Release the shoulders and neck, 24 min

 

As advertised, you slide the shoulders and make small shifts in the neck. As they move up, down, and around, the quality improves, diminishing the jumpy, staccato muscle movements.

As you go through this lesson, you become aware of how you use the ribs, shoulders, neck, and spine. Find out how your shoulders can feel light and floaty.

For more help with neck tension, what can make a big difference is fixing the head and moving everything else relative to it.

Many people find this lesson relieves long-term tension in the neck: #220, Twisting with head fixed. (Try the self-hug lesson in this section, too.)

(From Movement basics in a chair in the FeldenkraisTREASURY.)

Thought for August 8: More from Moshe Feldenkrais’s ten points on How to Learn

7. Why bother to be so efficient?

We need not be intelligent, for God saves the fool. We need not be skillful, for even the clumsiest of us succeeds in the end. We need not be efficient, because a kilogram of sugar yields-roughly speaking-20.000 calories, and one gram calorie produces 426 kilograms of work. From that count, we can waste energy galore. Why go to such troubles as learning and improving? The trouble lies in that energy cannot be destroyed; it can only be transformed into movement, or into another form of energy.

What, then, happens to the energy that is not transformed into movement?

It is, obviously, not lost, but remains somewhere in the body. Indeed, it is transformed into heat through the wear and tear of the muscles (torn muscles, muscle catarrh) and of the ligaments and the interarticular surfaces of our joints and vertebrae. So long as we are very young, the healing and recovery powers of our bodies are sufficient to repair the damage caused by inefficient efforts, but they do so at the expense of our heart and the cleansing mechanisms of our organism.

But these powers slow, even as early as at our middle age, when we have only just become an adult, and they become sluggish very soon thereafter

If we have not learned efficient action, we are in for aches and pains and for a growing inability to do what we would like to do.

Efficient movement is also pleasant to do and nice to see, and it instills that wonderful feeling of doing well and is, ultimately, aesthetically satisfying.

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