling it in.

Dennis Leri, Interview with Ryan Nagy

Dennis goes on to say that an Awareness through Movement lesson does much the same thing. The teacher (or facilitator--more on that later) asks, "Where do you feel changes?" rather than saying "Your left shoulder should now be pressing into the floor more." You fill in the answers yourself--the content is your own. More subtly, the teacher instructs you to do a movement involving the right side, then on the left side. You compare the sides and discover a wealth of new content--new sensory, intellectual, kinesthetic, and emotional information. You have a more complete sense of yourself on many different levels, and you have discovered that sense, rather than being told by someone what you should feel.

This is why the words teacher, student, and lesson are misleading. Ilana Nevill writes about this incongruence in the most recent Feldenkrais Journal:

Our students lie in a rather vulnerable position on the floor while we as teachers tower above them, guiding and instructing them to become more aware of having a choice: either to remain dependent on what others tell them or to assume personal authority in discovering what is right and good on their own.

Ilana Neville, "Toward a Culture of Mutual Learning," Feldenkrais Journal No. 22

This can lead to an expectation of more passive learning, while in reality Awareness through Movement creates the space for you to learn actively and own what you learn. Nevill prefers to use language such as dialogue, play, exploration, partners in learning.

Feldenkrais: Come as you are! Explore, play with options, make discoveries. Leave subtly transformed, with a new sense of yourself, but feeling even more deeply you.