Improve motor skills and live with less pain
The essential aim of Judo is to teach, help and forward adult maturity, which is an ideal state rarely reached, where a person is capable of dealing with the immediate present task before him without being hindered by earlier formed habits of thought or attitude.
— Moshe Feldenkrais, Higher Judo
There's hope for all of us.
People always ask me how to describe the Feldenkrais Method® because it seems so unusual, so weird, so outside our normal idea of improving movement. After all, don't we all just need to strengthen? Feldenkrais is not exercise or meditation, nor is it holding a pose, dancing, reps, or mechanics. So why do all this rolling around on the floor, paying attention to how we lift an arm and a leg, circling our eyes opposite the pelvis, and breathing in funny ways?
We do it to improve our motor control so we can enact our intentions in the world without contractions or contradictions. Moshe Feldenkrais created thousands of lessons that make obvious and concrete what humans do all the time anyway, which is to figure out how to relate to gravity. Most of the time, we do this automatically, below the level of consciousness, because who wants to think about relating to gravity all the time? As toddlers, we apprenticed our musculoskeletal system to the forces of gravity and figured out how to coordinate our locomotion across the floor. Then, we grew up and stopped figuring it out.
At some point in our lives, we start to feel clunky or experience pain, dysfunction, or fear of losing coordination and flexibility, and then we really want to revisit all this stuff about relating to gravity, but we forgot how. Most of us don't even know that went through a process of motor learning in the first place! Acquiring lots of motor skills is what neuroscientists call "creating a broad motor repertoire." It's the best way to be adaptable and skillful in life. Enter Feldenkrais: a concrete, testable process that trains us to reconnect to gravity.
Dealing with back pain
One of the most common ways we know that we flubbed our relationship to gravity is when we have back pain, which is also the most common form of pain for which people seek medical attention. If you go to the doctor with a musculoskeletal complaint, like back pain (which is reported to cost Americans $50 billion a year in medical and other expenses), the answer is usually a blend of pills, PT, and surgery. We are too complex to isolate any one factor for chronic pain, so in these cases, often the medical profession has no clear notion of cause and effect, or diagnosis, to work with. For the most part, the idea that learning new motor skills can help with chronic pain has not yet entered the medical repertoire for this thorny, pernicious problem.
According to Georgetown University School of Public Health:
Back pain is a leading cause of work-loss days (Some 83 million days of work are lost per year due to back pain)
72% of people with back pain report accompanying psychological distress
Back pain limits both physical and social activities
Back pain is a leading cause of work limitations
And, according to the CDC, twenty percent of US adults have chronic pain annually, defined as pain on most days or every day for the past six months. Yikes! It doesn't take much to find these scary numbers.
Improving motor skills helps us find solutions
I believe that much (not all, of course) of this undiagnosable chronic pain is related to inefficient musculoskeletal patterns, and much of it can be changed through improving sensory-motor skills. (This was true for me after seeking endless medical help for chronic pain in my twenties.) Athletic coaches think a lot about learning and automating new motor skills at very high levels of performance. In Feldenkrais, we are interested in the regular person's ability to do a similar thing with their motor skills, but with more novelty in their ongoing relationship to the everyday world. All of us constantly adapt to the external world through a complex process of perception, cognition, and sensory-motor feedback---until we stop adapting and get stuck. That's when we start to experience back pain, aches and pains sitting in a chair, or regret just going for a walk.
Here is a comment from a research paper titled, “Motor imagery and action observation: Cognitive tools for rehabilitation,” from the Journal of Neural Transmission (my emphasis):
We are continuously forced to find solutions for problems that appear in the environment. These solutions, however, cannot be static but should always be tailored to the actual requirements. Indeed, when the environmental constraints are never the same, the solutions can also never be the same.
This is an important point since it indicates that motor control cannot be the result of a rigid, hierarchically organized system, generating efferent commands to individual muscles and joints on basis of motor programs stored in a neural warehouse. Motor control is a much more heterarchical process, based on the continuous interaction of motor processes with cognitive and perceptual processes.
Feldenkrais practitioners re-educate your ability to “find solutions for problems that occur in the environment,” as the article says. We are not therapists, or healers, but educators. This means we re-engage your innate human ability to acquire new motor skills. Think of it as being coached in sensory-motor learning.
A highly educated brain draws on layers of interrelated experience and data to forge new connections and synthesize information. Wouldn't a highly educated motor cortex do the same? Yes, says another article: “Motor learning depends upon plasticity in neural networks involved in the planning and execution of movement.” This means we are not static in how we move. Nor are we static in how we think, sense, or behave. For me, this malleability is both the most fundamental asset and biggest challenge of our humanness. Personally, I see it as hope that I don't have to stay stuck. I can grow and evolve. Moshe always thought we were like a piece of precious metal that could change shape into many things, but we are always made of that same metal, meaning we do not become someone else, just more adaptable and multi-faceted in our own synthesis of our lives.
Re-linking the brain to our movement
I get that it's difficult to connect the physical sensation of back pain with the plasticity of the neural network, but it is, in fact, very linked. Improving motor skill is a neurological problem-solving activity, which all neuroscience research agrees upon.
Another researcher talks about improvement as, “Finding equilibrium, or stability, through the process of intrinsic self-organization.” So many big words! I love the idea of intrinsic self-organization. It means I can access my innate intelligence. Another group of neuroscientists proposes a three-stage model of motor skill learning: from cognitive to associative to autonomous learning levels.
Moshe Feldenkrais set up, through his lessons, many thousands of concrete sensory variables to help us locate ourselves in space. Thank goodness for that, because I couldn't locate myself in space in my twenties at all. I was dissociated and lost. Only after years of Feldenkrais did I start to feel I was more self-directed and living “in” myself, not just reacting in preconditioned ways. Once we use this skill of awareness to inform our sensory-motor learning, movement becomes more autonomous and less cognition-heavy. At the beginning, it's all deliberate, of course, then the motor skill drifts into the background, to be recalled when needed via Feldenkrais lessons, or what I call sticky-note reminders for the nervous system.
We talk about “choice” all the time in Feldenkrais, which means having the skill, ability, and awareness to choose efficiency over waste in our muscles, grace over clunkiness in our movement, and ease over tension in our relationship to the world.
“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”