How contrast improves your life
“You rest in the middle, not because the fatigue is so great, but in order to notice that something is changing in the body during and after the movement. You rest in order to learn practical, sensory anatomy.”
Exciting idea of the week
In before-times when I had a studio with real, breathing people instead of the small, sad, black squares on a zoom call, I used to get excited about something every week. It would be a word or an idea that had grabbed my attention. I'd say to everyone within ear shot, "Look at this! This is amazing!”
I still get excited, just more privately. How about: Trying does not mean effort. Why not try with ease? Who made the rule that trying corresponds to strain? Do babies strain and stretch when they test gravity? No, they do not. In this they are smarter than adults. Many of my clients, athletes and non-athletes alike, think movement must equal strain.
I just read an article called, "Work is intrinsically good. Or maybe it's not?" about how we believe hard work is inherently good for its own sake. Hard work is "unnecessary prosocial behavior," but we do it anyway because of the morality attached to it. You'd think we would want to correlate our effort to the profit, or at least to the tangible result of our work, but no, we are irrational creatures.
Of course, no one needs a study to state this unimpressive human foible, but this one did test the theory and found overwhelming evidence that yes, we do believe that even miserable, unnecessary work is morally better than no work at all.
Here is the study, if you're interested: The Moralization of Effort.
It's unsurprising, then, that we carry the burden of unnecessary work into learning to move. (Although, as a self-employed individual, I live by the 80/20 rule. I can't afford to waste effort!)
Contrast creates clarity
The other phrase I got excited about recently is contrast creates clarity. In all human domains, we need contrast—a comparison—to know anything. We know through smell there's smoke in air, through taste when something is spicy, through touch when something is wet, through our gut if a relationship is negative. We learn through comparing our sensory experience, like the Sesame Street song, "One of these things is not like the other. One of these things doesn't belong. Can you tell which thing is not like the other by the time I finish this song?"
Take wine tasting. Sommeliers have to pass a test to prove they can detect all kinds of influences on the wine. They train a minimum of three years to do this. THREE YEARS to taste wine! I lived with a sommelier for many years in New York so I know the travails of this process.
Transfer that notion to your kinesthetic awareness. What if you trained for three years to sense yourself better? It sounds shocking, but over the course of a lifetime it's not long at all.
The more subtly you can discriminate, the more knowledge you gain. It might be awareness of temperature, flavor, texture, or music. Some people are already hyper-sensitive and they need to filter this input out instead of invite it in. Most of us, though, are dissociated from our sensory-motor awareness until it derails us with a stroke, injury, disease, or chronic pain. Then we sit up and take notice.
How do we learn?
Moshe Feldenkrais mentions many times that our ability to clarify our movement is what creates choice and ease. It's not fixing the mechanics, it's knowing ourselves more fully. But how do we know what we don't know?
That's the magic: Any sensory learning highlights contrast, whether it's wine from the slopes of the Vaucluse or the way we lift our leg. Luckily for us, Moshe Feldenkrais solved this problem in brilliant ways thousands of times. He created movement scenarios that guide us to notice contrasts in how we move, which are probably easier than becoming a sommelier! These scenarios often use a process called "variables and constraints." This is the magic that makes the elusive obvious, and it's very easy to do, it's what all sensory learning relies upon, not just Feldenkrais.
(This process helped me become clear about many challenging life decisions not by thinking more, but by sensing more. Hence, it begs the question: Which is more important: thinking clearly or sensing clearly? Does one override the other? Is one more trustworthy? I'll let you mull that one over.)
When we contrast our experience in one situation with that of another, we have two things to compare. Once we can connect more fully to our experience, or once it makes more sense, or there is a qualitative shift in our sensations, there is such a sense of relief. It's like a recipe we've perfected, a relationship we like, or a movement that feels graceful and elegant. It is the contrast that creates clarity, and it is clarity that guides our life.
Movement test
Lie on your back, bend one knee. Push on the foot to lift the hip and gently roll the pelvis to the side. Keep the knee over the foot, do not tilt it to the side. Do an easy movement without straining or pinching the low back. Make seven or eight movements.
Pause a moment with the pelvis down.
Then, lift the opposite shoulder as you lift the hip. Right shoulder, left hip, for example. Do both at once so they run into each other. Feel how lifting the shoulder stops the rolling of the pelvis. Move gently, no need to force. Do this seven or eight times, sensing the clunk (my word) as the shoulder and hip bump into each other along their path. If this is not clear, you can raise the arm toward the ceiling and reach forward with the arm as you lift the hip.
Then leave the shoulder quiet and go back to rolling the pelvis. Without more effort, does it move easier? Is more of you rolling? Is there some ease or pleasure to the movement that wasn't there before?
Can you feel that something changed? You just created a clearer pathway for your hip! You can transfer force through your torso from your foot with less interference! You didn't suddenly get stronger so you can fight harder with yourself. It's common that when we encounter a block in our movement, we feel weak. We think we need to strengthen the muscles to overcome the block when what we really need is to stop over-contracting in a way that creates a traffic jam. Once you let go, you can access your true strength. Your muscles and energy are available for you to do things with, you can move forward, you can swing your leg to take the next step.
But why is it easier? Because you:
tested the path
blocked the path
cleared the path
tested again and felt the difference (One thing is not like the other.)
The brain knows what to do with this, even if you don't. That's okay. You are a functioning human who can learn. This experiment is a basic application of variables and constraints. Moshe uses many more complex variables in his lessons, as do I in my private practice, but you get the gist.
(Note that this very thing often happens when we walk: We have a chronic activation of one pattern—like hunching the shoulder—and another pattern that tries to move—like swinging the leg—but we run into the first pattern, and thus have to use more effort for the second, and then we get tired, injured, or sick...)
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“Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.”
― Helen Keller
“We must re-establish the function of attending to oneself, to one’s desires, to one’s needs, to the feelings of the body. Then we will find an integration of the fluency of movement through each joint into action where the integration itself is a new way of being.”